I woke up in stages, gradually rising from a deep coma into wakefulness. The first thing I heard and understood was; “Brain waves are showing she’s waking up. Can you hear me?”

  It was the voice of the ship’s doctor, but my own voice sounded very strange, robotic, and genderless when I tried to reply. “What… what’s going on?”

  I couldn’t feel my body. I couldn’t see anything. I tried to open my eyes, but nothing happened. I couldn’t help but feel a rising sense of panic, but at the same time, I felt oddly calm like my adrenaline simply wasn’t working. I couldn’t even feel my heartbeat. Was this the afterlife?

  “Ah good, she sounds coherent. No brain damage detected...”

  “Why can’t I feel anything? Why can’t I see anything?!” I asked, angrily. The doctor seemed as if she was discussing a lab experiment. Her bedside manner sucked.

  “Sam, is it? I have bad news for you, you died.” She said without preamble. “But the good news is we brought you back… sort of.”

  “Sort of? How’d I die?! The last thing I remember was… me pulling the switch to decouple the power conduits. Oh god, the jump drive. What happened?”

  “Slow down there, just, keep calm, we’ll explain everything,” an older male voice said, “First, let me say, thank you for saving my ship. I’m captain Tanleir, and your quick action is the only reason any of us are still alive.”

  Ah good, then I hadn’t “died” in vain, I thought to myself. That made me feel better. The captain continued in his soothing voice. “Unfortunately, the jump wasn’t actually stopped. Something weird happened, and now we’re in a place that likely isn’t even in our own universe anymore.”

  “What?” that made no sense.

  ”Yeah, we had a hard time believing too. But you’ve been in a coma for about a week, so we’ve had time to really run a bunch of tests.” Another new voice, an excited-sounding middle-aged woman. “I should introduce myself, I’m chief science officer, but you can call me Margaret. I’ve been studying you…” she paused, probably embarrassed by admitting she saw me as a test subject? “...and everything else of course,” she continued lamely.

  “Ahem, we are veering off-topic.” Another gruff voice, an older male voice I recognized from my interview process. The chief engineer of the first shift, the man who’d hired me. “For ethical reasons, we need her consent. We may not be in our own universe, but that doesn’t mean we can just use her against her will. Sam, I have a very serious question I want you to think about. How would you like to be our new Shipbrain? If you aren’t willing to do that for us, you have the option of saying no. We’d put you in cryosleep if you’d rather… until such a time as we have access to a new body for you, though I will say I have no idea how long that could take.”

  Me? The new Shipbrain? It wasn’t an easy question. I mean, I didn’t want to be put into cryosleep indefinitely, but being a Shipbrain was a serious responsibility. I wasn’t sure I was qualified to be one. I’d never been given the rigorous training required. Despite requiring a person to give up their physical body, there were a surprising number of people who wanted to become Shipbrains, and the competition for the small number of slots was fierce. “Why me?” I asked, “I’m sure you have more qualified people?”

  “Well, no, not really. You’ve demonstrated that you probably understand the ship’s functions better than most. I hired you because you were the best candidate available, near the top of your class academically, but also highly recommended by all your teachers for your attitude and work ethic.” The chief engineer said, sounding suspiciously like he was hedging his answer a bit.

  “You are also already without a body, while we are in the sort of situation where taking the brain out of a person with a set of able hands would be problematic. We need every crewmember we have, installing you wouldn’t cost us anyone fit for duty.” the ship’s doctor pointed out, sounding a bit sarcastic.

  “Ah… about that, how exactly did I die anyway?” I asked out of morbid curiosity.

  “Short answer? You were ionized. All the loose electrons in your body decided they’d rather go hang out inside the jumpdrive. You cut the power, everyone inside the room suddenly had most of their cells rupture from becoming highly positively charged as the jumpdrive’s massive positive charge stole all free electrons it could. It was probably a bit like standing next to a neutron’s star's magnetic field, honestly."

  That sounded horrific, I thought to myself. “The fuck? How did my brain not turn into paste?” I asked, shocked.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “That’s a good question,” the science officer, Margaret, interjected. “And one of the things I’ve been studying. Actually, judging from the footage we recorded of you deflecting multi-million-volt lightning bolts as if you had a personal force field, the better question would be how did you last long enough to reach that switch? Our best guess at the moment? Magic.”

  “Magic?” I asked incredulously. This was our science officer?

  “Or some psychic ability, I don’t know, we’re in a new universe, a lot of things don’t make sense to me anymore.” She said with a slightly deranged laugh. “Isn’t it great? It’s like everything I know has been called into question, and a whole new set of laws of physics need to be discovered. I feel giddy, like as if I’d time-traveled back to before Newton and got a chance to write the book on this universe’s physics. Or magic, whatever. For some reason whatever magic you have only protected your head from being ionized, it was perfectly fine… the rest of you though, not so much.”

  I didn’t even know what to say. She sounded like she’d gone off the deep end. The captain coughed. “As crazy as all that sounds, we do have a reason to want you as our ship brain related to that… um… oddity of yours. I myself couldn’t believe it at first, but, so far as we can tell, our technology only works right when it’s near you.”

  “What?” Was the captain crazy too? Had the jump fried both their brains?

  “It was pretty strange that the medbay was the only place in the ship where all the electronics that didn’t get fried by the power surge worked perfectly. That was our first clue.” The doctor pointed out.

  The chief engineer spoke up. “We’ve spent all week testing it. Well, after the first few days we’ve been reduced to dragging you all over the ship because as soon as you get near something, all the random glitches and errors disappear.”

  “There’s something about how this universe works that fucks with our electronics, yet, the closer things are to you, the less fucked up they become. Basically, you're the only reason we’re not already dead. Again. We had to drag you into the life support section of the ship just to keep the air breathable. Then we thought to ourselves, well, what if we make you the new Shipbrain, would that bubble of “normal” extend further? So here we are. Grasping at straws, hoping you’ll agree to be the Shipbrain, in the hopes that somehow, that will extend your ability throughout the whole ship and we can actually get this mess sorted out. Plus, without all the repair bots the Shipbrain can control, we’ll never get this ship fully back online.”

  “No offense,” I said after an awkward moment of silence, “But you all sound crazy right now. You’re saying I’m magic? While I was in a coma?”

  “I got engineers through the ship checking electronics as we speak. Now that you’re awake your tech field has gotten stronger. Mapping it out, it looks like maybe two hundred, two fifty meters of normalcy. Shit, that’s almost good enough as it is. We could put you halfway between the main engines and life support and we might actually be able to crashland this ship on the planet below. If you can call it a planet, I mean.”

  I suddenly had a sneaking suspicion. The way they talked about moving me around, hearing how my voice sounded, the fact I couldn’t feel my body, and how they described my medical condition. “You’ve already scooped out my brain and put me in a jar, haven't you?” I asked, coldly.

  There was a brief silence before the ship's doctor spoke up. “We didn’t have much choice. There's this thing called necrosis? Your brain was attached to a big lump of dead tissue. It was my medical decision before I even knew about your… “gift”... that the only way to salvage you was to immediately extract your brain. It’s actually a pretty standard medical procedure. We do have a few full cyborgs in the crew, surely you’ve seen them before. I expected to put you in cryo until such time as we could get you a body, but since then, yes, we’ve been using your brain jar as a mobile “tech field” generator by bringing you to where you were needed.”

  I had seen full cyborgs before, but there was a world of difference between being a brain in a full cyborg body and being a brain in a jar with no body. I was pissed. “You’re supposed to get my consent first!” I said angrily.

  “Sorry, but I have almost a hundred crew and ten thousand cryosleep passengers to think about. We didn’t have time to wait for you to wake up from your coma before I started using whatever resources I had available to save lives. Even if that resource was a brain in a jar with an inexplicable tech field generation ability.” The captain pointed out coldly.

  The chief engineer tried to smooth things over. “Look, you’re right. We crossed some lines, and I’m sorry. We’re giving you the chance to be the new Shipbrain because we desperately need your magic, or whatever, to keep us alive. Please help us.”

  I calmed myself and thought about it. Was being the Shipbrain really so bad? I mean, it wasn’t like I honestly had much choice. They said they could put me in cryostasis, but what if that deactivated my weird “ability”? I bet they’d wake me back up and then I could just sit around bored out of my mind, a brain in a jar, doing nothing but existing. Anything sounded better than that.

  “Oh, I almost forgot to mention, as a Shipbrain, in addition to having the whole ship as your body, you do get access to a special remote-controlled android. Only the Shipbrain can use it, and the last one owned it personally, but since he’s dead, and I’m desperate, I’ll give you his android body. Frankly, it’s better than having a human body, completely lifelike and with extra abilities. The old Shipbrain basically spent his entire salary on the damn thing, it’s yours if you say yes.” The captain said, sweetening the deal.

  “Well, I guess that doesn’t sound too bad,” I said, warming up to the idea. “Alright, I’ll do it,” I announced, figuring, what the hell did I have to lose? Then I paused, and asked, “Wait, you said his body?”