The rest of the evening passed slowly after my visitor left, taken up by routine health inspections and simulations both in Horizon and my actual combat sims as I tried to apply the things I learned between the two formats. It wasn’t easy to concentrate given my ‘wound’, but, I was still getting much better at both, applying the creative problem-solving I learned from the game into the simulator. I couldn’t be lax on this anymore. I knew that the next time I ran into a Foundation ship, it would be up to me to win the battle. And maybe by then, I’d be able to handle a situation without having to pull the dangerous maneuver we’d needed this time.
But given my exhaustion from activating the trap, it was only so long before I was going to drift off to sleep again, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d be visited by another nightmare. It certainly felt like the dull misery I felt would surely make things vivid again. Something nagged at the back of my head that I’d forgotten something though. I remembered that I’d had a nightmare again before I was awoken by Shaw at the beginning of the day. It was probably the same nightmare again, but it was bothering me. I couldn’t picture it clearly. I sighed, dreams were such a fickle thing. If you weren’t focused on them right after they happened, they always slipped away. It didn’t much matter to me, I was sure that I would get a refresher tonight.
A thought came to mind. Were dreams really so nebulous to the half-computer entity that I now was? It made me wonder if my thoughts could be itemized. It couldn’t be so different from data, right? And maybe the same could be said for memories. After all, my thoughts interacted with data frequently.
“Hey Doc, I had another stupid idea.” I called out into the room.
“You’ve had enough stupid ideas for one day.” Doc scolded from the opposite side of the room “Go to sleep.”
I huffed quietly “Just listen, okay?”
—
My eyes opened slowly. That same dream once again, of being engulfed in the darkness that was assaulting the void. I looked up at the large machine pressed up against my bed, and I recalled my request to Doc. It was simple, scan my brain waves while I slept. Record them as data. Perhaps I’d be able to recreate the dream and experience it with a more rational state of mind. To really recall what it is I was dreaming. Even though the dream was abstract, something told me that there had to be a hint in there somewhere. I hoped that maybe there was a mote of my real memory hidden beneath the layers of mental programming that were shrouding the truth.
Looking around, I saw that Doc had returned to his quarters at some point in the night. The man needed to sleep, after all. I disconnected the wire that had been plugged into one of my neck’s ports and pulled the probes off of my forehead. I swung my legs over the empty side of my bed and stretched my limbs out far. Aside from the dull ache of the missing compartment that wouldn’t quite leave me be, I actually felt great. And despite my dreams, it was uninterrupted sleep. My body felt a hundred times better than it had the previous day. I supposed that I just needed some rest after straining my mind so hard.
Hopping out of bed, however, there was only one thing I had on my mind: getting back into the void, seeing if I could make a more accurate assessment of my damage to ease the psionic wound, and seeing if I could actually do anything with the recordings we took.
—
After a quick bite of some kind of bread that Ray had cooked a few days ago, I was back in my void, basking in the light as I felt myself relax in a way that I hadn’t for several days now. It really felt like I hadn’t had a chance to enjoy the therapeutic benefits at all on the previous day, and my worries just floated away. The hostage situation, discovering the Foundation fleet, the ambush, the loss of the cargo bay, the nightmares, Shaw in general, it all felt like it was tolerable once I had a few moments to myself in the void. I was ready for a day of normalcy, at least as far as things tended to go aboard Theseus.
Closing my eyes at last, I smirked when I saw that what I’d thought had been a few moments had actually been most of an hour. I’d expected something like this though. Time flies when you’re mentally recovering, it seemed, and that pattern hadn’t escaped my notice. I gave a quick look around to see that Shaw was still asleep on the floor of one of the empty crew quarters, his room not locked this time now that we knew he just had to use his tool to cut through a locked door anyway if he really wanted to. Mouse stood guard outside of it this time, Joel having gone to sleep himself.
The cargo bay didn’t offer any more hints within the void that I couldn’t discern from out of it. It seemed the sensors were totally shut down. They had either all been struck with enough force to destroy them or more likely, the circuits to that area of the ship had been damaged. It didn’t seem like I would be able to make a proper assessment after all.
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Ray was taking stock of food, frowning at how our fresh supplies were looking. We’d planned to dock back on Luna days ago now, and we were starting to get down to the dregs. I didn’t look forward to dinner tonight, it was probably going to be bland. I REALLY hoped that it wouldn’t include protein rations again. I decided to leave her to it and go bother the captain.
Aisling was up as well, manning her station at the helm, and drafting a message to send out to request landing access when we got to Venus. It hadn’t quite hit me yet that we might not be the most welcome guests on the colony, given their disposition, but she seemed to be trying to carefully word the request, explaining the scenario on Luna.
I turned on the intercom and started to ask “You know, Captain-“
Aisling flinched at the sound of my voice “Fuck! Could you maybe let me know before you do that?” she took in a deep breath. I supposed that I’d caught her off guard.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to spook you. I was about to say, though, you could just use me as a bargaining chip if they won’t let us in.” I offered. I was planning on going in and talking to one of the Venusians at Shaw’s behest anyway, so if they were going to try and deny us landing access, I was certain they’d let us in if they knew that they might get a chance to examine an actual living starship core. “Long as you don’t leave me there, I’d be fine with it. I think the cat’s out of the bag with Foundation at this point anyway. I’m hoping they can tell me something about myself.”
Aisling stared at the half-composed message for a few moments “You’re really okay with people poking and prodding at you?” she asked, speaking in a warning tone to me “They’re gonna want an invasive look if they find out about you. Like, take you apart invasive.”
“I’ll take Mouse with me.” I said, trying to reassure her that I would be okay “If they do anything I’m not okay with, he can use force. And Shaw apparently already knows someone who could be a lead, we might be able to use them as a more discrete way in.”
Aisling closed her eyes and sighed, putting some thought to the idea before she shrugged her shoulders “Only if they turn us down on the merit of running from Foundation. But enough about that. How are you doing?”
“Other than still feeling like there’s a big chunk of me missing, fantastic actually. Waking up without a knife to your throat does wonders.” I chuckled silently to myself “I’m still having bad dreams, but I’m honestly starting to get used to it.”
She nodded along, a small smile on her face when she heard that I was doing better. “Good to hear. Not the nightmare thing, the feeling better thing. What’s our ETA to the colony?”
I quite enjoyed the secretary treatment, when she just started asking me for information she could probably read for herself on the terminal. It made me feel like I was on top of things. “Another two days at most. Venus is currently on the same side of the sun as Earth, so shorter trip. And despite the hull breach, we’ve got more engines this time.”
“Sounds about right. Got any training data for me to review?” she asked, quickly moving on to the next point.
I snickered to myself as a folder opened on Aisling’s screen and I put a copy of my Horizon save data down for her to see. She rolled her eyes and gave a quick laugh “Very funny, Meryll. I meant the sim metrics.”
“I couldn’t resist.” I said while I sent a zipped folder of several hundred log files her way “I’ve been getting better. I’ve gotten battle survival rate to about a high 98 percent. Getting close to 99.”
She nodded “That’s much better. Keep going though. You’re a fast learner, for a human anyway. I’ll take a look at these later. Any other projects you wanna clue me in on? And you better not tell me you’re messing around with that thing in the back of your head again.”
“Nothing as dangerous as yesterday, anyway.” I said quickly before I tried to steer away from the subject. “Gonna be trying something a little experimental in a minute actually. Nothing dangerous at all, just a data reading test. I wanted to see if I could analyze brainwave scans from my sleep computationally.”
She raised an eyebrow at that “Why?” she asked simply, leaning back in her chair, clearly ready to take a break from her work anyway.
“I think the nightmares might mean… I don’t know, something. Like my brain is trying to tell me something I can’t remember… a memory maybe? It’s hard to keep track of dreams, though, so I thought it might be more readable as data while I’m awake.”
“I’m no neurologist or computer scientist, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works.” She sounded more than a little skeptical about my idea “Do you even have a method for this?”
“Nope. Just gonna run it through the data stream and see what happens.” I shrugged. I knew she was right, that this was probably fruitless, but I had several other things to work on if this just turned out to be a waste of time. “Other than that, some minor optimizations, some NON-STRESSFUL testing of the psionic damper, milliseconds at a time mind you.” I really wanted to emphasize that so she didn’t think I was going to try to do something that would knock me out again “And I have this scanner script I’ve been wanting to put together since Earth too.”
“I understood like half of that. Are you sure it’s safe to use the damper at all?” she sounded very serious.
“In very small doses, without trying to operate at computational speeds, yes.” I nodded to myself “I’ve run it for twice as long as I did yesterday without any physical toll beyond the mental stress. In short bursts, even the… sense of dread that comes with being under its influence shouldn’t be a problem.” I was hopeful that it wouldn’t cause issues anyway. But losing control of my mind for relative seconds rather than relative portions of hours felt like something I could conceptually stand, at least. “I have at least some idea of what I’m doing now. I’m not going to hurt myself.”
“If you say so. Like you said, I suppose we do owe you some trust. Well, have fun with your computer science bullshit, I’m going to see if Ray’s up for a game.” She closed out of the word processor that she had open and stood up to step away from her terminal “Let me know if we get another tail, but I think we might actually be safe to get there by now.”