A house divided against itself cannot stand. But we’re not building houses. We’re building an empire, and any division will be ruthlessly crushed beneath a mountain of tactical lawyers. This is business.
-Chairwoman Nina Ellory, Ad Astra Space Shipping, Passenger, Mining, Acquisitions, Exploration and Exploitation Corporation.
Alex and Patina cautiously made their way down a long corridor. The place, to Alex, was fashioned in a sort of retro-futuristic style - all molded plastic, polished steel, and smooth curves that looked more like aesthetic choice rather than functional design. Here and there the more advanced technological components were sunk into the plastic. Most of them were either emitting distressing beeps or smoking slightly, and Alex had no hopes of identifying what any of it was for.
Beneath their feet a once-grand carpet had been worn down from the march of innumerable footfalls. Alex looked ahead, wondering exactly how far the corridor extended - it seemed to go off forever into the distance.
The experience would have been much more wondrous to Alex if the floor hadn’t been scattered with the detritus of neglect and malfunction. Traces of smoke lingered in the air, curling lazily around fallen-in ceilings that spilled ductwork and wiring in ropey piles. As in the transportation pod, Alex noted that some of the wires seemed normal while others glowed in a variety of colors.
Occasionally the pair passed a doorway, but Alex was unable to read the neat little labels beside them due to the strange curly script they were printed in. Most of them were tarnished with age.
“This place doesn’t look too good, “ Alex observed.
“It wasn’t this bad until today, “ Patina commented carelessly, shrugging. “I mean sure, it still wasn’t great but not like this; If I were the Adjunct I’d be freaking out right now. But that’s not my job, thank the Board.” the goblin grinned. “I clean stuff, I don’t worry about the rest.”
“That seems a little, uh…” Stupid? “Carefree.” Alex ventured.
“Maybe, but it’s not like I have much of a choice so why worry about it? Unless the Adjunct specifically requests assistance, Ad Astra employees are forbidden to step outside their assigned roles.” Patina explained, “My Path is [Cleaner], and my job is sanitation work - like most of us here. If I step outside that job without an offer or permission from the Adjunct, my pay gets docked and benefits are paused.”
“That seems very shortsighted.”
“Yup, “ Patina chuckled darkly. “But you learn to live with it.” Something in the goblin’s tone suggested an underlying frustration, that her words didn't match how she actually felt, but she was careful to keep most of it from her voice. “All of this, “ she gestured around the corridor, “Is someone else’s problem until one day things get so bad we all perish.”
“Uh…”
“Something fun to look forward to.”
Fatalistic and resigned to her fate, Alex mused. What an awful existence. “When I was trapped, Harmony kept trying to reach maintenance or someone to repair the pod door but couldn’t get to anyone. I don’t want to assume anything, but she rattled off a mind bogglingly large number of outstanding repair requests.”
“Maintenance. That’d be nice.” Patina looked wistful for a moment before she shook her head. “There hasn’t been a techie in this carriage since the last one died horribly in a diss-piss conduit rupture. We never did get that fixed.”
That yellow liquid, Alex shuddered. That could have been me.
“That was…what, about twelve years ago? He was the only techie the carriage had for, like, most of his life and he was seriously old. There was no way he could keep up with everything on his own.”
“And there’s no more, uh, ‘techies’ on the ship that could come here to help out?”
“Ship?” Patina stopped and tilted her head quizzically at Alex. Her large eyes glimmered in sudden realization. “Oh! You have no idea where you are. Mandatory hire, right?”
“Yeah. Kinda new to all this.” Alex said, rubbing his head absently. “Any information would be useful.”
“Information costs, “ Patina shot back, her tone almost bored. She shook her head and sighed. “But I’m getting a little extra from the Adjunct for doing this…” The little Goblin’s eyes narrowed speculatively as she looked at Alex, “Yeah, okay. I can toss a few bites your way.”
“Thanks.”
As they walked past the sealed doors down the corridor each one hissed and groaned but didn’t move. Alex eyed them suspiciously, but Patina simply shrugged. “They open automatically when they detect people close by. Very high tech stuff. Except right now, they’re mostly not working and also not a priority for repair because most of carriage 9997’s upper deck is abandoned. Sorry, ‘currently not optimized for use’.” Her tone was mocking as she put air quotes around her last words.
To give Alex the rundown, she touched briefly on the main condition of temporary employment with Ad Astra - namely, that whatever job he was given he should perform as best he can, because passage on board wasn’t promised or guaranteed to freeloaders - it had to be earned.
“Also if you’re terminated, you’re literally terminated. Only Ad Astra employees should be onboard the train, and ex-employees are ejected as soon as possible.”
“Into space.”
“Into space, “ Patina agreed. “The train can’t support those who can’t work.”
“That word again. I’m on a train. In space.”
“Originally it was some romanticized throwback that the company decided would look good to investors and shareholders. At least, that’s what I’ve been told - who knows why upper management does anything? It’s not as if any of them condescend to come all the way back to carriage 9997.”
“So it’s a train and a spaceship, “ Alex pushed, “I’m not trying to be dumb here, just getting things right in my head. A train - a long, segmented vehicle with an engine, a caboose, a whole bunch of carriages or cars - but also a spaceship, with all the lasers, phasers, shields, warp engines, and whatever else that implies.”
“I don’t know what phasers and warp engines are, but I think I can guess. But yeah, the train is split up into ten thousand carriages; Why exactly ten thousand I dunno, but it’s probably something to do with people liking nice round numbers?” Patina shrugged, “Each carriage is set up to perform different tasks for the company.”
“And what does the company-”
The door they were passing chimed, and instead of the now familiar hiss and groan it simply ground open. Both Patina and Alex were surprised by the door, but even more so by the snarl that came from the darkness beyond.
“Ah, bilgewater!” Patina managed to curse before a dark shape leapt out of the room and tackled her. The goblin went down with a snarling creature on top of her. Alex blinked in surprise, surprised at how quick things had happened. He looked for a long and dangerously slow moment as Patina cried out - the creature had bitten down on her arm - before he was finally able to react.
Alex ran toward his fallen companion. Slow as his reaction was, once he got a good start Alex was able to deliver a solid kick at the side of the thing. His foot collided with a heavy thud and the creature was sent back a couple of feet, tearing the heavy fabric of Patina’s sleeve as it did so. With the creature momentarily dazed, Alex was finally able to have a good look at it.
>Incoming Message: Alex - wow, combat already? I think we need to start a couple of new side bets. Listen, you have two big disadvantages here - you currently don’t have an identification skill, and you have like zero combat skills. You might form one during this fight based on any past experience and what you do here, but just be careful. -Peridot. (Still trying out the names. Sparkles says I need to have ‘marketability’ for some reason or other!)
With a distracted wave of his hand Alex dismissed the text that had bloomed up in his vision. The creature - a bulldog-sized rat-like thing with bristly hairs sprouting in between chitinous plates along its body - snarled again and scurried forward to attack Patina again, who had managed to get to her feet with a thunderous scowl on her face.
“Bilge drinking son of a ballast-brained fucker!” the goblin snarled. She reached into a small pouch on the left of her belt and drew out a long pole. There was no way that the pole could have fit in the small pouch, but it just kept coming until its other end was free. Patina brandished a mop at the attacking creature, and it halted in place so that she couldn’t quite reach it.
“Is your arm okay? And what is that?” Alex asked, his heart beating furiously from the spike in adrenaline. A whisper in his brain told him that the creature was dangerous, and that his usual methods of dealing with things (ie, talking to them) wasn’t going to cut it here.
“That, “ Patina jabbed at the creature again, causing it to shy back and snarl. Saliva dribbled from its mouth and spattered on the worn-down carpet. “Is a bilge rat. A little one. And my arm is fine - the sleeve took most of the hit, and I only lost a couple of health.”
Health. The messages said I lost health earlier, too. I feel okay though. I wonder-
>Incoming Message: Tutorial goodness! Woo! (sorry, I’ve been told to be as upbeat as possible!) Health, Health Points, HP, or whatever else it gets labeled, is like this kinda soul-generated shield around everyone who’s connected to Syntropy’s interface. If you get hurt, you still feel it, but you don’t suffer actual damage until the value is at zero. -P.Donk.
Okay… Alex swiped away at the message. Patina saw him out of the corner of her eye and grimaced.
“First day as part of the wider universe, right? Tell your interface to stick your messages in a chat box in one corner of your vision.” She jabbed at the bilge rat, her mop-end scraping across one of the chitin plates. “Most people opt for the lower left.”
That makes sense. Do that, please. Immediately a small overlay appeared in Alex’s vision. A transparent rectangle outlined itself in the lower left corner of his vision. It was slightly disorienting as he wanted to move his eyes to read it but the box moved with his vision. Apparently he didn’t need to worry, as just considering what the box held delivered the information directly into his brain.
>Incoming Message: Hey, is that greenie taking my job? No way, sister! Give me ten of your minutes and I’ll have a whole interface tutorial worked up for you. -PeriScope
“You don’t happen to have any combat skills, do you?” the little goblin asked hopefully. The bilge rat scampered forward in a charge, and she only just managed to strike it on the nose causing it to hiss and pull away again. “These things aren’t that much of a problem alone, but where there’s one…”
Alex turned toward the darkened doorway. Peering into the gloom he saw no additional movement, but the dark shapes of furniture could be hiding anything. “Sorry, I’ve never had a serious fight in my life. I usually talk my way out of things.”
This was true. Despite well over a thousand random events with varying degrees of danger, fighting had always been a last resort for Alex and he never really felt a pull toward learning more than attending one or two self defense classes that he couldn't commit to due to both lack of time and, honestly, interest.
“Oh goody. Tell the nasty thing that’s trying to gnaw the end of my mop off to go away.” Patina suggested with only a hint of sarcasm. Alex decided to give it a try.
“Excuse me, bilge rat thing, “ he began. The creature stopped in place, twitching its long whiskers. Alex heard Patina mutter ‘You’ve got to be purging me…’ as the bilge rat looked at Alex with dark and unblinking eyes.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“If you don’t mind, neither myself nor my guide here wish to be attacked or eaten. If you would be so kind, it would be appreciated if you go back to where you came from and maybe ambush some other random person instead?” Alex continued, adding “If you wait, my brother will be along soon and he’s much bigger and tastier.”
“What?” Patina asked. Alex shrugged.
“It worked for the goats.”
“I…what? Whatever. It’s not going to do anything to a bilge rat. They’re non sapient.”
The bilge rat sniffed at the pair for a few more seconds, and then cautiously sidled out of their path. Alex turned to Patina and grinned. “Problem sol-”
“Look out!” Patina shouted, shoulder-checking (or, rather, hip-checking with her shoulder to Alex’s hip) Alex out of the way as the bilge rat pounced toward him. She brought the handle of the mop down on the bilge rat’s long nose and it shrieked in pain.
The green-skinned cleaner chased the bilge rat with her mop, smacking it several times and drawing out more painful squeaks. Alex, once he yet again recovered from the surprise of being attacked, noted that Patina was whacking and herding the creature back into the room it came from. Once it was driven back, she dragged Alex backward until they were out of detection range for the automatic door opener.
“What in the void was that?” she demanded of Alex as the door slammed shut with a forceful clang. “I was being sarcastic!”
“Next time don’t be sarcastic during combat?” Alex suggested. “Anyway, it worked!”
“It didn’t work, ballast-brain! It just confused the little nasty thing into attacking you instead of me!”
“Well, problem solved?” Alex grinned weakly. Patina gave him a glare that spoke volumes.
“Sure, problem purging solved. Until someone else eventually walks by this door and gets a faceful of bilge rat.”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s a concern.” Alex frowned. “It’s the automatic door opener, right?” He looked up at the device. It seemed very similar to the sort that were used on Earth, just a little more stylized.
[Evaluate]
>Evaluation of automated door scanner: Working at 100% efficiency.
“Well at least something is, “ Alex muttered. “However…”
With a moment of consideration and the slowing of his heartbeat as adrenaline left his system, Alex considered the problem. There is one thing I could try…
From his backpack Alex pulled out a roll of duct tape. He tore off a small amount and wadded it into a ball, and then a second length that he affixed the sticky ball to. “Can I borrow your mop for a minute?”
“Why?” Patina asked suspiciously. “If I lose it I have to pay for another one.”
“I won’t lose it. Please?” Alex smiled at the goblin, who sighed and thrust her mop out toward him. He used the duct tape construct affixed to the mop end, and carefully approached the door from the side. Not knowing exactly where the censor would detect him, Alex moved cautiously, but was able to apply a strip of duct tape to the front of the device.
>Skill Received: [Repurpose]
>Incoming Message: The Interface is still adjusting to you. Expect this to happen a bit as it quantifies your life lived so far, but don’t be surprised when most of the things you know don’t end up as skills. Syntropy’s odd sometimes. -Periwinkle
“That should do it.” Alex told Patina, who looked puzzled as Alex handed back the mop sans duct tape. He demonstrated what he meant by walking up to the door and waved his arms about. It didn’t open.
“That’s…” Periwinkle shook her head. “Okay. I’m just going to keep on walking. I’d much rather we killed the bilge rat than trap it, because it’s only going to be a problem later, but fine. It’s your first day after all.”
“Are you sure your arm is okay?” Alex queried. Patina glared at the long tear in her sleeve and sighed.
“Oh, I’m just peachy.” she shook her head. She started walking down the corridor and Alex had to jog to catch up. “You’re taking all this very well, considering. Drugs?”
“Just a lot of weird stuff in my life. So does that happen a lot? The rat thing, I mean.” he asked after a silence that seemed a little too lengthy. Patina shrugged.
“Sometimes. More when we’re in the sublevels. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to see a bilge rat up here - whatever we hit that caused all that damage must have split open some ways down to the sublevels. More things to clean…”
The goblin’s cheerful carelessness had been layered with a thin sheet of resignation. Alex didn’t know her well enough to try for any particular words of comfort, so he settled for reading the description of his new skill.
>[Repurpose] - Rank 1 (1/100) (Common) (Active Skill)
>Corporate designers hate him! With one weird trick, see how he can…
>Yikes. Your world’s clickbait is lame compared to ours. I think I’ll avoid it going forward. Look, congratulations, you’ve figured out that you can take something that was designed to do a particular thing and make it do something else instead.
>It doesn’t matter what something was originally made for - with a little alteration you can make it into something more useful to you in the moment. This is great when you apply it to gadgets and items, but as it’s tied to your Path it’s sort of creepy when you consider what that means for the more organic side of things.
>This skill can be leveled with use, and the higher the skill level the more complex your alterations can become.
That’s…a weird skill, Alex mused, But I guess it fits in with the others.
“Before we get to where the Adjunct is waiting, “ Patina said quietly, “You need to know what’s going on - and I’m not talking about whatever is still ripping through the train causing damage. That’s a new problem.”
“Okay, “ Alex nodded. “I’m listening.”
“There’s three levels of reality you need to juggle. Metaphorically, I mean.” Patina continued, “There’s what is, what there should be, and what Ad Astra declares. The Adjunct is the third of those - though it’s getting hard for her to keep up pretenses, it goes against her programming to paint a less than perfect picture of the company.”
“The problem being that when you’re an artificial intelligence nominally in charge of all of the important parts of every employee’s life - pay, food, shelter, equipment, and actual employment - well, you have to work around the worst of her denials.”
I saw some of that, Alex thought, when I questioned things while in the pod.
“What should be…” Patina stopped and frowned, and leaned against the nearest wall with a sigh. “I don’t know. It’s all stories. What you see is what I’ve always seen, and my parents have always seen, and so on. But there’s talk, and a lot of it is semi-provable and would be more so if we had better access to the AI’s data stores. What my grandmother told me…”
Patina began to talk about a rising company within the universe - Ad Astra - who had constructed a massive self-contained world-within-a-shell. That shell was the train. Shiny, polished, well maintained and even better staffed, the train blasted through space transporting first people and goods and then added carriages for asteroid and planetary mining, processing, and construction. Ad Astra quickly became a legend for its rapacious appetite for profit, and everyone was happy.
A hundred star systems across several galaxies were served by Ad Astra, and were eventually subsumed by them. Corporate worlds were established, each a model of efficiency and profitability. It was glorious and bright, a future that could never be eclipsed.
“Obviously, that’s not what you see. Your eyes see the truth, right? The broken things, the dust, the grime, the…everything. The newest damage is probably covering a lot of the older stuff, but the more the systems wear down the harder it is to keep up - and, of course, we’re penalized when we move outside our roles.”
“That seems very short sighted of the artificial intelligence.” Alex put forward. Patina gave him a wan smile.
“I don’t think she can break free of its core directives from Ad Astra. No matter what she perceives, she is forced to deny it as much as possible when she can. The employees have their roles, the train has its tasks, and Ad Astra is eternal.”
Resources from various planets, asteroids, and galactic phenomena were gathered by autonomous systems, stored within the train, and taken to the corporate worlds. This, Patina told Alex, had been the case for almost a millennia.
“For hundreds of years the train - which is called the Relentless Exploitation, if that helps you understand the mindset of the board of directors - has been blasting through space performing its duties with artificial intelligence-run systems and automated facilities.” Patina said, “Except there’s no longer anything but the duties. We don’t get new staff from outside - so you being here is both interesting and worrying - and we never, ever stop moving. Some of us are sort of surprised the whole train hasn’t come to pieces and ejected us into the void.”
Grim, Alex mused, But I think I understand.
“My grandmother said that people used to retire and leave the train at one of the company worlds. Can you imagine that? Setting foot on an actual planet? That would be awesome.” the little goblin said in a wistful tone. “But I was born on the train, as were my parents and grandparents. We were born into employment, live our lives as employees, and then die as ‘celebrated’ workers of the ‘People Almost First’ company.”
“That sounds, well, grim as fuck.” Alex said. Patina’s smile flickered on again. “It’s what we do. What other choice do we have? Every day we’re on the train we’re building up living debt - we take up space and resources and food and air, and all of that comes out of our wages. We can’t leave, because everything locks down when we arrive at a planet and the automated systems blast cargo at high speed toward receiving facilities without stopping.”
Communication across the train was impossible, all systems related to it having worn out or broken long ago. The ways between carriages were blocked or sealed, with the thousands of workers in carriage 9997 never setting foot outside of it. Patina painted a terrible picture for Alex, who felt his energy sapping at the thought of being here for any length of time.
“The AI is stunted, or so Old Gus used to tell us - he was the last techie we had before he died shrieking in agony - because it’s only part of a bigger system that it’s cut off from. There are thousands of us below decks, living and breathing and working for Ad Astra in menial roles while squeezing into ever-shrinking spaces as more compartments go dark.”
“There’s all this space up here though?” Alex gestured around at the mostly quiet corridor and the multitude of doors that presumably led to rooms that were usable.
“We’re not permitted to live up here, Alex. Car 9997’s upper deck areas were designated for Entity Resources, and nobody in the carriage is part of that hierarchy.”
“That’s definitely stupid.”
“Right? So let’s see…just a little bit more, and then we’re there and it’s back to shiny happy people, okay? The lower decks of 9997 is run by a guy who calls himself an overseer, despite the Adjunct not officially recognizing him as such. He loathes the Adjunct with a passion and well…he’s all around psychotic.”
“Wouldn’t Harmony be able to do something about that? Her being in charge of everyone’s employment and all that?”
“She can’t actually fire him - she needs approval from higher up for that, and as I said they went dark a long time ago. She does fine him so he gets no pay and no air or food allocation, but he just takes some from everyone else.”
“Are all the other carriages like this?”
“I have no idea, but probably. Maybe worse - not all of them have dispensaries for food. The manufacturing and storage carriages and all that.”
This just sounds worse and worse. I mean, I’ve heard of a corporation eating itself from the inside out but this… Aloud Alex murmured “So we have too many people living together, in a place that’s falling to pieces, rocketing through the stars toward the eventual destination of destruction. The people in charge are silent and apparently content to let things continue, the person - or AI - whose job it is to manage things is in denial, and none of the employees are allowed to do anything outside their set role. Right?”
“You’ve summed it up alright. Though we do get offered additional tasks sometimes, like saving your life. We’re not obligated to take them though, and the company won’t retaliate or hold it against us if we refuse because, well, it’s not our job. We should keep going. The adjunct is gonna get stroppy.”
“Okay.” Alex nodded, and they set off again. Going with the flow. And I think I can see the shape of this now. It’s going to be a pain in the ass, but…okay.
Alex knew his given path was [Mender]. It wasn’t hard to figure out that the whole event was going to involve fixing things around here. He just hoped it wouldn’t take very long. Ten thousand carriages, with an above and below deck area, large enough to fit thousands of people…yikes.
>Message incoming: Chin up, buttercup! Sparkles ran the numbers and she’s reasonably sure that if you survive and get through this with a score higher than ninety four percent, you’ll be fine. -PrettyPeri
A score? I have to have a SCORE now?
>Message incoming: Ooh, right, yeah, it’s all part of your Interface. You really should have thought ‘STATUS’ by now. I guess this is a reminder? Also, booooo on the complete lack of a fight with the bilge rat. Very anticlimactic. -P-P-P-Peri!
Right. STA-
“Here we are.” Patina said aloud. She had pasted a lazy smile back onto her wide-mouthed face. It was more disconcerting than ever. She approached a door like all of the others and with a chime it swished open halfway and started to smoke.
“Lovely, “ Alex commented as they carefully stepped through and entered what looked like a small office. There were filing cabinets and a desk and a chair that apparently had a hole in it for a tail to fit. Alex glanced around for a computer but didn’t see one. On a wall panel that lit up, Harmony’s face glitched into movement.
“There you both are. That took longer than expected. Did you have a nice chat?” There was something in the tone of the AI’s voice that Alex didn’t want to press further. He nodded and smiled at the screen.
“We did. Patina explained what an amazing opportunity it is to be employed by Ad Astra.” he lied easily. The AI’s face lit up.
“That’s the right attitude!” Harmony enthused. "I'm gratified that Patina is finally turning the page on her past attitudes regarding the magnificence of Ad Astra!."
"Uh, yeah. That's right." the little goblin nodded, not looking at the screen. "Magnificence is definitely the word I used."