One in six. That was the best I could manage. It was a risky endeavor, and part of me was horrified that there was a reasonable chance we were all about to be torn apart by a wounded fighter ship plunged straight through my hull. But as my disparate self combined once more, I silently shouted my approval and braced for the worst. Though I had been divided, I had managed to come to exactly the conclusion that I’d have done, anyway, if I’d had the time to put it all together without the damper. Though I had changed under its influence, my true self and intentions shined through. One in six was an unacceptable risk, but not for Lily.
I let my script run unchanged, trusting my focused self to have prepared the best course of action, and as the single shot landed precisely beneath Lily’s engine, something exploded out of the rear of her ship, sending the entire small frame careening in a zig-zag of a dying engine’s movement while I evaded cleanly over its trajectory.
Even as the ship moved past me, its engines failing, and I knew that I’d won the roll of the die, my celebration was cut short by alarm at the damage done to Lily’s ship. It had not been destroyed, but that kind of damage was still catastrophic. If Lily was in pain before, she was surely reeling now.
I immediately corrected my course to chase after the lilting torpedo she’d become after the shot. Her failing engines were losing thrust, but momentum carries things far in space. I had to make sure I didn’t lose her.
‘Lily! Lily, talk to me!’ I sent while I moved to catch up to her.
“You got her?” Aisling asked immediately as Theseus’s movement evened out.
How was I going to report this? I’d just gambled with everyone's lives, and Lily might still be too injured to survive. I tapped the intercom and after sending a few different adjustments to my message, told her “Lily’s... she’s been... neutralized.”
Aisling nodded slowly, looking down at the floor. “And you’re back with us?”
I kept up my speed and found myself gaining on the spinning wreck carrying itself along through open space. If I lost it now, no one would ever find it again. “Yeah. Damper’s off.” I spoke curtly, focusing wholly on keeping Lily safe.
‘Lily, come on. Don’t give in now. Give me some kind of sign, please!’ I begged into the stream she still had open with me.
Aisling released her iron grip on the bar she’d been using to hold herself up. “Meryll... I’m sorry.”
“She’s still intact. I’m catching up to her.” I told Aisling outright. I didn’t have time to mess around with little lies right now.
“What?” Aisling went wide-eyed. She looked up and stared into my sensor array, shock on her face. She pursed her lips and nodded again. “It’s seriously scary how good you are at this already, you know that, right? You only took one shot. You could have laid into her with a salvo...”
“I took a chance.” I admitted. In a moment of immediate hindsight, I winced when I realized I could have painted this as the safer option, but it was already out there now.
She kept watching me with a wary eye. She was trying to keep her voice neutral, but I could tell she wasn’t happy. “How much of a chance?”
“Not as bad as it could have been.” I knew I was rationalizing. My mind wasn’t exactly on Aisling’s side of the conversation. “I’m sorry. I had to. Lily’s worth it.”
I couldn’t read Aisling’s expression, but I knew she was judging me. I knew logically, all too well, that I’d made the wrong decision. I’d put everyone at risk to spare Lily. But killing her was unthinkable. I’d even somehow managed to convince a purely logical version of myself of that. I’d have to analyze that detail later.
Aisling groaned and finally closed her eyes. “Meryll, you’re way out of line. But it’s already done...” I could tell that she was fuming. “We’ll talk about this later. For now, you’re on thin ice. You follow orders for now, no questions, got it?“
I nodded. I knew I was emotionally compromised when this encounter began. As long as Lily stayed safe, I didn’t care what happened next. It made sense Aisling should be calling the shots from here. “Understood.”
“She’s no longer a threat?” She asked next.
“She’s not responding. I’m not even sure if she’s conscious. I’m not sure if...” I didn’t want to say it. If I went through all this trouble and she’d died of psychic trauma anyway, I couldn’t live with myself.
“And her ship?” She asked.
“Momentum’s carrying her into wild space. I’ve been pursuing. I’m still in comms range, and I can keep up with her now that she’s not accelerating. I can slow her down once I’ve caught up.” I sent the message, and then realized that Aisling could easily just tell me to abandon her now. I’d just agreed to do as she said after all.
Aisling didn’t say anything for a moment. “What do you want out of this, Meryll? If she’s alive, she’s part of that ship now. We can’t tow her to Io, if that’s what you’re thinking. That ship is way too hot. Foundation would find us instantly.”
That was what I’d expected to do, but she had a point. Lily was a very high-profile ship, uniquely outfitted with obvious experimental tech and Foundation markings. There was no possible way to keep her shell discreet. And it wasn’t like we could just land her in an isolated part of Io, it wasn’t a fully terraformed moon.
“What if we just take her human body with us?” I asked. I knew what I was saying was practically sacrilege to what I felt as a ship core myself. The idea of leaving behind Theseus, condemned to float aimlessly in wild space forever, made me sick. But there was no other solution right now. We didn’t even have the resources to repair our own ship, never mind hers. But saving Lily’s human half was better than dooming her in whole. “We can extract her from the ship and leave it behind if we have to.”
“She just tried to kill us.” Aisling spoke sternly.
“She’s confused and she’s in pain.” I tried to explain. I thought back to my dream. It was just like what I used to be like when we were kids. “I know how she feels. When you’re in that kind of pain, you can’t think. You just do things that don’t make sense. Anything that you think might have some chance of relieving it. You can’t control yourself. You do things that you don’t mean to, and sometimes you hurt people you love. I know I can calm her down and make her see sense. You can restrain her if you have to, but please, she just isn’t in control of herself right now, and I know I can calm her down.”
She gave my sensors a deadly serious glare. She kept her voice low and cold. “And what would you do if I told you, right now, to turn back toward Io and forget about her?”
I whined and opened my eyes. What would I do? I wanted to trust that Aisling knew what she was doing, and I thought she would do what’s best for all of us. But she was mad at me right now. I’d never seen her quite this irate with anyone else in the crew before. Was she the type who would do that? Would she make me do something that devastating after I’d already won the roll of the dice?
Or was she just testing my loyalty? Should I tell her what she obviously wants to hear? “I would hate you.” I spoke honestly.
I could never forgive her if that was actually what came next. There would be no point. Lily was already neutralized as a threat. There was no risk left to be had here. The only reason she would make that call now would be to spite me for playing fast and loose with our lives. Which... fine. I deserved to be punished for that. But Lily didn’t.
“I know you would.” Aisling continued staring up, her eyes burning a hole directly into my sensors. “Answer the question. What would you do?”
What could I do? It’s not like I could disobey. What would that even entail? I’d have to... get rid of the crew. I shook my head. The fact that the idea even crossed my mind made me sick. My crew had become like family to me these past couple of months; maybe even more so than Lily. They’d been patient with me and accepted all my quirks and flaws, and they took on big risks of their own just keeping me on board. What I felt for them wasn’t born of a shadow of a memory. The comaraderie I felt with them was less ethereal than the love I had for Lily.
And even if I did do that, there were the practical problems that followed. I had no idea how to safely navigate vacuum in an environment suit, so I’d never be able to retrieve Lily without the others. Without Aisling or Shaw, I wouldn’t know how to navigate the outer colony underworld safely to stay unnoticed and work to repair myself. I wouldn’t be able to defend myself on the ground without Joel. I didn’t have the technical expertise to repair myself without Mouse, and I didn’t know enough about my own human body to take care of it without Doc. All I knew was being Theseus, not maintaining it. I couldn’t do anything alone.
I didn’t have a choice. I finally closed my eyes again and felt like crying as I told her, “I would turn back like you told me to.”
Aisling finally looked away from my sensor array, her expression softening slightly, but she stayed silent for a moment. She let out a loud sigh. “That was my turn to be out of line. You’re in complete control of this ship, Meryll, and I needed to know you can still act rationally.”
“So I can keep going?” I asked hopefully, relief washing over me. She was testing me, and I think I passed. I had to wonder if she trusted me at all right now. It was yet another thing I’d have to unpack later, but right now, Lily was all that mattered.
She nodded. “For now. Keep me apprised.” She walked up to the intercom and pressed the button. “At ease, crew. Threat’s neutralized. What happens next is still up in the air, but we might be doing a little more salvage.” She let go of the button and grimaced down at the floor. “Your awful decision-making aside... excellent piloting, Meryll.”
I watched a collective sigh of relief go through the crew. Joel helped Ray pick herself back up off the floor of the mess hall once they climbed out from under the table. Mouse detached himself from his makeshift harness and began frantically taking stock of all my internal systems, grumbling to himself over the stress I’d put everything under, but he didn’t yell at me this time, instead focusing on his work. Shaw was picking himself off of the wall he’d been hugging since the first evasion, checking his scraped arm and cursing at a deep cut that had formed across his palm.
With the crew settled, I could return my focus to my sister now. In my absence, she hadn’t replied to my plea. ‘Please, Lily. Tell me you’re there.’ I sent again as I approached the careening ship. If I stuck close behind it, I’d eventually be able to slow it down again using Theseus’s gravitational field to ease its velocity.
As soon as I reached psychic network range, I immediately connected back to that ship. This time, there was no interference at all. Which immediately sent a shiver down my spine.
Fuck. I couldn’t feel that horrible invasion of my senses that normal cores gave. That meant it was no longer operational. Was it dead from psychic trauma? What did that mean for Lily?
“Meryll?” I heard Doc call me.
“Yeah?” I asked back as I tried to make sense of the other ship’s sensors. Everything was about as organized as Theseus was before I configured it for myself, and it wasn’t a part of me like my own sensors, so it wasn’t all easy to parse.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“I saw your biometrics shift for the damper activation, but you didn’t show the same stress response as usual and you’ve been all across the board since then. Did it disengage fine?” He asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I think I figured some stuff out that time. It’s... weird, for sure, but I think I can keep it in check now. I made a lot more sense of it this time.” I wondered if maybe I could make more casual use of the damper now. While it was still a deeply bizarre experience, it no longer felt so foreign and dangerous that I couldn’t conceive experimenting with it. It would be something to consider later. “I’ll tell you more about it later.”
“That’s amazing.” Doc murmured. “What happened? Was it Lily?” He asked.
“Yeah.” I finally found my way into the internal sensors and I could navigate around with one array as a reference. The helm had emergency lights on. I must have done some damage to her reactor. I’d have to check that life support was still online. What gave me pause, though, was the pile of blood and human waste in the middle of the floor. What the hell happened here? “She’s... she grafted that ship.”
“What?” Doc sounded shocked. “Why?”
“I don’t know, but something went wrong. I think it’s because the old core was still operational. I don’t know why, but she was saying she was in a lot of pain. Unbearable pain. I think, somehow, she was feeling something like what happened to me when I was little. She was hurting so bad she couldn’t think straight, and she was trying... to take herself out and bring me with her. Save me from the same kind of suffering she was going through, I guess. She didn’t see any other way out, and even then she was still thinking of me.”
“Oh...” Doc spoke sadly. He was shocked and didn’t know how he should feel about that. “And you had to take her out first. I’m so sorry, Meryll.”
I was getting tired of hearing that. She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. I ignored Doc for now and moved myself through Lily’s ship, searching back behind the helm.
When I entered her equivalent to my heart, I was at first impressed with how new and sleek the core module looked compared to my own well-used, worn and dented sphere. But I also found a room in a rough state.
The fighter’s size meant the reactor, engine room, and core module were all crammed close together in one large engineering room. Two thin columns of smoke billowed from one engine in the back, which hinted that if the hull was breached, it was either sealed through some emergency function or something else collapsing into it. There was scattered metal scrap all over the floor where a terminal and a pipe had exploded. But miraculously, the environment was still pressurized and the core module itself remained intact, if soiled by a few light dents and scratches. I wondered how much of that was luck and how much was precision planning on the part of my logical side. Considering I didn’t know what the interior looked like until now, I had to assume the former.
On the floor, in the back of the room, was a heavily augmented body. A slim, pale, hairless man lay unbreathing, his bloody torso impaled on metal flak, and his body thrown about from turbulence. I gave a silent disgusted groan at the ugly sight. That explained what happened to the old core, at least. Poor thing. It may have caused a lot of grief between Lily and I, but it’s not like it knew what it was doing. I couldn’t think of it as anything but a tragic villain at worst. I wasn’t sure if Isabelle would have cared, but I was glad I hadn’t yet restored her access to my sensors all the same, in case she had developed any kind of empathy toward other cores.
I stared at the core module for a bit. I wished I could see inside. Looking around for a biometrics terminal like the one Doc used to monitor me, I saw it had been destroyed in the carnage. I’d have to reach into Lily’s augmentations directly if I was going to know.
I pushed my psychic influence into the core module and connected with something that felt similar enough to my own implant’s architecture. I reeled for a moment as the entirety of the electronic side of her system appended itself to the edge of my data stream. It was a lot to take in at once without it being a part of my own neurological structure, and it was a lot of noise. But it was definitely her. If she was still alive, I was about to dive directly into her head.
And immediately, I felt something sent back through the implant itself. A thought given form.
‘meryll? kill me please im sorry just kill me’
Despite her words, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. She was alive. ‘Lily, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t get through to you. Can you think more clearly now that the core is gone?’
‘no it still hurts it hurts so bad please just kill me you already shot me it feels like you ripped my guts open i cant take this and now i cant do it myself everything is numb and i cant move but it still hurts just end it please please kill me’
Was it the psychosomatic damage causing her mental grief now? I would have thought she’d at least register that as a different kind of pain. ‘Focus on your human body, Lily. That numbness is your ship. The wound isn’t real. Can you move your human limbs?’
There was a short pause. ‘no nothing moves i need help i need you to kill me please meryll it hurts’
She couldn’t move. Something was wrong with her body. Could psychosomatic damage paralyze someone? I reflexively swallowed in fear, terrified that I had crippled my sister.
‘Lily, listen to me very carefully. Take deep breaths. As best as you can. I know you’re probably not that used to the lubricant yet, but I promise, if you breathe deeply, it’s just like air. You can keep yourself calm that way.’ I waited a moment for a response, then decided it’s probably best to act quick. ‘I’m going to try to do something to help you with this. The pain you’re experiencing... when did it start?’
‘as soon as I got in this thing as soon as I became the ship it hurt so much and it never stops it hurts meryll please kill me kill me’
I wasn’t sure if it was a product of something the other core had done to her or if something else went wrong in her grafting. One thing was for sure, I wouldn’t honor her request. ‘Lily, I’m not going to kill you. I can’t. In fact, I went through a lot of trouble to not kill you. I should have killed you when you attacked me, to protect myself and my crew, but I literally couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just can’t. You’re too important to me. But I’m also not going to leave you in pain.’ I hesitated for just a moment as I recalled the words I wanted to use next. ‘I think you're a good person, Lily. You're just hurting. And confused. And you just need some help.’
I started examining the architecture of Lily’s data stream. It was absolute chaos. She had done nothing to put it in order. I wondered if she’d just been piloting through trial and error, lashing out with whatever she could touch that actually did anything and memorizing what responded without making a cohesive interface for it.
‘that sounds familiar why would you say that?’ she finally asked.
‘It’s what you told me. And we’re sisters,’ I told her. What she needed right now was clarity, and she didn’t need her ship. I would have to be careful not to sever it from her completely because I frankly didn’t know what that would do since it was merged so deeply with her brain, but I needed to simplify it for her. I started with the logging system. That was always a lot of input that was mostly unimportant, and one of the first things I discarded after I grafted myself. I trimmed away her awareness of it like I had my own, suppressing unnecessary information from cramming itself into her conscious mind. She’d be able to recall it if she reached for it, but I needed it to stop hammering her with everything all at once.
‘you did something what did you do?’ she sent immediately ‘it got quieter you changed something how?’
‘I told you, I can help.’ I told her as I started looking over her network. I didn’t want to break any of the connections to physical machines completely. I’d need to keep working on a purely software level. ‘Why is your data stream so disorganized? I couldn’t stand this when I first grafted. I had to sort it out immediately.’
‘how? it’s impossible its too much it hurts to look at and it hurts to touch it hurts just to be around it what are you doing?’
That’s... odd. It wasn’t so unbearable to me. Annoying, more than painful. It was easy enough to impose my will on the data stream and make it more manageable. I started blocking incoming reports and requests from all the failing hardware she was grafted to, one machine at a time. ‘Is this working? Are you starting to get any feeling back? Focus on your body, see if you can move anything.’
‘please dont stop make it go away please please meryll please fix this if you can fix this please fix it please please’ She sounded so desperate. I was doing something right. This time, her desperation was relief she thought she’d never experience again. Impossible peace of mind. It was a step up, even if she was still in a panic.
I continued gradually hacking my way through her data stream, cutting out everything but the barest links to her ship, her pleading gradually slowing with each fragment of data I rendered inert. And soon, she started to show cautious signs of sanity reasserting itself.
‘oh god meryll what did i do?’ she asked ‘im so tired im so tired all that that was me i did that im so sorry meryll i almost killed you meryll im so sorry i was so tired so confused im still confused i dont know how i could’
‘I’ve been there, Lily. I understand. Call it payback for your arm.’ I smiled, just glad to see that she was calming down. ‘My captain’s not happy with me for sparing you, but I’m glad you’re coming back to your senses. Is the pain gone? Can you move?’
‘theyre right you shouldnt have’ she replied, then went quiet for a few moments ‘its not gone no but its quieter everything feels numb i can barely move my hands my stomach burns but i feel like i could fall asleep’
‘That’s because your reactor’s shot. The ship is a part of you and you’re going to feel it when it takes damage. It’ll make you feel other things besides pain, too. I always start feeling sleepy too when my reactor winds down, so I get it. I might have caused nerve damage, though. Or at least your body thinks you have nerve damage.’
‘im actually this thing then arent i? im so stupid i should have just come to you before i tried this and now i cant move’
‘Why didn’t you?’ I asked. I could have walked her through this so much easier. I could have helped her do this safely if that’s what she really wanted. And I could probably have talked her out of it in the first place if I told her what it was like. ‘I don’t think that numbness is permanent, it’s just a stress response.’ I was just guessing at that, but Lily didn’t need to hear that she might be paralyzed right now.
Lily took her time with her next message. I could tell she needed to get a lot off her chest. ‘Meryll. When I first met you again, you were so different. So much more confident. Cooler. And you weren’t in pain anymore. You became so much more amazing because of that ship. I thought if I did the same as you... maybe things would start making sense. Maybe this world wouldn’t be so awful anymore. Maybe I could be strong like you. I did something awful, Meryll. I don’t know if you can see in the storage room, but... I didn’t know what to do after that. I thought maybe this would help me see things like you do. I thought it would all come together if I was just more like you.’
‘Hey, you’re getting the hang of text comms.’ I briefly praised her before I got back on topic. I flickered my sight through her ship’s sensors and raised my eyebrows at the gruesome scene in a small side room off the helm. The remains of a person in Foundation uniform, handcuffed to a shelf, lay filled with small caliber rounds and further torn apart in the aftermath of turbulence. It was more like a pile of gore than recognizable human remains. The firearm that did it lay in a pile among scattered rations and supplies. The implication was clear. Lily had crossed a line I was all too recently familiar with myself, and in the confusion and despair of taking a life, she did something drastic. ‘Oh. I see. I won’t ask you to explain, Lily. I’m sure you had no choice.’
‘I’m so tired. Of everything. I wasn’t even in pain when I did it. I just needed to know I had a choice. Being able to see what can happen next, you’d think I’d be able to change something, but I’ve never been in control. I had to see if I could. And I hate myself for it. I’m free now. Foundation... I got their claws out of me. I never want to go back to them. I don’t even want the temptation, and after I did that, I know I can’t. The liars. Those horrible people. Shooting him was like destroying my link to that awful company. But now I’m a monster. He was just doing his job. Was it worth it? Do I deserve that freedom?’
‘You certainly didn’t deserve what they were doing to you.’ I tried to comfort her as best I could with words along with further easing her digital burden. She’d taken a life, and I knew I was going to have to make her face that soon. But for now she needed reassurance while I continued to shear off ancillary systems from her data stream to further soothe her tormented mind. ‘And just doing his job or not, he was a threat to you. You were just protecting yourself. I get what you’re going through. That pilot back when we met the first time... that was the first time I killed someone, too. I know it hurts. But we were both doing what we had to do.’
‘You’d never done it before then?’ She asked. I felt like she was probably blaming herself for that, too. ‘Meryll, thank you. Thank you for helping me find a moment of clarity so I could speak to you again. It means a lot to me. But I don’t want to be part of this world anymore. I don’t deserve to live. I don’t even want to. If you can’t kill me, fine. But can you at least just leave me here to die? I don’t know what you planned to do with me, but I don’t deserve your kindness, and I’m so tired. I just want it to end.’
My eyes were definitely hot with tears as I read those words. She’d suffered so much, and now that she’d finally liberated herself from the abuse and torture, now that she was finally at some level of peace, she was ready to give up. I couldn’t stand for it.
‘No.’ I told her.
‘Meryll?’
‘I know you’re tired. I know you’ve been through a lot. But I didn’t spare you so you could give up, Lily. I don’t think you’re a monster. I think you were a victim pushed way over the edge by evil people, and now that you’re finally free, you’re taking all the blame on yourself. Like it’s your fault you were born like this or that they lied to you. You not only deserve to live, you deserve to be happy. You said you wanted to be like me, well let me show you what it’s like in a world that isn’t so overwhelmingly awful that all you can think to do is escape it.’
‘I’m so tired of false hope. I’m tired of being hurt.’
‘I won’t hurt you. You can trust me.’
There was no response for several minutes. I wasn’t sure if she had stopped responding out of anger at my insistence or if she was mulling over my words, but I smiled when I saw the words ‘Okay. I’ll try one last time. Because it’s you.’
‘I love you, Lily.’
‘I love you too, Meryll.’