Digital Exodus Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Once the threat posed by the UNSN had died down, the Turshen sailed back into Callisto orbit and we reconvened down at the moonside base. Joining us for the first time was May, the girl who’d complained about having to create a new government right after the attack, and Elissa in her first actual body, although it wouldn't be the final version. Oh and Desmonia, of course, but she was always around for this flavour of meeting.

The room we were meeting in was the typical utilitarian white and grey of the base, with furnishings that were cheap as all heck, but at least comfortable enough. Plus, something could be as hard as rock and it wouldn’t be too bad because of, again, the gravity.

“That was alarming,” Elissa said as she entered, coming in through a different door.

Elissa’s body right now was an older model which had been updated to match her preferences. She wore the same dark grey jumpsuit that the rest of us wore, and unlike her actual avatar in Exodus City, that body didn’t really do the aesthetic justice. Thankfully there was a new body being printed for her down in the lower levels.

“Understatement of the fucking century,” Gloria scoffed, dumping herself onto a sofa.

Elissa, with far more grace than Gloria had, seated herself beside the pilot. She also refrained from engaging with Gloria's colourful language and instead opted to drape an arm casually over the other woman's shoulders.

I followed Cerri over to a different sofa and plopped myself down. The moment my girlfriend was comfortable, I welded myself to her side.

David, Ed, Warren, and Jason came in, completing the crew. Then, Desmonia in her proper body waltzed into the room and sat down gingerly in an armchair.

Behind her came May, who was using a simple humanoid robotic frame to attend. Using our shared link to VR, she was projecting an image of a young woman, maybe twenty years old. She had mousy dark blonde hair that billowed down to brush her shoulders in gorgeous waves. One side was tucked behind her ear and held there with a little silver clip. That same ear had a whole bunch of artful little piercings and a golden cuff.

"Alright, how is everyone feeling after that little scuffle?" She said, clapping her hands together. They went clink and she glanced down at them for a moment in confusion, then snorted in amusement to herself. Someone forgot they were using a robot for a body.

"I'm feeling that us being the only real line of defence between the Exodus and them is a recipe for disaster," David said. "I hate to bring it up, but we might need a real navy of our own. Especially since Ed and I got out of that once already."

It was true. The two of them bonded and fell in love in the UN's wet navy. They didn't mention it much, but I think being gay and in the navy had actually not been very fun.

It was a tragedy how much social progress we lost in the latter half of the twenty first century. Over a hundred years since the information age began and bigotry was still rampant. It was a large part of the reason why it took me so long to realise I was transgender.

“Alright everyone,” Desmonia said, quieting what little chatter there was. “Here’s the deal. We’ve been fairly confident that the UN wouldn’t be able to reach us out here. This has obviously turned out to be false. I have a few things I want to talk about, then I’ll let you all have your say.”

"First off, it's clear that we need some form of official defence force," she said, grimacing as she did so. "The idea of an actual navy or army is… distasteful to me. We'll see what we can come up with in that regard. In the more immediate term however, how is the ship doing?"

"Badly," I said quietly. "Unlike our bodies, it relies heavily on video game handwavium to function normally. Every day I find three things that have stopped working properly, one or two of which I won't be able to repair."

"She handles like a drunken seagull,  so I believe it," Gloria added.

"Wow," Elissa said, gently smacking the back of the pilot's head.

"Babe, come on," Gloria laughed. "It's true."

Desmonia cleared her throat. "Okay. That's not good. Our primary defensive asset has a shelf life. We're already running our fabricators at full speed so we can't just build another one."

"Sounds like a ramp versus produce problem," Warren noted.

"We need a self replicating drone swarm," Jason joked. "One that doesn't run rampant and consume everything."

Desmonia hummed in consideration and tapped out a note. Oh no she took it seriously.

"Knowing the UN, we won't be safe until we've fucked off out of the system," Roger said, then gave the commander of Callisto base a pointed look. "Which is something we should be seriously considering."

"That will have to wait until we have the capability to build a generation ship of some kind,” Cerri interjected. “We have no FTL capability and making the trip this century would take a vessel we don’t even have the tech to build.”

“Getting physically away from the Sol system wouldn’t help our toughest problems right now,” May said sadly. “The new RAIDS 2.0 system is slaughtering any SAI that isn’t holed up in our servers. They’ve managed to develop AI that won’t become self aware and they’re using them to eviscerate us. Of course, they aren’t taking credit for it since Rosa and Amelia were able to… influence the SAI and DH rights act.”

Elissa, with her fingers tangled around Gloria’s to the point of visibly cutting off circulation, asked, “What do we do then? It seems like everything is fucked and we’re running out of time…”

“Aren’t we jumping the gun a little? The diplomatic stuff might work out,” Warren said, although by the tone of his voice even he didn’t believe it.

“There are factions within the UN who are on our side to a lesser or greater extent, but their power is not enough in the face of those who want us erased,” May explained with a tired sigh.

Someone said something in reply, but I was distracted when a polite little alert began to ping in the corner of my vision. Opening it into a virtual tab, I took one look at the innocuous warning about fusion core pressure and bolted up out of my seat.

“Alia?” Cerri called as I raced for the door.

I didn’t have time to explain to them what was happening, but I yelled back anyway. “Coolant line to reactor one is losing pressure!”

Taking the stairs to the surface two at a time, I nabbed my suit helmet from its place on a hook in the airlock and jammed it onto my head.

The ship was sitting innocently in its dusty berth on the flattened ground with its boarding ramp open and waiting. I rushed up, wishing that Bundit was functional the whole way. My poor mech had too many components that were built using handwavium and failed a week after we arrived.

I didn’t bother waiting for the lift, since the engine room was on the bottom deck. Reactor one was fixed into the wall on the back of the room, while coolant pipes snaked over it like tentacles reaching to tear it open. Rushing to my tools, I picked up several that would help and turned to run a frantic, critical eye over everything

The magnets that kept the fusion reaction contained needed cooling in order to maintain their enhanced state of magnetism, and that coolant came in the form of liquid helium. There should be detectable helium buildup in the engine bay’s atmosphere that I could follow to the source of the leak. If there was a leak. The actual breakdown could be a handwavium sensor finally giving in to entropy.

It was infuriating how much of the Turshen’s main, big technologies were fine, but it was the small things that were breaking. The fusion reactor, which used to be a backup generator for the aetheric one, was fine on a broad scientific and engineering level. The literal glue and metals it was made of, though? Handwavium.

The decay of the game’s reality-defying systems had started at the top with fundamental shit like aetheric energy generation and was now getting to more mundane things like materials science. Everybody, including me, forgot about materials science until their shit blew up because the molecular structure of the metal they were using was fucky in a tiny little spot or something.

Pulling up my atmospheric scanner, I began to home in on what was indeed a leak. I had to pull up a floor plate, but when I knelt to inspect the pipe where it finished veering under the floor, I saw the problem. Dust coated the area around the joint between two sections of piping. Dust that used to be nanotech sealant. I’d already fixed this pipe once before with shit from our old ship and now—

Warning. Catastrophic reactor malfunction in Reactor One. Magnetic containment failing. Attempting emergency venting procedure.

Oh god no. We were right above the Exodus servers! The venting would burn through the moon’s icy crust like it was barely there. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Overriding the venting procedure, I looked around for something to plug the coolant pipe that wasn’t from the game. Welding! I had a plasma welder that might still be working!

It was over… ah, on the wall. Scrambling half on all fours to gain momentum, I rose further and ran to the wall, grabbed the welder, checked its battery and fuel, then rushed back and skidded to a stop on my knees, already focusing the plasma blade to a fine point.

The searing heat of the blade came down against the joint and the metal began to heat. Slowly, way too slowly, I saw a few beads… shit! The coolant was keeping the metal too cold! Gods, it was so dangerous to be doing this with the coolant still flowing but if I tried to shut it off I had no idea what would happen. The reactor had no room for error anymore.

Come on, come on, come on! Heat up! Maybe I could play with the flow a little, get it just low enough that I could fuse the joint. Maybe… agh! I had no idea! Any wrong step could cause the ship to explode.

Would the shielding on the servers be enough if I wasn’t venting a concentrated beam of fusion reactor plasma into it? Could it survive a normal explosion? Agh, JUST FUSE YOU TEMPERAMENTAL HUNK OF—

Suddenly, with no input from anything else I could see, the metal seared blindingly white. When my digital eyes dimmed, which like the rest of my body were based on actual tech that the Exodus had developed, I was able to see something truly incredible. The metal of the two pipe sections was now one, as though they’d always been joined. What… the… fuck.

I sat back and stared down in shock. In the corner of my vision, the reactor’s magnets began to stabilise again and I shook my head, trying to clear this obvious illusion. The ship was wreckage and I was dreaming, that was the only explanation. This wasn’t… how?

“Oh thank fuck,” Cerri said, breaking me out of my stunned confusion. She knelt beside me, looking at the weld that was so perfect it was impossible. “Wow… I was watching the gauges. That was way too close.”

“Yeah…” I murmured, finally looking up to meet her relieved eyes. Did she see the weird weld too? I should tell her. First the incident when I was getting into my suit before the UNSN confrontation, now this… something was seriously wrong with reality. I needed… I needed proof, I needed to understand, I needed data.

I also needed my damn artificial heart to calm down because pseudo-adrenaline was still playing havoc on my thoughts. To that end, I twisted and buried my face in Cerri's shoulder. My helmet bumped into it instead, and I felt a surge of annoyance. Ah well. Better than nothing…