Seras awoke to complete and utter darkness. The darkness was not surprising considering she had been dying in space just moments before. What was surprising was that she awoke at all. Her whole life Seras had been a staunch and unrepentant atheist, seeing no point in praying to Gods that were supposedly once alive but are now dead, nor believing in an afterlife no one could agree upon.
To her; the most logical conclusion given all the evidence was that there had never been any gods, dead or otherwise. And that when someone died, that was it. No happy paradise or eternal torment afterword.
Just spare parts sent to be recycled and a bit of goo that got cremated so someone could stick the gross jar on a kitchen shelf to collect dust.
But waking up after dying in space threw everything she had -with very solid evidence- believed.
Unless this was some sort of hallucination occurring in her final moments as her brain slowly suffocated.
But if it was a hallucination, then why was it of a cold dark room? And why was she naked?
She knew the later part only because of the slight breeze moving across her exposed skin.
Well there was only one way to test the hallucination hypothesis.
She sat there for a minute waiting for the illusion to end as her brain finally realized she was dead.
Another minute passed.
Five minutes passed.
“Whelp, either my experience of time has changed, or I’m not hallucinating.” Seras said out loud. Her voice echoing around the room until it faded away.
She waited another five minutes just to be sure.
“Even with adrenaline and a brain too stupid to realize I’m dead this is taking too long.” She sat up. She felt the pricks of sharp pebbles press against her Smart Skintm (Now with twice as many nerves!) as she sat up. She ran her hands along the ground, feeling every bump and texture variation. “Feels real” she murmured.
She brought her hand up and realized that she still couldn’t see anything.
“System, dark mode” she said aloud, and her vision filled with a dark green film.
There was no ambient light sources around the room, but the slight heat her body shed from its internal systems was enough to outline the silhouette of her hand, and the slight acoustics in the room gave her augs enough data to create a rough outline of the rooms shape.
She stared at her hand. All four fingers, plus one thumb, all about the right size. That was all she could make out with the little infrared heat her body was giving off. She opened it, then closed it. It responded perfectly to each command. She was tempted to turn on the lines of blue light that ran along her skin, but just in case there was anything else in here with her she kept them off.
A naked women with glowing blue lines of light was something that would draw any unwanted eyes.
She reached up and pressed her hands to her face, only to realize there was something still grasped within her other hand. Now no longer hidden by her hand the pinky-sized data-shard let off a light blue light. Not enough to use as a flashlight, but enough to see it without the night vision.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
She turned the shard over in her hand a couple times. “All that trouble, for this little thing. What makes you so special?” Seras asked softly, not expecting an answer.
But as if in response to her words her HUD highlighted the shard and attached a floating tag to it.
Technology Essence
Well that was a stupid name. Seras had seen some dumb floating tags before, it was hard not to when everyone had the ability to apply them to their stuff, and had seemingly all agreed at some point to pick the stupidest names possible. But what the hell was a Technology Essence. If it was a shard on Tech then it should be labeled Essence of Technology, or maybe technology of essence. Seras fixed her gaze on the metadata of the shards floating tag.
A little box of information dropped down.
Technology Essence. Both the penultimate success, and first step in the research first began by Alfred Morris. A solid distillation of the strange extra dimensional energy first discovered by the crew of the Miraculous.
Well that was strange. Who the hell would write a metadata tag like that. It felt more like an omniscient third person observer wrote it rather than some egghead scientist who had been on Volta station.
Then again knowing nerds, it wasn’t exactly out of the realm of weirdness for them.
Still, she had to consult her long-term memory to find the name Alfred Morris. The man who invented the global net generator, capable of propagating net access across the whole world all from Biolite headquarters. A work of true genius that outshone all other inventions before. No matter where a person was, whether it was high above the clouds on a space station, or deep underground, they would have perfect net access.
The most brilliant innovation in human history.
Which had been promptly co-opted by mankind into a convenient way of watching porn nonstop. Truly the human race didn’t deserve the marvels at their fingertips.
Speaking of which. She should be able to access the net, maybe pull up her GPS location, call an acquaintance or two to pick her up. If she wasn’t dead then she needed to get home.
She opened her net access and it brought up the last thing she had been watching during the long space walk to Volta station.
Porn.
She was only human after all, even if she was technically more machine then meat a girl had needs, and there was nothing to do after the space shuttle had let them out.
Before she could exit out of whatever the search engine found for her, two dreadful words appeared in the center of her vision.
No Signal.
“How the fucking hell is that even possible?” she asked out loud, her confused voice bouncing off the rocky walls of where-ever-the-hell-she-was.
The net generator had never gone down once since its inception. Without constant net access there would be anarchy in the streets as pissed off civvies went into net withdrawal and started a purge.
For the first time in her life Seras opened up her settings for her augs and tried to find the tab for net signal. It took her a whole five minutes to realize that no such thing existed because no had ever needed to check their net connection in at least a century.
She was about to go into net withdrawal herself when she noticed a distressing little notification in her setting screen.
UPDATE COMPLETE.
Seras let out a shaky sigh. That explained it. Her system updated overnight, and it was so fuckin full of bugs that it broke her net connection. Everyone knew you waited for the after launch ‘hotfixes’ that made things halfway functional before you updated.
Great, this meant that once she got her net access back she would need to update her ad blockers, and anti-tracking software. As if this day couldn’t get any worse.
That’s when she remembered that if she wanted to get the ‘hotfixes’ with a broken net connection then she would need to find a terminal. Which meant figuring out where the fuck she was, and why the fuck she wasn’t dead!
She made a fist a shook it upwards. Before she let it drop back down, knowing that there was no point getting pissed at soulless machines that ran her life. Or the soulless corpo jackasses who released crappy code that made her life harder than it already was.
Since she had no net access she decided to at least open the update file and read whatever corporate buzzword bullshit they thrown together this time. It was always funny to read in a word-vomit sort of way. The last update had included the word synergize over a hundred times without ever actually using the word correctly.
Outworlder Seras System V2.0.0. Update download 100%
Hold on. That wasn’t right. That should have been Biolite Operating System with Synergistic overdrive and Aggregate cloudify V96.39.55… bullshit string of numbers that meant something to someone who wasn’t named Seras ‘Blackiron’ Cross.
Why was her name in it? And why was it only version two? What happened to Version one?
She opened up the meta data of the update and was greeted by a screen that wasn’t a barely coherent mess of corporate buzz words. But instead an incoherent mess of words she had no context for.
Outworlder Seras System update V2.0.0
Racial traits updated.
Special attack affinity-----------> Astral affinity
Human Ambition-----------> Biomechanical physiology
Human Essence gift-----------> Pocket space
Human Essence gift-----------> Stanger in a stranger world
Human Essence gift-----------> Net Connection
Human Essence gift-----------> Blueprinting software
“What. The. Fuck. Is. This. The fuck is a Racial Trait, the Fuck is an Essence Gift, and the fuck is all that other shit!”