Jack felt something impact into his foot and then again as twin bursts of electricity flowed into him. Having his portable charger with him, aka Yuma, was a huge upgrade. Without her, things had been outrageously difficult.

He was also way on Team Trash. There’s no way his AI had calculated the Waste Disposal SI’s contributions correctly.

He peeked over the pile of scrap and could see the HoS some distance away, then to the Bridge Core, much closer, and Yuma and Jonah looked expectantly at him.

Now that he was up and studying the situation, he didn’t like what he saw. There was no way he’d be able to beat the HoS here, between the relatively open ground and the, quite frankly, insane quantities of fire that poured off it, he didn’t like his chances of making the fight successful or short. He didn’t want to fight that thing right now.

So, he didn’t. He burst into a sprint directly toward the Core dodging errant fire. As he approached the pillar, the HoS started to focus fire on him, but it couldn’t bring enough firepower to stop him as he rounded the pillar.

“Why aren’t you guys inside?”

Yuma looked inside the door, he followed her gaze. Ah, elevator.

The pillar vibrated from an impact and Jack plucked the AI disk from her hands, ran inside, and interacted with the HandPad there. The door closed behind them, followed by a *wump* that shook the pillar and the floor beneath them. It crawled upward.

“Maybe we’re safe in here-” that statement was followed by more and greater *wumps*

“I wouldn’t count on this lasting forever.”

The silence was tense and filled with the unbelief that they were here. Here. In the Bridge Core. Well, almost. No one spoke as if a poorly spoken word could ruin the entire thing. It clicked and just in front of them was a small door. Jack placed his hand on the HandPad before realizing that he forgot to insert the AI Disk. He was surprised when the small screen above it read, Access Granted.

The door slid soundlessly open. Surrounding them on every side were Terminals and datastacks, server mainframes and flickering camera screens.

“Cord management is atrocious.”

Jack was scanning his surroundings and didn’t respond to the criticism, but yeah, the sightlines were terrible. Yuma wasn’t having much more luck than he was, if you couldn’t see you couldn’t see. His Affinity nearly blinded him before he shut it down again. There was an… odd scent in the air. Sterile.

“What’s tha-”

“Antiseptic.”

They squeezed through a couple of mainframes stacked to the ceiling and came into a circular cleared area with a chair facing a wall of screens. The smell of industrial antiseptic meshed poorly with the new scent of rot, Yuma tried not to gag as she focused on the screens lining the area. Some from the Cryo-Labs and the Cargo-Bays; there were others too, some sort of underground dungeon looking area and what she imagined as sewers.

Jack focused in on a figure seated in the chair, facing away from them, where only a scalp of patchy hair was visible.

“Julie?”

The figure jolted up, then started to shake. The outside of the Core shook, sending the figure rocking back and forth in their seat. None of the three were sure if it was the figure shaking or the Core itself.

Presumed-to-be-Julie laughed in an ear-grating tone, “Hi Jack, I wasn’t sure if you were going to be able to make it.”

Her chair turned and Yuma and Jonah jumped back and looked at Jack. They hadn’t necessarily doubted his communication with the Bridge, it was just that no one else ever seemed to be around, or conscious, when it had happened. Her being real was a bit of a shock, but that wasn’t why they jumped back.

Julie was a hybrid, it was obvious. But what was worse, or better, than that fact, was that cables ran along either side of her neck where arteries should have been. Where skin was present it was either half-rotten or a lifeless, pale gray. One eye glowed inhuman blue, while the other was human-like but resting inside of an eye-socket that was coated in shattered glowing-blue flesh. She was hybridized with an SI.

Jack felt the AI Disk in his pocket start to heat up well beyond the level of comfort, “Why do you look like that?”

Julie tilted her head, then back the other way and repeated that motion a few times. It reeked of inhumanity.

“Look like what?”

Jack wasn’t going to play this game and instantly didn’t care what she looked like anymore. He had questions, she hopefully had answers, and the Core itself was consistently shaking now, presumably because the fighting outside had quieted down and the HoS was focusing its attacks here.

Now that he was here though, finally here, his mind felt blank. He had had lots of questions along the journey, but now that he was here, his thoughts were scarce as he desperately grasped around the suddenly empty space of his mind.

“Is the ship really going to crash?”

Thanks Yuma, Jack quietly praised. That was a good place to start.

“Yes. Directional sensors have calculated that we were approaching a Class 3 Star.”

Jack was still trying to organize his thoughts, but Jonah caught that, “What do you mean, were?”

“We are no longer on a direct collision course with the solar body.”

“How?”

“Approximately 10 hours ago we suffered a gravitational anomaly that redirected the ship’s heading. We will be performing a modified gravity sling around the star that will burn off most of our speed.”

Yuma looked minorly hopeful, “Well, that’s good then, right?”

Jack momentarily pulled out of his hyper-focused introspection, not necessarily.

Jonah felt the call of some sort of science thing, “What did that? Was it a natural anomaly or… perhaps something else?”

“Something else. There are no natural gravity sources that could have affected my… the ship in such a deliberate way.”

“How long-”

Jack cut Yuma off, “What was the original mission of the ship?”

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

“We… The ship was meant to be a colony ship,” he already knew that much, “an extragalactic colony ship. Our homeword came under attack at some point from an extraterrestrial species and it was decided by the Prime Authority that a series of colony ships would be sent out to ensure the continuation of the species, Human.”

Intergalactic? Prime Authority?

“How long have we been traveling? Are we in a new galaxy?”

Julie shook her biomechanical head, “Negative,” she waved her hand and the screen closest to the three lit up and scrolled a modified log. The most important part was…

“A collision with… a bubble, as best can be described, at the edge of the galaxy’s gravity well redirected our ship back to the Milky Way. Our course was further redirected by contact with ‘Them’.”

“How long.” Yuma’s voice was quiet.

Julie waved a hand as a cylinder spun out of the wall containing a suspended sphere of bright, silver-colored metal.

Jonah refocused his goggles on the target, “What is that?”

“Atomic half-life clock. This is a ball of pure plutonium-244. There are also xenon clocks as well as various other long-lived elements used to measure the local passage of time that were placed through different sections of the ship.”

“So how long has it been?”

“As of this measuring unit. Bridge-time, 32,328 years, give or take several millennia.”

“Aren’t these supposed to be accurate?”

Jonah answered that as he scrolled through the log she had presented, “The passage of time has been variable…? Impossible, unless we’ve been traveling at relativistic speeds. Even then, the ship is in one piece, so unless the different parts of the ship were traveling at vastly different speeds… Even more impossible.”

Julie nodded, “We have, but-”

“But what?” This was valuable stuff. He finished it himself, “either time has passed differently on the ship or… time is… not constant? The speed of light and time? Impossible.”

“Not impossible. It is.” She waved a hand and new information filled Jonah’s screen. Jack peeked at it but it just looked like a bunch of numbers to him. He was following along pretty well though. Yuma looked like she had decided to be comfortable in ignorance after losing track somewhere in the beginning. Instead, she studied her surroundings.

“There’s significant deviation of the ship-board clocks on these times. The bow of the ship is aged 30,000 years beyond the next closest clock, here, on the Bridge.”

Julie nodded, “Yes, that’s-”

“When we passed the bubble.”

She nodded again, “Attempted to. Before we were redirected, that was the only clock that passed the boundary of our galactic gravity well.”

“Gr” Julie nodded eagerly at Jonah, seeming to finally become animated now that she could share this information with someone who understood its significance, “Gravity controls time?”

“Gravity directly controls the speed of light which is the universal, as far as we can measure, baseline for the movement of time. At the speed of light, time stops, slowing as you approach it. Less gravity, faster light, faster time. Thus, more gravity, slower light, slower passage of time.”

Jack felt like he should start saying stuff and was at the very edge of what he could understand at the moment. There was also the instinctive reflex to interrupt Jonah which was too strong of a habit at this point.

“So… gravity wells stabilize pockets of time?”

“Essentially yes. It’s likely.”

“Likely?”

“I’m one person, I could even be completely wrong. Stability… is difficult to maintain.”

Jack sagely nodded in understanding, or at least that was what he was trying to give off. His companions had bought him enough time to settle his thoughts.

“Is that why people have lost memories while being in Cryo? Instability?”

Julie sighed, “That was when the Cryo-Storage SI lost their mind. It attempted to spread a mental contagion through Cryo-Storage.”

A contagious mental illness wasn’t even on the top 10 of strangest things they’d heard, none of three were fazed by the new knowledge.

“How does that relate to our memories?”

Julie nodded, “That was the eventual solution. The Human mind suffers from incredible instability when all memories are stripped from an individual. The Cryo-Sick you’ve seen is what happens when there is no stabilizing memory present.”

Jack felt his gut twist, “Is that why I don’t have a memory? I’m one of the ‘cryo-sick’?”

Negative, “No, you were an earlier attempt to contain the contagion.”

“Explain.”

“Humanity has always contained the seed of psychic ability, manifesting from simple unspoken communication to psychokinesis and beyond.” She nodded to Yuma, “even perception is tied into this inherent aspect to some degree.”

This seemed more in Yuma’s wheelhouse, “Is that what intuition is?”

“Somewhat. Intuition is a byproduct of the brain’s split between the conscious mind and the unconscious. The conscious focuses on a few tasks quite well, but the subconscious mind collates everything the senses perceive, in totality. Thousands upon thousands of stimuli from moment to moment, even those beyond conscious comprehension. The gut feeling comes from a bundle of neurons and nerves located in the lower torso. Your body’s brain, if you will. There is an unknown Psy-based process that accentuates this connection.”

“So does that-”

Jack cut Yuma off, this was unimportant to him, “What did you mean, I was an earlier attempt?”

“Them weren’t the first invasive alien species, the quantities of life aboard the ship were tempting targets for malignant forms of life-”

The shaking was getting stronger, he didn’t need a rehashing of the malignancy of alien life. “Get onto the part about how this relates to me.”

Yuma took out his AI disk and inserted it into a wrist-watch type device as she fiddled with it. He hardly noticed.

“You were an earlier attempt, an… ill-thought out solution based on the base question of, ‘what is a Human life?’ We didn't know that the Cryo-SI was already in the beginning stages of insanity himself.”

He waited for her to continue.

“We possessed… templates to ensure the mission wouldn’t be compromised by the untimely loss of any single crew member.”

Jonah realized it first, “Clones.”

Jack whirled to Jonah at that realization then back to the Bridge-SI, or Julie, or whatever she was.

“You’re saying I’m a clone. That’s… that’s why I don’t have any memories?”

An early memory of waking up, clothed in a ship-suit entered his mind.

“But I had a ship suit on when I woke up, how do you explain that?”

“It was grown onto you. Clones show… instability, especially when faced with the fact that they are a clone without sufficient original memories to fall back on.”

“What about inserted memories?”

Jack felt a bit bitter as he picked up on the excitement in Jonah’s tone.

Julie shook her head, “Impossible. Well, possible, but a worse solution than no memories at all. There is a theorized, for lack of a better word, communication-link between the brain, mind, and soul that recognizes and rejects non-local memories. Clones do eventually recall prior memories as their souls settle.”

“So why…”

“Why is Jack so unstable if he didn’t have any artificial memories?”

“And why haven’t I remembered anything yet?”

“That’s because you're not a clone. Well, at least, not the way in which you assume.”

“Explain. Quickly.” The shaking was getting worse and he was not leaving here without some damn answers, even if he wasn’t ready to start processing them.

“Your template was designed to possess an extraordinarily adaptable genetic code, far beyond conventional tolerances. Several forces on the ship, in concert, attempted to modify your template to make your Psy-gland immune to mental corruption and contagions. They were successful, in their own way.”

Jack laughed, “By trading one mental affliction for another?”

Julie didn’t smile, “Yes.”

“So I’m just some… artificial Human? How many of me are there?”

“Made with your current templ-”

“Julie!” The air was warming then cooling in quick cycles.

“Unable to answer your question with any degree of accuracy. Your original template was made on Earth and distributed as ‘Emergent Security Personnel’ on every ship that was sent out with the capability to produce an artificial Human body.”

“What’s the deal with my soul? Why’s it so weak?”

She shook her head, “Unknown. There was a similar problem that was noticed with a few of the other templates, though none as severely as yours.” As if reading his mind, she continued, “Combined with the early activation of the AI alongside you, none were predicted to have as high of a success rate as you were considering that the AI would be able to adapt you ‘on the fly’ as you progressed through the ship.”

“So you’re telling me… that some predictive calculation you did all the way up here is the only reason I’m alive?”

“If by alive, you mean, composed from amino acid chains, a DNA printer, and a NonStandard Cryo Pod… Then yes.”