Awake now, I projected my hologram onto the bridge and found Margaret missing. Good. I was quietly fuming at what she had done, the more I thought about it, the angrier I felt.

  ”Oh good, you’re awake? I wasn’t sure Margaret would actually manage to wake you.” Captain Tanlier told me cheerfully.

  Did he know what she did to wake me up, I wondered? I gave him a glare.

  ”What?” He asked, looking fairly surprised to see me so upset.

  He probably had no idea. I sighed deeply and tried to calm myself, ”Never send that bitch into my dreams again.” I told him.

  Captain Tanlier frowned, ”Did she do something bad?”

  “She took advantage of me while I didn’t remember who I was,” I explained.

  Doppel gave me a worried look, then whispered, “That sort of thing is supposed to be impossible. When you go to sleep at your scheduled times, we do it right, with proper security protocols and defenses. We make sure you have a lucid dream with all your memories intact. When you passed out mid-shift, the whole system went down before we could do any of that. But there are backup protocols we can put in place if you ever pass out unexpectedly again. We'll keep you safe.” She promised me. When Doppel said ”we”, she meant herself and the full power of the ship's computers. I felt reassured.

  At the same time, Captain Tanlier looked a little embarrassed, then turned away. “I’ll talk to her,” he promised.

  But would he, I wondered? I trusted Doppel’s promise, she was basically me, and I knew my promises were good. Captain Tanlier’s promises? I had no reason to trust.

  There was an argument to be made that Margaret had thought it was just some harmless joke, because her attitude about VR was different than mine. To her, nothing that happened in VR mattered, it was all just a game. That wasn’t how I saw it, to me it felt like she’d invaded my dreams and had her way with me while I was too impaired to give consent, but I suspected Captain Tanlier would accept her way of looking at things and decide not to punish her.

  He certainly hadn’t done anything about the second chief engineer who was trying to undermine me just because he was jealous I’d gotten some android body and a job I wasn’t even sure I wanted. Instead, he’d given that bastard a raise and tried to hide his actions.

  For a moment, I was tempted to just quit. Did they even really need me for anything besides my tech field if the ship was permanently grounded and no one even bothered to respect my authority over the Shipnet? I felt immensely tired, and I had a bit of a migraine. Had I passed out from overusing my magic? That seemed likely.

  ”Why did you wake me?” I asked him, though I already suspected the answer.

  ”Ah after you passed out, your tech field shrunk to only cover half the ship, and the cargo bay doors wouldn’t open...” Tanlier checked his screens, which were showing the ship’s status, it was almost completely full of green boxes. ”It’s back up to covering the whole ship,” he sounded relieved.

  ”You could have waited.” I pointed out, grinding my virtual teeth. He didn’t even have the decency to pretend to care about me for anything other than my ability. ”Did you know why I passed out?” I knew I was being too emotional, maybe even lashing out at the wrong person, but I wanted to scream at the captain, make him take me seriously, take my complaint against Margaret seriously. But I knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t fear me like he feared the second chief’s threat of mutiny, maybe he feared me less than he feared Margaret’s general craziness. He saw me as someone he could afford to treat like dirt, I thought to myself.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Captain Tanlier frowned at me. ”Not really, was it the jitters from almost crashing? Don’t worry, I won’t hold that against you, luckily we somehow swayed back upright and this position isn’t that bad. We’re planning to build a pier from here to the shore, if we ever build some fishing boats, they’ll have a place to dock.”

  ”I was the one that yanked the ship upright, I think I overexerted myself or something. That’s why I passed out.” I explained icily.

  Captain Tanlier looked skeptical. ”How could you have done that? I thought you didn’t even have any control over your… ability.”

  Did I have no control of my ability? Is that why he didn’t take me seriously? Well, I think it was time to change that. I focused my anger inwards and for the first time, really tried to sense what exactly I was doing to create my tech field.

  Up until now, I’d sort of shied away from examining my magic closely, afraid of what I’d find. I didn’t want to know how it worked, because my ability scared me. But now, I was too pissed to feel fear. I remembered how those sparks at the end of the engine’s plasma plume had felt. Tingling bursts of magic as the energetic free electrons decayed into raw magic. I remembered how it felt to reach into the metal of the engine’s nozzle and yank the electrons into a powerful magnetic field. It was all tied together, a single unified path between electrons and my magic, the same path that had awakened my power as I’d tried to protect myself from the electron fury of the malfunctioning jumpdrive. I had power over electrons, they listened to me.

  I reached out with my mind and tried to sense my tech field. I could feel it now. It was vague and subtle, but it was there. It was a volume of space where my personal understanding of how electrons should work was being forcibly applied, I suddenly realized.

  All this time I’d thought I was somehow negating the hostile magical energy of this universe, a sort of anti-magic. But that wasn’t what I was doing. Electronics didn’t work properly in this universe because free electrons were too unstable and prone to breaking down into magic, turning the ones into zeroes randomly.

  My tech field prevented that. If I imagined a computer game where spells worked, I was doing the reverse, running a spell where computers worked. I was forcing electrons to behave as if magic didn’t exist. Inside my tech field, free electrons couldn’t decay into raw magic, so when a bunch of them were pushed out of my field by plasma exhaust, they decayed en masse. That is why the fireworks had occurred. It all fit together.

  I now understood how it worked. And with that insight, I knew how to turn it off. I just needed to accept that it was normal for electrons to decay randomly like that. So long as I stopped trying to fight that weirdness, so long as I let go of the rules I expected, and just relaxed my grip on the fabric of reality itself... My tech field should stop working.

  With a deep breath, I let it go. I turned it off everywhere across the entire ship except for the smallest possible volume that would keep my brain jar functional, the fusion reactors, and the bridge. It was hard, I felt a massive strain on my already fatigued brain to take control like that. It was something like cognitive dissonance, my mind didn’t want to accept what I was forcing it to do. More than that, it felt as if I was plugging some fountain or spring, and there was a growing pressure as my magic struggled to break free.

  But now, I could hold it in, I wasn’t just passively pouring out my magic to be nothing more than a tool others could use.

  Alarms began to blare, and startled, the captain turned to look at his screen. It was rapidly turning red, all the green status boxes flashing angrily as system after system throughout the entire ship began to fail.

  ”What the hell? Sam, what’s going on? Your field...” he stared at me in confusion.

  ”Looks like I can turn it off now,” I told him coldly. ”So maybe you better make sure Margaret gives me a genuine apology because I’m banning her from the Shipnet until she does, and if you try to change my Shipnet settings behind my back again...” I left the threat hanging.

  Captain Tanlier gulped nervously then nodded.

  I stopped holding my magic in, allowing the tech field to flow back out to cover the whole ship. It was a relief. My threat was a bit of a bluff, I still didn’t have enough control to permanently turn off my ability, no more than a normal person could hold their breath indefinitely... but he didn’t know that.