"Res-a-tesseract, please state your purpose. You're making station security nervous."

I looked up from my tablet at the station drifting lazily outside the viewport. Oh, shit. That wasn't the idea. I reached for the comms to reply.

"Uh, sorry about that. This is the first time I've had damage. I was searching Station Net, trying to figure out where I was supposed to go for repairs," I hope that would nullify them. In hindsight, hovering above the shipping lines probably was a little bit menacing.

"Acknowledged. Sending handshake with your docking computer," the briefest of moments later, the console lit up with a request to accept the station taking control of the docking computer. I hit the accept button and the ship started moving on its own accord. There was nothing special to it, a bit to port, a bit down, forward, and then launching onto the docking bay. The only thing that still got me with the Res-a-tesseract was that the docking port was on the front instead of the side.

"Landry is the only one here that specializes in actual ship repair. Most of the outfitters can be found just off this arm. Follow the rules. Enjoy your stay," with that said, the screen popped up with the question of whether or not I wanted to begin filling the tanks and who was paying for the docking fees? I punched in my numbers for the docking fees, but denied the tankage on account that one of my tanks was ruptured. Who knew what else was ruptured? Now, I had to go find whoever Landry was and did I have to explain how I got damaged? I didn't like the idea of that. Maybe I could just say pirates. I wonder if that's an actual thing that happens with people that have Rift Drives? Though I suppose it's also a thing that happens to people without Rift Drives and I was living proof. Sam had already sent a rather comprehensive restock list to my tablet. So as soon as I was certain that I could actually start, I began accepting cargo, which I guess was kind of normal when you consider that I still had to find cargo for the ship, but the stuff had to fit inside the vessel instead of being latched to the outside. Also, the destination needed to be farther away from the Broker's station.

Now that we were docked to the station, there were two things that could be done. Firstly, there were the data packets that kept coming in. I had downloaded enough tutorials to figure out that I could copy the incoming data stream to new folders and take a look at them. I still didn't know how to actually stop them yet. I watched as the data came in, populated the folders, and then got sent out to whatever devices they were supposed to go to. I opened the first one, it really should not have surprised me. The ship had been full of like seven guys. All of which were some type of either mercenary or pirate or something. An archive of pornography was not that groundbreaking. I didn't know what device it was going to, but now that I know it wasn't important, all I had to do was blacklist the device.

On the other hand, the other folder had a mixture of different files. I found it surprising, though I shouldn't have. I couldn't actually open a lot of the files, they were updates to some other file or another, but the ones I could open were bounties. Yeah, literal bounties. Like there's a price on this person's head in this area. There's a derelict ship that needs to be located in this region of space, someone stole the vessel of this make and model and it needs to be located and the person apprehended. I assume this was all going to the Captain’s Console. That would make a lot of sense and it also kind of told me what these people had been doing. They were in some ways bounty hunters. I wondered if retrieving the box that was buried in my cargo container was some type of legitimate bounty. Though, with the whole broker thing, I didn't really think so. Maybe a side job for a capable crew or something. I'd have to either get into the captain's console or figure out how to emulate the software so I could look at the bounties myself. I doubt I'd ever make a good bounty hunter, but I could give it a shot. With that done, I checked the Station Net to verify that I wasn't a criminal, at least not yet, and then got up as I was gonna have to go station-side.

Sam walked onto the bridge just as I was about to leave. She stopped suddenly realizing I was in her path and her face went from glaring at her tablet to mild surprise. I don't think she expected me to be here, but the smile told me she was a bit pleased.

"Hey, is Ship Net down?"

"Uh, no, why?”

“I can't connect and I don't know if it's my tablet or if it's Ship Net."

I took a step back because it was a little close quarters on the bridge and held my hand out for her tablet. I flipped through the settings and located its ID. Sitting back down at the console I navigated to the blacklist, verified that it was indeed the same ID, and re-enabled her tablet's permissions to use Ship Net. I handed the tablet back to her.

"Sorry about that. I was playing with some stuff. I must have blocked it."

"Oh, ok," she said cheerily, clearly happy to have her tablet back and in working order.

I watched her leave, skirt and tail swaying as she walked off. A ship full of male mercenary pirates, and it was the ship’s female medic that was downloading porn. I wonder if there was anything to the succubus persona beyond just looks.

***

Nobody called it Zero-Deck. It was referred to as Oh-Deck. Essentially, it was the part of the space station where most of the docking arms were. Every space station was different, but due to the constant comings and goings, most of the four or five decks in the center of any station were pretty similar. Further to the interior of the O-Deck was who knew what, possibly just storage, but mostly O-Deck was ship services and a whole lot of cargo loading and unloading.

Deck One tended to focus on the business end of things. That's where a lot of shipping offices were located. Deck two tended to be more of your fine dining, hotels, stuff for the tourists or the crew members who wanted to splurge a bit on themselves. Going negative, the Neg-One tended to support all your chandleries and other ship services that didn't immediately settle on the O-Deck. Things like painting services, refurbishing services, stuff like that. Neg-Two is generally where all the spacers went. It was the place where all your dance clubs, bars, and cheap and terrible entertainment was. It also included a large number of restaurants that catered to the clientele that existed on ship time and not station time. The general thought was that the whole system, at least Two through Neg-Two, had been pirated from some book written thousands of years ago. I had been on plenty of stations that didn't follow the usual rules, but the usual rules were very handy when all you did was attach, drop off a can, pick up a new can, and head back out. There was a subculture to spacers and generally speaking, keeping them separated from the station culture tended to be pretty good policy.

I sat in a hole in the wall restaurant, forking up the last of my hash browns and listening to the general chatter of the people around me. Two hours on station and I was already sick of people. There was a word for people like me, but it didn't actually fit. The word was Rifter. The general stereotype being a person would rather be off in space flying between ports than dealing with the humans aboard any of the stations, orbitals, or planets. Honestly, that would be a very good description of me except for one small tiny little fact. I hated the fucking Rift. Rifters were the weird ones that didn't feel uncomfortable in the subspace. If it even was a subspace, I don’t think anybody actually knew what the Rift was and every once in a while you hear the horror stories about ships that go in and never come out. Ghost stories or not, it still kind of creeps me out. I sat on the dividing line between Spacer and Rifter and for once, I had a thought that wasn't about me. Sam couldn't get off the ship. I'm not exactly sure what about thinking about space or culture had tripped that little factoid, but I realized that the girl couldn't get off and eat somebody else's cooking.

I punched in an order to-go on my kiosk, paid the tab and waited. I hope the repairs on the ship didn't take too long. Fortunately, it was almost entirely paid off by the previous captain's credit chips, which he had left stored in his safe. It wasn't entirely enough, but covered the majority of it. My bank account was starting to drain rather quickly, to the point I already couldn't afford the next payment on the flying brick, but what the hell, why not default on that loan too? I already murdered people, stole a ship and then murdered some more people. Why not loan delinquency? For the umpteenth time today, I paused to check my profile to see if I was wanted for anything. I still didn't have a price on my head. So that was good. I still had crates full of lead, of which I had no idea what to do with, and though it was my first time playing with the small cargo system, I actually found and scheduled a cargo for a star eight light years away. Fucking glorious. It wasn't gonna pay me a whole hell of a lot, but it would pay for the trip and give me some practice with how the hell this small cargo worked. Will also get me further away from the broker and all that. I think I pretty well decided I was just gonna run.

The waiter brought me my to-go bag and coffee, and I headed back towards the ship. My ship. Can I call it mine? I fucking stole the damn thing. I had stayed on board while they were fixing the underneath parts. A large majority of the cost was a new oxygen tank that had been pulled out, hauled out the lock and then replaced with a newer shiny model with a newer shiny price tag. Really? I should stop grumbling over spending somebody else's money. Just wasn't all his money and even if I wanted to sell the weird AI with its two-dimensional avatar that lived in a 3D Holo Tank, no one was gonna pay 100,000 credits for whatever she was supposed to be.

I climbed up the ladder and poked my head into the galley to check if Sam was in there, she wasn't, which meant she was likely in her little medical cabinet. The one place she felt most safe. I made my way there, knocked on the door and then opened it. I froze when I saw Sam.

Samantha Draken was sitting in her chair facing her tablet which was propped up on her desk. I had a view of her side as she flailed wildly. She was holding something in her hands, but was moving around a bit too fast for me to tell what the hell it was. Her head was bobbing. Her feet were thumping the deck plating in what I could only assume was some type of beat or rhythm and she kept taking sharp intakes of breath. What the fuck? I watched for far too long and she eventually hit a point where she stopped moving so quickly and began a slow tap of a single spot in the air with what could only be a drumstick.

"Sam?"

She didn't appear to hear me. The only sounds in the room were the environmentals and her heavy breathing. She turned away from me, started drumming the drumsticks in the air on one side and turning clockwise towards me. On what I could only assume was the final hard smack of an air drum, she finally noticed me and practically jumped out of her chair with a scream. Of course, that made me jump, nearly spilling the coffee.

"What the hell, what the hell?" Sam shouted. She then started hitting her ear as though something were crawling in it.

"What do you mean, what the hell?"

"You scared me," she said like I had actually tried to scare her.

"I knocked."

"Well, I didn't hear you."

"How could you not hear me?”

“Because I have music in my ears," she said, brushing her skirt off.

"How do you have music in your ears? You're not wearing any plugs or anything?"

"Augments," she said in that kind of you're-an-idiot tone girls get sometimes.

"You have augments?"

"Yeah. Doesn't everybody?"

"No," I said.

She shrugged. "Well, why not?"

I lifted up the to-go container and coffee and asked, "You want breakfast?"

Sam's eyes lit up. "You bought me breakfast."

"Yeah."

"What did you get?" she asked, taking away the container and opening it up to look inside. "Omelet, hash browns, I don't actually know what you like."

"I like anything I don't have to cook. Ooo coffee."

"You're welcome."

Sam placed the tray on her desk, set her ass back in her seat, and took a sip of the coffee.

"I thought you'd be gone longer," Sam said, opening up the little plastic fork and spoon set.

"Why? Honestly, I'm ready to blow this place."

Sam looked at me like I had worms crawling out of my eyes. "Seriously? The previous guys used to spend the day and most of the night off the ship when they got to dock," she shoved a piece of egg in her face and closed her eyes with a "Mmmm."

"Well, I guess I was born in space. I've spent my entire life in space, and I'd rather be in space."

Sam nodded and kind of said, "All right."

At least I'm fairly certain that's what she said. Probably shouldn't talk with her mouth full. "Are we all stocked up on food and spares?" She had given me the list to order from, I had ordered, it was delivered, but once everybody else was off the ship, I had left her to put away everything.

"Yeah. All spares are stocked and the freezer is, well, full as it can be."

"What do you mean full as it can be?" I didn't like their tone when she said that.

She looked up at me again like I was the perplexing one and said, "Well, it's currently full of bodies."

"You put the bodies in the freezer?"

She giggled, probably at my expression, which I assume looked pretty flabbergasted. What the hell did she put bodies in the freezer for?

"What else was I supposed to do with them?" she asked.

"I don't know, space them," I said.

"But they might hit something."

"In the middle of nowhere. It would be like the best place ever to space them."

"Oh."

Really? That was her final statement? “Oh.” What the hell? I pinched the bridge of my nose.

"Anyway, I expect there to be people here in about an hour to load up on our current cargo. Just note that, so you can stay here."

With that, I walked out and back up to the bridge, pausing for a moment as I went through the galley and looked at the large freezer. Every time she opened that thing, she had been putting food around frozen bodies. What the actual hell? I slumped in the pilot's chair and began fiddling with downloads, primarily courses on how to actually do some programming or system routing stuff. I needed to be able to get into the Captain's console or at least set up my own console with its bounty hunter database thing. I probably wasn't gonna end up as a bounty hunter, but depending on what options were available, who the hell knew.

We were pulling away from the station when my tablet bipped. I pulled up the screen and opened the message. Good news was the message was for me; it was a thing I had set up to inform me if something became available. Bad news was that something that became available was a bounty on my head. 15,000 credits for the capture of myself and the ship. Last known location was the station that had the broker on it, and I was apparently expected to be armed and dangerous. Well, shit. As soon as I got into the next system to deliver the load stacked up nicely in the cargo bay, the station authorities would have my ship locked down and banging on the lock entrance by the time I docked. I was suddenly truly screwed. In some ways, I kind of now understood how Sam felt. It would be five and a half days in the Rift. Five and a half days to figure out how the hell I was gonna get out of this shit.

***

"Hey, we can plug the A.I. into the ship now, right?" Sam asked in such a cheerful tone that it made me realize I was poking at my plate instead of actually eating.

"Huh?"

"The A.I., we got the plug for it. Remember?"

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Oh yeah, sure." I put my fork down and pushed back the seat to get up.

" She looked down at her own food, shoved a couple of bites in her face, and then moved over to the corner of the galley where we had stuck the Holo Projector/A.I. thing so other people didn't find it. I unpackaged the new cable while she hauled the thing onto the bridge, and it took literally next to no time to connect the A.I. into the ship systems. Nothing immediate happened for nearly ten seconds. Then the little two-dimensional avatar flicked out of existence. The ship's power fluctuated slightly, which was mildly concerning, and a half dozen of the screens on the bridge reset. Suddenly I had to wonder, was it a good idea to plug a random A.I. into the ship systems? The answer was probably no. Why the hell would I think that was a good idea?

"Testing. 1,2,3, testing," came a female voice over the ship's speakers.

"Hey," Sam said very excitedly. "Can you hear us now?"

"I hear you," replied the A.I.

I looked at the open systems cabinet and shrugged; there wasn't anything I could do about it now. Instead of continuing to worry about it, I plopped my ass back down in the pilot's seat.

"It's so good to hear your voice," Sam said, putting her own rear end in the navigation chair.

"And it is nice to be heard."

"So, what do we call you?" I asked the room at large because I wasn't exactly sure where the microphones were that the A.I. was listening from. The program in question popped up on my screen in front of me. Her two-dimensional avatar looked far better on the flat screen than it did on the Holo-Projector. She held her hand out like she was about to try to shake, and her mouth opened before Sam said…

"Her name is Z-Talia."

The A.I.'s avatar frowned and shot an annoyed-looking glance in the direction of Samantha, which meant she had access to the cameras, which meant she could probably turn on and off the cameras in the bathrooms. I had to fix that. The A.I. returned its gaze to me and said, "I am Xenomorphic Information Replication Processor by Vicktsuius-Natalia. But that's kind of a bullshit name. So you may call me 'X-Talia.'" The avatar looked toward Sam again. "X-Talia." She blinked out of existence, leaving the phonetic spelling of the name in her place. (eks-tah-lee-ah)

"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought the 'X' was gonna be like a 'Z' sound, like in Xeno," Sam said.

"I did not correct you because text is the lowest form of communication. Your apology is accepted."

"Ok. So what are you for?" I asked because that seemed the logical next question to ask an A.I.

The avatar tilted its head, her hair following far too slowly. "What am I for?"

"Yes. Like what are you programmed for?"

Her eyes got big as understanding dawned on her. For a computer program with a two-dimensional animated avatar, she really was quite expressive. "Ah, I am a prototype of an interpersonal learning model. I have the ability to understand human emotions and can learn a wide variety of tasks. This does mean that I am not programmed 'for' anything in particular, but that I can perform the duties of a dedicated A.I. and then be moved to a different task." The little avatar nodded and put her hands behind her back, standing straight and tall like whatever she just said was a thing of pride.

"Can you function as a ship's A.I.?" I asked.

"Fairly certain that falls into what she explained she can do," Sam unhelpfully commented.

The avatar nodded her head emphatically. "Oh, yes, that would be quite exciting," she said, her voice getting a bit bubbly. Her eyes grew rather wide as she looked further out of the screen. "Is that what you would like me to do?"

I looked over to Sam. "I'm not actually sure I can get her out. Is there a problem with leaving her there?"

"I don't have a problem with it."

"Yeah, I guess you got the job."

The avatar put her hands together and grinned as though she was holding in her excitement. "Yay. I'm a ship," she exclaimed before she seemed to freeze, her posture softening so it looked like the excitement dissipated considerably. "I'm an ugly ship."

I laughed. I had to laugh. I swear I said that just the other day.

"It's what's inside that counts," Sam said, a slight chuckle in her own voice.

I already liked the damn A.I., though to be fair, I tended to have a better relationship with machine intelligences than actual humans.

"All right. So, I think one of our first tasks should be to help me find and disable the cameras in the bathroom."

I felt more than saw Samantha's head swivel towards me, her eyes fixed like targeting systems.

"There's cameras in the bathroom?" Her voice, a mix of surprise and anger.

"There's cameras everywhere in here."

"But you've watched me in the bathroom?" She launched the accusation at me like missiles.

I had to bring up my own defenses with some type of deflection. "No, I disabled the cameras in the bathroom. But now we have an A.I. that can turn them on and off at will. So I thought maybe I should mechanically remove them."

Her attack seemed to be aborted because she crossed her arms and mumbled, "That fucking pervert," before returning her gaze back at me and saying, "You didn't find any videos or anything, did you?"

"I've found nothing. If there is anything, I probably expected it to be on the captain's console, which I cannot enter."

That seemed to mollify her as she got up and stomped her way out of the bridge, mumbling something along the lines of "that fucking asshole."

I turned my attention to the avatar on my screen. "Can you connect to my tablet now?"

The animated figure grinned, she clapped her hands together and disappeared into pixelated smoke. I heard my tablet bip. I pulled it out of my pocket and thumbed it on to find her on the screen in a "ta-da" pose. This thing was cute. "Ok. Well, let's get to work."

With X-Talia's help, I was able to actually locate the tiny little camera and yank it out of its hiding spot.

"Awesome. That's it."

"What about the other six?"

"Other six?" I asked because I had not been aware of another six cameras.

"Yes. In the sanitation unit, there are six cameras in both this sanitation unit and the other one down the hall."

"Well, that’s freaking bullshit. Let me guess there's one on the floor, the ceiling, and all four of the walls."

"That is correct."

Great. That basically meant that whatever perv put the cameras in here, he was taking holographic video and the only female on the ship was Samantha. She was gonna be pissed.

"I suppose there's no way you can hack into the captain's console?" I asked the little A.I. currently residing in my tablet.

"With my current resources, I think a brute force hack would require roughly 274.6 years."

I had a laugh at that. That did technically mean she could hack it.

"However, if you wish, I could bypass the password and unlock it now."

Well, that got my attention. "How the hell can you bypass it?"

"Factory default has the captain's console connected to the captain's key. The first owner of the ship should have deactivated the ability to do the default override. However, no override was completed, and the console can still be accessed via the company's default override."

"So, human error."

"That is correct."

I had to laugh. I wondered just how many places a person could break into because nobody turned off the factory defaults on how to get in for the first time.

"All right. Can you override the captain's console, please?"

"This does bring up the question, what happened to the captain?"

"He attacked my ship. I fought back, and now he's a corpsicle in the freezer."

There was a moment of silence before X-Talia's voice came back over the tablet. "I see. Captain's terminal console has now been unlocked."

"Are there any videos of Sam on it?"

"One moment."

I poked my head out of the captain's quarters and wondered where Sam was while I waited for X-Talia to reply.

"There are 174 videos consisting of 12 different girls and two men. 103 of these videos include Samantha Draken."

Oh Holy Shit. That did mean I could probably go watch Sam naked. She was fucking hot. And that would likely make things really weird between us. What about the other girls? Fair game? I suppose they too were victims in whatever perverted shit the previous captain was into. "Am I one of the males?"

"No."

Well, that likely meant that the recording was activated manually and didn't just happen anytime somebody got in the shower.

"Ok. Can you message Sam, tell her that you were able to get into the captain's terminal and let her know that there are videos of herself. I want you to either delete everything or bundle up the videos, send them to her and then delete everything on the captain's console. Her choice."

"Message sent."

"You are very helpful."

"Thank you."

"All right, we still got another bathroom with a bunch of cameras." I looked down at the tiny wireless cameras in my hand. I wonder what else I could use them for. Can I make drones? I don't know how to make drones, but now I had an A.I. who could probably explain it to me while I did all the actual physical mechanical moving of parts. I could have drones. I need money for more shit though. And I had other problems.

***

I sat picking at my noodle bowl while considering the dilemma of how to deliver our current cargo without being picked up by port authorities. Sam was oddly quiet and the dinner atmosphere was quite dead until a separate female voice belonging to X-Talia rang through the comm system.

"Can I join you?" asked the A.I.., exuberance in her voice.

I wondered how the hell she would join us for a meal as she wasn't, you know, real in any sense of the word. I got up out of my seat, spun one of the side chairs around, and placed its back against the edge of the table. I leaned my tablet against the chair, and the two-dimensional animated avatar popped into existence with sparkles of blue. I almost chuckled to myself when I noted that she was sitting at a table complete with a bowl of noodles and chopsticks.

"Thank you," the artificial intelligence said, oddly human-like. Sometimes I felt like I wasn’t talking to a machine. Soon the galley was once again full of the sound of environmental blowers and the scrape and clicks of plastic forks against plastic bowls or digital wooden chopsticks on digital ceramic bowls. Again, I was mulling over how to not end up in prison when Sam said…

"Are you gay?"

"What?" I asked, my brain rewinding and replaying the words back. Logically I understood the words. I just couldn't get the meaning.

"You know? Homosexual, attracted to other men?" Sam clarified.

Ah, Samantha was talking about something completely different than where my head was. Hence why it didn't make any damn sense. "No," I said.

"Oh," Sam went back to her noodles, and so did I, though she did interrupt the quiet with a follow-up question, "Asexual?"

"No."

"Oh."

Forks against noodles and bowls again. The table returned to its loud quiet, its noisy silence.

"Oh, come on. Are you serious?" X-Talia said out of the tablet speaker. I looked up to find her blue eyes shifting from left to right with exasperation written across her face. Quite literally, in bold text.

"What?" Sam asked.

"You asked if he's gay. There has to be a reason, right?" She turned to look at me. "You're not curious as to why she's asking? I feel like I'm missing half the conversation."

I shrugged. "In the time that we’ve known each other, I haven't hit on her, I don't think, I try not to stare at her, I haven't tried to utilize her specific situation for any sexual favors, and I assume she had you verify that I never looked at any of the videos. It's reasonable to assume I'm not interested in her or other women," I said, "She can come to three conclusions." I looked over to Sam and held up my fingers to tick each of the conclusions off. "First, I can be the nice guy, but considering the way that we met, I doubt she believes that."

Sam gave a sideways nod of her head as I pushed down the second finger.

“She can believe that I'm not into the whole gothic, succubus, doctor, chick thing, She's got going on. Which I am. It's totally hot."

Sam seemed to jerk her head back and managed to look slightly redder than she did a second ago. I dropped the third finger.

"Or she can assume that I'm mostly just a loner. I don't do well with people, and considering the way that we met, I am trying very hard not to be a dick." I put my hand down and looked back at the A.I.'s avatar. "She's like the sixth or seventh person to ask if I'm gay. I'm kind of used to it."

"Oh, ok." The blue-haired, blue-eyed avatar went back to poking at her digital noodles with her digital chopsticks. Sam and I went back to poking at our real noodles with real forks. Now, my thought process has been completely derailed. Pretty sure I was moping about not going to prison. I looked back up at Sam and asked the question that's honestly been on my mind for quite a while.

"What is with the whole succubus thing anyway? Wouldn't your parents have had to design you like that before you were born?"

Sam looked up from her noodles and gave a single shouldered shrug. "I was born with gray skin, vibrant pink hair, black sclera and pink irises. But yeah, I was designed like that. Parents were a little up in the air about the spaded tail, but they assumed that if they got tired of it, they could just have it docked." The tone of her voice indicated that she wasn't quite happy with her parents and the whole docking of the tail was a point of contention, but she continued, "I found the whole succubus thing later in life and decided I liked the red skin ones with the black hair. I usually change my eye color every two years but," she made a swirling gesture with her hand as if to point out the entire ship, "lack of equipment at the moment."

"You can change your skin color? And hair and eye color?" I asked, though the question was probably kind of stupid. I knew she was a splicer and it was just a simple genetic modification.

"Yeah, can change anybody's eye, skin, and hair color. It's all just pigmentation."

"No chance you can change facial structure?"

She looked up at me as though wondering what I was thinking and gave her head a slight nod and said, "Yeah, I can do that. Again, I don't have the equipment."

"You can do all that with genetic modification?"

"No, facial reconstructive surgery still requires well, reconstructive surgery, but I went to school for gene therapy and plastic surgery. So that's kind of in my wheelhouse," she shrugged, "I'd recommend not getting shot in the chest or abdomen or any areas like that. Thoracic and abdominal surgery are not in my wheelhouse."

"Huh? So you do have some sort of medical degree?"

Sam nodded her head slightly and gave a small smile as though she were secretly proud of the accomplishment.

"Well, I guess every parent wants their kid to be a doctor." I made the comment slightly offhand, one of those things that was supposed to be more for myself. However, it was audible because I wasn't used to other people around me.

Sam's small smile faded and she snorted.

"Not a good relationship with the family?" At this point, it was pretty much prying, but I'd let her decide how much to tell.

"No. My parents were controlling, just not on the career end of things. Mostly it was aimed at my older brother, but when he left, they turned their attention to me. Always look this way, look that way. Date this girl, date this boy, and I was all like, what about medical school? And they were all like, yeah, sure. That's fine. But we need you to dock your tail. I said fuck no, I like my tail. And they're like, well then we're not paying for medical school," Sam stabbed her fork at her noodles, which literally just made a loud clunk as it hit the bowl underneath. "Honestly, the whole thing was pretty terrible. It just went into a downward spiral from there, and a lot of my childhood sat on borderline child abuse, and I haven't seen my therapist in like 3.5 years," she rolled her jaw around like she was thinking about saying more, but put on a forced smile and looked up at me with her glowing coal eyes. "How about you? You good with your parents?"

I kind of had a sigh. "My mom left us when I was six. My dad worked a lot, pretty much raised myself."

Her forced smile grew a bit sickly looking, and we both silently returned to our noodles. I noticed X-Talia looking between the two of us with an expression that said she wasn't sure if she should speak or not. Should I say something or not? Maybe a distraction from the current topic wouldn't be unwanted.

"So if we had the equipment, you could do some type of modification. Make me look different enough to fool the cameras?" I asked, partially trying to change the subject to something she seemed to like more and because I was slowly getting an idea of a way we could get around the fact that we were all criminals.

Sam looked back up at me, though she continued to swirl her noodles around her fork. "Yeah, tired of looking like everybody else? Brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin, tall and gangly like literally everybody else in this sector?"

Ow, shots fired. My ethnic group was amalgamation. Literally take every ethnic group from Earth, shake them up together and spit them out as a homogenized blob. That was pretty much how I looked. "Maybe. Is that possible?"

She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands, staring at me like an artist staring at a canvas. "And what would you wanna look like?"

"I don't know, just enough to fool the facial recognition software," I thought for just a moment. "I guess my ancestors were Asian."

"Hm, some of the genes might be recessive. It might not actually be that difficult, darker irises, maybe a lighter skin, wider nose, higher cheekbones, epicanthic folds,"

"Um, sure. Can you change the eyelids without surgery?"

She shrugged. Yes and no. You have to change the genes then cut off your eyelids and then let you regenerate in a tank. Honestly, surgery would probably be easier.”

“Yeah. I don't know if I like the whole idea of surgery in general.

“Well, we can change your eye, skin, and hair color, but recognition software generally uses facial structure to pick out people.”

I nodded and pretty well figured as much.

“Again, we don't really have the equipment.”

“If only we can change the facial recognition for the ship.” I said, my thoughts returning to how to dock a ship that the station computers would look at and instantly tag the crew as wanted.

“What do you mean?

I sat back in my chair and ordered my thoughts. “When we pull into the next system, the port computers are gonna pick up our transponder ID and check to see if we're legal. They're going to find that the ship is wanted and we'll all be arrested.”

Sam once again adopted the sick, uneasy look.

“Can we change the name?” Sam asked, directing her question to X-Talia who seemed to be happy that she could be included in the conversation.

“No, names are for us meat bags, computers check the actual registration number which is burnt to glass.” I said before X-Talia had the chance to start the same explanation.

“Hmmm.” Sam said, her eyes dropping back down to her unfinished meal.

“If the ship is picked up as not legal, this means somebody is going to come aboard and take a look around. Right?” X-Talia asked.

I looked over to find her avatar looking slightly concerned. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“And they'll probably take the ship. And then take me as well?”

“Yeah, I guess they would.”

X-Talia looked uneasy. “We could bypass the transponder.” X-Talia suggested.

I felt my eyebrows raise on my head. “How is that possible?”

The little avatar shrugged. “You'd have to go outside, open up the housing, find a specific wire and wire in a switch to be able to turn on and off the transponder. Then we would need to broadcast a different transponder code, one that can be checked against the database and not cause us to be tagged.

“Could we use the flying brick?” Sam asked, looking slightly less displeased with the situation.

“No, again, that's just a name. We need the actual transponder ID.”

All three of us kind of slumped in our seats, both in the real world and in the virtual. Then it suddenly hit me.

“X-Talia? Can you tell if the transponder ID for the Flying Brick is in my tablet?”

The little avatar girl inside the tablet seemed to fade out of existence slightly as though somebody had reduced the transparency. She snapped back into focus with a bright smile. “It is.”

“So we can spoof the Flying Brick’s identification?” Sam asked, almost excitedly.

“Someone still has to go on the outside of the ship, get into the transponder and wire it up to be turned off.”

Sam looked towards me. X-Talia followed her gaze. I absentmindedly noted that X-Talia would have had to see Sam's change in direction on the camera and then extrapolate to where she was looking.

“Yeah, we'll drop out of the Rift, then I'll go for a spacewalk.”