MILO

The shapes of his three deposits were blurred within his mind. Was there even a fourth in the distance, behind the others and all the fog? Maybe. He was sure he had seen a fourth before. But reaching for the fourth was an impossibility if he couldn’t reach for the others. The deposits were clearly still present in his mind. The water deposit was closer than the others. He could reach for it, the hook was there. So why didn’t it work? He reached for it… A hammer-blow to his head.

Milo stepped forward and extended a palm, but instead of lightning he fell down on one knee.

His head throbbed with pain.

“I don’t understand,” Milo said. “I am suffering, I am in pain. My best friend hurt me. Where is my power?”

The coffee brewer in the corner came to an end, signaling that its content was ready.

“I know what’s wrong,” Diego said, leaning on the door frame.

“You don’t know, Doc,” Milo said. “I am sorry, but you don’t.”

Diego stepped into the room. “Okay, you are correct. I am not a hundred percent sure, but I have a theory. Or two. Either you were drained too much and for too long during your entrapment in the circuit board.”

“I have rested. There is liquid in the deposits. I can see that much,” Milo said.

“Alright, scratch that one then. But listen closely,” Diego said. “I have observed you the last few days. You are filled with doubts. Correct me if I am wrong, but your emotional state is imperative for the usage of your power. Your enlarged emotion creates a hook from which you reach and tear into the deposits with. But now your mind is muddled with doubts, which has thrown a foggy veil on your hook. The doubt clouds your mind. You need to get rid of them.”

Milo nodded. “Compelling argument. But there is one flaw. I had doubts before, back on Europe13, when Sam and I trained for me to get control of this. But then the sweetness flowed and I never had this kind of headache. I think you are wrong.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You were trapped in your lightning form, inside a circuit board for weeks, months even. Nobody knows how that changed you. What if some of your synapses were re-wired? Or the grey matter of your brain altered? We cannot know. Your predicament is novel,” Diego said.

Milo poured coffee to two mugs and offered Diego one. “So, how do I get better?”

“If you were my patient, which you actually are. You need to believe in yourself and our cause. We have been through a lot,” Diego said.

Milo sipped from his mug. “You have a way with words, Doc. But it is not as easy as that.”

“I think Sam’s transformation is screwing with you too. You will need to forget about him. Focus on yourself and what you believe in,” Diego said. “Believe in the lightning.”

“I don’t know how,” Milo said, staring into his mug. The black aromatic scent rose into his face, the black liquid sloshing around inside the mug. If he looked close enough and for long enough, creatures and monsters were shaped in the coffee.

“He is not the same person anymore. Something broke inside him when he watched you die,” Diego said. “I have seen it happen many times in Navy veterans.”

“Maybe you are right. But it doesn’t change our situation. He will have his mind through, he pulled a weapon on us,” Milo said.

Diego sighed. “Forget about him, you cannot change him back. The alleged responses from Tern, they have stopped arriving. There are some unique sequences in every message, but there are also some that are the same. As you said, there has to be something to it. The size of it’s very small. Maybe he has a limited amount of energy available.”

Something clicked in the back of his mind. An idea.

“Take all the unique sequences and input them into the navigational engine. He doesn’t know anyone to be able to easily understand the messages, but he cannot encrypt them either, because we don’t have any protocols setup with him or anything shared between us. But he still wants to protect the message from being too easily understood by others. He padded the messages with overhead,” Milo said. “I think the unique parts are the coordinates!”

They ran to the bridge.

Sam sat in his seat, his face tired. “Why are you in a hurry?”

Diego dropped down into his seat, scurried through Tern’s responses and inputted the unique sequences into the navigational engine.

“Let us try this, Sam,” Milo said.

Sam grunted.

“Look!” Diego splashed the result onto the main view screen. “You were right. They are coordinates. To a planet. It’s quite a way off, so we will need to go into hibernation to get there.”

“Yes.” Milo smiled, turning to Sam. “We are going there, with or without you. We need them.”

Sam frowned. “Doc, set the course. Claire, prepare the hibernation pods.”