-- sparks geysered from the consoles around her. The companion stood rigidly inside the theatrical, fiery swirls and stared at the wall. She had been ordered into this corner of the bridge, and here she would stay, even if the ship were to break up under her feet.
The wall was a seamless, metallic cyan, with nothing her eye could light on. Nothing except the occasional tiny spark speeding past, gleaming with a few bright seconds of life, then snuffed out in--
-- running, his last words crashing over her. The short corridor blipped in and out of existence, or maybe she did, shifting between worlds as she—
—-escape pod exploded from the ship, and the ship exploded behind it. She stared at the bright cloud as it filled the windows around her, a world-ending spark, and waves of heat shuddered through the walls --
--in darkness. Only darkness, darkness forever –
When her senses returned to her completely the companion was standing in darkness, but she instinctively knew she was in another corner.
She couldn’t see it, and her hands were by her side, so she couldn’t feel it. However the sense of walls framing her face was unmistakable.
Had he ordered her here?
Where exactly was here?
And who was he?
The companion stood in the dark for an achingly long time. Her body barely moved, but her mind churned. She stretched her tattered memory so taut that it seemed to fray under the strain. Sparks flew again in her mind’s eye in a space ship under attack. She was ordered into an escape pod. He had ordered her to go. What did he say?
It was like remembering a long ago dream.
“Get… and go… near… ‘scape... Pea… escape pod.” A man's voice, screaming at her.
Pea, was that her name?
It didn’t feel familiar. There was no sense of “me” that flowered when she remembered that particular syllable.
However, it was an improvement over thinking of herself as “companion”, particularly as she appeared to be completely alone.
It was that thought which finally spurred her away from the corner. You couldn’t be a companion if you were all alone.
She had to find him, wherever he was. Whoever he was. The last thing she could remember was him ordering her to safety.
Standing in a corner in the dark was no way to honor an order like that.
So she put out her hands, slowly easing them through the dark towards the walls that surrounded her. The surface that met her fingers was slick and smooth, like glass. A soft vibration rumbled against her fingertips as she dragged them over the flat surface, searching for something to indicate where she was standing.
Presumably she was still in the escape pod, but that was only a guess. A person who isn’t sure of her own name can hardly be sure of anything else.
She turned on the spot, running her fingers blindly over the entire, tiny… closet. The space was barely a meter square and had no distinguishing features, not hooks or shelves on the wall, not carpet on the floor. Pea barely had space to crouch and touch the floor. Nothing. Smooth, slick, nothing.
Finally, as she searched with increasing fear, she located a thin seam near one corner that hopefully indicated a door.
She pushed.
Nothing happened. She skimmed the door’s surface again, hoping for a latch or a handle, but found nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Only the same glass-like material as the walls.
A tendril of panic unfurled in her stomach.
Pea pushed harder, using her shoulder, then tried each of the other walls the same way. She tried the door again, bracing her foot against it and leaning on the opposite wall to shove with all her might.
Nothing. Not a single crack, not an ounce of movement.
She hammered her fist against the door. It even absorbed the sound of her blows, so that she could barely hear the dull thud, thud, thud.
She was trapped.
Hot, sick fear bloomed in her, cramming into her stomach, pressing against her lungs, pushing aside all thought. With blood thundering in her ears, she threw herself against the door, using all her strength to push and hit, and finally to scream for help.
The instant the word ‘help’ passed her lips, a soft, cool voice spoke to her.
“How may I help you?”
Pea instinctively flinched away from whoever was speaking, and banged into the side of her prison. She flung out her hands, warding her potential assailant away, but only smushed her fingers, quite painfully, into the unyielding door.
“How may I help you?”
The voice repeated, directly into her ear.
You’re in a spaceship, you idiot, Pea told herself. She took a few deep breaths, trying to crush down the panic, doing her best to ignore the instinct still urging her to scream and fight and run and dash herself against the walls until she escaped, one way or another. She could feel her heartbeat thudding in the tips of her aching fingers.
Spaceships have computers to run them. Computers that can do things.
“Please open the door,” Pea managed to force out.
With only a tiny whisper of noise, the door slid open and Pea flung herself out into the light.
At first it was enough to just be out of the tiny space. Pea stretched her arms and legs as far as they would go, lifting and flexing them to shake off the lingering fear, as her eyes adjusted to the new surroundings.
Whoever else she might be, she was a person who did not like small spaces.
The room outside the closet was a flattened sphere, with a sunken middle rimmed by brown velvet sofas and mahogany tabletops, and a clear crystal dome arching overhead. The lighting was a dim gold that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. In the very center of the room was a pool of water.
Beyond the dome was…. Nothing. Not the blackness of space that Pea had been expecting. Not the metal fixings of the interior of another ship. Not even the weird landscape of an alien world.
Just a steady, off-white… nothing.
It was creepy. As if her escape pod was sitting in the middle of a blank page, just waiting for someone to write over it.
Pea turned her eyes away.
There were two doors in the room, aside from the closet door. One was quite close to the closet. After a short moment of futile scrabbling, Pea asked the computer to open it, and quickly discovered it led to a small bathroom. The other door led to a control room.
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There were two plush, red velvet seats in the middle of the control room, each set in front of large display screens. The screens were busy with glowing graphics and scrolling numbers. Half of the room was a window into the taupe abyss.
At least, Pea assumed it was a window.
Maybe my master just has really boring taste in screensavers?
For a second Pea wondered why her brain had decided on the word “master” for the mysterious “he”. However, there was too much else to worry about and she set the thought aside for now.
“Where are we?” Pea managed to say, swallowing hard as her eyes fuzzed. There was something so hungry about that blankness outside the ship. She had a sickening sense of deja vu, as if she had looked into nothingness before, searching for anything that she could grasp with her eyes.
And yet it was also utterly strange. The blandness seemed dangerous, like the call of the void had taken over the whole world outside the ship.
“You are in escape pod A, from the ship Icarus.” The voice was cool and emotionless, but not quite robotic.
“But where is the pod? Where is the ship?”
The voice hesitated. Pea wondered if the hesitation was an attempt at emotion, or if it had simply paused to calculate its response.
“I cannot detect the Icarus.”
Pea found she couldn’t take her eyes off the view- the anti-view- that filled the wall. She supposed it could be a video monitor, but it felt like a window. She eased herself into one of the command chairs, careful not to touch the flickering display screen in front of it.
“What’s out there?”
“The escape pod is in a Sandbox. There is nothing out there.”
“Sandbox?”
It was intended to be a question, but apparently an inflection was not enough to get the computer to respond.
“What is a sandbox?”
“A Sandbox is a place where Items may be created and tested.”
“Like… like an engineering bay?”
Pea closed her eyes after a moment, giving up on getting a response. The escape pod computer did not seem to be very advanced. It also only responded to direct questions, which was particularly annoying because Pea had no idea what to ask next.
She tried to remember who she was and where she came from, tried to remember what her life had been like, tried to remember why she might be stuck on an escape pod with a dumb computer, tried to remember anything at all. Nothing. Nothing inside, and nothing outside.
She certainly didn’t know what a sandbox might be, or why she was stuck in one.
“Do you wish to have a lesson on the ARcade?”
“I… no. I don’t even know what that is.” Pea considered the possibility that the ship’s computer was broken in some way and shuddered.
“Where is the sandbox?”
“I cannot answer that question.”
Pea huffed. “Well can you get me to a star system? We need to go back to get… him.”
“You wish to be in a star system?”
“Yes… but don’t just paint the windows or something. I want actual stars out there.” She pointed at the screen, at the big, blank page that her escape pod seemed to be drowning in.
The computer seemed to hesitate again.
“Please specify the star system.”
“I don’t know! Whichever one we just came from!”
The hesitation was much longer this time. Long enough for the panic to start seeping in again. Pea clenched her fists and waited.
“Request has been authorized. Total estimate for star system of sector 231 is approximately nine hours.”
Pea sagged with relief. “That’s fine.”
At least now she was getting somewhere. If she could get back to the last place she remembered, maybe she would remember more. Maybe, she would even find him again.
Pea hoped that would be a good thing.
As her body relaxed, a deep ache in her hands grabbed her attention, matched by an even more urgent ache in her belly. Pea realized that among the missing bits of information in her head was the last time she had eaten or slept.
“Uh, is there any food to eat, um, Escape Pod? Pod?”
Pea. Pod. Ha. Ha.
Well… maybe whoever had named her had a daft sense of humor?
“You may request any nutrients you wish and I will provide them.”
That was more like it. There had to be some advantages to being in a spacecraft. Pea felt saliva gush into her mouth at the thought of food. Maybe she hadn’t eaten in a very long time.
“Um, a steak dinner please. Medium rare. With mashed potatoes and broccoli. And apple pie with ice cream for dessert.”
Pea blurted out her order without thinking and then grinned to herself. Maybe she couldn’t remember her own real name, but she could apparently remember her favorite meal with ease.
“Your food is now available in the recreational room.”
That had to be the room with all the velvet sofas. Pea hauled herself out of her chair. Moving seemed to require a lot more effort now that she wasn’t facing immediate strangeness. She decided to eat well and then collapse on one of the sofas. They were the closest thing to a bed she had seen so far.
Except, of course there was no steak dinner. Only a bag of mush, newly extruded from a console in the wall, plopping onto a mahogany table.
“What is this?” Pea picked it up by one corner. The mush was gray and had the consistency of cold porridge.
“A meal containing all the nutritional value of 500 grams of beefsteak, 250 grams of mashed potato, 300 grams of…”
“I wanted the actual meal, not just a gross paste.”
“I am unable to comply,” Pod said with her cold voice. “A Captain assignment is required to authorize use of non-emergency rations.”
Fury zipped through Pea, tightening all her muscles, so that her fists formed and her teeth clenched… but there was no one to fight. There was no one here, except a stupid computer and a once-companion with only a semi-functional brain, and apparently no Captain assignment.
All Pea wanted to do was shut it all out for a while.
So she sucked it up, and she sucked down her bag of mush, grateful at least that it was tasteless.
Her belly full, she curled up on one of the sofas. Her clothing wasn’t exactly comfortable, but as soon as she lay down her eyelids began to droop.
”Could you at least do something about that dome?” She waved her hand vaguely overhead.
For once the computer managed an intuitive response and darkened the dome so that the void was shut out. The light in the room dimmed, although not to the pitch black of the closet.
As the underlying vibration of the ship revved to a slightly higher pitch, Pea shut her eyes and let herself slide into sleep.