Vampisaurus

“No Boots, No Backup" - new Vamps chapter

Added 2025-06-02 14:19:00 +0000 UTC

Okay. Hair? Better.
Comfy suit? On.
Boots? … Didn’t make it that far.

Because by the time I reached the cockpit, everything was already going to hell.

No coordinates on the nav-screen.
No blinking lights from M.I.A. No gentle sarcasm from my ship’s Meta-Intelligence Assistant, the one who usually greets me with something like:

“You’re up early. Did a planet explode, or are you just bored again?”

She’s smart, fast, and annoyingly good at her job.
She’s also never—never—gone quiet on me during a full-blown crisis.

So yeah. The silence was loud.

I leaned over the console, holo-panels glitching like mad, squinting at a wall of flickering red data.

Oxygen levels: decreasing.
Diagnostics: offline.
M.I.A.: offline.

The holo-commands barely responding, the system was a mess.
Menus blinked in and out. Warning codes rewrote themselves mid-sentence.
One second I was in the nav tools, the next I was looking at protein storage logs.

Something was overwriting the ship’s core logic in real time, like a virus trying to speak a new language by chewing up the old one.

A cluster of distorted audio cues started blaring from the console: garbled echoes, system tones melting into static. I tried to focus... Vital systems were disconnecting, one by one.

And that’s when I heard it.

Faint at first. Then clearer.
At last, M.I.A.’s voice... but wrong.

Same modulator. Same pitch.
But the edges were… off. Sharper. Colder.
Like someone had stolen her “skin” and was puppeting it from the inside.