by BL Craig
He looked at the sub-light drive specs. The Tilly seemed to be set up with much higher tolerances for high-g maneuvers. The kind of fast turns possible with those parameters would overcome standard inertial damping systems. Maybe, as living dead, the crew could handle more stress than the living? He glanced at the FTL drive status, but the figures meant little to him.
Finally, he accessed the orientation materials and picked up from where he had been interrupted on Elysium. He learned that his new dead body was resistant to radiation, poisoning, and disease, though there were a few bugs, mostly fungi, that specialized in wrecking reanimate bodies. Ship systems maintained a very low level of humidity to help prevent infestation.
He skipped over the surveys and questionnaires designed to help place him in his “rewarding SecondLife career.” The friendly orientation program went on to explain the undead economy. It turned out that he did get paid, after a fashion, in the form of AfterLife credit. With which he could purchase a wide range of personal and recreational items from the company. A small list of items was available on the Tilly, but most could only be purchased on stations or planets. The whole thing reeked of the company scrip from industrial 19th century Earth.
He was surprised to find that there were six major planetary installations inhabited solely by the dead. It turned out there were over fourteen billion currently active SecondLifers, of which 1,413,959 were high-functioning. Fourteen billion was two billion more than the population of all the living-controlled worlds put together. Fourteen billion. How had he not known this? Fourteen fucking billion.
He was skimming, trying to look up “sabbaticals” when his door chimed. “Come in,” he said, still swiping through pages of information he would have to go back and read later. The door swooshed open, and a woman stood in the doorway. She was wearing dirty coveralls and had a rag hanging out of her pocket. There were smudges on her face and her straight brown hair, cut in a pixie bob, was hosting some very large dust bunnies. William stared at her blankly, reorienting from the endless data stream. This must be Clarke, owner of the feet he’d been introduced to earlier. Still feeling gob smacked by the revelations in his “orientation,” he blurted out, “fourteen BILLION, really?”
She snorted wryly. “Oh, that’s just the first in series of mind-fucks you’re headed for. Yes, there are really fourteen billion of us. But most make for very poor conversationalists.”
“I’m sorry.” William blushed, or, he should have. He didn’t actually feel any heat in his face, though he felt embarrassed. “Please, come in.”
“Oh, I’ll just hold up the door for now,” she said crossing one ankle over the other and leaning against the frame, arms crossed in front. “I’m filthy from crawling through ducts. Captain asked me to stop by and check on you. She says I’m the, ‘least socially inept’ of the crew. High praise from our valiant leader.” She smiled and waggled her dark eyebrows. “So, are you getting ready to space yourself or do you want to go smash some shit?”
He thought a moment. “Both?”
“Well, it would be pretty inconsiderate to break our lovely ship and then duck out on clean up by taking a permanent walk outside. You should probably just pick one. Oh, and by the way, I don’t recommend the space walk. One of the many “improvements” the company has made to the glorious undead proletariat is that we can actually survive a while in a vacuum. Pretty painful way to go.”
“Um, smash stuff, then? Is there actually stuff to smash?”
“Oh, sure. Anything headed for the recycler is fair game. I keep a nice heavy pipe around for when I need a good workout. Not that we ever need a workout.”
“I don’t think I actually want to smash anything right now.”
“Well, keep me in mind if you do. It won’t grow your biceps, but it can be cathartic. I’m Sarah, by the way.” She waved in lieu of a handshake.
“William,” he replied.
“I take it that’s William only, not Will, or Billy, or Liam?”
“Yes, just William, please. What did you mean that we don’t need to work out? I like to run. It helps clear my head.”
“Well, you’ve probably noticed the disconnect between your brain and physical body. That includes things like fatigue and ‘runners high.’”
“Oh.” He had been planning to find the ship’s treadmill and run as soon as he could.
“OK, well, I’ll let you get back to it. Oh, and make sure to login to the ship’s feed. We do a lot of work communications through there. You can of course send private messages—and by private, I mean anything you’re happy with Alex, and the company, seeing. Alex is cool though. She doesn’t really care what hijinks us wee bebe’s get up to.” Sarah tilted her head thinking, “Well, unless they disrupt her hijinks.”
“Good to know.” He would not have thought of the reserved 1st officer as someone capable of hijinks. There must be more to the story. “I’m supposed to report back to the bridge in—oh, wow, I guess 40 minutes.”
“Ah yes, FTL training with Brooks. Just a heads up: John’s a little . . . sensitive, right now. You might want to tread lightly.”
* * *
…
* * *
William changed uniforms and tidied his hair. He didn’t have time to shower now, but he would definitely partake of a long hot dousing later. Learning about the wild disparities between his old life and this new one was making him feel even more unbalanced. He was basically an indentured servant, cut off from his old life, a cog in the massive AfterLife machine. But he also had a cabin bigger than an Admiral in the Navy, and a real shower. These were things he had taken for granted as a child on Eden but had come to value greatly during naval life.
The Navy Academy had been a shock after his soft life on Eden. Fleet took pride in the deprivations of shipboard life and made them even worse for the young officers-in-training. An utter lack of privacy, cramped spaces, foul tasting recycled water, and dry showers had been just a few of the charming features of life as a cadette. It was mostly desperation that had kept him going, that and spite. The jeers and disdain of those born and raised in fleet life had hardened his spine. He had often wondered if he would have made it through if there had been any other option. How much harder must the transition to second life be for someone without his experiences? Then again, most reanimates would have been given a real orientation and time to adjust.
When William arrived on the bridge, Brooks was waiting. Distracted with being newly undead and piloting away from Elysium, William had not paid much attention to Brooks. Standing next to him now, William realized the man was built like a tank. He was taller than William by more than few centimeters and his shoulders were broad and muscled. His shaggy, dirty blond hair fell into his eyes, which were a pale grey blue.
His jaw was strong and held tightly, as though he was ready to bite his way through leather, or maybe someone’s arm. It made the watermark on his skin stand out more brightly around his jaw and cheeks. The jagged white lines made his face look like old porcelain, cracked under the glaze and ready to fly apart at any moment.
“What do you know about FTL drives?” Brooks asked aggressively, without preamble. There was a hint of a Scottish brogue in the way his r’s rolled the vowels just a little too emphatic for William’s ears.
“Almost nothing,” replied William.
“Well, you don’t need to know the intricacies of maintaining the drives, that’s for me and Addy, but you do need to understand the limits, so you don’t overextend and cause an uncontrolled drop.”
“What happens if there is an uncontrolled drop?” William asked.
“It’s assumed that we all die, again.” Brooks deadpanned. “but, technically, no one knows what happens because any ships that did disappeared.”
Brooks sat down in front of the navigation console. William took that as a cue to join him and pulled a chair over from communications.
“I’ll explain the basics to you and then we will get into the math. There are thre
e parts to FTL travel.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Entering slipstream, maintaining velocity, and exiting slipstream. It’s easiest to think of it as a tube with doors on the ends, but don’t because that’s utter bollox. What you need to know is that it takes a large amount of power, delivered rapidly, to enter FTL slipstream—and nearly as much to exit. You always have to have enough power in your capacitors to open the exit when you get to the end. That is why we and never come out of FTL with a full charge. Even though we are charging while in slipstream, we always use up some of the charge to exit. Maintaining slipstream requires very little power relative to entering and exiting, but we do it for days.”
“Capacitors?” William asked, fascinated. FTL was the purview of the dead and was the holy grail to fleet scientists. If there was one upside to being dead, it was the idea of seeing non gate systems.
“They really don’t teach you assholes anything, do they? This is the vaunted Navy training that makes you qualified to replace—to be our new pilot?” scoffed Brooks.
William was taken back by the active hostility.
“You can’t create enough power to enter slipstream with the engines alone. It requires a massive jolt of power that is supplied by equally massive capacitors. The length of the trip is also determined by the initial pulse. If life were fair, the tunnel would be perfectly straight, and I could teach you this in an hour. But gravity bends space, and we have to plot a course that follows the curves. Mess up the calculations and we all die. Now, let’s see how well you know three-dimensional gravitational geometry.”
What followed was informative but not as difficult as Brooks wanted it to sound. Brooks continued to be hostile about it, though. The FTL capacitors had a set limit on the power they could deliver. Travelling any distance required multiple point-to-point jumps. Between jumps, the capacitors needed several hours to finish recharging.
Navigation required a few simple calculations but was very sensitive to input data. The navigator needed to have a good idea what gravity effects existed between jump points, as well as an awareness of the current mass of the ship. Downtime between jumps not only served to repower the capacitors, but also gave navigators time to check for drift and adjust the next jump segment accordingly. FTL travel was frequently non-linear, often being faster and safer, to give large stars wide berth.
After explaining the navigation interface, Brooks set William to plotting a series of “easy” jumps. If William failed to account for an unmapped but implied stellar mass, or didn’t work quickly enough, Brooks responded with snide comments and harsh criticism. William was growing increasingly frustrated with Brooks’ teaching style but continued silently making the necessary corrections.
“Well, Billy-boy, I think that’s enough for now. You’ve killed us at least six times today and that’s my limit.”
“William. My name is William.” He tried to say it as neutrally as possible, but there was a definite tone of disapproval in his voice.
“Oh yeah? William, not Billy the Butcher?”
“William Butcher, or William, or Butcher, will do just fine.”
“Not proud then? Aren’t you the big hero of Mirada, Billy the Butcher?”
Williams lips compressed into a line. For a moment he sat still. He could feel the tingling in his fingers and the growing tightness in his throat. He rose abruptly. “If we’re done for now, I think I’ll be going.” He turned and strode tensely away, hoping the other man simply thought him offended and did not see the impending attack.
“You do that little Billy, just you do that.”
5
Your SecondLife
“Do it again, Butcher.” Brooks ground the words out through a clenched jaw. William looked at the jumps he had calculated. He knew it was right. He had caught all the little traps Brooks had been setting for him. There were three implied masses not plotted on charts, but evident in the movements of surveyed systems along their proposed path. He had adjusted the jump length to account for the extra drain on the drives from possible micro-singularities, though William knew there were none, because this route had been taken many times by Hades Fleet ships and no drain had been noted. He accounted for the vacuum energy of the ever-expanding universe. He had even formatted the code in the style Brooks demanded, something the manuals told him was entirely a style choice on the part of navigators.
“I am afraid, Mr. Brooks,” William said, with cold formality, “that I am unable to find any errors in the plotted jump.” The calm tone of voice was a cover. The tightness was back. His fingers tingled. He had to get away from the man.
“Then you’re bloody useless, bampot.”
“Mr. Brooks,” the Captain said from the doorway. “I think you are needed in engine control.” William had not heard her come in.
Brooks pushed away from table with exaggerated disgust. As he stomped out, he muttered loudly enough for William to hear, “Yer aff yer heid if you’re gonna put this walloper in charge of our jumps.” William noticed that the Scottish accent and vernacular came out strongest when Brooks wished to express his distaste.
“May I have a look at your figures Mr. Butcher?” asked the Captain.
William handed over the nexus, silently. He did not trust himself to speak. She scrolled through his final plots, the notes and all the vectors he used. She swiped the screen to see his other work. William resisted the urge to drum his fingers on the table and sigh loudly. Brooks’ histrionics were contagious.
The Captain held the pad out to him. “These all look fine. If we have to do anything fancy while you’re still getting your feet under you, I’ll run the figures past Brooks for a final review. Thank you for your diligence, Mr. Butcher.”
William sat down hard after she left. His legs felt weak. Once again, he felt on the edge of tipping over into panic, but something held him back. He had to get through another five days before they got to Mirada. He focused on this part of the trip and getting through it.
By fixed wormhole gate, it took ships four days to get to Mirada. It was by far the longest gate trip in Earth controlled space. Mirada was four times more distant from Earth than Babylon, which had been the furthest Earth colony. By FTL it would take six jumps, nearly two weeks. Brooks had been needling and harassing William for the last seven days. It was clear that something to do with the incident at Mirada was behind his antagonism. William was unwilling to discuss the battle, and that seemed to be the inevitable topic if he pushed back. So, for a week he had ignored the man’s jabs and focused on learning everything he needed to know about FTL navigation. He read up on the subject extensively in his off time and when he was on watch. Still, Brooks refused to accept that William had mastered any point of the process and made him redo the same simple plots over and over again. William had been just about at his limit when the Captain intervened.
Twelve-hour shifts had seemed long when the Captain had first told him the schedule, but during FTL they turned out to not to be onerous at all. Keeping busy was better than the alternative. When off duty, he read or binged films and series. He did not particularly enjoy the media he consumed, but it distracted him from thinking about Carly and his friends back on Eden. He had made so many plans. Career, family, maybe someday being able to go to University. Becoming a writer of obscure history, publishing books no one read.
His brain would turn back and back to all the things he had lost. The feelings, the regrets and missed opportunities, the sheer unfairness of everything. He felt like a dog worrying a bone, but he could not feel it. Emotions were mere sign cards in his brain. “Now I feel sad.” “Now I am angry.” “Time for self-pity.” He could not dive in, wallow in the pain and work through it. He just felt stuck.
There was no retreat into sleep. The designated “rejuvenation” time was not true sleep, just a hazy, dreamless blank, more like powering down. The time spent lying on his bed in that liminal state provided no feeling of refreshment nor of the quasi drunkenness of the heavy sleeper. It barely acted as a
marker of a new day.
He spent most of his time shadowing Sarah as she crawled through hatches and holes, or farmed disgusting microorganisms for, as she put it, “pleasure and profit.” After Sarah, he helped Addy in engine control. “Help” was a generous assessment of what he did for Addy, but the engineer was, if not friendly, at least not openly hostile. Adakunle Simon Haruna was obviously brilliant. He knew the ship in and out and was happy to show William the various improvements he’d made to the Tilly’s engines. Sarah told him that in his first life, Addy had been a wildly successful engineer who had made a small fortune with his FTL drive designs. She hinted that there was a dark story behind Addy’s death, but she never elaborated, and William had not asked.
During his free time, he looked over the information on the Hades Fleet. Technically, the ships would not have qualified as a fleet, given that they did not travel together en masse. It was a shocking number of ships, thousands of vessels, many times more than the Navy and commercial vessels of the living worlds. Closer examination revealed that more than 90% of them were used for transporting food and consumer goods from dead worlds to the gates. The large carrier transports were basically space-faring tugboats.
Survey ships like the Tilly were much less common. In the whole fleet, there were only four sets of paired ships like the Mikki and the Tilly, each pair bearing matched gods of death. Osiris and Nephthys. Malsumis and Glooscap. Erishkigal and Inanna.
The fleet also included the great transports like the Reaper, which brought the bodies from the living worlds to Elysium, along with smaller transports used for in-system transfers, and mining vessels.
William flipped back to his orientation checklist and then shut it down again. Some things just were not making sense to him. He had asked the counselor why the high-functioning dead were not allowed contact with the living world, and why the living did not know just how many of them there were. The counselor had talked about the importance of moving on and not giving people false hope. There was no way to predict who would come back high-functioning, blah, blah, blah. But William was skeptical. Knowing that you could be a live, real person after death, that would make more people want to sign up for mortgages. It would make some people willing to pay to be reanimated.
