A magnificence of innovation, to free the mind from the body, to set it free to ride the winds and the seas through realities of boundless variety and flavour. This was the life he lived. The world of his body was just one such place he visited; the rest were as dissimilar as birds. He spread his life amongst so many realities that Arker was thin, his spirit tenuous, segmented and stretched into orbit around celestial bodies and characters innumerable and distant.
To which reality did he owe his true loyalty?
The Forstella’s ancillary craft, a smaller but self-sufficient ship, had broken away from the larger bird in the shadow of Lament, a rocky Mars-like planet much too cold for habitation. The idea was that their pursuers would continue to follow the Forstella’s predicted course and ignore or miss the separation of the smaller craft. Arker’s father would pilot the Forstella on a more intense series of evasive manoeuvres, attempting to lose the pursuers somewhere else in the system and, if necessary, transition to hyperspace. His father had promised him that was the last resort; he wanted to stay in the system to meet up with his son as soon as their pursuers lost his trail or gave up.
Arker had always suspected that his extensive slimming and gaming would eventually disrupt his grasp on reality. The incongruence manifested in his lack of trepidation regarding separating from his father and journeying through the system by himself, under threat from an unidentified enemy tracker. But then again, he had done this a thousand times, on a thousand worlds with a hundred different bodies. His dad said it was likely unsophisticated corporate espionage. They wanted his work. They wouldn’t kill Arker for that. They just wanted to pressure his father into relinquishing his IP. Who cares? Meanwhile, Arker had the Ancillary craft to himself. His father usually didn’t trust him with anything.
The Ancillary Craft looped about Lament, hiding behind its second moon as their pursuers raced off after a gravity-assisted Forstella towards the system's centre. Arker watched the progress from the lounge area while Gop ambled about the compact room, inspecting fixtures without pattern or reason. The robot would take a few steps and then stare intensely at the water fountain before ambling off again and finding fascination in the couch's corner Arker lay back on. Arker felt sorry for the thing. His father hadn’t had time to program it correctly, hadn’t had time to let it learn. Not only did it look like a child in a shell, but it may as well be for its naivety and ignorance. Arker blinked away views of the ship and its course.
“Gop, what are you doing?”
“I found a hair,”
“It’s probably mine. Anyway, do you know what’s going on?”
The small robot stared at Arker blankly.
“Guess not, look, come over here, and I’ll give you the lowdown.”
Gop ambled over to the front of the couch. Arker rubbed his eyes and smoothed down his unruly chestnut hair. If he was going to the teacher, he might as well try to look at the part.
“Ok, so this is how it goes...”
He then proceeded to lecture Gop on the basics of space, physics, chemistry and astronomy. Half of it he was making up, filling in the blanks in his own knowledge, but who cares? His father said this thing was smart, like really smart, like humans compared to ants smart. It could work it out; Arker was just giving it the basics. As he considered the comparison between him and ants and how he was now the ant to this machine, he started talking about ants to Gop, ant colonies, how they worked together, and how they had unique roles. The robot stared back, fascinated.
“Ants aren’t smart, but they work together and accomplish feats of problem-solving which no one ant could achieve on its own; they do it together, almost instinctively. Like creating bridges over water or ladders into trees. Amazing, right?”
Gop’s eyes were green. “Yes”.
Arker stared at the little machine; its white plasteel shell gleamed in the half-light. It had roughly the proportions of a human, yet around half the height, and with smooth, pearlescent limbs. It was like a child in a bulbous white plastic space suit, complete with an oversized head where two perfectly round blue circles, around the size of fists, stared, blinking occasionally. Of course, it didn't have to blink, yet the robot simulated the action to settle the observer.
Not much going on there, it seemed. What was smarter, one mature ant, full of purpose and guided by evolution-rich instinct, with the capacity to solve great problems? Or an infant human without a teacher?
“Anyway, do you wanna see the bridge?”
Gop nodded. “Yes”
With a sigh, Arker pulled himself from the couch and led the way through the small ship to the bridge. The small robot followed along like a pet, looking about itself as they moved through the cramped, functional corridors of the ship.
Arker reached the door to the bridge.
“Have you seen space yet?”
“No, not yet.”
Arker smiled. This’ll be good.
He fired off the passcode to the security door via his cortical web, and then the door slid sideways and clicked open. The concave expanse of the viewport screen created such a high-fidelity artificial window that it was as If the bridge was open to space. At one point, the room ended, and the stars began. Interplanetary space wasn’t black; the light of a thousand stars filled it. The Milky Way saturated the expanse with its heterogeneous blanket of celestial bodies.
Arker heard a thud behind him.
Gop had fallen back against the wall, apparently in a state of catatonia induced by the sight befalling its unaccustomed sensors and immature, if fantastically robust, computational lattice. His dad had told him not to flood the thing, but Arker rarely listened to his father since his mum had died.
“You right, Gop?”
The robot didn’t move.
What do you do when you’re smarter than everyone else? Simple, you do what they wouldn’t think to do. Lucky for him, Arker was smarter than most, but he was not only smart but also savvy. His time simming and gaming had forced upon him all manner of dire and challenging situations; he had escaped from every threat paradigm, ambush, and corner Arker had backed into. This was no different. The bad guys were different; the universe was real instead of fake, but Arker had done it all before.
So, what did you do if you were smarter than the bad guys? You did what the bad guys wouldn’t think to do.
Arker turned the ship right back around and headed home. People running away never returned to where they were running from because it made little sense on the surface. But Arker didn’t operate on the surface; Arker was in deep, a deep thinker, a real bottomless intellect. All that with thousands of hours of combat experience under his belt.
The ancillary craft took a dive past Lament and fired itself back into the void between oversized rocks. Arker and Gop rode the nothingness like a bullet from a gun, silent and linear in flight. Arker sat in the cockpit, blue high-tops resting on something important, with his unruly hair a source of perpetual stimulus for his sweaty fingers, threading, winding and pulling relentlessly. Meanwhile, Gop watched the starlight passing with superficial composure which only manifests from sheer befuddlement.
It took twelve hours to race back to the station's current orbital position, straddling the asteroid Sterling 11 like a jockey to a horse. Arker’s home differed from most. Few teenagers called asteroid stations home, and even fewer called abandoned research asteroid stations their home. Everyone left five years ago; now it was just Arker and his Dad. His mother had been the station chief, with all the connections to universities and NGO’s. When his mother had died, the pigeons had flown the coop back to places where the geriatrics spread the bird seed with gusto, not where it had to be picked from the cracks between the cobblestones.
Arker had never decided whether he admired his father for anchoring him to an abandoned research station where his mother had died or resent him with the passion with which a beach resents the waves. Without friends, one had more time for games. Maybe he only played games because he didn’t have any friends anymore.
The ancillary craft slowed appropriately, twisted and turned as instructed before drifting in a controlled fashion towards the dock. Spins became synchronised, and suddenly, the world was still. Sterling 11 was bright, like a silver coin in the solar radiation of a distant star on the viewing screen. Home was stark, always had been. But the sight of that big old icy rock was comforting regardless. With his father or not, this was the place where he wasted his days in comfort and ignorance.
“Let's get back inside,”
Gop followed him to the airlock, seemingly thawed from its catatonic state.
Arker drifted through two sets of pressure doors with the air of a man returning home from another hard day at the office, staring at the ceiling as the mechanisms of the life-support suite modulated pressures and scrubbed particulates with differential hums and clicks. The embarkmentation chamber was spartan, cold and dark as usual; you had to save money when it came in at a trickle. Arker passed through the vegetable garden with eyes glazed and mouth slack; the plants paid him no mind; they were used to being ignored by the station's intellectually absent princeling. The door to the common area slid away and revealed lounges, dining tables, and the kitchen, with lights dimmed and silent. Arker sighed. Something to eat then.
The embarkment chime caught him so thoroughly off guard that he stumbled.
Silence.
“Is dad home already?”
Gop looked between Arker and the entrance to the garden beyond the door.
Arker pushed hair out of his eyes and blinked. His heart was bothering him with an alarm of its own. That was quick; his dad must have pulled some kind of navigational wizardry with the Forstella to get back so fast.
He didn’t quite believe it.
He walked back into the vegetable garden. There were plants on each side of the long room and two rows between, leaving two paths to the door to the embark mentation lounge. Lettuces, bean vines, radishes and god knows what else sat plump and turgid in their soil cubes. He came to the door and waited.
Check the station’s suite, you bloody muppet. Arker winced. He accessed the suite with his web and checked the exterior cams. Dock 2 had a ship in it, but it wasn’t the Forstella; in fact, he had never seen it before in his short life.
He started running back to the common area, where Gop stared blankly at him. He ran straight past Gop and towards his father’s study.
“Where are we going, Arker?”
Arker ignored him, raced into the cluttered study and slammed the door. He couldn’t lock it, he didn’t have the codes. Gop might? He and his father seemed to spend lots of time together. He opened the door and found Gop staring at him, right there in the doorway. “For fuck's sake, get in!”
Gop scuttled in. “Can you lock the door?”
Gop looked between the door and Arker. “What do you mean lock?”
Arker shuddered, “Make it not open!”
Gop shrugged, “I guess.” Gop stared at the door and smoke hissed out of the gap between door and frame. Arker braced for the inevitable. The fire alarm wailed so abruptly and loudly that his mind cracked open like an egg. After its initial burst, it settled into a lower volume but maintained an unpredictable warble to keep everyone’s attention.
“Did you just weld the door shut?”
“What do you mean weld?”
Arker’s eyes bulged like a fish. He rechecked the station suite. The embarkation lounge was now strobing with the fire alarm as armed men entered the station from Dock 2’s airlock, and none of them were Dad.
Arker grabbed Gop by its small, round shoulders, keeping his mind’s eye on the corporate goons as they checked the embarkmentation lounge worryingly professionally.
“Dad has a stash of gear somewhere, a bunch of shit that he had for this kind of thing, for intruders, for, you know, fighting. Ah, what would it be, you know, some kind of armour or something.”
On rare occasions, his father drank too much of his own home-brewed gin; there was no way they could import genuine spirits here, and he would become rather cynical and paranoid. Arker would sit at dinner listening to his father spout doom and gloom about the state of the Conglomerate, his research, and people in general. One particular time, he mentioned one of his corporate sponsors had given him a “safety package”. But Arker knew his father had been lying. The man couldn’t lie when drunk; he got all vague and cagey when the scientist was usually specific and overly elaborate. Arker was sure the “safety package” existed, but his father didn’t get it as a gift from a sponsor. Likely, his dad stole it from someone, or perhaps his researcher contacts sold it to him.
Thoroughly out of character, Gop pointed to a chrome safe beside his desk. “In there”
Arker was sceptical. That was far too easy. “Can you open it?”
Gop shrugged, “I don’t know.”
The goons were wrapping up their search of the embarkation area, checking the service corridors and maintenance bays. A few were stacking up at the entrance to the vegetable garden and the common areas beyond.
Arker wrestled with his frustration; it was just a child. “Can you try?”
Gop’s eyes began a cheery forest green. “Ok!”
The safe opened with a click and a hiss, and there was no smoke this time.
Arker’s moist young eyes latched onto the trunk's contents with watering adolescent zeal. “No way”. This was better than good, more fantastic than amazing. Only sims had granted him the pleasure of laying eyes on this. There were a hundred instructions and labels, but Arker only saw two words: “nano suit”. He ignored prototype, sensitive, unstable, and property of Stereoviva because these words did not ring audible alarm bells in his video-game sculptured reality.
He opened the smaller matte black case, removed the coverall and jumped into it. Next, he placed the heavy bricks of the nanomaterial reservoirs into the pouches on his chest and legs. Finally, he placed the wristwatch-like cortical-web interface on his left arm and let his own cortical web talk to the nano-suit’s control suite.
Having forgotten about the intruders, he initiated the suit’s building phase. Simultaneously, the nanomaterial reservoirs broke open like black, rectangular eggs, and the clear yolk spread across the coverall with purpose and gravity-defying movement. Arker embraced the enfolding mobile jelly suit like a king accepting his robe and crown. The jelly ran up the back of his neck, covered his head, folded his hair almost tenderly, and bubbled out around his face. Initially goldfish globe-like, the visor flattened into a more traditional skull helmet and began building a re-breather and atmosphere filter.
Arker bent down again as the building phase continued and reached into the trunk for the second item. This time, he produced a chunky black handgun with silver trimming. The thought of his dad holding something like this made him blush; did the man even know how to handle a weapon? Arker stuck four spare clips to the undulating jelly on the side of his left forearm before loading a fifth into the gun. He was familiar with the weapon. It was a Frontier Super 6, a flashy, expensive bear-stopper designed for shaky-leg colonists with too much money, too many daughters and a phobia of large, hairy animals. Or similarly proportioned men. Eight rounds per mag of .45 Penetrators. Far more bang behind them than a .45 ACP, they designed these things to punch through a Yeti’s femur with gusto.
From his geek out, Arker fell back into reality and found Gop staring at him like a lobotomised golden retriever. The intruders were making their way through the vegetable garden.
Arker chambered a Yeti killer. “Time to water the garden”.
Gop’s eyes flashed happy green. “I don’t know what that is”
A bloody battle ensured, a proper blood bath. It was something sensible folk cringe at, as these things tended to be. It was PTSD material; in fact, Arker thought he could feel it coming on in the moments after. A life of therapy and medications was a likely possibility. The hardening suit had carried him around the station, accompanying his tactical advance like a thick plastic condom. Gop had been behind him, scurrying in his wake as he ducked, weaved, moved between cover and forced the enemy to retreat. Gunsmoke had kept the alarms howling, and spent shells clinked and scrunched under his fog-coloured boots. It was messy and bloody, but it wasn't hard; Arker had done this a hundred times.
Life was a game, and this particular grind was the same. For hundreds of hours, Arker had become an instinctual master of PVP. The arenas of the gaming multiverse were as varied as the real universe; he had fought in offices, stations, homes, gardens, jungles, deserts, asteroids and the hulls of star ships, but it all boiled down to the same elements. The tools varied, the armour, the weapons, the magics, but people stayed the same, and Arker had become a master at exploiting human behaviour when it came to killing. In non-reality, of course.
You moved, and you acquired targets as they presented themselves. If there was more than one target, you prioritised the one that was the greatest threat and eliminated that one first. You never shoot at more than one target at a time, you eliminate one and you move to the next. You time your advance to when the enemy expects you to be stationary. You count the bullets in your magazine. You aim for centre mass unless your target has vulnerabilities elsewhere.
So when the shooting started, Arker regressed into well-reinforced habitual behaviours. The vegetables shied away as he wove between the verdant walls of frightened greenery. The leaves of beans and legumes were sprayed with cordite and slapped by pressure waves so violent, so thoroughly insulting to plants accustomed to the gentle breeze of humidified blankets of refined atmosphere cultivation. Then came the carmine fluid filled with the tang of iron and salt. It dried into scabs on the leaves.
Three of the home invaders died in the vegetable garden as the thin-framed teenager in a gel suit advanced like a madman with a thimble military discipline. The baby spinach plants were crushed when a corpse in a survival suit came crashing down with eight fragments of alloy, ensuring he fertilised the soil as quickly as possible.
Arker had ducked into the embankment lounge as quickly after the retreating commandos as possible, not making a fuss, just darting through whilst the home invaders regrouped and reassessed.
They reacted poorly when the glad-wrapped adolescent with the armour-cracking handgun started creating more corpses at a terrifying rate. Soon, they were scurrying back to the airlock, dragging the comrades they could. Arker made sure to wing as many as he could, and they piled into the chamber and cycled it.
As the door closed and, Arker made sure the ones left behind were messily dead. The protective dissociative state began to slip away. His heart started hammering uncomfortably, and his belly became a storm-swept ocean of churning sea foam. Arker stared at the airlock door as the station indicated the invaders had returned to their ship.
Holy smoking catfish.
He stared at the bodies, just like in the games. Odd that it didn't bother him.
Gop walked over.
"What do I do with these?" The small robot had a handful of bullets in his cupped palms. The projectiles were unscathed but separated from their casings, meaning they had been shot from something. Arker couldn't comprehend.
Gop looked down at its collection and gestured at Arker "I didn't think you wanted them because they were coming at you quite quickly, and you seemed to be using them to make the other people spill out all their juice. I assumed you wanted to keep your juice and not catch these small rocks with your organs. But I'm sorry if that wasn't the right thing to do."
"How many did you catch Gop?"
Gop thought for a few moments. "At least 57, but I couldn't carry them all, so I left the rest over there." He pointed to a small garden of bullets placed in perfect rows on the floor of the room.
Arker frowned within the confines of his gelatinous fortress. His delusions of grandeur hit a brick wall and left the wet smear of his confidence dribbling to the ground below.
"Nah, you can keep them, I don't want them" He replied nonchalantly.
Gop looked around, unsure what to do with the slugs before opening his hands and letting them spill all over the floor.
A stalemate ensured.
Arker and Gop faced the airlock behind a temporary barricade consisting of tables, utility crates and a few unfortunate vegetable plants. Arker monitored the external feeds of the invader's ship, which, for the most part, sat in the dock inert. Only when the external airlock cycled open did the invaders reveal their next strategy, which represented a rather abrupt escalation. They were rolling a combat mech into the small chamber, which two technicians fussed over as lights began blinking and weapons were cycled. Arker panicked.
He overrode the airlock door and shot one of the technicians as he tried to scramble out of the airlock back into their ship. Then he emptied the rest of the magazine into the hibernating killing machine.
He shut the airlock and waited for their next move.
Five minutes later, three soldiers erected a temporary barricade in front of the mech before the remaining technician attempted to ready the mech again. He had a tough time wiping the blood off the important bits before he began trying to assess and repair whatever damage Arker had caused with his shots.
It quickly became apparent that the mech was not permanently disabled. Arker was afraid. He couldn't take his eye of the Sharde rifle on the mech's left side. It would turn him into flesh-flavoured toothpaste, nano suit or not.
Gop tapped him on the leg. "Why don't we get the other ship to help?"
"What ship?"
"The one outside the house"
Arker shook his head "I can't control our ship remotely."
"Not our ship, the other one."
"What other one?"
"The one outside"
"Holy fucking catfish, Gop, what ship are you talking about?"
"There is a third ship; it's been just sitting there for a while."
Arker checked the station, nothing. He checked the visual feeds, nothing. "How do you know there's another ship?"
In the airlock, the mech began unfolding and loading its weapons. Arker tried to disable the airlock door but the station safety protocols didn't allow it.
"I don't know, I just know it's there" The small robot pointed towards the station's ceiling.
Arker thought the robot was going around the bend, unless it had some kind of sensor suite that Arker didn't know about, something it didn't know how to use properly yet. Machine learning - what a buzzword. Arker probed around his suit controls, his cortical web was talking with the armour’s inbuilt lattice, and he queried the computer for something capable of dealing with a combat mech.
Gop tapped him on the hip. "Want me to get them to help?"
"Yeah sure, get the phantom ship to kill that combat mech." He replied sarcastically. The airlock door opened and Arker's suit fired a glob of its malleable constitution at the mech. It stuck to the tri-barrel autocannon and prevented it from cycling. Arker used the spare moments to fire a few shots at the mech’s sensor suite.
“I think they got my message" Gop sounded pleased. "What’s an airlock?"
Arker ignored it.
"Oh, that, OK"
The airlock door snapped shut just as the mech began advancing.
Gop's eyes were bright green as he tugged at Arker's elbow. "Help is on the w-
Gop’s voice was cut off by the great blacksmith in the sky slamming him between his anvil and forging hammer in a clash of forces designed to birth stars.
The enemy ship, the airlock and its habitants, combat mech included, were gone. Arker watched on the external feed as iridescent droplets of slag drifted away from the raw edges of the station; sparks accompanied the escaping debris whilst leaking gases and fluids created their own crystalline geysers, dissipating into the nothingness. The surrounding structure of the station was scarred with the markings of passing shrapnel and flammable materials.
Arker's suit had just finished unblinking his sensors when he realised he was in a vacuum. The airlock door was gone, and the whole embarkation lounge was open to space. Debris and particulates drifted about him like snow.
Gop seemed unfazed.
"Guess that was your help, Gop"
"Spectacular, huh?"
"Terrifying."
Arker rechecked the external sensors and was greeted by a fresh dread. Their ship was toast. It looked like half the airlock had made its way through their vessel on its way out to the great beyond. Arker rewound the footage and slowed it down. He frowned; it was useless. Just the same flash and then everything turned to shit. Although there was the suggestion of something hitting the ship, it didn't appear to come from the direction of the airlock.
In a fit of frustration, Arker scrambled to remove the solidifying gel helmet from his head and then realised they were still in a vacuum. His eyes popped, and he went rigid. He held the handgun close to himself and broke out in a sweat. Reminding himself that this wasn't a game was getting dangerous.
Gop's eyes were bright green in the darkness of the lounge; in front of its small white figure, the debris was swirling like a miniature tornado.
Arker checked all the pressure doors to the rest of the station and found them sealed. The station's computer reported pressure leaks from most other compartments. The water was gone and they were using stored power. With a few other queries, Arker and the computer determined the station was now toast too, and so would Arker be once his 02 ran out. He sat down on the deck and regarded the expanse of vacuum and stars.
He squinted suspiciously. Maybe it was just a game.
Unfortunately, this reality had all the trappings of the mortal one - he needed to urinate, and he was terrified in a physical, all too biological way.
"If I die, Gop, can you make sure my father knows I tried to protect the station"
"Sure"
"I wonder if he’ll be relieved"
"Relieved that you tried to protect the station?"
"No, that I was dead. Seemed that way when mum died."
Gop stared blankly at him and shrugged its shoulders. Arker overcame his nerves and urinated into the suit.
"Want me to call the ship over now?"
Arker started. Of course, the ship that slagged the invaders was still out there. Visions of his frozen, cyanosed corpse faded. Somewhere, he suspected his father was displeased. "Yeah, that's a good idea."
The pair watched the stars of Milky Way through the hole in the station as they waited. Arker's suit slowly frosted over as the outer layer of the gel kept the cold at bay. All except the helmet was changing. Where it had once been translucent, it was now turbid and dark. Slowly, it became grey, like the colour of fog, and it shaped itself into something one might imagine a survival suit to look like. Arker didn't notice.
In the station's opening, a black dot formed against the backdrop of star haze. Arker rocked back as the dot grew larger and larger, too quickly, frighteningly so. The shadow expanded and grew details. Line and edges described a ship of considered, pragmatic menace. Arker saw a warship. A large one.
The stars were gone, and only the ship's prow could be seen.
"Who the hell are your friends, Gop?"
"Yar Ron is his name."
"Who's that?"
Gop gestured to the ship "That."
"That's the ship's name?"
"No, the ship is called the Herald of Oblivion."
Arker paled. The gel lining his skin soaked up a fresh upwelling of sweat.
"That's the bloody Jar'ron Navy."
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