Digital Exodus Chapter 8 (Patreon)

The Turshen was dead. We pored over it for days and found more faults than we could even catalogue. The crew was more than a little saddened by the demise of our ship, but it was overshadowed by the wider implications. Right now, the UN thought that we had a fully capable warship, but now all we had was a hulk.

In an effort to pretend that we still had a working ship, we rewired the Turshen’s running lights so they drew power from a series of jury rigged power packs. It was critical that nobody learned that our biggest military asset was fucked.

Meanwhile, Operation Crawling Swarm was more important than ever. Everyone from the rangers was assigned to a drone that was heading out into the Kuiper belt. Our job was to collect resources for more drones, which we would then use to build the Exodus' new moving home.

The ship we'd be using was still in the early design stages, but it would need to be part refinery, part shipyard, and part server farm. It would need some pretty colossal heat radiators too. Oh, and huge fuckoff engines.

I was bored out of my mind piloting the drone I was assigned to, but the design of the little things was so cool that I wished I had been part of their development team. They were the size of your average aircar, and powering them were some truly adorable closed-loop fission reactors. The reactors were actually a redesign of the ones the badger aliens used to fuel their missiles.

Those reactors could put out a truly insane amount of power, and that power was mostly directed to the MPD thrusters. The thrusters we were using weren’t the efficient version that were used by most modern spacecraft—they were built for as much thrust as we could get out of them, while still keeping most of the general advantages of an MPD thruster. I guess that was just my way of saying we burned excessive amounts of fuel to get around faster than we would have otherwise.

Still, an MPD thruster was fuel-efficient enough to allow us to save most of the ice we found for the ark ship itself. Speaking of the ark ship, it would need a lot of fuel if it was going to make it to a different system at slower than light speeds. Well, it was going to need a lot of everything, to be honest. The initial design concepts were large.

That was why we were headed for the Kuiper belt. That was the furthest from Earth we could get where we had decent resource density. The hope was that raw distance would protect us from the physical reach of the UN, if nothing else did. Even our upgraded drones would take two months to get to the build area on the inner edge of the belt. As far as we knew, the 0.05 Gs of acceleration our drones could get when fully loaded with resources was much more than most UN ships could do.

Of course, that same agonisingly long journey was why I was so damn bored with piloting the damn drone in the first place. I wasn’t even loaded up with resources yet! I had an intermediate asteroid I was supposed to strip for rare materials on the way.

Most of the time I was at home working on designs for things while a little holographic chart showed how far from the asteroid my drone was. Weeks passed while we flew, and time and again I ran into various engineering problems with my designs that were just… confusing. I was starting to think I wasn’t smart enough for the level of engineering I was getting involved in. Well, or maybe I needed to push my framerate super high and complete a few more courses in physics. Ugh.

At least my crazy armour worked now. That was cool. It took a while to figure out too, but I now had a design that should, in theory, be ready for prototyping.

I was actually looking over the design one final time before I sent it off to be looked at by the wider Exodus scientific community when my drone beeped at me. What was up? Oh! Oh! It was informing me that I was coming up on my target space rock! Finally!

Excited, I dropped what I was doing and hopped over into the drone. Now embodied as the three by two by two metre vessel, I watched while the rock approached. It looked boring, but it contained a whole bunch of exotic materials that we were going to need, some of which would make my fancy armour possible.

Uh… hold on. I was coming in way too fast! What the fuck?

Desperately, I tugged at the controls, but it was like trying to change the direction of a hundred ton weight sliding over solid ice. No! This rock was important! Sure the drone was expendable, but if I obliterated the rock…

Gah, gosh darned shitty drone made for the barest minimum specifications!

Move damn you.

In an instant, a spike of pain ripped through my digital mind and I was pulled out of every single connection I had. The blackness of a DS mind untethered from anything expanded around me in every direction. Except… it wasn't completely black.

This space was meant to be how my mind interpreted being disconnected from everything, and yet there was a huge splash of colour up and to the side. It looked like someone had ripped a hole in the void and a gorgeous nebula had come through.

Attempting any sort of digital connection to it gave me nothing. As far as my frame was concerned, it didn't exist. Yet… there it was, plain as day. Something was causing my confused brain to create the image of a nebula where there should be nothing but darkness.

So, being the curious little foxo that I was, I tentatively reached out and touched it with my thoughts.

The nebula responded, reaching back in a mirror to my actions. I stopped. It stopped. I continued. It continued. I pulled a funny face at it— oh god. Somehow… somehow it copied the goofy expression I'd thought in its direction. It was just… responding to everything I did…

"Alia, baby, why are you all the way back in here?"

Cerri's voice snapped me out of my little dance with the nebula, and I reached out to take her connection request.

"Something really weird is happening in my brain, Cerri!" I told her excitedly. "There's a funny nebula that's dancing with me!"

"What?"

"Don't worry… just some weird interactions between my brain and the way it's interpreting being isolated from everything," I said… then paused. "Oh, shit! My drone!"

Pulling my full interface back up again, I lunged into my drone's feed again, expecting to find it broken beyond all usefulness. Instead… It was fine.

Well, until I looked at my position and velocity. If I could still faint, I might have.

Frantically, I pulled up the flight data from my drone and threw it up into a holographic plot. The plot broke.

Three seconds had passed since I lost connection with the drone. I was now almost two million kilometres from the rock I'd been about to hit.

My vaguely simulated body went cold, then hot, then cold again. Ohmygodohmygodohmygodgbkudf.

"Cerri!" I burst back into our Exodus City home like my tail was on fire and practically shoved my broken chart at her.

She smiled lovingly at me and caught me before I hit anything. "Hi, you finished hiding in your own hea— huh, what's this?"

"The velocity of my drone from like half a minute ago."

"No, see look you've clearly gone just under twice the speed of light," she said, pointing to the big line that was bursting up out of the top of the graph. "Your sensors must be fucked."

I just stared at her, grinning, and shook my head. "Diagnostics are running right now. I bet you, if we contacted other drones asking for a position check… well…"

"We absolutely need to do that," she said, eyes widening as she began to believe me. "Can I have access to your drone? Let's pull all the data we can. Goddess, how on earth did you manage this? There's no equipment on those drones that's even close to pulling something like this off."

Giving her a cheeky grin, I said, "Well, for starters… we're not on Earth."

Rolling her eyes and fighting a smile, she jumped on the authorization keys when I gave them to her. Positional data requests went out to all the other drone pilots.

Five minutes later and it was confirmed. Somehow, my drone went twice the speed of light away from the rock for five point nine seven nine seconds. Not just that, but it took several hits from space dust at that speed, each hit ripping chunks off the craft. It was amazing that the damage was only to non-essential areas. Blind luck kept it intact through the journey.

"I'm calling Des," Cerri finally said after we were done staring in shock at all the data. "She needs to come over and see this."

"Invite Larry too," I said. "They'll probably be able to extrapolate out from the data faster than anyone else."

"Good point," she smiled. Then she wrapped me up in a hug. "You've just given us a nice little shove in the right direction for FTL travel, little fox. I don't know how you did it, but either way, you're incredible."