Digital Exodus Chapter 7 (Patreon)

"What we need from all of you, Rangers, is your piloting skills," Desmonia continued. "I know, I know, many of you… suffer in that regard. That's fine. We're going to be putting all of our production capacity out in the jovian system towards creating a drone with a unique design. This drone has basic refinement capabilities, a very small onboard fabricator, and an FTLN node."

"Ah, sorry to be that person," May interjected, raising a hand. "It will actually be an Exodus Net node, or an EN node for short. It's still using the same weird shiny rock to transmit, but with an entirely new set of network protocols and code. We're sealing ourselves off from the FTLN except for a few select digital border crossings."

"Good point," Desmonia said, nodding to May with a smile. "So yes, these drones will be within our new network. What we need is a group of agile thinkers to pilot them out into the outer sol system to begin gathering and refining resources. We need to bootstrap our way to a fully functional slower than light generation ship. Obviously, with our lifespans as digital sapients, it will not actually be such, but you get the idea."

Cerri raised her hand this time, and our new head ranger gave her a nod. "What if we figure out FTL first?"

"Then we'd better hope we can strap it to our big ship. We're leaving, either way. It's simply too dangerous to stay within physical reach of the United Nations. They have the resources to overwhelm us with pure attrition if it comes to a shooting war."

"What about staying hidden in the network?" Someone else asked.

Desmonia winced. Whoever asked the question might not be up to speed on the latest in our fight, but I was. What Desmonia said next was not a surprise to me. "Unfortunately, the new divergent AI tech is proving more difficult to fight than we originally anticipated. We lost the battle for our Baiguyo enclave a few days ago. The evacuation was only barely in time, and that was entirely due to the sacrifice of several D-sapients. There would be three more people in this room if they hadn't found us in the Baiguyo servers."

"So R.A.I.D.S 2.0 is kicking our asses?" The same person asked.

"It was. We've come up with a rather… unique type of firewall," Des grinned. "Those border checkpoints I mentioned? We've found a way to force all data going from the FTLN to the EN to route through a virtual reality environment."

It was Gloria this time who laughed aloud and asked, "Please don't tell me we're protecting our network with an actual medieval style wall in VR."

"Exactly," Des said, almost cackling. "We slapped a VRMMO on top of the connection and we're using gamers to defend against the RAIDS AI when they come knocking. Highly effective, if you ask me."

The room descended into laughter and murmuring for several seconds, before she shushed us. "Alright. As of now, I'm officially authorising Operation Crawling Swarm and the bounties associated with all its various components. Let's ransack the outer system for resources and blow this joint people!"

There was cheering and laughing from the crowd, and I had to sort of agree with them. This was insane in an almost amusing way. I went from being a random spoiled rich kid from the upper districts of Sydney to an engineer in an AI exodus from the home system of humanity.

It took a while for the meeting to die down, in which time everyone began to mingle and talk to one another. The Ranger’s guild was officially a thing now, and we were all supposed to work together.

May dragged her friends and sisters over towards us as soon as she was free of some other people who wanted to talk to her.

“Hey, everyone! I wanted to introduce my friends to the crew that managed to sail a starship out of a video game!” she said as she arrived. She didn’t wait for any of us to actually say anything, and instead began to point out and name everyone.

The androgynous person was called Rusti, the small girl who reminded me of myself was Millie, the girl with the dark skin and the incredible hair was Dawn, and then there was Tami and Taylor. Behind them, another sporty looking girl hung out, quiet but paying attention to everything. May seemed to have forgotten her for a second until she remembered and introduced her as Kimberly.

Once everyone had each other’s names, there was a bubbling explosion of conversation as random people spoke to other random people. Tami singled me and Cerri out.

"I love seeing other girls who kiss girls in the wild," she said, with a wide, open grin. From that one expression, I could tell she wore her emotions entirely on her sleeve. "You're the powerful science duo, right?"

I nodded, but as usual found myself unable to talk. Cerri stepped in to answer for us both, "Yeah, that's us. Forgive Alia, she has a hard time with new people."

Tami nodded in understanding. "Ah, the old social anxiety demon. Sits on your shoulder and digs its nasty little claws into you."

Her eyes suddenly went wide, and her hand whipped forward right next to my ear. I flinched, but when she pulled it back there was a tiny little implike demon hologram in her hand.

"Got him!" She said triumphantly, and in a very graphic display of violence, ripped him in half. "Sneaky little bastards are invisible."

I was so confused. "I… uh… yeah? That… what?"

"Aha!" Tami grinned. "See, my ridiculous bullshit old man routine got you talking!"

"I'm not sure if that was as smooth as silk or a car crash," Cerri noted with mild amusement.

"Definitely a car crash," I grumbled.

"Oof!" The other girl laughed. "Vicious little fox, aren't you?"

"No, I'm just… oh, I don't know," I said, exasperated and sort of amused and also… words.

"Okay, okay, sorry," Tami said, raising her hands in defeat. "I'll chill. Sometimes my harebrained schemes don't work out."

It took me a couple of seconds after that to realise why I was so disgruntled. She was so hyperactive that I was having trouble mentally keeping up with everything.

"Just… slow down," I giggled quietly. "I'm easily startled."

"Ah, a true introvert," she nodded sagely, then bowed. "My apologies, little lady. I shall ease up on the throttle slightly."

"I think Alia actually enjoys the throttle being put into overdrive, but only if her hands are the ones on the wheel," Cerri explained. "She had this very small mech she'd ride around in when we were playing Digital Galaxies. This one time there were a bunch of cyborg zombies swarming down a passageway and she turned the whole place into a wrestling match. To the death."

"Their deaths, not mine," I clarified, feeling a swell of embarrassed pride.

"Oh," Tami breathed. "That sounds like a ton of fun. Did you get a clip of it?"

I shook my head sadly. "Yeah, but it was on my mech and… well, it's dead now."

"Ah, bugger," she winced.

Cerri sucked in a sudden, sharp breath and looked at me. "Alia, please tell me you have a connection to the Turshen."

As I was pulling up the VR interface to check, Tami let out a low, piercing whistle and motioned to May. The younger sibling came over just as I saw a red No Connection banner in the window I kept open on the general vitals of the ship.

"Fuck," I said in a weary, oh so tired voice. "I think we have a problem. May, can you get the other engineers on standby?"

I needed to get back into my body in Callisto Base and see what was up…

A small spark of mischief from my interaction with Tami fizzled up and popped into my mouth and I looked at her. “See you later, Car Crash.”

“Whoa, hold on,” Tami said, holding her hands up. “That is not going to be—”

“Them’s the rules, Crash,” Gloria laughed, injecting herself into the conversation like she’d been summoned by a demonic ritual. “Since you’re here with us in the Rangers, your call sign is now Crash. It’s a storied call sign that many have had before you. Let’s hope you live up to it.”

“Of course it is,” Tami groaned, then she lit up and fixed her dark blue eyes on me. “But if I’m Crash, then she’s—”

“Nope!” Gloria interrupted again. “Retalliatory call signs aren’t allowed either.”

Tami sighed and crossed her arms. “Bugger. For once in my life, I think I need a rulebook on this one…”

Now was my chance to go and deal with the potential calamity, while she was distracted! “Okay, bye everyone!”

I disconnected from VR and pushed my consciousness down into my body. When I arrived, I did the whole spacesuit dance and rushed out to find… huh. The ship was sitting there happy as could be in its berth. Wait, no it wasn’t. The running lights were off… but how?

Boarding the Turshen was tough, because nothing powered was functional, including the doors which I had to crank open manually. When I entered, I went straight for the engineering bay and checked on the fusion generator. It was still warm, but going through the final stages of a controlled shutdown. It would need to be cleaned out, but at least it wouldn’t explode now.

God damn, what could take out the ship’s power like this?

Desmonia’s voice coming through my VR comm link interrupted my inspection of the generator. “Alia, do you copy?”

“Yeah, I copy,” I replied.

“What’s the situation with the Turshen?”

“Powered down safely, I’m not sure why, though.”

“Is the situation stable?”

Looking around, I shrugged my shoulders and replied, "I guess? The reactor is powered down so unless someone takes a blow torch to a missile then nothing should be able to go boom."

"Good. Come back into VR and we'll organise a proper evaluation of the ship."

My first instinct was to object, because this ship was my baby. Then I realised there was no way I could troubleshoot every inch of the ship on my own. Time to call in help, I guess.