---Escape---
---Jackson’s perspective---
---2679 Terran Calendar/34 years BF---
I walk down my street on the outskirts of New Aspen, my rifle slung over my back.
The vivid orange leaves of the New Coloradoan trees dance in the breeze that’s followed me down from the mountains.
I’m getting back from a week and a half long expedition, guiding a funny party of Xīn de Qínese tourists on a hunting retreat.
Didn’t speak a lick of English between them, so all of the communication had to go through Lincoln.
So many jokes that we laughed at more because it was funny they couldn’t be translated than because we got them!
I had a whale of a time out there with that crazy droid and those guys!
And the money I got for the work I did was not bad!
Even still, right now, I’m happy it’s over…
I’m happy that I get to walk up the path to my house, walk through the door that opens for me as it detects my holo approaching and…
“*oof*”
…get hit in the chest and tackled to the floor by 100lbs of Coloradoan lynxhound(!)
“Hey!… Yo!… *pfff*… Buddy!… Where’s the…*pllh*… fire!” I splutter at the three eyed mutt while he licks my face, excitedly.
My wife’s Earth dog, Lady, approaches Buddy from behind and watches him in a way that suggests she thinks he’s behaving undignified…(!)
Like she didn’t do exactly the same as her little bro when Lyla and I started dating(!)
That was before she got too old to have that kind of energy…
“Sophie! Your dad’s back!” calls my wife from the kitchen, out the back door.
The only answer that returns is an incoherent shrieking of excitement that rapidly approaches me.
I manage to extract myself from under Buddy just in time for 4’2’’ of long haired kindergartener to sock slide into the hallway and tear toward me!
Sophie is Lyla’s absolute spitting image in every way except for having my blue eyes…
I even remember jokingly asking the fertility clinic doctor if she was sure she hadn’t accidentally used Lyla's genes as both Sophie’s mom and dad and left mine out(!)
I stoop down to catch her in my arms and lift her up into a hug.
“I missed you, Daddy!” Sophie pouts.
I chuckle “I’m back now, sweetheart!”
“And you won’t leave again?” she demands.
“Yeah… I’d like to know that too!” smirks my wife, appearing in the hallway, dressed in her dental scrubs.
“Not for a while, you two…” I smile “…the amount I just made, we should be good for 3-4 months before I gotta take another contract!”
“So you can walk me to school tomorrow?!”
I kiss her forehead and answer “To school, back from school and, after that, we can go into town for ice cream!”
My daughter squeals with delight at that.
My wife tuts with mock disapproval and says “All that sugar’ll be bad for her teeth, Daddy(!)”
I smirk back “Yup… Just think of it as drumming up business for you, darling(!)”
She smiles, sighs and walks to me.
At 6’2’’, my wife towers over my 5’11’’ so she has to bend down to kiss me over Sophie’s shoulder.
She wraps her arms around me and our daughter.
I turn my head to the hallway mirror and smile as I see myself embraced by the two most important people in the universe…
---2714 Terran Calendar/1 year AF---
I wake up from a dream of heaven to my current hell…
Anyone who’d say that oblivion isn’t hell has clearly never experienced it!
Not anchored to the sense feedback of a body, there’s really nothing to separate being asleep from awake, nothing to mark the passage of time, nothing to make me sure that I ever existed at all and didn’t just imagine my entire life before where I am right now!
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
My brain is also constantly screaming at me about the fact that it’s no longer attached to anything, no longer receiving the reassurance of a beating heart, a full stomach, lungs with air in them, blood at a tolerable range of acidity and oxygenation, all of which the body that was hijacked away from me could simulate…
Oh, and, of course, not having any senses, I’d have no way of knowing if someone were holding a hammer over my brain’s container, about to bring it down and end my miserable life…
Maybe it’s better that way… not like I’d have any way of defending myself if I could see the hammer coming!
I have no idea how long its been since that fucking AI beat me with that cheap trick!
Even if subjective measurement of time weren’t next to impossible without senses, I don’t know how long I’ll have spent in stasis!
For as long as I’m thinking, I know I’m not, but I’d have no way of knowing if there was a gap of months between the start of this thought and the end of it!
They’ll probably put me in a slow moving droid made of aluminum to stand trial, the kind of thing a child could walk up to and push over!
Then, obviously, when I get sent back to that supermax, they’ll grow me an organic body to put my brain into.
They’ll make it weak…
They’ll engineer it such that it will be almost impossible for me to build back the kind of muscle I had before the worst day of my life…
I’d rather they just fucking execute me… but of course they won’t!
The same spineless ‘mercy’ that kept them from exterminating the xenos (who’d proved that they deserved nothing less) will keep them from killing me like they should…
Maybe, I can…
My train of thought is broken.
I… feel something…
I shouldn’t be able to feel anything, right now!… Not physically!
Feeling comes from sensors (biological or cybernetic) and, without a body, I don’t have any!
A ceiling I recognize instantly as being aboard a Navy vessel presents itself to my mind.
Involuntarily, my brain attempts to gasp.
The signal returns that reassures it that ‘yes, indeed you have lungs and they are indeed full of oxygen!’ despite no such lungs existing!
I bolt upright and spin my head 360°…
I see the only other person in the room with me and am about to attack him when I recognize who it is…
“Easy there, big guy!… Just me!” soothes the dark skinned man, raising both of his bionic palms to me and giving me a flash of his golden teeth.
“Rylan?!… What the hell’s going on!? Where are we?!” I demand, disoriented.
“Evidence locker on the UTCS Dreadnought, Spite… I just finished reassembling your body and we’re busting outta here!”
“How’d you…?”
He gestures around his body to his extensive battery of augments “I’d’ve been blind, deaf and paraplegic if they’d taken all this… Inhumane(!)… They settled for trynna digitally neuter them, they didn’t do a good enough job(!)… Hacked my cell open, shielded both our presence from digital notice and rerouted guard patrols out of our way… Already retuned one of the engines of a long range patrol so its ion trail won’t be recognised… All we need to do is get to the hangar and get out of the warp bubble!… Oh, and I upgraded your arm!”
I hold up my right hand and find that, like he said, the slapdash industrial bionic is gone, replaced with a much sleeker military model, more like the one that old guy ripped off.
“Where’re the others?” I ask.
He grimaces “We… can go back for them… but I don’t know how much I’d count on any of their loyalty… most of them found out they were clones… They weren’t happy about that!”
Shit!
So they know about the Lazarus Program…
Confused, I ask “You didn’t find out that you’re a clone?”
He grins “I already knew… Hacked the Bastion intranet when I was 14… found out that way… Doesn’t matter to me!”
Surprised, I answer “…Alright then. Let’s go… no sense risking our escape for compromised agents…”
He nods and we head from the cellar like room.
As he said, we run into no patrols on our way to the fighter hangar.
We board the craft he indicates he tampered with and launch it.
Slowly, we float backwards out of the doors.
We might have a shield preventing any AIs or other digital processes from noticing anything we do, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be heard by biological ears…
If we blast out of the hangar, we’re far more likely to be caught!
We’re about 300m away from it when the whole gigantic ship blinks out of existence, letting me know we’re out of its warp bubble.
“Phew!” breathes Rylan “Now… I’d say we wait here for 2 hours… Less time than that and we risk triggering their proximity alarms by entering warp, more and we risk them realising we’re gone and doubling back to look for us!”
I nod and ask “Where was the handoff?”
“Sorry?” asks Rylan.
“Where did the Bright Plume hand us over to Naval custody?” I clarify, irritated.
“Oh… Xartham Space Station… Think it was about 3 weeks ago?”
“Good… then their ion trail should still be fresh enough to track from there.”
“I’m…? You can’t be serious!?” he objects.
“Dead serious.” I say, stonily.
“After what happened?! We’ve got to get back to Bastion! We’ve got to report all this! We can’t go chasing after folk who’ve already…”
“Who’ve already what?” I snarl.
Cowering away from me, he takes a few seconds to steady himself before responding “…I’m not going after them, Stetter… I’m taking us back to Bastion…”
I sit in silence for a moment.
“I see…” I say, calmly, before hitting a button on the control panel, seizing him by the lapel and lifting him out of his seat.
“What…!? Hey!!! What’re you doing?!?!?!” objects the boy dangling from my arm.
“I’m sorry, kid… Really I am!” I say, sincerely, as we approach the ramp that’s in the process of lowering “That escape was all you and I owe you for that… This arm too… Even if the last one you found me had some… shall we call them ‘issues’(!)… Right now, I’m afraid… you’re just something in my way…”
Realization hits, followed immediately by terror.
He takes a breath to beg for his life but, the same moment, I toss him through the atmo field.
Exposure to vacuum isn’t like you see in the movies…
In spite of the near absolute zero temperatures, people don’t instantly freeze solid into blocks of ice!
Since, in space, the heat transfer by conduction and convection is effectively nil, it’ll take a long time for him to freeze.
Vacuum is such a good insulator that early spaceships actually had to be specially designed to radiate away heat or they would have turned into ovens from the accumulating heat of their machines and bodies.
What is happening, as he flails in the airless, zero gravity, is that his brown skin is turning red, from his blood pressure bursting his capillaries, and his mouth is emitting steam, due to his saliva boiling from the lack of pressure.
It takes 45 seconds for him to lose consciousness.
“A damn shame…” I observe, before turning around and walking back up the ramp.