by Logan Jacobs
“Very,” I answered and thought it was more than merely pretty neat, “not sure why you went through all the subterfuge though?” My lovey-dovey feeling had dissipated, and the psychedelic gas that filled the ship had caused my brain to make some weird connections. “Why couldn’t you just be honest from the beginning?” I blurted as tears burst from my eyeballs and an overwhelming, inexplicable feeling of betrayal washed over me.
“Excellent question, Marc Havak,” Artemis began, and then suddenly broke into giant crocodile tears herself. “Empathy is an unfamiliar human characteristic, and sadness, wow, sadness is... very sad. I am terribly sorry we lied. So very, very sorry.”
We both cried at each other for a second until Phil popped his head out of the cockpit portal.
“Ah, shit on a shingle!” He exclaimed as he walked over to the panel again. “Man, human physiology is such a pain, the sudden lack of serotonin is making you both as emo as a gundark in its third cataclysm. Am I right?”
He tapped a few buttons, and the navy-blue threads in the pink cloud slowly turned bright green. After a few breaths, the inexplicable sadness faded, and the tears dried up.
“I have no idea what that is,” I answered deadpan.
“It’s a... never mind,” he said almost to himself. “I keep forgetting what a noob you are. The Milky Way is considered the freaking boonies by most planets that have mastered intergalactic travel and the workaround for the whole relativity thing, so in order to absorb your culture, I watched a crapload of your television, another of my kind’s handy traits. Figured out you were young enough in your evolution that the strong-arm-tough-guy, ‘give us what we asked for or we’ll destroy you’ bit was the most expedient way of getting things done.”
“Oh, so there won’t be strip mining and space slavery?” I asked.
“No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I wasn’t kidding about that.”
“Indentured servitude,” Artemis mumbled as she wiped away her remaining tears.
“What she said,” Phil said as he nodded his head toward Artemis and mouthed ‘space slavery.’ “Normally we can contact the local planetary government and bing-bang-boom we’re on our way. But you guys are primitive and, I came up with the good familiar-looking space alien, bad weird-looking space alien thing.”
“But my body wasn’t ready yet,” Artemis, who had returned to sounding more like her bubbly self, added, “so we needed to use the hologram.”
“Artemis did a nice bit of improvising there when the weapons came out,” Phil complimented.
Right as he stopped talking, I had a feeling that every molecule in my body had suddenly separated from each other, floated around for a second, then glued themselves back together.
“I like pie,” I yelled for absolutely no reason.
“Draxx them sklounst!” Artemis shouted at the top of her lungs. “Excuse me.”
“Don’t worry,” Phil assured me, “that’s just the aforementioned warp drive kicking in, you’ll be fine. Here, check this out.”
Phil tapped a few more buttons on the console and the wall of the cabin started to melt away like holding a butane torch to a sheet of ice revealing the endless expanse of space outside the ship. The number of stars, and their brightness was incredible. I’d always lived in metropolitan areas, so light pollution pretty much made seeing more than a handful of stars at night impossible. This was, for lack of a better term, awe-inspiring.
Suddenly, bright red lights began to flash in an offbeat rhythm throughout the passenger cabin. Phil looked around, surprised as Poda clacked loudly from the cockpit.
“It did what?” Phil yelled at her through the portal.
“Ack ack ack, ack!” She yelled right back, and while I had no clue what she was saying I got the gist pretty well. Poda was freaking out.
“You hang tight here, kid,” Phil said as he got up and rushed into the cockpit area.
A barrage of angry ‘acks’ floated my way, but I mostly tuned it out as I continued to stare out into the endless expanse of space.
After a few minutes, Phil waddled back up to my recliner.
“Good news and bad news. Good news, we are almost ready to send you to the Higgs-Boson Vortex which will deliver you to Nexus Station, your gateway to the Crucible of Carnage.”
“Okay,” I replied. “What’s the bad news?”
“Well, I may or may not have gotten a little wrapped up in some of your television shows while absorbing your culture, and we took too much time on Earth and the location of the Higgs-Boson Vortex changed,” he answered in a guilty rush. “It does that every so often, you know the whole quantum probability, ‘Schrodinger's Cat’ thing, right?”
“No,” I replied, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Poda ‘Acked’ again.
“I said I was sorry!” Phil yelled back. “You try watching just one season of Sons of Anarchy. It’s impossible, I tell ya. Impossible!”
He took a small thumb drive looking device out of his pocket and handed to Artemis.
“Artie, I need you to hop on ole’ Marc-y-boy’s lap here and download that into the chair’s operating system, okay?” Phil said more than a bit impatiently. “We don’t have time to prepare both pods for space travel, so you’re gonna have to get comfortable. I gotta help reprogram the nav computer.”
“Um, uh, yeah, sure,” Artemis stammered as she disengaged her chairs foam and climbed over onto to my lap as Phil ran into the cockpit.
She slipped the device into a port on my armrest. It turned bright red and looked like it was injecting something into my chair. I tried not to focus on the fact that a super smoking hot interstellar space babe with a computer for a brain was now sitting in my lap as her butt wiggled into my crotch as she attempted to get comfortable. The foam did its best to accommodate both of us but was clearly only meant for one.
Phil rushed back out and put a device that looked like a small pencil up to both our necks, and I felt a fast pinprick, then hot liquid flowed into my veins. When whatever it was hit my brain, it was like a good night's sleep and a cold shower rolled into one. I was instantly very alert and very sober.
“Long story short, kid,” he explained, “the Vortex to Nexus Station is now located in the center of your sun.”
“And that is bad?” I asked as the chair began to sink into the floor of the ship.
“Yes, Marc Havak,” Artemis said, completely sober as well, “it is tremendously bad.”
“That might be catastrophizing things just a bit,” Phil replied, his voice sounding more than a little nervous. “Poda had to recalculate about three million equations on the fly to get the right speed, mass, and distance, and she is ninety-nine percent sure she got them all right.” The pod beeped, and Phil pulled the thumb drive out of the slot.
“Acck, ack ack aaaaackkk,” Poda click-clacked as she crawled from the cockpit over to my chair.
“Yup,” Phil said to her, “just uploaded the new coordinates and heat shield booster. Alright, Marc, nice to meet ya, fella, nice to have ya aboard, and this is where we tell ya to have a safe trip.”
He and Poda moved away from the pod as it continued to sink, its sides closing over us to form a reverse teardrop made of white, polished ceramic-like material. A windshield of clear glass seemed to extrude itself from the rest of the pod to cover our head and shoulders giving us almost three hundred and sixty degrees worth of vision.
“Ack, ack ack ack,” Poda said.
“Poda says she enjoyed having you aboard,” Phil’s muffled voice came through speakers in my headrest as the pod rotated until we were forward facing the front of the ship.
“Ack,” Poda added.
“Wow,” Phil said, surprised. “And she wanted me to tell you that she thinks you are very cute and if you are ever in the Pulsar system to give her a ring.”
I shivered at the thought but was also kind of flattered. I was thinking about how the logistics of something like that would work when the ship turned, and I saw that we we
re hurtling through space straight for the sun.
“Okay, Marc,” Phil’s voice yelled in my ear. “Good luck in the Crucible, I hope you win a lot of cool shit for your planet and don’t die immediately.”
“Thanks?” I replied.
“Anytime.” Phil’s voice had gotten a lot softer and far away sounding. “Next stop, Nexus Station.” And with that, the pod separated from the ship which pulled up, rolled, and sped off in the opposite direction. I thought I could hear Phil’s voice, like an afterthought.
“…if they survive the Higgs Vortex, he’s not gonna last two minutes…”
Then the pod's engines roared to life, and I found myself hurtling toward the large yellow ball at the center of our solar system on what looked like a collision course.
“Holy shit!” I yelled as the pod rocketed forward. There were no G’s to feel, but I could tell we were going faster than any human being had gone before, well, at least human beings from the planet Earth. Almost as if it had read my mind, the pod lurched forward with another burst of speed. The multitude of stars that surrounded us began to elongate as if they were wet drops of paint, and someone had just blasted them with a hair dryer on high.
“This should be interesting, Marc Havak,” Artemis said nervously, “I am familiar with quantum traveling as a theory, but I have never experienced it first hand. I assume the tickling in my stomach and dry mouth would be fear?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “that would be it.”
The pod began to shimmy like a drink shaker in the hands of a pissed-off bartender. Warning lights flashed, and a calm female voice started saying the same phrase over and over again. It was in some complex alien language so I had no idea if it was telling me to eject or kiss my ass goodbye. All the surrounding light grew in intensity, and I started to notice slight time distortions and ripples.
I watched the sun get bigger and bigger directly in front of me. Soon it was all I could see. The sea of stars was gone as the flaming orb continued to grow. The outer edge of the pod began to glow red, and ions swirled in bright colors around us. I couldn’t tell if we had started spinning like a bullet shot out of a precision-rifled gun or if it was everything else that spun around us.
I didn't feel any heat, and I figured that it must be a good sign we weren’t about to be hard boiled. The pod shuddered so hard that I felt like the inside of a Shake-Weight in the hands of a steroided-out meth head.
My brain barely had time to register what a strange metaphor that was before the pod hit the sun’s photosphere like splashing through the edge of a hurricane made up of billions of nuclear reactions. Solar winds danced and flashed all around us as myriads of orange and red twirled in every direction. Massive, hundred miles long flares licked off the core of the sun flashing white hot before going the color of fireplace embers. Just before it looked like we were going to crash headfirst into the roiling fusion furnace that was the flame-filled ocean at the center of the sun, the pod suddenly stopped shaking, time slowed to instant replay pace, and there was nothing but the sound of our breathing.
I had a brief second to wonder if this is what dying felt like before the universe bent around us, expanding and stretching as if it were an image on a big piece of rubber that someone was trying to pull apart.
Everything went black.
Time seemed to have stopped.
We floated.
We were.
We weren’t.
Then it snapped back, and we shot into the center of the sun like a faster-than-light cosmic bullet.
Chapter Four
In a blast of bright liquid orange light, the pod shot out of the center of the sun as nuclear fusion ribbons of combusted hydrogen trailed in our wake like atomic streamers. We sailed through space at hyper speed until the sun was a couple of million miles in the rear view, which at our reality bending velocity, only took about thirty seconds. Our quantum momentum eventually eased down, and we began to travel at a respectable sub-light speed.
I glanced at Artemis who was still snugly nestled into my lap, her head on my shoulders. Her eyes were the size of saucers and filled with pure amazement.
“That was freaking awesome!” she said, and her voice trembled with excitement. She did a little arm pump, her elbow bent in front of her, and punched the air in rapid succession three times.
“Whoo!” she hollered and let some tension out with the exclamation. “That was not what I was expecting at all. The textbooks do not do Higgs-Boson Quantum Tunnels justice.”
“Wait,” I said with my voice a little higher than I normally like it. “your textbooks described shooting through the center of the sun at faster than light speed, and they didn’t describe it as cool? The authors must have never experienced it because that was the very fucking definition of cool.”
“Way fornicating cool,” she nodded as she regained control of herself.
I noticed that we were approaching a large, Earth-like planet covered in dark blue ocean punctuated by several large land masses. Clouds swirled through the atmosphere and made the planet look like a giant marble flung out onto a pin-pricked black background.
In orbit around the planet was a moon that didn’t look nearly as inviting. Its surface was a dark, muddy red with blue ice caps at each pole. There didn’t seem to be any oceans, only large scattered lakes of dark purple water. I couldn’t see any forests or anything green for that matter. Mountain ridges stitched across the surface like scars. The only other feature I could make out was a large installation of some kind, probably the size of Manhattan. It was one large circle, surrounded by several small circles connected to the main one by tubes. The whole thing had a military-slash-scientific feel about it and was made of some kind of dark green material.
The pod banked and started to veer toward the large planet. I breathed an audible sigh of relief. There is no way in hell I wanted to go to that moon.
We were headed toward what I first thought was a ring of satellites that floated between the moon and the planet, but as we got closer, I realized it was actually a small sea of spaceships.
As we closed the gap at an impressive pace, I could see that it wasn’t just a sea of spaceships. It was a sea of spaceships at all-out war with each other.
Red and green laser blasts streaked through the miles-long battlefield like crisscrossed hash marks. Small starfighters zoomed in and around the larger cruiser ships like angry wasps looking to sting anything they could. Volleys of lightning-fast missiles snaked from launchers to streak through the sky in all directions, exploding in small puffs of orange flame as they found their targets.
It was an amazing sight to behold. The chaos of battle was staggering and deadly, and we were flying right toward it.
“Um, can we not go through the middle of Battle of the Planets?” I asked nervously.
“Unfortunately, Marc Havak,” Artemis said in an unexpectedly formal tone, “that is exactly where we must go. This is your very first combat Trial. It is to test your initial physical and mental prowess, stamina, and ingenuity.”
“Wait, what?” I stuttered. “We’re starting right now? Like, no warm-up round or anything? No ‘figure out the controls of the game’ level?”
“That is what this is, Marc Havak,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Oh, so, like, this is all a hologram or something?” I almost gushed with relief. “Do I get three lives or a respawn or what?”
“No,” Artemis answered, her face a stern mask of seriousness, “it is very real and very dangerous. You only get one life as do I. Please do not die.”
“Okay, okay, alright,” I stammered, my brain spinning. “That’s okay. I got this. It’s all going to be good. Can you help me at all?”
“Yes,” she answered.
I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when she interrupted me, “And no. I am allowed to do that which is necessary to preserve my own existence and function, but if you are in trouble, I cannot assist you or give you information outside of the scope of t
he particular trial.”
“Well, something is better than nothing,” I said as I tried to look on the bright side. “I’ve been thrown in the deep end before, like having to take shop class when I signed up for theater. I survived that in eighth grade, I can survive this now. How hard can it be?”
“Very hard, Marc Havak,” she answered stoically.
We were advancing on the battle very fast as the pod gobbled hundreds of miles in mere seconds.
“You’re like a living computer, right?” I asked, my mind spinning, “Can’t you download something to Matrix your way to knowing how it works?”
“Possibly, if we had the capability to transmit or receive digital data,” Artemis explained, “but this pod can only send short bursts of information at a time. And I don't even know how to do that. The pod is of a Telecultian design that I am unfamiliar with.”
“Oh,” I uttered, “well, shit.”
“Yes, feces,” she said seriously. “Male bovine feces.”
Not even the direness of our situation could keep the small smile from my face. Her fundamental misunderstanding of American idioms, yet utter commitment to using them, was so freaking endearing I almost forgot we were about to enter a laser filled maelstrom of destruction.
Her hand dug into my thigh as the pod broke into the sea of battle besieged spaceships. We floated lazily, like a leaf on a stream, as violence swarmed around us. It was almost comical.
“Huh,” I uttered, “maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“The odds of us successfully navigating a full-scale space battle are approximately three thousand seven hundred and twenty to one,” Artemis rattled off nervously. I winced as the pod slowed for no reason at all and stopped in the middle of the battle right between two huge Dreadnaught cruisers bristling with cannons.
There was a brief moment of utter deep space silence as the cruisers’ cannons stopped firing. I could almost see the captains of each vessel as they looked on dumbfounded before they turned to their respective first officers and said, “What... what are they doing?” to which the first officers would just shrug.
