Mind Games

by Dragon Cobolt

  The entire station shuddered and I felt the floor shifting underneath my feet. I staggered, grabbing onto the frame of the door, then looked up and down the curving corridor that made up the outer ring. The dim lights that came from the ceiling flickered on and off – and then a voice came from inside my head .

  “Bugger me, is this working?”

  I blinked. Had I…

  Had I imagined that?

  But no. Along with the voice, there had been an image, appearing in the right hand corner of my vision: A box with a static-filled field in it and a name beneath, proclaiming that an ‘unknown signal’ was being picked up.

  “Hello?” I rasped, my voice sounding strange to my ears.

  “Ah! I heard that!” The voice said - and as it returned, so did the boxy image and the name. I focused on the name: It was male, deep and slightly lilting. I cocked my head slightly and wondered if he could see me too, or if he could see my inventory. I blushed and didn’t know why I was embarrassed...but I was. I crossed one arm over my breasts. The voice returned.

  “Bloody hell , you’re in CryoSup. Okay, um, shit. Listen, whoever you are, my name is Lucas. I’m in tech support, and I think I might be one of the only people left alive on this bloody station. If you want to survive, we’re going to need to work together. Okay?”

  My hand went to my throat, rubbing it. Was the voice in my head scarier, or was the fact that most of the people on this station were dead scarier? But I took some solace in the fact that Lucas was here. Lucas. It was a nice name. And as I thought of his name, I saw that the static filled image that popped up whenever he spoke had a face and a name to go with it. He was a smiling, dark haired looking man with a lantern jaw and deep, brown eyes. The name underneath said that his name was Lucas M. Astra.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. “Are you, uh, one of the cryonics?”

  “Those coffin things?” I asked, biting my lip.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “T-Then yeah,” I said, nodding slowly as I dropped my hand from my throat. “What was that sound ?”

  “Well, ah, that was the sound of the habitation deck’s station keeping engines...exploding.”

  “What!?” I blinked, my mouth opening, then closing. “That’s bad . That sounds bad. What the fuck is a station keeping engine?” I rubbed my face with my palm. “S-Sorry, I...I don’t even remember my name. I just woke up in a cof...er...cryonics. Um, it was labeled 0451.”

  “Okay, I’ll start trying to crack the networks for the cryonics. We had a lot of bigwigs in there, we’ll see who you are.” He chuckled. “You’re probably five or six steps above me on the social strata. So I’m going to enjoy bossing you around until your memory comes back.”

  I made a face somewhere between a scowl and a smile - on the one hand, after being on my own for so much of my subjective life, the idea of having a boss kind of sucked. But I admit. I liked Lucas’ attitude. It made me feel like he had things at least slightly under control . “Enjoy it. So, station-keeping?”

  “Right. Virgil Station’s in the L3 point – basically, a place where Earth and the Moon balance each other out gravitationally speaking. It normally doesn’t need much station-keeping, but the experiments the boffins were running makes everything screwy. So, without our station-keeping engine, the ship’s going to start slewing out of orbit. If we get too far out, then a week or two from now, we’re going to smash the whole thing into the Earth.”

  I gulped. “And that’s bad, right?”

  “Well, for them,” Lucas said. “If we can’t get off this station in two weeks, we’ll be dead either way. Though, I mean...wait...wait, wait, wait, if you’re free to move around, we could just head for the escape pods and-”

  I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose, holding up my hand. Lucas cut himself off.

  “I should get upstairs to habitation, shouldn’t I?” I sighed, quietly. The idea of just getting out of this place was tempting, but...no. I couldn’t just let this station – which had to be huge if this was just part of it – drop onto the Earth. “How long do we have to fix the engines?”

  Lucas coughed. “Two hours before the degradation becomes irreversible.”

  “Fucking wonderful ,” I muttered.

  When I closed my eyes, a string of text had appeared in the space between the inventory and the indicators of my health and my weapon.

  OBJECTIVE: Re-Activate or Repair Station Keeping Engine

  [Time: 2:00:00]

  As I watched, the time blipped down.

  [Time: 1:59:99]

  [Time: 1:59:98]

  [Time: 1:59:97]

  I opened my eyes.

  “Time to get to work,” I muttered.

  ***

  The first thing Lucas helped me get was some clothes. Turned out one of the storage rooms had lockers that I hadn’t been able to access by touching their open buttons. Lucas told me the pass-key for his locker and I punched it in. Rather than finding clothes, I found a sleek collar and a small tube of gray looking liquid. I picked up the tube, my brow furrowing ever so slightly.

  “What is-”

  “Right, you’re missing out on important facts,” Lucas’ voice cut me off. “That’s a container of nanites. The collar’s a clothing fabricator. In engineering, we had to have clothes tailored to specific situations – the best choice was a sheet of nanites. Smart clothes! Rather than having to don new gear, you just tap in the program and fffip , the clothing reforms perfectly to what you want. You can even scan in other bits of armor into the program and mix and match as you see fit. You’ve got a rig, so it’ll tap right in and you can direct it in your interface. ”

  “Huh,” I said. I undid the collar, frowning as I looked at the interior. It seemed to be smooth silver, though it was etched with an odd set of curving symbols. The name that sprang unbidden to mind was runes. But I had no idea what a rune was, or why the symbols made me think of them. I traced one with a finger and felt a strange, uncomfortable nervousness slide through my spine. “Lucas, are you sure these are safe? Also, uh, rig?”

  “Sure are,” he said. “I mean, safe as anything else on this bloody station.”

  I gulped. “I could just-”

  “What? Wander around bare arsed?” he asked, sounding amused.

  Embarrassment filled me. I felt my whole body turn bright red.

  “Y-You can’t see me, can you?” I asked.

  “...well...yeah, I’m hooked into your cyber-rig, but I’ve also got access to, well, the security cameras...”

  He was watching me. His eyes were on my bare ass, on my pale skin. He could see the swell of my breasts, the hard nubs of my nipples. Everything. I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw, the embarrassment becoming shame . And arousal. Intense, confusing arousal – arousal that made my pussy glisten. I snapped the collar onto my neck without a second thought. Nothing happened.

  “You need to put the nanites into the socket – near the front, lassie,” Lucas said.

  I found the socket with my thumb. Attaching the tube of nanites to it was a matter of moments. The collar buzzed and a thin line of grey goop started to spread from the bottom half. It flowed along my skin, like cold water mixed with mud. My nipples grew stiffer stiff as the goop dripped down my breasts...but rather than falling to the ground, the droplets swung around and cleaved to my breasts like a second layer of skin. The cool, tight grip of the material around my nipples felt as snug and as comfortable as a lover’s grasp. Then it tightened slightly and I whimpered as my breasts became perkier and thrust out – supported by a lattice of nanites. The flowing liquid came to my bare pussy, slithering over my sex with the same disquieting sensation.

  I squirmed and bit my lip hard to keep from moaning as the coolness slurped up between my thighs, looping around to find the cleft of my ass. It spread outwards and upwards, meeting with the nanites that came from the back of my shoulders. I looked down and found a whimper escaping my clenched tee
th as the thin line of nanites that pressed to my sex drew taut . I was essentially wearing a completely skintight layer of paint that formed the rough shape of a one piece bathing suit as designed by a fetishistic Japanese anime studio.

  ...the fuck was an anime?

  “W-Why don’t I have pants Lucas?” I snarled, arousal and embarrassment transmuting, through the magic of a human soul, into anger. “Also: What the fuck is a cyber-rig?”

  “You’re a tall lassie. You’ve only got so many nanites - once they’re out, they’re out. So, they’ve covered you as best as they can,” Lucas said, his voice so studiously neutral that I was sure he was popping a hard on as tough as my wrench. “Well, you’ll have ta live with it, until we can find more nanites. We’re not getting those other lockers open unless to find a key. Now, a cyber-”

  I grabbed my wrench and brought it smashing down into one of the lockers. The door bent inwards and the electronic lock crunched with an ear popping squeal . Red lights flashed on the lock and I smashed again – causing the door to cave inwards. It was made of really cheap metal, light weight rather than sturdy. I used the wrench and the opening I had made to lever the door open, and grabbed another tube of nanites. Soon, they were flowing along my thighs and knees.

  “Blood hell!” Lucas said. “Ask me before ya do something like that!”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” I asked, eyeing the other lockers.

  “Aye, it worked. It set off every security alarm on Cyronics!” He groaned. “Shite! Shite! Shite!”

  “I thought the only thing I had to worry about was those...” I paused. “What the fuck is going on on this station?”

  “That’s just it,” he said, through clenched teeth. “We got monsters running around, the security system’s gone ahoo, and you just called down two fucking TCS drones to check out what the noise is. And, lassie, they don’t ask nice in Cryonics.”

  I blinked. “Oh.”

  Lucas sighed. “You better run, lassie. And don’t stop .”

  I started for the door, but the sound of the drones approaching stopped me dead. There was something horrible in the sound they made. It was a rattling sound, but so fast that it became an almost tearing sound. Worse was their voices – computerized and deep.

  “ Stop, lawbreaker .”

  I hefted my wrench. From the sound of their approach, I knew I couldn’t outrun them. But they sounded big and rattling – so I stepped back and away from the door. Then the first drone came to the door itself and I was struck almost dumb by their design. At first, I thought that a massive hula-hoop had come to kill me. But it was too wide, too thick. The outer edge of the ring was studded with metal that looked designed to cling to walls and grated floors with thick, curved teeth that glinted in the pale light of the room. Between the teeth were circular eye-cameras, each one glowing with a malignant red flare, as if the whole thing had been set on fire. Looped within the ring was a second ring, providing a pair of wheels that could rotate and spin the drone around in any direction. More, I saw that the ring was compressible, squeezing through the door and shifting the two rings so they overlapped to make it as thin as possible.

  I figured that a security drone should try and stop to capture a ‘lawbreaker’, but whatever had gone wrong in the station had turned ‘capture’ to try and run me the fuck over. The drone shot forward and I only escaped it by the skin of my teeth, diving out of the way. The ring smashed into the wall of lockers behind me, causing several dozen to spring open at once. Their locks started to flash and whir with red lights – and I groaned inwardly at the idea of even more security alarms going off.

  But I had no more time for thinking. The second drone had arrived, and was also pushing its way into the room. I stepped forward and brought my wrench smashing down into one of the camera eyes. It shattered and the drone stopped as if it was assessing damage. The wrench felt light – adrenaline surging through my body as I brought the wrench down again. Another camera. I stepped back and managed to get in one last smack. The other drone, though, started to rev up and back away from the wall. It aimed at me. I shifted quickly – moving into the drone in the door’s blind spot.

  Both shot forward.

  I sprang out of the way.

  Both smashed home. Metal claws and spikes smashed and locked together. Ring surfaces deformed beyond their limits. And then I sprang in and started bashing both with the wrench, aiming at any weak spot I could. Metal flew and I felt something tug at my sleeve. But then I stepped back and the two drones lay on the ground, their ring-surfaces snapped in half like busted tires. Their cameras had covered the ground with shattered glass, something that made me stand perfectly still until I had surveyed the situation.

  I looked down and saw that my left arm had a thin slit of red along it, and the red was growing. I hissed, my hand going to my bloody cut. That made it hurt more. I closed my eyes - and I saw that the red bar for my health had dropped from 100/100 to 78/100. What was more, a third bar had appeared, between Health and Psi: Armor . It was at 100/100 and was colored a bright green.

  I had taken damage.

  A fucking quantifiable amount of damage.

  For some reason, that pissed me the fuck off.

  “Lassie! Are you alive ?” Lucas’ voice broke into my distraction. The sound of his voice set off a quivering peal of arousal down my spine. My nipples ached. My cunt ached. God. I needed to be fucked . Like...pinned against a wall and slammed like a bitch in heat. I laughed quietly, adrenaline buzzing through my body. I was horny . Should people be horny after a fight? I shook my head from side to side and stepped gingerly around the glass to check the other lockers – speaking as I did so.

  “I seem to be.”

  “Well, uh, lassie...I can answer your question about the rig.” Lucas chuckled. “And give you something to cheer about.”

  The first locker I checked was empty, save for one of the nanovials. I picked it up - and saw as the nanites swept the vials up. They were dragged along my skin, like pushing a pea through a straw, the pressure curious and slightly ticklish. The vial slid along my shoulder, down my back, then popped into a silvery belt that my smart-clothing extruded for me. When I closed my eyes, I could see that several ‘grayed out’ boxes in my inventory had become black. One of those newly unfilled boxes had a tiny vial symbol in it, with a numeral: x1.

  So.

  The rig could track and sort my inventory for me, working with my nanites. NIce. But as I noticed all of this, Lucas spoke: “A cyber-rig is the shite they put into naval officers, marines, and those creepy fucks from the OC. They’re designed to enhance and improve combat, technical and psi abilities, while also managing battlefield situational awareness. Best of all, they got little nanites that run in your blood - they keep track of your hurts, your energy levels, everything. They can even tell you if you’re poisoned or knocked up.”

  I bit my lip. The casual mention of being knocked up made my aching, eager cunt throb . I looked away, trying to ignore it.

  “But they also have slots for additional cyber-modules, so you can enhance and expand yer abilities. The best rigs can even download new skills into your noodle, I hear. And the system here...it’s registering your rig. It’s…” He whistled. “ Jesus -” he pronounced it ‘jay-sus’ “-your rig’s a class five multispectral system. And the system has pegged hostiles and keyed you into the cyber-module dispenser.”

  “Does that mean…” I paused.

  “Aye, lassie: I’ve got a pair of cyber-modules here. Let me see if I can shunt them to you through the station’s delivery system...there we go!” I heard a rattling clank and a small pneumatic tube in the corner of the room opened - revealing a pair of wafer-thin gray disks. When I picked them up, they melted into my hand, vanishing like smoke. I shivered and saw that a glowing numeral had appeared beside my health and psi bar: CM: 2 .

  “Nice…” I whispered. “So, the system is designed to give me these every time I take out a hostile?”

  “Or accomplis
h an objective. It’s hardcoded, lassie, but I am going to do my best to cheat the system and dump all of them at once.” Lucas chuckled. “Never minded some munchkining when I can get away with it.”

  I mouthed the word ‘munchkin’ to myself.

  “Nevermind, lassie,” Lucas said, chuckling.

  “Why the fuck would they keep module back, though?” I asked, frowning.

  “Well, they only give ‘em to soldiers who show they’re loyal and doing a good job. Plus, it takes a certain amount of mental fortitude and skill to absorb them without going buggo,” Lucas said, his voice matter of fact. “The idea bein’ a good trooper can hack having more modules than a shite one.”

  “Right…” I turned back to checking out the lockers. They looked empty, other than those nanites I had snatched. Then I saw something tucked away in the one at the far end. My brow furrowed. “Lucas, who was T. Dubois?” I asked.

  “He was the security officer for Cryonics,” Lucas said. “He’s...different now.”

  I reached in.

  When I pulled my hand back, I was hefting a pistol. I checked the magazine with a cool efficiency that I hadn’t known I had – and noticed that the nanites I wore had reacted to the blood soaking them. They focused, clumped, then filled into the wound. I felt a tiny pricking sensation run through my skin – then the nanites faded away and revealed that the wound had become a thin scar. Regenerating clothes. Nice. I also noticed that the rip in my clothes remained. I frowned and then touched one of the nanite tubes to my collar.

  The clothes healed.

  So, my clothes could heal me, but that used up the nanites.

  All of this was tracked by my interface: Health had come back up to 100/100, and now my Armor was down to 89/100. I did the mental math. One armor ‘point’ had healed two ‘health’ point. And when I closed my eyes and focused on the image of the vial, I saw that it held 50 Armor Points in its nanite reserves. Which made sense: One vial had been enough to give me the stripper outfit. Two had been enough to completely cover me. I opened my eyes and looked back at the rip. I frowned at it - and the rip flowed across my skin, evening out as it did so. Soon, it had created an oval opening between my breasts, framing the inner curves of my chest.