Interzeit: A Space Opera (13 page)

The sun shone into his room through thin pink curtains, the fresh nitrogen wind blows through the open window and stings
his face with its chill. He blinks awake, his head drumming with a heavy headache. Low power red lights compete with the dim sun over his eyes.

He no longer knew where he was, not in the physical sense of the location of his body, but where his soul may lie. His mind was scattered and fogged
for
most of his waking hours. The sputtering sparks of neurons occasionally lighting up to his past, a random memory trip throwing him into some forgotten life and humanity now lost to dust.

He had narrowly escaped destruction at the hands of the
Kuipterra
ns, the Deimo
s
’s red armor had be shattered in many places, his own internal life support had failed to a considerable degree. Had most of his body not already been replaced by mechanical externalities, and pseudo organs, he would have died halfway back to
Marineris.

His life in the green zone had
changed considerably after the last unified war
. He could no longer enjoy the rich greenery of his home. The artificial machines and will power had built it, and now it had saved his life, taking away his ability to enjoy it in the process.

He crawled to his bed’s edge, looking at
his legs
.
T
he
y
were sitting in the corner charged. He sent out the assemble command, and they worked there way onto the bed. They lined up with the slots in his hips connecting with the grinding noise of several interlocking screws and bolts.

The cybernetic implants ran from his face down to his torso, assuming most of the organ function there. Past that, there was nothing human or familiar, all just fabrications. Hard carbon fantasies made up in a machine, b
abying the dreams of mechanical fetishists across the whole system
.

He didn’t know what kind of life it was. He could eat, feel in some places, his mind however never fully recovered, and all these sensations were like mimicries
, or ghosts of their past self
. Some miniscule
derivative of a derivative
had been cobbled together with digital ideals and fetish
replacing
it
.

He knew that his
presence was requested for
a de
brief
. He didn’t know he defiantly thought, he was told by his implants that he was wanted. The psychologist had tried to help him accept them a
s an extension of
himself, that
it was a healthy way to cope
.

He got up, and headed to the meeting, somewhat of his own will. The thing
was,
that if it was part of him now, if it was him now, what did that make him before this time? Was it incomplete? He had never thought of it that way.

If the replacement wasn’t so natural, and wasn’t so real after all, he had to contend with the uncomfortable truth, that he had died.
Perhaps not fully, but mostly.
Most of what he had been made up of had been destroyed and replaced. What was left, that was uniquely
his, that
was him?

In truth he only felt whole again, like his old self
,
when he was inside Deimos.

“Kales,” his boss said, “I’m glad to see you up and running again. Did you sleep well?”

Kales scarred tan face wrung in confusion, “Sleep? Is it still considered sleep, what I do?”

“Just being polite Kales, no need to get pushy.”

Kales sits
down at the table, “Performance evaluation?” He mutters weakly,

“Your reflex times are still having trouble breaking human levels, something we anticipated from you a long time ago. Despite that, your victory over Tiger West was complete.”

“The pilot,” He muttered, “She did not live?”

His commander smiled, “That’s all in hand,
the
machine was the important p
art. It was a matter of legacy
that could have been a problem moving forward.”

“Is that all?” Kales questions softly,

“The good doctors also made it off colony without
incident,
they are calibrating your upgrades as we speak.”

“Upgrades?”
Kales ask, “What are they?”

“They’ll help boost your neurological activity
Kales,
much of your brain is non-functional without external stimulus. We’ve discussed this a few times, however it is no fault of your own for not retaining it.”

“Is that all?” He asked again insistently.

“Yes Kales, we will let you know when the operation will begin.”

Kales left the meeting, letting his legs take him where he wanted to go. He reached the cold vapory air of the outside
surface
.
They were staying in a small crevasse owned by MISA in south east Marineris.

The terraformary atmosphere hung over the canyon as a huge opaque cloud of gas. It was a cold morning, windy
breezes
from other parts of the surface interrupting the calibrated greenhouse heat.

The surface was covered in rooting carb plants, and algae like stalks of green designer plan
ts. The environment here was
a
filter
,
only a distinct few members of different monocultural species had flourished. With a place like this, successful ideas were replaced only at the most careful considerations, perhaps a reason for his continued existence.

His role
now,
was like the fields of plants his organic eyes gazed upon, perfunctory.
He wondered how long
it
would
take to walk to Marineris South, his home city, where he wanted to be. Supposedly the canyon between
here and there
was fielded, terraformed thoroughly. Kales couldn’t be
certain now tho
ugh, he had no memory of walking through it
, although sadly that didn’t preclude
the possibility that he had
.

He felt like the only human being in this isolated canyon, with its one road to the outside. All he had here was his stoic handler Commander Raesh, and
his
little grey outfitted automatons. They scurried, almost afraid to be exposed to the outside air. Like the rats they were
,
they preferred plotting and burrowing from
within a cave or bunker
.

He walked up to the rim alone, the filtered dirt slowly returning
to its soft iron oxidized form
the further from the growing fields he traveled. He looked down at the pneumatic black legs that carried him. They were
strainless,
he could keep going so long as they were charged.

From what he had calculated they had a maximum charge time of about eighteen hours of movement. At their slow rate of movement, he could get perhaps a hundred kilometers or more, before they shut down, stranding him to the mercy of whatever place he was lost to.

The air was cloudy and thick near the rim. His ears popped from the drastic shifts in air pressures. His already strain
ed
breathing,
was further limited as he lifted his head above the clouds.

The outside terrain was red, and dusted, as was the norm. Several installations of a “defensive” nature emerge
d from under
ground tunnels, the metallic and mesh buildings on the surface, the
most pervasive sign of
their presence on the planet, like a steel zit of some kind, a giving up of the terraformary dream for
the
pragmatism of
t
he now.

It had been his dream as it was his parents
’
, who inspired him to become an engineer. Eventually hi
s passion drove him to the unified war
, to help secure the vision of the future he was born into. A green
world, a new Earth, destined to eclipse its predecessor in everyway and capture the adoration of all humanity.

The new Eden of this dream came with the high price of machines, until the place was resurrected to its new
destiny,
it was on permanent life support. A delicate process, hundreds of years could be thrown away in the wind.

When he was little, t
here wer
e
only certain hours of the day you could walk through the canyons.

His parents gave him faith in the cause, and in his early adulthood he walked with them through the gardens of Marineris South as they were opened permanently, scheduled to remain open for all time.

He felt the command to return hit him. I
n
his prosthetics, his sensors, his
personal terraformary process
.
All the same, his eyes were bloodshot from the strangeness of the top of the ridge. He looked deeply at the isolated alienscape for a last time.

It stood unbreakable and forlorn
,
outstretched before him. So much demanded attention, so much deathly circumstance to be changed, it stood on their borders like a barbarian army, salivating silently, inviting and reminding of their futile struggle against the planet’s great uncle.

He began the slow descent back into the fertile valley. He dreaded returning indoors, where his mind felt suffocated. It lacked the visual cue, the spar
k to set off his thinking
. Life indoors was crippling.

There wa
s nothing to be done about it
. Kales had no power to perpetuate
his own
survival now. In his darker thoughts he dared to think of something more sinister beneath that. He no longer had a choice in his own survival at all.

If he wanted to survive he must continue forward, but he suspected the choice to live or die had be subtly taken from him all together.

When he finally returned to the base, Raesh led him into the pre-operation room. Two of the technologists from Vesta were standing among a full surgical staff, prepping themselves for the role they too had been conscripted to play.

His mind scans for the large machine that will be butchering him this time, as there always seems to be one. He eyes a large claw like mechanism in the corner, and tries to imagine it blending the back of his brain into a mushy goop.

“Remind me again…” Kales muttered, “What
is
this one for?”

“Exactly Kales,” Raesh answered soothingly, “This is exactly why. Please sit while they begin the anesthetical process, Doctor N
guyen
will walk you through it.”

The vestian approached his side, squatting down to his chair’s eye level. A
n
orderly of some kind began hooking IVs into different parts of his body with a precise but strong
series of stabs.

“We’re installing an electrostimulator in your brain stem Kales.” He said, “It will help normalize your overall neurological behavior.”

“Sounds great,” Kales acted, “That will help me?”

“Yes,” N
g
uyen
assured, “It will also help you sync up with the new software for Deimos. It will help the sensors trigger autonomic nervous responses faster.”

“When will I fly again?” He asked
deliriously
as the drugs began to take ahold of him, “I can only feel it when I fly.”

N
guyen
pushes his head back, muttering
something back to him, but through the fog and fugue of his fleeting consciousness is lost
hopelessly
, a scrap of words gets through, a mumbling
echo, only serving to taunt
his insufficient mind,

“…you will fly…”

At nearly the same moment Nol is recovering from his recent encounter with the machinated and laser precision of the robotic surgeon. The base of his
neck, solar plexus, shoulders, biceps, hips, and so forth extending further out to his extremities have been altered.

The neurological syncing mount, consists of a series of surgically installed electrodes. They serve as ports to the machines “nervous” system, as
the staff doctors has told him.

After the surgery he was allow to meet with the other pool of candidates. Twenty people of young ages, ranging from late teens to their thirties, tested and cleared for a variety of skills. They greet Nol with little enthusiasm, likely not t
o
o thrilled to
see their competition increase.

There were twenty test pilots, but only twelve test platforms. The engineers insisted that this twelve were only there for testing purposes only, and had no way of being retrofitted into an independent army due to how their power supplies had been designed.

Nol
did not
probed into this, but everyone on the project was quick to justify the ne
cessities or even the legality
of this secret endeavor.

He
was the
twenty
first
candidate
.
T
here was a general air of rejection
directed to him from the others. They
had all been drafted together,
tested and reduced into
their number together, and now one of them might potentially lose a spot they would otherwise claim because of him.

After some cold greetings he met a girl named, Leora Vadtha, and another pilot by the name Cesar. They seemed to hate him slightly less then the others, so he opted to stick close
by them. They filled him in on training
expectations lightly, careful to be vague as to safeguard their own bids for pilot candidacy.

“We’ll be doing simulators for most of the day,” Leora explained, “No one’s been able to see one of the test platforms, let alone pilot one.”

They were kind enough to let him join their rough duo for the day
’
s operations. The simulator room had large
rows of psuedo cockpits strewn chaotically along the walls
.

The simulators themselves were nothing fantastical. He was actually quite disappointed at their standard pilot control sticks
, and large arrays of buttons.

The models the
y
walked around in were untextured images of gray and black
3d models. Perhaps intentional,
they had almost no level of detail at all.

“From comparing with each other, we’re pretty sure you get a random configuration every day.” Cesar explained,

The trio set up, digging in by some mountains with their mechs.

“What kind of configuration?” Nol asked, “Like the controls
?
”

“Rocket thrust, rotation speed, response times, max speeds, length of maximum speed maintainment, subtle things like that” Leora delved deeper, “Its hard to notice first, but one of the other pilots, Madara, began running his owns tests and keeping tables in secret. It
’
s
hard to dispute number crunchers of such
extreme
dedication
.”

“I suppose so…” Nol answers, scanning city across the mountain range for movement, “Any particular point to what we’re doing here?”

“Warm ups, self-selected teams only, last team standing basically.” She answers.

“And a team of three, out of twenty-one?”
Nol asserts, “Is that a normal size?”

Cesar laughs, “Yeah, something like that. Just keep your eye on the city.”

Nol deferred to his judgement, and kept his rifle trained on the rendered cityscape in the distance. After a few more minutes of silently gazing, a storm of fire came in from the other end. A squad of seven
unreal war mechs came crashing against the relatively high res city.

Like a virus unfolding and reproducing for the millionth time, they disassembled the place with whimsical efficiency.

The whole thing, though simulated, hit Nol in an uneasy way. He found himself stalking a particular mech with his reticule, urging to fire despite it giving away their location so foolishly.

“Can I take a shot?”

“Please don’t,” Leora said almost contemptful, “We usually try to pick off a straggler or two whenever they move on.”

“Oh I don’t know Leora,” Cesar interjected, “It’s a nice
morning,
let’s give them a bit of a chase.”

Cesar’s mech leaves its post, climbing up to the viewing spot where Nol is
dug in
.

“Just give me a minute to get a good lock,”
Cesar
cautions.

“Shit…” Leora mutters.

Her form similarily soon appears at Cesar’s side, training her rifle towards the city.

“On you,” Cesar says, “Leora?”

“Ready,” She grunts tersely.

Feeling emboldened, Nol thinks carefully choosing his target. Initially he was locked on the back team, two mechs destroying the buildings left behind by the others. Then an impulsive itch hits him, and he pulls his sight further afield.

The front four are destroying the near end outskirts, scanning the great wastes inbetween
the city and mountains
.

“On my mark then…” Nol says squeezes his trigger slowly.

The rifle kicks back powerfully, the red bolt sails to its destination. His companions begin burst firing after him, going for the stragglers in the city. Nol’s shot hits left of the cockpit, blowing the person’s rifle from their arms.

He quickly re-aims and blasts through the cockpit, as they try to evade.
Without hesitation,
the fire is returned with greater magnitude, several of the returning bullets
singe by their mechs. The three
pull back into the mountains laughing together.

“We’re so fucked,” Cesar joked, “
They’re
going to have the flank by the time we even make it out of here.”

He wasn’t
wrong,
it was a mere few seconds once they broke away from the mountains. Fire came quickly from both sides. Their mechs were disabled
quickly,
they bunched together firing outwards, eating the bullets and exploding.

They played a few more rounds of this kind of playful guerilla war. Nol figured out
there was
two other groups with
five
members
, making them the smallest “team”.

Cesar and
Leora
we
re very patient and methodical.
They had a sense of caution that was almost detrimental to their chances. Nol by comparison had been a long time player of these kinds of simulations. It seemed stupid almost childish. In effect, he tried his hardest to show boat as much as possible.

The Mechs only had the very dull standard rifle
. It was basically a sized up squad automatic weapon, old sty
le machine gun, absurd amount charge
. It suited the purposes of the simulation, Nol thought, but it lacked any vision.

He took to a “bait” role for his more tactical comrades. He rushed up behind one of the
“
five
”
squads, clubbing them wildly. The stock of the gun came crushing through his enemies head. It sparked and crashed to the ground. They w
ere
alerted,
he fired back
sloppily, retreating behind the ruined buildings.

Dropping the gun, his
mech
crouched
waiting behind a shattered condominium tower. The machine guns of L and C raked the street across from him. A mech jumps around the corner, and he pounces
.

They tangle up,
and
Nol
tackles them to the ground. Their gun fires ineptly behind him, his metal hands bash over the core. One arm digs through powerfully, ripping out the fake cockpit and crushing it.

“No Mercy!” He yells triumphantly.

He grabs the limp caracass of his opponent, and holds in front of him. Nol runs into the fray with, the machine guns turning on him instantly.
The oth
er three futility fire into carcass
shield.
The thing holds for a few moment, but then bursts into flames as its armor plating fails.

He throws the burning husk into them, and it explodes powerfully. All of their
units
explode in a small chain reaction of death. Nol takes off his headset laughing maniacally.

His antics are received to a mixed company. Some of them enjoyed the harassing nature of it. Others were more took his intentions more directly and were agitated by the irrational nature of his play style, it was a honed recklessness that was brought together by his past experiences with games, and something else.

Something deeper, a figment, or a ghost that was growing inside him, perhaps it had always been there, but now, now it was finding the right medium to express itself through. Eventually they were dragged from the simulators, a result that Nol was rather ambivalent about. It was such a sad excuse for training
so far.

The next exercise was much more
difficult,
however it was not as complex either, no group dynamics to navigate through. This exercise was called synchronization training.
It was innocuous sounding enough, lacking the usual military
obfuscation
of acronyms and mindless redundant name shortenings.

Cesar and Leora both were sullen, their warm attitudes withdrawing into themselves for strength to face the moment ahead. They were escorted to a room full of pods similar to the simulator pods, and the compatibility test capsules.

The room was silent as teams of technical experts assisted them in entering. They wired plugs into their surgically installed electrode array. Each connection sent a small zap through Nol as it sealed, the electricity causing a small seizing spasm.

His technician explained to him the rough idea of what was about to take place. She had the monotone
,
matter of fact
,
rhythm that every other technician in the facility seemed to possess.

“The control system works off of an advanced virtual intelligence system. It doesn’t contain much in the way of command or guidance on its own, it just stores the base instructions for different movements and system regulatory processes.”

She paused, easing in a cable into his
neck,
Nol winced at the strong shock.

“Think of it as the machine’s brain stem, or cerebellum maybe. Does that make sense?”

“
Yea,
seems simple enough. And it needs to be synced up to us?”

She finished with the plugs around his upper body, and began working his extremities into the machine.

“Basically, it
’
s designed as a kind of blank slate when it comes to the human pilot side of the interaction. We’ve never
intermingled
the nervous systems of people with machines like this before, so it could be dangerous to impose a strict set of instructions for the intelligence to send upwards to the pilot.

Try to think of it as a learning
opportunity
, for the machine, but for you as well…” She looked at him realizing she did not know him.

“It
’
s Nol, Tomson
,” He asserted, “New guy.”

She smiled, “Of course, nice to meet you Nol, I’m Veni, hang in there, okay?”

He nodded weakly, and left her silently finish up her duties. Soon the technicians all pulled back to a control terminal at the front of the room. A technician over the loudspeaker spoke,

“Prep complete, all pilots ready themselves for synchronization, in T-minus 10…9…”

Nol closed his eyes breathing out deep controlled breaths. As they speaker counted down through the five, and four, he slowed down, inhaling the
minutest
amount of air possible, emptying his mind.

The machines switched on, Nol felt his limbs lock into a controlled stasis. H
is
eyes open, pupils widening from the stimulus, something dances on his nerves up into his brain. His vision blurs, and melts away completely.

He’s in a dark pit,
alone,
he looks down and sees his own body, fading in and out of existence. There is something brooding in there with him. It has no form or will, but there is a weight a psychic tinging that he is not alone there.

He looks at his erratically ephemeralizing limbs. At his right arm he tries a basic gesture, squeezing his hand into a fist. The action leaks out into his nervous system, the muscles in his forearm tense in obedience when the action is cut short.