Nikos caught nothing.
His heart lurched, throbbing with emotions he could not describe. A profound feeling of loss, a cold hollowness that went as deep as his core.
Yet the world did not stop. Not for him.
“ Authenticating…Recognising Principal…”
Words were lost on him.
The singularity warbled and pulsed to an unknowable rhythm . He watched unseeingly as it retreated into itself, each consecutive shudder compressing it, collapsing into infinite spacetime that made his eyes water.
The event horizon seemed to pinch inward, pulling at the fabric of reality like cloth. The seam into oblivion bled a dizzying wash of colours and substance that scratched at his mind and made his hindbrain whimper with hysteria.
Nikos could’ve stared and fallen into its unknowable vastness, letting himself go until all that remained was a husk.
Yet the air in the immediate vicinity whined, making his teeth ache and upsetting his inner ear. A lurch broke his trance as bile crept up his throat.
Nikos came back to himself horrified at the loss of his agency. A sentiment short-lived as again he had to reflexively scrunch eyes shut as light flared so brightly it made shadows long and solid. There might have been phantosmia of sunshine and a taste of blue when a backwash of ephemeral energy gushed through and around his body, painting his surroundings in colours beyond mortal ken.
Probing sensations, energising and euphoric, sunk into his skin in wisps of blue, turquoise , amethyst, and ultraviolet, electrifying his spine. He was still blinking away gossamer motes of light when a shadow fell over his bleary vision.
Something big, loomed in silhouette, and then two points of actinic blue were glaring down like spotlights.
‘Teleportation?’ Nikos’s heart skipped a beat, adrenaline jolting his brain to full alertness. His flight or fight response, however, seemed to be at cross purposes. And what was he supposed to do when the fight had already gone from him?
Yet he couldn't help but gulp when the thing opened with a pneumatic hiss of sterile air. His mind immediately jumped to stereotypical scenes of alien pods or sarcophagi opening to reveal the horrors within as a frisson of dread crawled across his skin.
Then, he saw her. He only had to let his eyes adjust to the near-absent ambient light to see the idealised form of a humanoid female.
She had an oval face, a light skin complexion of biracial ethnicity, a pert button nose, high cheekbones, and a soft, rounded jawline. Flowing from a lime green beret were long and curly tresses the frosty hue of gunmetal grey with highlights which made her French braid look as though woven from oxidised chrome.
Garbing her hourglass body was an elaborate and futuristic outfit of a dark techwear jacket with lime yellow highlights, miscellaneous metallic accoutrements, buckles, and straps. Underneath that she wore a high-collar leotard jumpsuit in grey with tufted sections of fabric and an esoteric logo on the left side of her chest. Shod on her feet were chunky soled boots with heels, giving her a very cyberpunk vibe.
Nikos thought his sister would have undoubtedly approved of it. It was a prime encapsulation of exotic beauty come alive.
When the girl’s eyes finally flickered beneath eyelashes the same shade as her hair Nikos’s breath was taken away. Her sclera was the purity of an egg’s whites, broken up by startlingly cyan blue irises verging on gold ringed pupils akin to central heterochromia.
For what seemed like an eternity, she held his gaze without blinking, as if assessing his worth behind her inhuman gaze. He swore there were points and traces of gold behind her eyes twinkling and spinning like the inner workings of trans-human augments.
She blinked, looking around, then at him
“ Boss?” Her face softened into an expression that Nikos only ever saw on one other person.
“Whuh?” his mind bluescreen as his jaw flapped, wordless and dry, before he suddenly received an armful of girl.
“Oof! Arcis?”
He gasped, as she glomped onto him like a limpet, staggering him backwards with a weight that belied her stature.
Nikos could not describe how it felt to meet the personification of a complex virtual intelligence he never thought he’d meet. In daydreams or imaginings perhaps, but they could not compare to the presence, weight and warmth of a real body. Left unsaid was that her scent was of that new wrapper smell and ozone. It was like hugging a very warm and purring humanoid laptop.
Tears welled in his eyes as a paroxysm of feelings finally overran the metaphorical bottle. Awe and relief he was not alone and grief that he’d almost been.
“Anomalous. Conflicting biometrics. But voiceprint is you,” the girl murmured against Nikos’s chest. Even in their tangle of limbs, her short stature and lithe form just barely came up to his chin. She had an ample bosom on a swimmer’s build and understated musculature whose strength could nevertheless be felt through the hug squeezing him for it was worth.
“ How are you here? And where even is here?” Nikos wheezed, gently pulling away so he could see her in her entirety. The safety of meeting someone he’d never thought he’d see was being tempered by the feeling of being off-kilter as various sensations of his own body made themselves known among them, lethargy and a misplaced centre of balance.
“ Apologies…I was late,” she said haltingly, searching his face as committing it to memory. “ Time spent in the noosphere was not insignificant and real-time translation was even more so. I gather you must have recently awoken from some form of stasis. ”
“Noosphere? You mean cryostasis, right?” Nikos chuckled wryly, his mind going a mile a minute. “I don’t believe that Waylen Arkwright is in the habit of kidnapping people for shits and giggles. Maybe that jerk Mick Forsberg looks like an alien―”
Denial.
He was rambling. Prevaricating to steer clear of the cliff and a sudden descent into hysteria lurking on the other side of it. Another part of him wondered whether his mind was a casualty of the Mandela Effect.
‘ A casualty of causality, heh,’ “ I’m sure I’d know if cryogenics had evolved that far; after all, we were going to―”
His heart palpitated, and his lungs drew short on air. Nikos felt a sudden floaty sensation, an out-of-body experience akin to missing a step in the stairs. He saw Arcis blink in slow motion, her head tilt stuttering, motion buffering, each miniscule action broken into frames.
“... the end result was ….. animation, the principles behind cryo…. and ... .sleep differ in application―” He was half aware of her voice, which seemed to echo from afar, dopplering.
His lips could barely move to ask what was wrong because it was as though they were two lead weights. Or his brain was moving faster than his body could catch up and somewhere along the line his pharynx short circuited from neural overload.
Badump!
Time screeched to a halt with the delicacy of dry glass panes sliding over each other. Nikos’ mind caught up with repressed memories as reality unraveled and faded into black.
----------------------------------------
“ Mayday! Mayday―”
Turbid waves rushed to meet a nose cone. Crushing pressure, broken glass, the taste of metal and burning air in starved lungs as his chest collapsed. The smell of ozone, salty and murky sea water and kelp clung to his limbs as he was dragged flailing beneath the water, nostrils and sinuses clogging, ears popping, filling up with stinging salt. Blackness encroaching the corners of his vision―
Nikos came to heaving-scrambling-grasping onto armrests with pale knuckles, the sudden jerk all but arrested by a lap bar. He sucked in a breath yet the barest of it seemed to reach him like a fished-out, almost-drowned man gasping for precious air.
“Wha—?” he croaked, trying to grasp what happened, only to flinch at the lightshow, glaring at his face before his eyes became accustomed to new scenery.
“ Where?” He aborted another query as a cascade of runes scintillating with backlit hues faded into attention. Meaning stayed out of reach as the text spun and swum in his vision in a dyslexic dance of foreign language.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
‘I must be seeing things,’ he scrunched his brow in frustration. Whatever bender he’d undergone had him light headed and feverish. There was an unexplainable hyper-sensory awareness of his body and a metallic tang of blood at the back of his throat.
His proprioception was out of sorts, waffling a second behind as if a toggle was out of alignment, making everything around him so slow. Then things seemed to crystallise, shifting as if finding their rightful place in a puzzle. Alien memory meshing with his, overlayed like a film or perception filter.
Nikos shuddered, wracked by a full body spasm. A hiss escaped between clenched jaws as his brain threatened to undergo a mental split between two viewpoints.
Then vision flickered again, letting the cacophony of cognitive feedback cohere into rhyme and reason. He came around to himself, finding his body in a literal eggseat, his lumbar back support conforming to his spine as he sat across from on a T-shaped instrument panel. The intermittent sounds of activity drew him sideways where the console split the space into two workstations.
On the other side sat Arcis, an intent look writ over her face and hands splayed across the glossy surface, luminous dendrites of teal spreading beneath her palms.
Ambient glows of emerald and burnished gold illuminated displays resembling mercury trapped inside panes of glass and a multi paned helmpit viewscreen. Beyond the canopy marred by sediment was an inky blue that bled into black.
“ Mayday! Mayday―”
He shuddered. It reminded him of―
Crushing pressure,broken glass and the taste of metal and burning air in starved lungs as his chest collapsed―
He winced, brutally crushing that phantom of thought under a metaphorical heel, mentally wrangled his navel gazing into the moment. A glance immersed him in the deluge of information in his face, reminiscent of emulators he’d used for cross-platform programming environments. It was magnitudes more sophisticated and dense. So utterly out of his wheelhouse.
“ What happened?” he rasped, his voice dry and unfamiliar.
“ Seizure; origin unknown,“Arcis stated, beckoning forth a hologram with her free hand. A series of chevrons panned into drop-down bars of glyphs and indicators.
“―Exotic energy and effects thereof caused activation of vessel. However, short term exposure should dissipate safely.”
‘Of course there were consequences for unveiling squinting behind the veil of reality,’ Nikos shuddered, from conjectural cognitohazards and unmentionable extradimensional that could make his brain jabber itself into madness. It was obvious a seizure causing ‘exotic’’ effects was not exactly reassuring.
Nikos had questions but pending current circumstances required he ask them later.
“ Holding position deemed untenable; immediate exfiltration is advisable,” Arcis said.“ Mobility is paramount and primary to subsequent objectives; pinpointing current location.”
Nikos heard the protestations of the hull around them. Back of his neck niggled, warning of deep waters and unknown perils.
“ ―ost transmission. Foxtrot-Echo-Niner-O-Niner to Den Mother, requesting vectors to initial. I repeat we have lost transmission―”
“ Foxtrot-Echo-Niner-O-Niner to Den Mother transmitting in the blind guard we―”
“ Sitrep,” Nikos flinched, reining his focus tighter to the present.
“ Unknown computing architecture proves incompatible. Anomalous operating platform detected and breaching algorithms are currently in progress―”
‘Right,’ that was a thread of familiarity he could follow. Attempts at controlling the new interface were immediately obvious as task windows popped up with action cues, snatches of alien language slipping through too fast to understand. Comprehension danced out of reach, taunting like a cob kernel stuck between his teeth.
Then Nikos remembered a certain language engine modelled upon the finite state transducer and facepalmed.
“ Rosetta's Babbel?” He asked hopefully.
“ Ah, based on the runic alphabet,” she acquiesced. “ Successful. Translating.”
Another hologram popped up, script scrolling and highlighted like a very fast game of tetris and word crush.
“ Cross reference for security measures matches /psioneural meld/; /psychometric lock/;”
“ Psychometric lock?” Nikos muttered in disbelief.
“ Context insinuates means of authentication,” she said.
“ Like biometrics? I thought we were the only ones on the ship?” he frowned.
“ No other biosignals have been detected,” she said. Nikos' thoughts stuttered to a halt.
“ How likely do you think It’ll accept mine?” He asked. It was a long shot but against the alternative he’d take those odds―
“Probability…is infinite, ” she blinked.
“ Infinite is not impossible― “ Nikos looked askance at his surroundings. The armrests of his seat were indented for elbows and wrists, at the end of which hemispherical protuberances formed interfaces that could easily fit inside his palms.
In Avitech he’d seen many forms of control systems, even concepts that had never left the draft paper but these were new even to him. Regardless, the form factor and ergonomics was geared towards opposable thumbs or, barring that, hands, which was all he needed.
So Nikos grasped the trackballs before he could vacillate, hoping against his luck that by fate he was right.
----------------------------------------
There was a beat of silence. Tension ratcheted up several notches, thickening so much that Nikos swore it could bounce lead. It was the nail-biting point in time, one slot before a jackpot.
And then―
Haptic feedback thrummed through his bones. The deceptively metallic surface went grey-goo and swallowed his palm as electric tingles nibbled at his fingers with probing tickles. Nikos repressed an urge to flinch from cold metal gone viscous at room temperature, an artefact of associating argentine liquids with toxicity.
There was the sensation of falling, a key turning, a half-way open doorway; reality rippling like a drop of water on a pond.
The world fell away.
Then he came to.
He was half in half out but not quite disembodied.
“...ss?” Arcis’ voice warbled as though it were underwater.
“...?” Nikos blinked. Suddenly, his perspective exploded into multiple viewpoints, each ensconced in hexagonal elements, like a pixel under a microscope. Overlays swum in the periphery of his vision, looking both far and near in a way that made his visual cortex water.
Arcane alphabet and symbols, glyphs ascribing meaning to the ship’s ready status, blinked at him in haphazard constellations like stars in foreboding darkness.
Biofeedback wailed against his grey matter as myriad sensations and concepts that had no human analogue sought to make themselves known via synaesthesia.
‘Guh! Minimise―’ everything faded out.
Nikos' reflexive first response was to customise the hell out of what was in front of him. He segued into it like putting on a well worn pair of shoes, never mind that it was alien to his sensibilities. Let it be said that Nikos was an old hand at the clutter of augmented reality interfaces.
"Highlight important details only, altitude, direction, gyroscoping orientation― dynamic positioning system,’ the view screen rearranged itself, glyphs and symbols settling into the edges. It was like wearing his auggles in a game’s sim-view but something was missing.
‘Arcis! Authorise peer-to-peer connections!’
A glyph pulsed. Something at the back his mind responded in a chirp that tasted like colours. A hexellated pane, hexel? A hexel expanded, taking centre stage, into a close up view of Arcis.
“ Boss? Oh, connection established, ” she blinked, her voice’s verisimilitude rendered true as though conveyed directly into his mind.
Rather than wonder, he got down to brass tacks spurred on by the urgency of their circumstance.
“ Can you do something from that side?” Nikos asked. For all that effort, he wasn’t sure how to handle the activation, what with all the feedback of information jockeying for his mental bandwidth.
“ Positive. Stand by for control assist,” she stated.“ Reinstating recent directives; recycling effectors, boosting aegis…”
A particularly large groan of buckling metal halted prematurely as the aforementioned shield cocooned the craft. The effect mirrored the vessel’s gyro-locked projection system as a shimmering bubble of blue overtook its silhouette. Arcis carried on―
“…routing auxiliaries to mass impulsors…”
A resonant thrum rumbled through the airframe. The model pivoted, highlighting pulsing at the corresponding active locations.
“…in five, four…”
Readouts popped out and counted down in alien numerals. Arcis’ hexel banded in teal and gold highlights pulsated outwards in ripples; a distinct demarcation between the ship’s own functions and Arcis' communications.
“…three, two…propulsion ignition!”
The ship rocked, unseating from years upon years of sedimentary build up. The engines were unnaturally silent, and inertia was almost non-existent.
“...one, zero!”
But water gurgled across the hull, echoing like a large stone dropped into a near-empty well. Sand sloughed away from the view screen, giving way to wobbly and undulating bubbles as air escaped its compacted cavities with sediments that had long clung to the view screen.
With bated breaths, he waited for gradient changes in the light piercing through the water to see how far they had to ascend.
For a while, nothing seemed to change.
Panic whispered in the corners of his psyche, but counting numerals on the altimetric display became an anchor to recenter himself. He could almost hear the blood rush through his ears as they popped from pressure differentials.
Tension evaporated with the rumble of thunder and flashes of lightning, and unfamiliar propulsion kicked into gear, pushing the craft from water to air.
“Lift-off successful,” Arcis murmured.