by Isaac Hooke
“Excellent!” Targon said. “Then you’ll agree to sign this contract…”
Rhea received the share request and accepted the document. She read it through. It seemed a standard boilerplate agreement, allowing Targon to use any and all footage he recorded while her and her companions were aboard. It also gave him nonexclusive rights to rebroadcast any video she shared with him.
She signed it.
“Thank ye kindly,” Targon said.
“You were pretending to be far more outraged a few moments ago than you really were, because you thought it would help you convince her to sign the contract, didn’t you?” Will said.
“Maybe,” Targon admitted. “Hey. Anyone up for a game of Robot Wars with yours truly? I’d like to get a few more segments recorded.”
“Of you beating the Warden…” Will said drily.
“That’s right!” Targon admitted.
Rhea chuckled softly. “We’ll play you, Merchant.”
Targon beamed. “I’ll set up the lobby.”
12
Time passed slowly in the transport.
On the second day, Rhea found herself growing impatient—she was eager to try the Ban’Shar, and she refused to wait until they reached Earth before doing so. And so she woke up early that morning and fetched the weapon from the crate that harbored it. Will and Horatio grudgingly helped clear a space for her to practice.
“This is a bad idea,” Will said. “And remember, you’re giving Targon free hidden camera footage. Plus, I doubt he’ll be happy when he finds out. There’s a rule: never shoot a weapon aboard a starship. I think that applies to your disk generator thingies. Even more so.”
She shrugged, secured her boots to the deck via a strap, then activated the Ban’Shar. The plasma disks erupted from the metal knuckles, painting the nearby bulkheads and crates blue. She instinctively ran through different defensive postures with the disks, being careful not to bring them too close to the deck, bulkheads, or overhead.
She discovered it had a remote interface she could access, which allowed her to loosen the buckle that held them to her hands. She wasn’t sure how useful that would be in a fight, but it did make them easier to remove.
When she originally tried to transform those disks into blades, as she had done in one of her flashbacks, she was uncertain at first what to do. But after some trial and error, she realized that instead of making a complete fist, she had to leave certain fingers extended, while the remainder closed. It was easy: extend the index finger, and the disks transformed into plasma blades. Join the two hands together, and the blades became a single, longer unit, whose reach surprised her—it bit into the bulkhead, cutting a sizable hole before she could deactivate it.
Will regarded the black gash dubiously. “Told you this was a bad idea.”
“Guess I probably don’t need to practice for the duration of the trip,” she said. “Quick, help me shove the crates back into place before Targon finds out.”
“He’ll find out when he wakes up and reviews the footage anyway,” Will said, but he shoved off to begin moving back the crates.
She removed the knuckles, freed her feet from the straps, and returned the weapon to the crate she’d taken it from. She had only just begun rearranging the remaining crates to cover the gash when Targon came jetting inside.
He wore a big smile on his face, but when he saw the damage to his bulkhead, he was beside himself. “Me precious wall! Do ye know how much it’s going to cost to fix this? And ye could have killed yourself and your friends!”
When she explained how relatively shallow the gash was compared to the hull thickness and promised to devote her every waking hour to playing Robot Wars with him, he forgave her.
“All right,” Targon said. “But don’t let it happen again.”
“I won’t,” she promised.
True to her word, she didn’t touch the Ban’Shar for the remainder of the journey. She also played Robot Wars with Targon each and every day, though she didn’t devote all her waking hours to the game: sometimes, she just needed some Rhea time.
She often sat alone in virtual reality, seated cross-legged on the pier before a Ganymedean lake, the stars shining through the translucent panes of a geodesic dome on the horizon, and the city lights of a quaint settlement beckoning behind her. She sat there, dreaming of a world she could not remember. A world she would never see.
One such time, Will materialized next to her.
“How’s it hanging, Dude?” he quipped. He took a seat next to her on the pier, letting his feet dangle over the edge.
She gave him a forced smile and returned her gaze to the stars reflecting off the lake. Jupiter hung low in the sky. The red spot seemed bigger today, as if the constituent storm was spinning so fast that it threatened to break itself apart.
Too bad it wasn’t real.
“Why do things always turn out differently than we expect?” she said. “I thought I’d be happy on Ganymede. I thought I’d be home. Instead I found a dead world, colonized by people I didn’t recognize, and a government that threatened to imprison me unless I agreed never to return.”
“It’s life,” Will said. “We can’t control the randomness of it.”
“I suppose not,” she said. “I just wish… I’d found what I was looking for.”
“And what was that?” he asked.
“A sense of belonging,” she replied.
He studied her for a moment. “You had that on Earth, didn’t you?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “While the people of Rust Town called me their Warden, and adored me, with many willing to follow me to their deaths, I always felt disconnected from them. Like I didn’t truly belong. And when I found out what I was, I thought that explained these feelings. I thought that coming here would give me the sense of belonging I so desired. Instead, it’s only made me feel even further alienated from everything. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Welcome to everyone’s daily existence,” he said. “Each one of us has to deal with similar problems and find purpose. Though admittedly, the issues vary from person to person. We all bring our own unique situations to the table. Your blank past, for example.”
She nodded. “You’d think that would make things easier.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I used to think that when we first revived you, but I can see now that’s not the case.”
“No,” she said. “Especially when you have assassins hunting you, and you don’t know why.”
“That can cause just a few problems…” he agreed.
“But it does give me purpose,” she said. “At least a temporary one.” Her voice had grown cold at those words.
He gave her a careful glance. “Assassinating the assassins.”
“Yes,” she said.
He rubbed his chin. “You know, you don’t have to do this. You could join Horatio and me and live the rest of your life as a salvager. You could stay in the Outlands indefinitely. Horatio or I could make city runs now and again to sell salvage and fetch supplies. You, meanwhile, could wait along the outskirts, never needing to set foot in a settlement again.”
She considered that for a moment. “It’s tempting. But let’s be honest: the assassins will find me, eventually. Just as the Scorpion did. I have to hunt them down at the source.”
He looked away. “Yeah, okay. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sway you, but I had to try.” He gazed at the stars in silence. Then: “By the way, do you really plan to obey the contract you signed? You know, the one where you agree never to return to Ganymede? Or did you just sign it for the get-out-of-jail-free card?”
“I plan never to return,” she said.
“You sure?” he asked. “You’re not even going to try sneaking back, just once? It’s a big moon. You could probably slip past their orbital cameras in a normal shuttle.”
“I’m a woman of my word,” she told him.
He bowed his head. “And so you are.”
>
She unfolded her legs and let them hang over the edge of the pier, just like Will’s. “Besides, there’s nothing for me there. I realize that now. I retrieved the Ban’Shar, and triggered a memory, so at least the visit wasn’t for nothing. But my people, and the cities they once roamed, are no more. There’s no place for a Ganymedean in modern Ganymede.” She shook her head, feeling suddenly emotional, and she blinked away the tears. “You know, ever since I’ve awakened, I’ve thought I was someone special. And for a while there, I even believed it… but you know what? I’m not special. What you said is exactly right. Everyone is struggling with purpose. Everyone deals with problems.”
“No, you are special,” he said. “Your problems rise above the issues ordinary people have to deal with. Not everyone can inspire a whole settlement to fight against seemingly insurmountable odds. Not everyone can garnish a following of hundreds of thousands across the world, even though they’ve been banned from all the major streaming networks. And not everyone can destroy the mind-jacking chip in a mayor’s head and get him to restore water to the settlement along its borders. You are special, Dude. Live with it.”
She nodded slowly. “I guess.”
“You’re a warrior,” he said. “Not just spiritually, but physically, too. Not everyone can kill an assassin like the Scorpion.”
“I had help,” she said. “Without Horatio…”
“Hey, what about me?” he said. “No, just kidding. I was a bit late to the party. I can’t climb buildings like you guys…”
“You’re right,” she said. “I would have died without your help as well. Thank you for what you did.”
He smiled. “Not a problem.” He paused. “I wonder what the Scorpion has been reborn as. You know, there used to be an arachnid called a scorpion that was pretty common in the southern parts of the continent. If there are any still eking out an existence there, it would be poetic justice if he came back as one of them.”
She looked at him. “You’re really set on that reincarnation theory of yours.”
“Well yeah.” He glanced at her over one shoulder. “Think about it. Life is the expression of the universe. An endless cycle of death and rebirth. There is no escape. We live, making as much use of the time that’s given to us in the bodies we have, and we can do nothing when death takes us, and the next cycle is thrust upon us.”
She sighed wearily. “I just hope I don’t come back as some bioweapon.”
“Don’t worry, the odds are low,” Will told her. “The universe is a vast place. Teeming with life.”
“Except we haven’t encountered any of it yet,” Rhea said.
Will smiled patiently. “I thought I put some emphasis on the word vast. Maybe not.” He gestured at the sky. “Look at the stars in your simulated environment. There are probably hundreds of other sentient species like us out there in the known universe. Thousands. Maybe millions.”
“And we can be reincarnated as any one of them?” she asked.
“That’s right,” he replied. “And I’m not even counting the quadrillions of lesser species that might exist on all these worlds that we also have the potential to return as.”
“If coming back as an alien tick worm was meant to cheer me up, it didn’t work,” she said.
“No, it was meant to open your eyes,” he said. “At the incredible complexity of the universe, and the life it contains.”
“Consider my eyes opened.” She turned her gaze toward the dark sky. Space was so very vast, filled with countless stars. And many of these ‘stars’ were galaxies themselves, so far away that they appeared merely as pinpoints of light. Some estimates pegged the number of galaxies in the observable universe at one hundred billion. It made sense that life would exist on more than a few of the worlds each contained.
She finally looked away from those stars, and her gaze settled on Jupiter. “So beautiful. Jupiter.”
“It is,” Will said. “Like you.”
Stunned, she looked at him. “Do you mean that?”
He returned her gaze. She saw only sincerity in his eyes. “Yeah.”
She smiled. “Thank you.” She looked back to the stars. “Though beauty is meaningless in this day and age. Everyone can be beautiful, thanks to technology.”
“Externally, maybe,” he told her. “But I was talking more internally.” He rested a hand on her knee. “Though I admit, sometimes I wonder…”
She looked at him, but he refused to meet her gaze. “What? What do you wonder?”
He shook his head and let his hand drop. “Nothing.” He gazed at the stars.
“No, don’t do that,” she said. “Finish what you were going to say.”
“Nah, it’s not important,” he said.
“Will…” she pressed.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “But it’s probably going to hurt. I was going to say, sometimes I wonder what you looked like, when you were completely human.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Like I told you, it would hurt,” he said.
“Actually, it didn’t,” she replied. “I often wonder that, myself. And I wonder what our relationship would have been like, if the two of us had met while I were fully human.”
He smiled. “Probably wouldn’t have worked out, considering I was a kid.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
“Plus, even if we met when I was older, I would have just invited you over, and after we did our thing, I would have never called you again,” he said. “So it’s probably for the best that things ended up the way they are.”
“Probably,” she agreed, though she wasn’t entirely convinced. “Why do you do that, anyway?”
“What, have sex with random women?” he asked. “It’s in my nature. When you install the genital attachments, you’ll understand.”
“What I mean is, why not seek out one person?” she replied. “Someone who you can have sex with again and again?”
“That’s an old-fashioned notion if I ever heard one,” he told her. “Look, let me tell you a story. There was once a young salvager who was doing fairly well for himself. He had saved up enough money to buy a transport, and he was going to start expanding his operations. But then he met this girl online, and they hung out together almost every day. After a while, he told her he loved her, and would do anything for her. She said she loved him, too, but if he could help her buy a transport, she would really, really appreciate it. So he did. With all his savings, he bought her a transport. She saddled on up in that brand-spanking new transport, waved goodbye, and he never saw her again. Lesson learned.”
Rhea regarded him uncertainly. “You made that up. You would never fall for something like that.”
He smiled. “Maybe. But you should know, you’re not the only person in the world who’s ever been naive.” He stood. “Well. I’ll leave you to your cogitating. People to see, games to play, and all that.”
She gazed up at him. “Thanks for the visit. You and Horatio… you help ground me.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, and vanished.
They weren’t harassed by any more assassins or pirates during the remainder of the journey, and the two weeks passed uneventfully for Rhea. Well, as uneventfully as playing Robot Wars against someone as good as Targon all day could be. For his part, the merchant certainly enjoyed the passage of time, and Rhea had to admit she had begun to get into the game as she got better. She and her two companions even won a few bouts, though she suspected it was because Targon let them. When she confronted him after one suspicious victory, he admitted to going easy.
“Have to make ye look good once in a while,” Targon said. “Ye are the Warden after all. It’s not good for ye to lose all the time, even if you’re dueling a world class player such as meself.”
She put her heart into every match, so much so that when they finally reached Earth orbit, Rhea had become somewhat addicted to the game.
“You know, I never thought I’d say it, but I’m actually going to miss the game,”
she told Will and Horatio.
Will nodded. “I used to hate it at first, but it’s kind of grown on me.”
“It’s not even the game itself I’m going to miss most,” she continued. “But rather, that microcosm in time we spent together, with nothing else to do. A place for us to hang out during the day and be with each other. Bond. That’s what I’m going to miss most.”
“I’m sure we’ll have ample opportunity to bond in the coming days,” Will said. “You didn’t really think we were going to let you confront Veil alone, did you? Even with that Banshee thing or whatever you call it, you’re not all powerful.”
“No, I suppose not,” she said. “I won’t try to stop you from coming, if it’s what you want.”
“It is,” Will said.
She glanced at Horatio. “Does he speak for you?”
“He does,” Horatio replied. “We fight with you, Rhea. You are our Warden. And our friend.”
She frowned. “Don’t call me your Warden. To you, of all people, I’m only Rhea.”
“Whatever you say, Dude,” Will said, patting her on the shoulder.
A passenger shuttle arrived to take them to Earth, since Targon’s craft wasn’t capable of atmospheric entry.
The merchant escorted them to the exit hatch. Everyone was wearing their spacesuits, as per protocol.
“Thanks again for letting me take you to Ganymede,” Targon said.
“Are you thanking me for the voyage, or for the gaming footage I gave you?” Rhea asked.
“Both,” he said. “Everything. I hope to play Robot Wars with you again, someday. Perhaps remotely. Hopefully you’ll have improved a bit, by then. In the meantime, keep an eye out on the streaming sites. You’re going to be famous, soon!”
“I already am, apparently,” she said. “At least in some quarters.”
“Well your fame is only going to grow by leaps and bounds,” Targon said.
“And yours as well, I’m sure,” she told him.
The merchant smiled. “I can see the viral video titles even now: ‘Targon smacks down the Warden in a classic Robot Wars reversal.’ ‘Targon whoops the Warden’s arse in a Battle Royale duel to the death.’ Targon—”