“Really. Want to tell me about it, Kat?”
Kat realises that she really wants to tell him. She jumps up, the idea of regaling her father with her dream giving her a sudden burst of energy, and off she goes, telling him about waking up in a storage cabinet, about the magical skeleton, eating trashy fast-food, Histaff infections, and an identity crisis culminated by a harrowing escape in the worst ship in the galaxy. She mimics the action parts, waving her hands around like a child while making noises with her mouth, producing sound effects. Her father looks fascinated by it all, laughing at the correct places while gasping in horror at others.
“And then I froze over! Haha, it was so silly. I survived getting chopped in two, managed to regain consciousness after having my brain turned to slushy many times, and even survived having two actual Histaff behemoths pummel the ship I was in into the ground, and then at the end, I died because the atmosphere leaked from the ship due to catastrophic internal ship damage. I even remember having my face burned off again. Looking through those hardwired sensors in my skull was not pleasant. I kept getting a headache from the low resolution, but then what finally did me in was that I froze solid!” Here Kat devolves into a gale of laughter, the absurdity of the situation only now sinking in.
“Haha, that is a weird dream indeed. But Katare, what was that about magic? That sounded pretty spiffy, I think.”
Katare rolls her eyes. “Spiffy is lingo from over a thousand years ago, Dad! And that magic was just stupid, though. It didn't make any sense! Nothing there really made sense.” She falls back into her bed, totally ignoring the fact that she is in her underwear with just a shirt while her dad can look in her room. She sighs deeply, rolls over some more, drops off the edge of the moving mattress, and starts walking towards one of the many closets in her room. “But Daddy, I’m happy that I'm not really some mecha-addicted freak, though. Natural is really the best way to go! Just pure human, leave the metal and splicing to the common folk, as you say.”
“Yeah, I do say that, but this magic thing, though, that sounded pretty weird. Did you feel anything when he cast that? Do you know what those runes he wrote mean?” Solan is now pacing back and forth slowly, walking along the glass wall separating her room from the narrow sitting space Katare’s dad is located in. “You don’t have to tell me, but it just sounds so interesting, Kat.”
“There were the floating ones when Douglas casted spells slowly.” Kat does not see Solan stiffen. She does not see his gaze sharpen and bore into her barely clad back. Instead, she is entirely focussed on the wardrobe, stroking and feeling the many pieces of clothing. “They looked like the ones he scribbled on that shitty boat, but the ones on the boat all looked the same. The floating pieces of text and lines also contained these headache-inducing scribbles, lines connecting everything, and stuff like that. I also felt like I should know what they mean, but that felt like it would be a lot of effort, so I didn’t.”
“Hmm, when did you see these things? What colour were they?”
Kat bites her lip, rolling her eyes at the persistent questions. “I don't know. Like before I got out of that piece of crap salon? He froze parts of the Histaff slime when we met the first reworked. That’s when I saw those floating things first.”
Solan starts furiously tapping on a tablet attached to his wrist. The video playback from Katare’s perspective starts playing, showing a spacesuited skeleton, an ice spike appearing from nowhere, and a large Histaff amalgamation blocking the way. The way the slime shatters after it is frozen is interesting, but Solan frowns when he does not see a single floating symbol anywhere.
“And when he was poking that stupid ship with his finger. Loads of them floated around the boneheaded idiot back then.”
More tapping is followed by a playback of Katare staring at the engraving skeleton. Solan sees the runes turn blue, but does not spot a single floating line or symbol.
“Where are we going, by the way? This feels like the engines are running full blast? Yeah … couple hundred g’s?” Kat waves her arms around a bit. The odd way the momentum of her arms change combined with the minute vibrations she feels clue her into the fact that they are moving. The way the inertial dampeners fight the massive acceleration is imperfect, something she has learned to detect.
“First, we're making a small jump to a research station, a few light minutes out. Then we’re off to the core again. I still don't know how you ended up here, but I'll find out!” Solan keeps scrubbing through the video file, playing back the parts where Kat told him she saw floating symbols. His thin-skinned brows furrow as he fails to see anything special.
Kat, however, is sensing special things indeed. The fact that she keeps hearing shards of conversation between herself and Douglas is freaking her out.
“Ah, we’re making the first jump in a few seconds. I’ve had the engines recalibrated, so I wonder if you can still tell when the jump happens. It should be perfectly smooth now. Anyway, Kat, tell me more about the magi–”
Everything freezes. The space and time in front of the kilometre-long vessel that the father and daughter pair are on has become nearly infinitely thick, the space behind it nearly infinitely thin. This way, the ship needs only travel its own length in order to travel many times the actual distance. This concept - colloquially called the warp drive - causes the ship to appear near instantaneously at the pre-calculated location. The amount of space that can be squeezed from the back to the front determines the warp speed. This does have a single side effect, though. Although the transition is instantaneous for anyone inside the bubble, there is still travel time as seen from the outside. The universe does insist that people can’t exist in two places at once, after all. Faster than light speed travel is very much possible, you just need to throw enough energy at it. The amount of energy determines how much time passes in the outside world while in transit.
So when the entire ship freezes in space, Katare wonders what's going on at first. Then some form of fog lifts and she freaks out. The only reason she does not go on a full freakout, destroying everything in reach in a mad rampage is the fact that she can't move. Her mental state was already steadily declining the moment she started hearing fragments of Douglas’ synthetic voice, combined with what she recognises as her own speech. This leads her to the conclusion that her dream was, in fact, not a dream and very much real. The fog over her brain clears further as the panic takes further hold.
She is still halfway inside the closet, grabbing for a glow in the dark dress with one hand while the other rubs at some Anterian spider silk underwear. She really missed proper garments, she realises.
What was with the way Solan kept calling her Kat, Katare, and Katarenin? Usually, he sticks to a single name for centuries. Now he switched four times within minutes.
Why is she frozen in time, unable to move but very much able to think? Shouldn’t her mind also be locked in time while the universe sorts out what to do with the impossible way the ship is currently crossing a lot of time and space? But no, Katare can think clearly. She recalls how the memories of Douglas and the Histaff truly felt like a dream. How telling Solan everything felt like the most natural thing to do. She even ignored the blinking blue dot at the bottom of her vision without another thought.
Why did she hear herself and Douglas speak? Then it hits her. A lot of species don’t have ears, but nearly all sapients have eyes. Encoding sound into the visuals is a widespread policy and a common standard concerning visual interfaces; it usually needs to be turned off manually. Katare then suspects that the universal language trait is not meant or designed for the high speed, content-rich environment of the current age. Malls usually have regulations locking that feature away, but she suddenly understands why she kept hearing that cacophony of broadcasts even when the white boat’s atmosphere was gone - why she kept hearing the mind-numbing stream of multi-layered entertainment and amusement even while her body was slowly freezing.
Now she realizes that Douglas could have kept her
thawed had he only cast one of those globes of fire near her. Ah, no. By that point, her skull had been scoured clean by the superheated tonnes of upper atmosphere they had smashed through.
Something in her heart hardens. Is not this all Douglas’ fault? That stupid, retarded skeleton has been at the crux of all that's gone wrong in her entire life. It could have brought some food along, letting her recover her flesh while keeping her warm with a fireball. It should have left her well enough alone, come to think of it. The cryo pods she usually takes her naps in can withstand planetary annihilation. It undoubtedly could have endured anything the Histaff cleaners may have thrown at the system. Obliteration of Histaff only requires a perfect scouring of all matter, locked and sealed indestructible containers - like her cryo coffin - need only be thrown in the sun for a bit to decontaminate them.
The fact that she found out that she is a light-based processor probably running a copy of her own brain in a vat somewhere is also Douglas’ fault. She could have lived on for aeons without ever finding out her own father kept stuffing the link to her own biological brain in new clones. And the mind control thing? So obvious now that she knows what to look for. Solan was always so nice to her, but you don’t get to become the boss of a sizable chunk of the galaxy by being nice. So of course, he is going to use a bit of control when it comes to his next of kin.
She even tried linking her own consciousness to a robot frame! She wants to roll around the floor in shame while destroying solar systems in rage at the same time. Her own frozen form remains still as her mind goes through a rollercoaster of emotions.
So now what, she thinks half an hour later. Her own father obviously has not seen this development coming. Nobody ever consciously lived through an entire warp transit before, she is pretty sure. The fact her own hormones can’t really influence her perception right now also confuses her. If the entire ship is locked in stasis, why is she still seeing things? She is sure she is still feeling things too, but the unchanging nature of her physical form has long since let those sensations fall away. People stop feeling the clothes on their body after a while, let alone if those clothes stop moving.
A shot of mad nervousness crashing through her unmoving body, Katare decides to check what the blue boxes have to say to her.
[ Reworked Histaff behemoth chrysalis lvl 45 slain; 231,703,923 xp earned ]
[ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 25 slain; 703,923 xp earned ]
[ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 30 slain; 1,017,238 xp earned ]
[ … ]
The list is endless. Histaff kill upon Histaff kill spams her vision until her entire view is blocked by the messages. Katare freaks out again, doom scenarios about spending the rest of her life with her vision covered in blue messages popping up in her imagination. Then the list stops, the repeating messages vanish, and she is left with a single line.
[ Philotically twin-linked photonic mind lvl NaN NaN/NaN xp reached ]
[ NaN xp deferred ]
Having her condition rubbed into her face once again does little good for her mental state. She shouts at it to leave her alone, to go away. It does so.
[ Congratulations, you have reached philotically twin-linked photonic mind max level ]
[ Your skills allow you the following options ]
[ ERROR philotically twin-linked photonic mind NaN/NaN ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad arcane skeleton 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad soul skeleton 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad skeleton 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad revenant 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad zombie 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad mummy 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad death knight 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad arcane wraith 0/10 ]
[ Lesser flesh-clad soulbound construct 0/10 ]
[ Lesser soulbound human 0/10 ]
[ Lesser cloned puppet 0/10 ]
[ UNKNOWN Brickad golem 0/NAN ]
[ UNKNOWN technological homunculus 0/10 ]
[ UNKNOWN enhanced android 0/10 ]
[ UNKNOWN UNKNOWN NAN/NAN ]
[ UNKNOWN DEITY of Death 0/999999999 ]
[ UNKNOWN DEITY of Life 0/999999999 ]
Her mind shakes some more. Katare then has yet another mental breakdown. She knows that she can change her physical shape. She understands from the trickle of information dripping into her mind that she can rewrite her very physical being. The idea of total freedom of body, undoing all that her father has done to her physical self is extremely alluring, and she almost chooses at random just to spite everyone and everything.
And Douglas, that piece of shit bone … She somehow knows that he could choose this too at some point. He killed quite a few Histaff beasts, so surely, he had this happen at least once in their journey through the space station. Knowing the utter, despicable idiot, he probably chose the most boring and stupid option possible.
A red haze comes across her vision as Katare thinks about all the anguish she could have avoided had Douglas only acted differently. The small seed of hate that she has been nursing in her heart all this time blooms now that her mind is stuck in a physical vacuum. Her own body frozen in time, her consciousness spins further and further away from what would be considered mentally sane by the general populous.
“–c. I know it sounds silly, but I’ve always been rather interested in the supernatural. My companies have mastered the physical realm ages ago, but there has been this stumbling block that I’ve never managed to breach. Do you know that the Histaff partially works on supernatural principles? Those blades can cut through matter that they theoretically can’t even scratch. We’ve managed to tell everyone it’s some form of super acid, but … Ah, my pilot just informed me we jumped, did you feel it?”
Katare’s odd silence goes unnoticed by the aged man, who is still too busy scouring the video footage for any signs of runes to pay attention to his daughter. Katare, in turn, uses this time to reign her mind back in. The effect of having a body - and all the mood-altering drugs that are coursing through her veins beside her own rather unstable hormonal levels - stabilizing her mind swiftly. She’s shortly confused by that odd episode, but her quick brain puts the pieces together before her father’s little monologue ends.
“Ha, no, Daddy,” she says while copying her previous vapid tone. “Those engie guys did a good job. Give them a bonus, okay?”
“Ah, yes, of course. So tell me about this magic. Where does it come from?”
An odd compulsion drags her consciousness back into the blissful cooperation she was in before. Faking her previous tone did not help in this regard, and soon the nightmarish episode of being frozen in space for hours seems like a mad nightmare. “They made my eyes hurt, you know. Not fun to talk about, but they were blue, just like these screens are. Do you know that they told me I’m a philotically twin-linked photonic mind? So stupid. Anyway, squishing all those large bone beasties must have given me a lot of those ‘xp’ things because I can totally level up my race! Wahaha! Should I become a lesser flesh-clad mummy? No, that’s a stupid name. Ooh, Brickad golem. I wore one of those, made chopping up the ships a breeze.”
Solan is paralysed. His mouth is gaping open while staring at the women who is still fingering the many clothes inside the closet.
“Or deity of death sounds fun! Soul seems to exist, it says here, so maybe that’s why the warp jump regulations are in place?”
“Wha–what other races can you choose from? And what other things do these … blue screens tell you?”
And so Katare tells Solan everything: the entire adventure in the space station and her slight, hate-fuelled episode of madness tucked away in a hazy corner of her mind. She tells him everything, from the bonuses the various status effects give her to her own understanding of her stats.
⁂
[ Name: Katarenin Auchinfon Tomat Peezes ]
[ Race: Philotically twin-linked photonic mind ]
[ Level: NaN (NaN/NaN) ]
[ Class:
None ]
[ HP: 72/73 ][ HP/h: 0.04 ]
[ MP: 0/NaN ][ MP/h: 0 ]
[ STR: 6 ]
[ AGI: 7 ]
[ CON: 8 ]
[ VIT: 6 ]
[ INT: NaN ]
[ WIS: NaN ]
[ Technological parasite ]
[ Controller of UNKNOWN human body ]
[ Universal Language ]
[ Thought control ]
[ Brain surgery; -INT, -WIS ]
⁂
Solan hasn’t moved a single muscle the entire time, listening to his daughter’s rambling in stupefied silence. The few loyal scientists and artificial minds on the ship are flooding his communicator with messages, all of them expressing similar states of confusion and panic. He looks at Katare with an odd emotion on his face as she happily tells him she is currently under the effect of both the thought control and brain surgery status. Her happy expression as she tells him not to worry about it because her intelligence and wisdom don’t seem to work anyway does odd things to his otherwise cold and unfeeling heart.
He taps a single message into the communicator the moment he regains his wits. He orders his captain to set a direct course to the core worlds, knowing full well that the mobile research lab they are currently rendezvousing with does not have powerful enough equipment to study something like magic.
“It’s a bit of a shame, though. That Douglas guy did some pretty cool things with magic. Ah well, he was a stupid, stinky, stupid skeleton anyway. Good riddance! So Daddy, where are we going, by the way? I really want to go on a black hole dive. Maybe watch some pod racing?” Katare starts pulling on some complex items of clothing, utterly oblivious to the near panic her father is in.
She turns around, putting a finger to her pouty lips as she looks upwards, thinking hard. “Oh, just now when we jumped? Yeah, that wasn’t fun. Please don’t warp, for now. I feel like something really ba–”
Histaff Page 25
