Jack was familiar with this feeling, it was when his electricity was focused on primary functions. Aka ‘keeping him alive’. That usually meant he was circling the drain. Brain, heart, and now that he could perceive it, his Core. That’s where he found himself now as electricity continued to flow from his body’s primary functions toward it; he felt his heart skip a beat and slow, he felt his perception of possessing motor control disappear from his mind. The forces that assaulted his Core could sense blood in the water, a moment of weakness, and their attacks redoubled. The green mushroom energy planted imperceptible spores into the cracks of his Soul Core, his fading electrical charge too low to burn them out quickly, so they multiplied. Multiplied and expanded the cracks into painful rents, like a cool salty breeze on flayed skin.

Then the panels of shielding around his Core moved and sliced the growths as they were ejected from the Core. Somehow the red viral energy’s attacks seemed to help as the pressure pressed down on the shell of his cocoon, pushing the shells of broken Core closer together, helping less than they hurt as some places were pressured near to shattering. The viral pressure and mycelial infestation seemed to be fighting against each other as much as they attacked the Core.

Jack found his perception suddenly shift from observing the battle to being in the middle of the assault at the heart of the cocoon. How had he ended up here?

He felt weak here, like a wisp, ready to go out as soon as the lights turned off or when his Core was invaded. He touched one of shards of…

“It’s chitin, crab chitin. Move that piece over there will you?”

Jack moved the shard of chitin over to a point where the electricity had failed. It stopped a burst of red energy from piercing through.

“You took your time. Finally, you’re here.”

Jack jerked his perception around. There was another him there, but different. His hair was slicked back and his eyes were dead and cold. A wide Smile crept across this Jack’s face. The face was pale and drawn, haggard.

“Shut up you, don’t try to scare the boy.”

Jack whirled his perception in the other direction. It was a third ‘him’. This one’s hair was somehow even wilder and more uncontrolled than Jack’s own, his eyes were animated with a wild, excitable grin on his face. He was spinning electricity from point to point in the shell sparking an adaptive defense against the invaders. His eyes glowed like dying embers, the tips of his wild golden-tipped hair visibly losing color as it turned to ashen gray.

“That was some good killin’ we had with those crabs eh? Shame about this whole thing.”

Jack didn’t share that sentiment, “It’s not over.”

The wild-looking Jack’s tired face lit up in mania as the grin came back, “Just testing yeh, fighting to the last is the only way. Would have preferred a blade in my hand or my hand in something’s soft precious insides. Could have done with a bit more killin’,” the wild Jack shrugged, “Not the worst way to go, all things considered.”

“Speak for yourself brute, I refuse to die, my masterpiece is still yet ungifted.”

The slick Jack sprinted up to a shell and braced himself behind it, preventing the piece of chitin from shattering under an impact and kept it in the fight. He slammed together two pieces and cut off a mushroom growth then slid open a small path and kicked the piece back out of the cocoon’s interior. The wild Jack brought over some electricity to sanitize the area.

“He’s always yammering on about his art this, his art that, you should have seen him when I was ripping and tearing those filthy crabs outside the Core. He had tears in his eyes! Tears!” A guffaw erupted from the wild Jack’s belly.

Jack didn’t hear the response, he knew this all should have shocked him but here and now… it didn’t.

“Who’re you both?”

He got another guffaw in response, “Guess you’ve been keeping all that IQ to yourself eh?” He was talking to the slick-looking Jack who grunted and swapped two chitin shells like they were parts of an intricate puzzle.

Slick Jack turned to Jack and replied with the same question, “Who’re you?”

Jack didn’t understand that, he was him, Jack was Jack. “I’m Jack.”

The other Jacks looked at each other and shared a smile then Wild Jack shrugged, “That ye are.”

Jack wanted to reflect on that but it didn’t look like they had much time, chunks of chitin were breaking into smaller and smaller portions that created more and wider gaps that were more and more difficult to fill with the steadily decreasing amount of electricity available. The struggle continued in silence as Jack helped shore up the holes in the defensive matrix where he saw them. The wild man preferred brute force over finesse in his electrical control.

Both Jacks caught a long moment of rest. Jack looked up, out of the cocoon. The red and green had both pulled back into ominous billowing clouds of deep putrid green and hot violent red. It felt like the atmospheric pressure was building.

This was going to be the one.

Wild Jack roared, “Not much longer now! Nice to meet ya boy, at least officially. Damn shame it all is, thought we were going to go the distance.”

Slick Jack kept the Smile on his face but it looked more like a grimace, his eyes darted back and forth.

“Lookin’ for a way out! Yer a slippery snake-bastard until the very end. It comes!”

The mass and volume of the clouds grew steadily until they filled near the entire space above them. They started their slow, inexorable plunge downward.

“Oi! You feel that?”

Jack did feel that. Lightning lit up behind the clouds illuminating their colors.

“Grab it boy!” Jack reached his perception up and pulled down. It didn’t respond.

“I can’t! It won’t come down.”

“Aye, repairing my body first.”

“Your body? You vile ape, it’s mine!”

Jack felt like he should say something, “What are you talking about? It’s mine!”

A familiar green flash flashed through the room outside of the cocoon.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Even in the strange calm of the space that green light twinged something… something familiar to Jack, the AI disk? He pulled down on the intensifying flashes of electricity and, this time, it responded. A shaking wail echoed outside the cocoon through the entire Soul space. Jack kept pulling at the electricity until it started to fill him with a strange sense of dissociation.

“They’re hurting! We could… hmmm, or we could…”

“Shut up snake bastard! We need to get out there. It won’t last forever! Never does.”

Wild Jack ripped the electricity from Jack’s hold and Jack felt his perception settle, “Not yet boy! You stay here! Hurry up snake!” The wild man reinforced their surroundings then charged himself up before making a gap in the cocoon and plunging into the dark with an elated shout. Bolts of electricity sparked from beyond the harsh dim light of the cocoon’s interior.

“Well? Are you just going to stand there like an idiot or are you going to help the ogre?”

“Help?”

Snake Jack rolled his eyes as the Smile dropped from his face for a brief moment then came back.

“You really are a fool aren’t you? Perhaps I have been a bit too stingy with you. I cannot control electricity, surely you noticed.”

Jack didn’t know what to make of that as he pulled more electricity into himself. He fixed a few points in the cocoon, it seemed that Wild Jack was more the type to just stack on more and more electricity rather than use it effectively. That seemed accurate to Jack based on his memories of the man.

He pulled at the electric weave on one side of the cocoon and it loosened the weaves at the other point of the defense. Jack moved toward it, ready to jump out.

“Hurry up now, as I’m sure you remember now the brute always overestimates how long he can last.”

Jack did remember as he noticed that the jolts of electricity were decreasing in frequency beyond the cocoon.

He moved closer toward the gap.

A warning instinct flared inside Jack as he stepped back from the edge and turned back to the snake.

The Smile was near and wide. Filling up his perception.

“Time to leave, fool.” The Snake Jack kicked his foot and Jack, nearly at the edge of the cocoon, was sent toward the gap. He bounced off it.

“What? Why didn’t that work?” The snake looked surprised.

Jack’s survival instinct flared at this attempted violation. This was HIS Soul.

Jack would turn that surprise into shock. He stripped electricity from the cocoon and filled the space around them. Snake Jack’s eyes widened before a mass of electricity locked onto him and cooked him on his feet. His head and body violently twitched and seized until it pulled away and left him a blackened chunk.

“Id.. id idi id did IDIOT!” Snake Jack was recovering, now a blackened and smoking corpse that was steadily reforming in front of his eyes.

“The wild guy was right, you are a snake. Get out of here.”

“Never.”

“Well I’ll just make you then.”

“You can try.”

Jack would try. The electricity of their surroundings was growing as the electricity outside kept pouring in.

“Idiot. You’re bringing too much electricity in here, this pitiful excuse of a Soul will be torn apart. There’s a reason the electricity is kept on the surface of the Core!”

Now that Jack was focusing on the snake, memories of flesh started to flood in. In this muted space he could look at them without flinching, compartmentalization was impossible here but it was also unnecessary, “So what? I’ve seen what you’ve done. I remember it all now. You’re a monster. Barely Human. No, less than Human. No better than a crab in a lab.”

At that Snake Jack charged forward at him before being stopped dead and reduced to cinders for the second time.

Jack focused his perception and opened a hole in the cocoon to throw the unmoving charred mess of his sick doppelganger through it. The snake bounced off some invisible barrier there just as he had.

Snake Jack brushed his hair tight against his head as he stood, “So that’s why…” A Smile reaffirmed itself on his face.

“Leave, snake.”

“No.”

“I’ll make you.”

“Impossible.”

Jack tried to throw him out again.

“I won’t agree to it.” The snake looked smug at that statement.

Something crossed Jack’s mind, it rang true, “Free Will…?”

“I prefer consent and you don’t have mine.”

“Why would I need that?”

“It’s your Soul fool! That ape, he knew it all along. Dumber than he looks but clever like a beast…”

“Like a snake?”

Snake Jack’s eyes flared at that, “Is fulfilling your goals at any means necessary cowardly? That’s rich coming from someone like you.”

Jack stopped himself right before responding, greasy or not, the snake did have a point.

“Fair. Then, one monster to another, what do you want in order to leave?”

“Give me something worthwhile and I’ll consider it.”

“What do you want? That’s right, you said you can’t control electricity like me and the other one can.”

The Smile drooped for a second before coming back to his face, “Bastard.” Jack wasn’t sure if that had been a lie but that reaction confirmed it.

“Huh. So maybe there’s some way I can give you that capability?”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because the ogre got it before I did and he won’t share.”

“I can see why, at least with someone like you.”

Jack was unsure if it was possible but the deadened look in the snake’s eyes got even deader.

“Give me something like that and I will leave. I want an Affinity.”

So he wanted an Affinity then… was that even possible? Jack remembered something that Tule had said about having to be born with them. But what did Tule know about Affinities? He was just one man and now, with a brief flare of pity, he was even less than that.

He thought about it as he continued to pull electricity from the space around them onto the surface of the cocoon. A triumphant roar was cut short as wild Jack’s body impacted into the cocoon. He sprung off, back into the fight. The ceiling and walls of the space beyond the cocoon were starting to crack, slowly but steadily widening.

Had he had his Affinity from birth? Even here, with any memory available to him at his whim he still didn’t remember anything before coming out of Cryo. He had only seen his Affinity mentioned on the Terminal after he had electro-exploded his hand inside that very first crab. Was the Terminal unable to recognize the Afffinity until he had an exposure to it… was it really something innate, or maybe even the all-powerful Terminal was less reliable than he had been led to believe.

“You really are a slow thinker, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been carrying a whole chunk of Affinity-enhanced Nano with you this entire time. Well that tasty tall girl had to do it for you or your fool-self would have just left it behind. It’s an incredibly precious thing that the crabman gave you.”

“Magnetic Afffinit-”

“I want it.”

The Magno-Tube that Tule had given him when they were floating on the crab. “It’s for Yuma and Korl.”

“Well then I’m sure Jonah will hand it to them after leaving your Soul-less corpse down here. It’ll be a nice bereavement gift.”

Dammit, the snake was right. How was he going to get Jonah to give him the Magno-Tube right now though? Jack assumed that Jonah had removed it from his body otherwise he wouldn’t even be having this conversation… with himself?

Jack looked up, the cracks in the space outside of the cocoon were absolutely wider and definitely deeper as they exposed complex metallic arrangements of Nano superstructure. The slithering lines… the Nano pathways he had formed in the Cryo-Core with the ‘electric snakes’, the efficiency of their trainsportation pathways was keeping wild Jack in the fight as he continued to fire beams of electricity that charred and drove back the waves of malignant clouds. Something had changed within the clouds thought, the infighting between the mushrooms and the virus had nearly stopped. The wild man was using Jack’s Afffinity to dodge their increasingly coordinated attacks.

“That’s our body that cracking apart out there you know, it’s remarkably resilient but there are plenty of things that can kill it, shockingly easily. Unmanaged electricity would be probably the most embarassing way. There IS another way to acquire what I desire…”

Jack knew what he was talking about and didn’t want to give anything to this slimy-bastard but… he was right. The value Jack placed on his own life was high, nearly enough on its own to cleanly make the decision. The possible repercussions that would happen to this ship if its fate left his hands made the choice increasingly simple. Whatever it cost. Whomever it cost. He had already committed to pay any price. The ship was his reponsibility and no one else’s.

In this space he was able to analyze this motivation that was driving him. It flashed into his awareness and he accepted the thought fully, the AI had likely implanted this driving goal into his mind in some way. But that didn’t matter anymore, not here, here, things were True. It didn’t matter if the AI had planted it in him or it was something that had started from a natural desire. Whatever it’s origin, it was as good a goal as any. Wherever it started, it was his now.

He reached out and couldn’t feel the tether. On a whim he pulled another huge mass of electricity onto the surface of the cocoon and wove it in a pattern that copied the slithering patterns that he had burnt into his body and brought himself next to it. He made contact with it and finally felt Yuma’s presence. There.

Sorry Yuma, hopefully this doesn’t kill you.