Days passed quickly in the aftermath of the battle that had surprisingly left Theseus almost entirely physically unscathed, but left a tense uncertainty among myself and the crew. We had no way of knowing how Lily found us in the first place, or if she’d be able to find us again. But thankfully, no ambush seemed forthcoming. After a few days, our state of alert had dwindled into cautious monitoring while our idle day-to-day lives resumed.
Ray woke up two days after the surgery and had been relegated to her bed for the time being. I showed up in my human body to apologize, and she predictably forgave everything without a second thought on it. I had to keep the ship itself safe, after all. What was causing a major surgical error between friends? She’s entirely too nice for her own good. I often found Mouse idling just outside of her room when he wasn’t busy, but he never went directly in to talk to her himself.
He still hadn’t taken up my offer to let him vent to me, but I knew I would have to be patient if he was ever going to open up to anyone about his pent-up frustrations.
Joel had almost completely recovered by now, the remnants of his bullet wound still occasionally making him grunt when he strained his leg, but he’d gone back to showing off and working out in the halls, despite Doc’s fruitless scolding.
I noticed Shaw starting to flirt with Aisling. I wondered if he was trying to make me jealous, completely unaware that Aisling and I had amicably agreed to keep things platonic for multiple reasons the rest of the crew didn’t need to be privy to. She kept finding more and more creative ways to embarrass him each time he approached her: simply using his words against him, physically pushing him aside, and once threatening him with her pistol. She seemed annoyed at those moments, but I could tell when she went into private each time afterward that she was having fun with it. It was an entertaining distraction from the doldrums of the long trip.
As I hovered over Doc, staring unmoving down at his personal terminal, his case study on me opened and unchanging for an hour now, I wondered why he’d been so quiet. He’d become less pushy about my health lately, granted I’d gotten into better habits than when I first started as a core, but that was thanks to his incessant nagging. Was he mad at me for ruining his surgery? I doubted that. He wasn’t proud, and he definitely wasn’t the type who held onto a grudge like that. Hell, he let his worst enemy live out of principle when he had him dead to rights.
I decided to tap the intercom and face the problem. “You’ve been quiet lately. What’s on your mind?” I asked, happy to talk through my clear, synthesized voice.
Doc hummed quietly for a moment. “I’ve just had this feeling that I’m missing something lately. Feels like I’ve overlooked something vital.”
“About me?” I asked. He nodded quickly. “Well, you can always just ask if it’s about what’s going through my head or anything.”
“That’s the thing. I can’t ask about what I need to ask.” He gave a long, frustrated sigh. “You don’t know yourself. Or your past, rather. A medical history is very important in diagnosing a patient, and I feel like the same applies here. You have no past from which I can draw conclusions. If we could get our hands on Foundation’s internal files on the Arthausen Project, that would go a great deal toward figuring out this whole living clone business, and maybe give us insight into how your sister could find us.”
“I wish I could figure it out, too. I’ve checked my systems over so many times for invasive hardware and software. They didn’t track us down electronically, I’m certain of that. But what else could she have done?” I pondered it for a moment, but then realized what Doc was saying. “Wait, are you saying that you think Lily found us because of her abilities as an Arthausen clone?”
“Perhaps.” He mumbled. “You’ve said it before. They haven’t made her into a machine core, but they’re still doing something with her mind. So what if it’s exactly that?”
“What if magic is real?” I huffed into the lubricant. I didn’t even know what to make of it either, but maybe there was something more than natural happening here.
“Don’t be obtuse. She’s psychic, not magic. We’ve already known how psionics work from a scientific perspective for decades.” He pursed his lips in frustrated thought and let out an annoyed grunt. “But what if we don’t? What if Foundation’s stumbled onto something that changes our whole understanding of psychics?”
“You’re saying she just found us using the power of her mind? Like... she can just see places that she’s not at?” I asked. I’d wondered the same thing, but Aisling had talked me out of following that absurd train of broken logic already.
“Exactly. What if she’s able to... I have no idea, see great distances from herself, and just plot an intercept course whenever she’s ready?” He shook his head, staring down at my file some more.
“Do you think I could do that, then?” I asked, wondering if it would feel something like looking through a connected sensor array. I suppose I already had the mental architecture for remote viewing, but only through the vessel of technology.
Doc shook his head and gave a wide shrug. “Who knows? It would be very helpful if I had Foundations’ project files. But I assume a defense contractor their size wouldn’t just leave something like that lying around in their databases unprotected. If I could see what their researchers have already done, how this all started, it might become clear. But I’m really starting to wonder if psionics aren’t the answer. I mean, why else would they go through the trouble of making living clones and not utilize them for the one thing we already know psions are so good at?”
“Maybe I can take a swing at their systems remotely once we’re in relay range.” I smiled to myself. I would love to try. The medical relay system had fallen to me with a few thoughts and no trace of my tampering. Maybe I was just a naturally gifted hacker, and I could just digitally walk in and get the information he needed?
But Doc shook his head. “I know it’s not easy to trace a physical location from a relay connection, but it’s possible. And I don’t want you risking blowing our cover, making risky dives into their systems. If they find us on Io before we can earn some money to make full repairs and gather a good collection of supplies, then we’ll have nowhere else to flee. This is already a last-ditch hideout for us, and if they catch us unprepared deep in their own territory, we’re screwed.”
“Yeah, but they can apparently find us anyway, right?” Through Lily. Were we already doomed? I hoped that we were making an incorrect assumption about her, or she would just be able to find us there, regardless of what we did.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I suppose we just have to guess and hope.” He mumbled. He didn’t like it either. With a wave of his hand, he dismissed it. “Forget it. Let’s leave that to Aisling and focus on our own work. Do I need to look in on Ray?”
I suppose he had the right of it. Speculation wasn’t going to get us anywhere. Aisling and Shaw had a plan, and we just had to trust that it would work out. Lily’s supernatural awareness of us wasn’t something we could do anything about right now. We’d just have to face problems as they arose. “She seems fine. Still in bed, playing mahjong on her terminal. Water bottle looks a little low. That’s about all.”
“About time to bring her lunch, anyway. You rejoining us mere mortals tonight?” He joked, and I couldn’t help but let out a silent snort into the lubricant.
“No, I’d rather eat as little of that shit as I can, and I thankfully have that luxury. Good luck choking it down.” I taunted, getting a quick eye roll from the doctor. “I slept last night, after I talked with Ray, too. Just need a few hours in torpor tonight, and I’ll be fine.”
“You are getting a better understanding of your body’s needs, I guess.” Doc admitted. I was surprised he let me have that after all the shit he gave me about my health in my first month on board. But he also wasn’t wrong. It almost felt like I’d grown a quantifiable understanding of my needs for both rest and sustenance, like there was a graph somewhere in the data stream telling me exactly how hungry and tired I was. Maybe that’s why he was harassing me less lately. I’d just been taking care of myself, in my own ‘partially disconnected from traditional biology’ way.
As he left my heart and made his way down toward the mess, though, my mind wandered. I opened my eyes to contemplate the void, imagining myself floating horizontally and looking up at a blank sky, feeling oddly pensive as I reflected on the last few days.
I was dangerous, wasn’t I? I was possibly the most skilled pilot in the system with little effort put to training toward it, and I now held the capacity for violence. I had begun to grow the armor Aisling spoke of. The scars upon my soul that would allow me to use a weapon on another living person and mean it. It still made me queasy if I thought about it too hard, but it was no longer so alien a concept that I couldn’t imagine myself pulling the trigger. Not only that, but I would definitely have to utilize it because I was a magnet to danger for those around me.
My crew was in danger because I was there. I wondered if any of them resented me for that. I was being forced into what may be a hopeless corner, and they were along for the ride, for my sake. Were they really just okay with that? I supposed I could make up for it through the merit of being a living core who could outmaneuver even secret experimental Foundation starships, and all the privileges that came with having the only free and sapient psychic hacker in the system, but was that really enough of an incentive to make being run ragged out of the safest colonies worth it for them?
I closed my eyes and watched Doc gather food for Ray while Aisling fidgeted with some system configurations on her terminal at the dining table. As soon as Doc left the room, I tapped the intercom. “Hey, Aisling?” I asked.
“What’s up, Meryll?” She mumbled, browsing through the display options, but I couldn’t tell what she was trying to get it to do. “You’re not about to tell me there’s something on externals, are you?”
I sent out a sweep of the area to be sure, and my ping returned nothing. “No.” I said tentatively before the data got back to me. “I’ve just got something on my mind. Why do you put up with me?”
“Not sure what you mean,” Aisling said, her browsing uninterrupted. “You’re a bit of a smartass sometimes, and you’re more emotionally volatile than Mouse is, but it’s not like you’re hard to be around. All things considered, you’re pretty good company.”
“That’s not what I meant.” I started. Was she screwing with me again? Around Aisling, I just had to be direct if I wanted a real answer. I was starting to wonder if she was training me to be more direct with my words. “I’m a major danger to you and everyone else on this ship, and you really could have just gone and gotten another core. So why bother with me?”
“Plenty of reasons. Because if we didn’t, Foundation would have you. And not only would that be devastating to you, but it could very easily make the entire system a worse place if they keep fostering what you are for their own ends instead of using it to better everyone’s lives. And if we didn’t protect you, who would? You’re part of my crew, you get protected. I’m not having a pity party where I abandon you to make you feel better about your perceived faults, Meryll.”
I still didn’t really get Aisling’s philosophy, but I also kind of wanted to end the conversation soon because I noticed Joel approaching from the cargo bay, probably for lunch himself. I wondered how much he’d heard, but I sighed silently into the lubricant when he immediately spoke up. “Cause it’d make us hypocrites.” He added to the conversation as he walked into the room. “Fuck, Meryll, do you think you’re the first of us to be chased around the system by a vengeful corp? You aren’t even our first brush with Foundation. I got us dragged to a few inconvenient places when I signed on, too. They eventually lose interest and write off their losses. That’s what corpos do. You become a big enough problem for them to keep pursuing and they decide it’s not worth it. You’re not even the only one of you they got, right? So they’ll forget about you in a few months at most. Just because you’re a weirdo clone girl doesn’t make this much different from being dragged around as the remnants of a failed rebellion or being chased around for harboring a fugitive malpractice doctor or whatever.”
Aisling just nodded and motioned to him in agreement. “Exactly. We’re outlaws, Meryll. We were never going to settle in comfortably anywhere, and we’re used to being chased. You’re not holding us back from some idyllic happily ever after. That’s why it’s not a big deal. So quit beating yourself up and thinking you’re taking advantage of our generosity or whatever. You’ve got a job to do as much as anyone else on this ship and you’re doing it. Wonderfully, I might add. Sure, you’re still learning a few things, but everyone needs a while for that. You’re contributing, and this is just the price we pay for that contribution. If we weren’t willing to go through the growing pains of dodging your pursuers, getting you proper gear, and consoling you through the rigors of becoming a hardened criminal yourself, then we wouldn’t deserve to keep the rest of us together, either.”
“I know they don’t teach loyalty to anyone but their overlords to you corpo drones, but we got it for each other in spades around here. So get all that shit out of your head that we secretly hate you or whatever.” Joel grabbed a bowl and started sorting out his own meal. “Fuck, I can’t wait to have real food again.” Joel muttered to himself.
I guess that was that. This wasn’t even abnormal to them. Desperately hiding away in whatever corner of the system they could manage was just a default state of being for a bunch of pirates. The fact that we were being chased down across the system probably hadn’t even crossed their mind as something to blame me for. It didn’t even give either of them pause enough to interrupt their day-to-day activity to discuss. Maybe I was just overreacting to an invasive thought, after all. I smiled to myself and quipped, “I seem to remember someone bitching at me about being spoiled when I complained about it on my first day.”
“She got you there.” Aisling chuckled.
“She still complains about it every day. I’m not allowed to bitch now and then?” Joel asked, grabbing a spoon to fruitlessly stir at the yellowish mixture.
Maybe I needed to stop thinking of myself as an outsider of the crew. Sure, I’d only been here for a couple of months now, but everyone had welcomed me into the group. They didn’t always like everything I did, and I didn’t always agree with them either, but we could trust each other and we’d grown used to each other. We were like some kind of twisted family. I had to stop making myself feel like I was intruding on the crew of Theseus. I’d long since passed the initiation phase by now. I’d developed complex relationships with most of the crew, and they accepted me and all my weird quirks and needs. It was time to stop feeling like I was an awkward passenger who had to constantly prove herself and justify her existence again and again to everyone. I was really a part of this crew for good, probably until the day I died.
I am Theseus, and this is my crew.