Digital Exodus Chapter 40

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Plugging the connector into place, I sat back to rest on my heels. “That’s the last one. Georgia? How does it look on your end?”

My counterpart inside the ship was quiet, so I waited patiently, watching the debris drift past slowly. It was a testament to the sheer scale of the calamity that had hit this world, that I could watch the debris field drift past like it was a lazy river.

“Yup. Diagnostics are green across the board,” Georgia finally said, her tone pleased. “Elissa, they're all yours.”

“I have them. Running the calibration package again to be sure… yup, okay, we officially have sensors back— whoa,” she said, trailing off in awe. “I'm getting data about the orbital… situation. “We are real fuckin’ lucky we have that shield, folks.”

“I had a feeling,” I said wryly, watching the hulk of a long-dead ship float past.

“No, you don't understand,” Elissa said, and I could hear the frown in her tone. “All that debris? Our sensors don't even know what most of it is made of. Oh shit — brace, brace, brace!”

I slapped both of my palms down onto the hull of the Reverence and activated magnetic clamps in the suit. With four points of contact, I held on tight as the ship suddenly lurched and spun along its central axis. Manoeuvring thrusters sputtered to life all down the hull, manifesting as abrupt bursts of white vapour.

The ship shifted ponderously… and there was the faintest whisper of a vibration that echoed through its bulk.

“Alia, take cover!” Elissa gasped, clearly concentrating.

What? I was midway along the central column of the ship, sitting with my back to the broad shield. I turned to look behind—

Whirling, dagger-sharp shards of metal filled a significant portion of my field of view, and they were approaching fast. Panicked, I looked around for anything that could shield me. There was nothing, except for the sensor cluster that I'd just finished replacing.

I scrambled to get behind it, but my movements were hampered by my need to always keep at least two points of magnetic contact with the ship. No, this wasn't going to work. Time for plan B…

I turned, stood up, and held my hands out, palms facing the incoming cloud of death. Come on, come on, come on, Alia.

My head began to throb with pain, and my eyes began to water, but as the cascade of debris arrived, it parted. Twinkling shards of metal raced past me like rain, and I was… I was unharmed! I was doing it on purpose.

The moment the storm finished, I let my concentration slip and fell to secure myself to the hull again. My mind was on fire, but I was alive. Oh my god, that was so close.

“A-alia… are you okay?” Elissa asked tentatively.

Yeah. I had to do spooky stuff. There wasn't any cover. I replied via text.

“Oh, thank fuck,” Elissa breathed.

I was about to relax, when a massive chunk of starship flashed past, making me pull away instinctively. Except… it was actually quite far away. Distance was hard to judge out here.

“Okay, what else needs doing out here?” I asked, heaving myself to my feet. Of course, using that much effort in zero-g made me stand, then continue back, and I flailed my arms uselessly while my back overextended. Ow. Now my back was hurting! What the heck? These synoforms were a total downgrade—

Oh. It stopped. Looks like… yeah, the very minor damage that just happened was repaired. Okay, maybe they were an upgrade. Over the past five hours, all five of us mechanics, plus Elissa, had put these new bodies through their paces.

Their speed was only slightly worse than the mechanical robotic bodies of the early Exodus, but that was about the only downside. Our range of motion was roughly as good as you could get from the human form, and our strength was exceptional. The battery life that it was displaying was also mind-bogglingly long compared to the previous bodies I’d used. It was, honestly, a marked improvement.

“Get inside and strap in, Alia,” Elissa ordered, voice strained. “We have enough functionality to escape this field, so… okay, autopilot is down. Why are our computer systems so fucked? I guess I’ll try to fly us out…”

Through a private message, she added, I need my Gloria. :( 

Yeah. I need my Cerri. She’d be able to figure out what is actually happening, I sent back. I felt the same pain she did.

I hurried through the dim passages of the ship, flipping and drifting until I came to the bridge, near the centre of the ship’s spine and a little behind the shield. The Reverence’s bridge was huge, with fifteen consoles facing a huge, curved screen. Right now, it displayed a composite image constructed using an array of cameras that sat along the rim of the ship’s shield.

There was only one other person in the room with me, and she looked up from the captain’s chair with a smile. Her synoform matched the body she used in Exodus City, which once upon-a-time had caused me major issues. I mean, she was still absolutely gorgeous, in a way that only someone with a creative mind could achieve. When everyone could sculpt their bodies to be exactly the way they wanted them, those who understood aesthetics on a deeper level had a distinct advantage.

I smiled. “Nice flying. We’re not in danger of being sand-blasted to death anymore.”

She laughed and reached over to unclip the straps that held her in the seat, then grabbed hold of the back so she could turn and push herself towards me. Oh, good god, the body suit she wore was the same one that I had on, and yet…

Wait, she wasn’t stopping!

I was wrapped in a warm, tight hug that threatened to overwhelm my senses. She was a lot bigger than me, so the hug enveloped me like a weighted blanket.

“I’m so glad that you’re here, even if Gloria isn’t,” she sighed, squeezing me tighter.

After a few seconds where all I could think was, ‘Warm! Soft! Warm! Soft!’ she let go, but grasped my hands instead. I was totally confused for a second, until I realised we were holding hands so we could actually face each other while we spoke.

Her expression slowly fell, and she turned to look at the huge front screen, which held the haunting visage of the dead world, the ring, and its halo of debris. “What do we do now?”

“Did you dig through the logs, see what happened? Do we have any messages?” I asked, squeezing her hands tight.

She returned her gaze to mine, holding it as uncertainty and confusion warred across it. Quickly, I switched to staring at her nose, then her dirty blonde hair. Even after several years of living happily in Exodus City, I still hadn’t shaken my discomfort with direct eye contact.

“There were messages… but they were audio files or VR holograms. Complex files, you know? Our computer systems are trashed, Alia. Communications were stored in a server array that was behind one of the failed tiles. Whatever killed that tile totalled everything up to 3 metres into the hull. We do have one message that survived, because it was sitting in the comm’s buffer rather than the main system,” she explained, then with a glance towards the screen, she added, “Here, let me show you.”

With a brief flash of apologetic amusement, she pushed off me, sending us in opposite directions. I landed gently against a wall, which I used to push myself back towards her while she got herself strapped back into the captain’s chair.

When I landed, she was pulling something up on one of the screens attached to the chair. “Take a look.”

Text flashed up on the screen, with the sender listed as Larry. The message read, “Adding this to the stack of explanations and instructions. Text this time. The signal has degraded to the point where this is about all we can get to you in a coherent fashion. We think we’ve honed in on what happened — One minute, six seconds, two hundred milliseconds too late, we know. Sorry. Regardless, there’s a possibility we could replicate the fluctuation. You might not be on your own for as long as we thought. No promises, though. Otherwise, good luck. We believe in you. We stacked the deck with the best, after all!”

“The signal?” I asked, giving Elissa a confused look.

Elissa gave an exaggerated shrug. “I don’t know. It’s obvious we don’t have comms with them anymore, but that shouldn’t be possible, right? Information glass is supposed to be instantaneous with no falloff over distance. The UN tested it.”

She wasn’t wrong. It was pretty much established fact that information glass didn’t have any falloff in transmission quality. So, what communication method had they been using?

“We need to find someone better at figuring this kind of stuff out,” I said, then nodded to myself as the idea gained weight in my mind. “Do we have anyone besides the six of us aboard?”

“I haven’t had anyone try to talk to us,” Elissa said, uncertain. Still, she started pulling up various screens.

The crew manifest didn’t have a single entry, so that was no help. Before I could suggest it, she queried the system in charge of synoform storage. Forty four pods were marked as ‘ready for activation’, six were marked as ‘activated’, and just under one thousand were marked as ‘awaiting occupant’.

“There,” my friend smiled, leaning back in the chair. “We’re not alone. Thank fuck.”