Digital Exodus Chapter 4 (Patreon)

“Fuck, that is ugly,” Roger commented. “It’s not getting the Turshen name is it?”

Out of the small Callisto station window, haloed by the massive bulk of Jupiter, hung a large squat cylinder of alloy and composite. It looked like a beer can floating in space, and with nothing else nearby as a frame of reference, it might've been one. In reality, it was a ship with a length of thirty metres and a diameter of sixteen. At the front of the tube sat a large flat wall of armour, while the back sported three massive engines. Along the side of the ship were radiators that glowed gently with an orange light.

Cerri laughed at Roger's statement and shook her head. “Nope. That is Interstellar Test Vessel One, or ITV-01 for short."

"Our new ship?"

I huffed a little laugh and sent a message to the group chat. "Nope, thank goodness. We're testing a whole bunch of upgraded systems on it. The Turshen had some auxiliary fusion reactors on board that we learned a lot from. The biggest thing is the hull itself though. Radiation shielding is still a problem for our current ships, but not for the Turshen. We managed to replicate the hull material… sorta, and now we're going to see if it works like the simulations."

"How are we going to do that?" Roger asked, keeping a hand on the window handle to make sure he stayed steady. We were a long way off from artificial gravity.

"Oh, that's easy," Cerri grinned. "We're going to send it out-system as fast as it will go and see if anything inside survives the radiation shower that comes from flying through space."

"What are the engines?" David asked from his place at the window 'above' Roger.

"Fusion reactors with a hole poked in the back," I sent, somewhat flippantly. I was memeing, but it was also kinda true. The pressure of a magnetically contained fusion reaction was immense, so immense, in fact, that you could generate immense amounts of energy using nothing but the pressure it exerted on the magnetic fields that contained it. If you put a tiny hole in the right place, you got a terrifyingly hot jet of plasma that you could ride. Well, that or a really fucking big flamethrower capable of—

I turned to Cerri and grabbed her hand, letting go of the window in the process in my excitement. She steadied me and sent a questioning ping to match her expression.

"What if we used those engines to cut asteroids up into nice bite-sized chunks?" I asked out loud.

"Oh, I like that," she said. "Put it in the notes."

With a thought, it was added to the shared notepad we had.

A voice spoke over our FTLN Link channel, interrupting our conversation. "ITV-1 Engine ignition in T minus 30 seconds."

Throughout the station, a hush descended and everyone waited out the countdown.

"Five, four, three, two, one… Ignition."

The massive ship lurched and sped off into space at a rate of acceleration that would've punched anyone onboard into their seats. It didn't have anyone physically aboard it, though. Bodies for digital folks were expensive to make due to the combination of synthetic and organic components that needed to be printed into place. Because of all those sensitive parts, our bodies were just as susceptible to high doses of radiation as a normal human’s would be.

We lost sight of the ship very quickly, but since we were all digital sapients, we had access to an augmented reality feed that highlighted the vessel. Also available was a sensor feed from the ship, and I opened it to see how the various tests were going.

The armour was holding just fine, along with the radiation shielding, but that was to be expected. It'd take the ship a while to reach speeds where the rads would start hammering it.

The engines were the most interesting experiment right now. By the looks of it, there was a slight discrepancy in the exhaust cone from the fusion nozzle. Something wasn't working… aha! I thought so! The damned researchers didn't listen to me, just like I knew they wouldn't.

"Cerri," I sent to her privately. "One of the electromagnets in each nozzle is out of sync. It's the one I mentioned earlier, where the cabling has to go around the injector feed."

"Of course they didn't listen to you," she replied, giving me a private little smile. "Silly fools. Can you correct it?"

Nodding, I made a public note of the issue and pushed a timing fix into the controlling code. The issue wasn't really that bad. The ship would've just very slowly curved off course, but still! It was the principle of the matter!

"Well," Gloria said, clapping her hands together with finality. "That was fun, but I'm going to go do simulation flights for the shuttles. Need to get those ECs so I can buy a few more processing cycles for my house. I want a hot tub."

"And I want a new skin for my cat," Ed said, clapping just like Gloria had.

David groaned. "Can't we get a bigger bathroom first? You already have like four skins for the cat, and she hates all of them."

"She hates everything so that's fine," Ed shot back with a mischievous grin. "Plus, I want to buy some more cycles to upgrade her AI too. She gets weird around the chairs."

Oh dear. In the time since we'd been ripped out of the game, the boys had taken their new existence and run with it. They were also poster children for why the monetary system in Exodus City worked. Most people were still more than happy to work even after their needs were met. Dangle a cute digital pet in front of them and bam, they were grinding cash to get their hands on it.

"Okay, that's fair," David acquiesced. "The CPU management department actually sent me an email asking us to stop breaking things in the house because the extra physics calculations were putting the suburb over budget."

"Wait, is that the time Felcat got her leg literally stuck to the chair and decided to panic and run around the house like she was on fire?" Ed asked, his grin getting wider and wider.

Gloria, who'd stopped in her exit of the viewing capsule to listen, raised a hand. "Hold on. Hold the fuck on. What happened?"

"So we mentioned—" Ed began, only to snort with barely controlled laughter. "The uh… the way the cat gets weird around chairs? Yeah, it's not —-pfft— it's not her AI that's strictly the problem. She just suddenly becomes magnetic to chairs or something. One second she's rubbing against it, the next, bam it's stuck to her side like it was glued there. Obviously, because this happens whenever anything gets stuck to a cat that it doesn't want there, she booked it through the house trying to escape —hahaha— trying to— to escape the scary killer chair—"

He dissolved into a fit of giggles that had David covering his eyes with an exasperated hand while the rest of us began to laugh along with him.

"Did you get it on video?" Jason asked excitedly. "I've started an Exovid channel and I'd love to post it."

David was unable to hold back a smile as his boyfriend moved into the breathless wheezing stage of laughter. "Yeah, I think we have it. I'll send it over tonight."

We all stored our bodies back in their nooks soon after that and headed back into Exodus City. Cerri and I reappeared in our house and she immediately grabbed me by the waist.

“Hello little one, didn’t think you were going to just scurry off and keep working, did you?” she purred. My heart rate might have doubled from her words, and I knew that the next hour or so was going to be… intense.

Later on, though, I did get to scurry off and keep working on my projects!

My current hyperfixation was trying to figure out a way to defend our ship with more than just armour. Basically, I wanted shields, but the shields we had in Digital Galaxies were handwavium, so I had to build these ones the hard way.

Annoyingly, though, it was proving very hard. I mean, I could see a way to potentially capture kinetic and heat energy before it dealt damage to our armour, but getting the structure to hang in space without any physical support seemed impossible with the tools we had right now.

“Cerri,” I whined, finally giving in.

She looked up from her nook in our little study-library-office room and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“I need help…”

Pushing herself up out of her chair, she strode over and sat down in the empty seat next to my work area. We used a combination of a desk and an augmented reality suite to do our work, which meant a good chunk of my research and calculations were just floating around in the air.

“So, see how this would capture some kinetic and heat energy and funnel it away?” I asked, pointing out my sketchy prototype plans. “The sims say it would work, but I just don’t know how I can project it out into an actual shield.”

“Where does it funnel it to?” she asked after a few seconds of reading my work.

I blinked. “Huh?”

“The energy it intercepts, where does it send it?”

For some reason, I just couldn’t comprehend what she was talking about. It was like my brain was sitting there blending my thoughts up into a soup trying to convert her words into actual meaning. Frowning, I asked, “What does that have to do with it?”

“Well, I was just curious, because this all is predicated on the idea that you actually have somewhere to send the energy in the first place,” she explained, still staring at my work thoughtfully.

Damn it Cerri! I didn’t care about that problem right now! I wanted to solve this problem.

Frustrated, I swished my tail back and forth. “Cerri, please, I’m… ugh, nevermind. My train of thought with the problem I was working on is all munted now.”

She finally seemed to realise she’d hijacked my focus and reached out to give me a hug. “Sorry, little fox. Here, take a minute to empty your head.”

I did so, breathing in her scent while I did my best to centre myself again. It took a few moments, but when I was calm, I pointed back to the structure and asked my question again. “How do I make this into a shield? Magnetics just mess it all up, and that was all I had for ideas.”

“Oh, yeah… I see that,” she hummed, letting go of me and leaning forward in her chair to get a closer look.

She was silent for almost two minutes, and I was beginning to get antsy when she clicked her fingers and lit up. Turning her distractingly pretty starscape eyes on me, she asked, “Why does this need to be a shield at all?”

I blinked. “Huh?”

She leaned forward, grinning now, “Don’t make it a shield! We can build it into the armour! Can you imagine how tough our armour would be if it could shrug off a huge chunk of the energy of an impact? Hell, if the energy is small enough, I reckon you could get the transfer to be close to one hundred percent. It would make us functionally invulnerable to micrometeorites, no matter the speed we were going!”

“Oh,” I murmured, and now it was my turn to look at my work more closely. “Oh!”