by A. K. DuBoff
“I was going to say ‘mundane’, but yeah.”
She smiled and squeezed my right shoulder. “Knowing you, you’ll find a way to make it interesting.”
Maybe she was right, but nothing in the course catalog had piqued my interest in the slightest. The only path that sounded remotely appealing was becoming a Ranger in the Hegemony’s space force, but I wasn’t ready to tell my parents I was interested in applying to Tactical School. Even though I knew the Rangers would probably reject me because of my bum shoulder, I couldn’t help dreaming about it. But, I needed to be realistic. And have options. To satisfy my parents and keep multiple paths open, I figured I’d try the vocational academy for one semester and then take it from there.
We arrived at the town square and found that most of Ochre’s two thousand other residents had already congregated in the open plaza facing the crystal and its surrounding access terminal. Members of the crowd were shifting on their feet, eyes darting. Parents clutched their children tightly as urgent conversations buzzed throughout the square, speculating about the reason for the alarm.
The atmosphere was a stark contrast to our standard weekly assemblies, a special service where we would watch Mayor Therman touch the crystal to initiate a backup record for our community. Though he performed the task every day, watching the task was a weekly tradition; it gave us assurance that there was always a backup, specifically to ease our minds in situations such as this.
However, assurances only went so far.
“Dad, what’s going on?” Ben asked with a quaver in his voice.
“Here’s Mayor Therman,” my father replied, his gaze fixed on the platform surrounding the crystal. “I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”
The elderly mayor approached the railing at the edge of the platform a meter above the paved square. He held up a frail hand, and the din of conversation faded to silence. “Thank you all for coming so quickly. We received a message from the Capital this evening about reports from the outer colonies related to a crystalline network malfunction.”
Conversations reignited in the crowd, overpowering the mayor’s raspy voice.
“Quiet, please!” the city manager, Dilon, cut in. He held up his hands and waited for the townspeople to settle.
“As a precaution,” the mayor continued, “the Hegemony has issued an order for us to perform a global reset. We will go back one month.”
My parents each placed a reassuring hand on Ben’s and my shoulders.
Local resets were common enough, but I’d only ever experienced one coordinated planet-scale reset before, when a transport shuttle exploded in a freak accident several years prior. We’d gone back three days to the previous check-in point that time. To go a whole month meant that something major must be going on.
“Just so long as I don’t have to retake my final exams,” I muttered in an attempt to break the tension.
“I’m sure the records have already been sent to the Academy, don’t worry,” my mother replied, missing my intended humor.
“Man, that’s going to be a pain to reset all of the clocks,” Ben added.
I wasn’t sure if it was his own attempt at levity or genuine annoyance. Keeping track of when we were was always a challenge with any reset, by virtue of it being a rollback to a previous physical state rather than actual time travel. Anything outside the reset zone stayed the same, so we relied on the master clocks in the Capital for us to resync with the rest of society. We always made the town reset points for the same time of day to minimize confusion, but I couldn’t remember where I may have been a month ago at the time of the reset point they intended to use.
Regardless of the logistic headache surrounding the reset, my chest tightened as I thought about why the order was given in the first place. I feared the reset must have to do with the darkness in the canyon crystal—it was too big of a coincidence. That meant it was on other worlds, too.
With a renewed wave of alarm, I realized that I had touched the infected crystal moments before the darkness appeared. “Dad, I should have said something sooner, but—”
“Resetting,” the mayor announced as he reached for the access terminal.
Before I could finish my warning, an electrical charge surged through the air and my ears buzzed. The world distorted around me into white light. Everything vanished into nothingness.
I floated in the darkness, drifting with no sense of self. I waited. And waited.
The reset was taking far too long—reality should be reforming by now. My consciousness wanted to panic, but I had no corporeal form to react.
Then, a physical world finally began to solidify at the edges of my vision. Except rather than the town square, I appeared to be in some sort of glass enclosure too brightly lit for me to see beyond its boundaries.
My eyes struggled to adjust to the dazzling light above me. A dark-haired man in a black uniform came into focus on the other side of the glass half a meter from my face.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked me.
I blinked with confusion. At least, I think I blinked. Somehow I still didn’t feel fully connected to myself. “A girl…” I said.
“What is your name?”
“Elle,” I replied, more certain in my response this time. “Elle Hartmut.”
A warm tingle ran through my limbs. As it passed, I was left with a renewed sense of my physical form.
Before I could look around to get my bearings, the man activated a holographic projection in front of me, depicting a sword, a shield, and a wand with a star on the end. “What is your strength?” he asked.
I evaluated the symbols. Was it a test?
The shield called to me initially, given my defensive attitude toward the whole situation. However, the wand was a much more alluring choice, almost certainly indicating magic. I was about to respond with that selection, but I caught myself. I’d always wanted to be strong—to regain the physical prowess I’d lost when I was injured. “The sword,” I stated.
“Are you sure?” the man asked.
“Yes.” Another tingling wave passed through my limbs and torso. My senses sharpened and I felt physically charged, ready to push myself to my limits.
“You are a fighter. Use your strength well,” the man stated as he stepped back. The front half of the glass cylinder, which had a frosted band in the middle, swung open. “You’re lucky you survived.”
“What do you mean?” I stepped out of the chamber, unsteady on my feet. Looking down at myself, I realized I was wearing a white, form-fitting jumpsuit that was nothing like anything in my wardrobe. My pulse spiked. “Where am I? Where’s my family?”
The middle-aged man strode across the sterile room to the side wall and touched a panel. With a mechanical whir, a section of the wall rolled down behind the smooth interior surface.
My breath caught as I stared out the newly exposed viewport. A planet—my planet—loomed before me, luminescent blue and brown set against a starscape. Dark tendrils were snaking through the atmosphere.
Panic constricted my chest. “What’s going on?”
“Elle, I’m Commander Alastair Colren and you are aboard the Evangiel,” he replied. “I represent the Hegemony. We have a mission for you.”
2
“Huh?” I wanted to say something more articulate, but that was the best I had at the moment.
“Forgive me, this all must come as quite a shock.” Commander Colren took a seat at a metal table near the viewport. He gestured to an acrylic chair across from him.
“You could say that.” Dumbfounded, I stumbled toward the empty seat. I couldn’t stop staring out the viewport at my home planet of Erusan. Was I really in space? I’d seen images and tried to imagine the view from a spaceship, but this… It didn’t seem possible.
I took a shaky breath. “How did I get here?”
“I’ll explain everything, don’t worry,” Colren replied.
“None of this makes any
sense. What do you mean you have a mission for me? I’m no one.”
Colren examined me with his piercing hazel eyes. “Had you recently come into contact with a crystal that exhibited a dark cloud?”
I struggled to think back to the events from a few hours before. “Yeah, I was hanging out with my friends outside of town, doing localized resets. We were just about to do another reset when we noticed it.”
“In that moment, you were… altered,” he explained.
I gaped at him. “What? How?”
“It’s something like an immunity. You had a brief touch with the Darkness during the reset just prior, so when you encountered it again during the global reset, you were prepared to hang onto your sense of self.”
My heart sank. “What about my friends? They touched the infected crystal, too.”
“Unfortunately, we can only perform the extraction on one person at a time. You were the fortunate one,” Colren replied.
“What about my family? My world?” Fear and worry clouded my mind. My parents, my brother, everyone who meant anything to me was still down there. They couldn’t be gone.
The commander took a slow breath. “The world is suspended and its records are preserved in the Master Archive.”
“Suspended? What in the stars does that mean?”
“It’s a way of locking the records so they don’t become corrupted. It’s the best we can do once the Darkness infects a planet,” he continued. “But you can help us do more.”
I barked a nervous laugh. “Yeah. Right!” Either the last reset had messed with my head, or the man across from me was insane. I was leaning toward the former option; people didn’t randomly wake up on spaceships. I had to be dreaming.
“Elle, I know this might seem like an elaborate prank, but I assure you it’s not. You’re special and we need you.” The commander looked me square in the eyes—dead serious, as far as I could tell.
I inched back in my chair. “Whatever you think I am, I’m not. I can’t help you.” The Hegemony needed scientists or heroic soldiers. Not me. As much as I aspired to be a Ranger, I knew it wouldn’t happen. I was physically broken—and I certainly wasn’t a genius.
The commander folded his hands on the table. “You’re exactly who we need.”
“I’m a kid.”
He nodded. “The young do seem to be the most drawn during the extraction; there’s a fearlessness in youth. I’d never discount someone because of age alone.”
I still didn’t believe any of it was real, but he certainly did. I figured if I heard him out, maybe that would end the insanity; all I wanted was to go back home and finish my summer vacation. I crossed my arms and leaned back in my seat, studying his expression for any tells that might reveal his true intentions. “What is it you want me to do?”
“We are assembling a team of others that have been extracted like you. Together, we hope that you’ll be able to help us track down the cause for the spreading Darkness, and stop it. With your immunity, you’ll be able to go places others can’t.”
Articulate speech failed me again. Me, stop the Darkness? Now he was really talking crazy. I laughed and shook my head with disbelief.
“It first appeared three months ago,” Colren continued, undeterred. “Initially, we thought it was an isolated anomaly, but when it started to spread, we had to take action. We developed the extraction procedure to give us a means to fight back.”
I wanted to dismiss his statements, but I was struck by the gravity of his tone. Maybe this wasn’t a nightmare after all. If I really was on a Hegemony spaceship, and if my world was now uninhabitable, as he indicated, I had no idea where I could go.
My heart pounded in my chest. “I still don’t understand how I got here. It doesn’t seem possible.”
“We have certain technology that’s not exactly public knowledge,” the commander replied. “Frankly, we don’t know how it works, but it does.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Magic?”
He chuckled. “You joke, but it may as well be.”
Crazy or not, the thought of legitimate magic use caught my attention. I leaned forward with my elbows on the table. “What was that test you gave me when I first woke up?”
“The extraction procedure is for consciousness, but your physical manifestation is more fluid based on fragmented data stored in the crystalline network. Those questions were to bring your new body into focus and solidify your innate traits.”
It was then that I noticed the long hair hanging down around my shoulders—not the faded pink dye job from minutes before on my homeworld, but bright fuchsia. And it didn’t look like dye. “What the—?” I nearly leaped out of my chair.
As I tensed, I noticed that my left shoulder didn’t feel tight in the way I was used to. I rolled it and then raised my arm, finding that I had full range of motion.
“Stars, I—” My chest constricted.
“This is you,” Colren said. “The real you that you wanted to be.”
“How did you…?”
Colren smiled with compassion. “Think of it like this: pretend your mind is like a digital file that we would back up on one of the central servers. The original computer used to create that file became corrupted. That file has now been downloaded into a new, better computer that was optimized to run that file. Likewise, your new body was bioprinted in that chamber to fit the ideals contained within your consciousness—built to your own specifications.”
It still sounded like madness. I ran my fingers through the soft, fuchsia strands. “I guess I did have a few changes in mind.”
“Whoever you were before, you still are. Now, you’re just a different version of yourself.”
I could barely breathe. Losing my world, my family, my friends. But gaining a whole, new body? It was too much to process. I wasn’t broken anymore, yet I was separated from my loved ones and had no idea if I’d ever see them again. As much as I wanted to be healed, it wasn’t a worthwhile trade.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “And now I’m alone.”
“Not alone,” he hastily replied. “The others we’ve extracted have also found themselves to be faster and stronger than they were before.”
“Others?” My heart skipped a beat, relief washing over me with the revelation that I wasn’t the only one who’d been unexpectedly yanked from my home. If nothing else, we’d have that in common.
He nodded. “You have two companions so far, but we hope to be able to extract others. They have each manifested certain… abilities.”
“Like what?”
Before he could answer, a thud sounded through the interior bulkhead, followed by a series of scuffles and another bang.
The commander sighed. “It would seem that one of your companions is experimenting again.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Oh, he’s only getting used to his new body.” Colren glanced at the wall. “Some of the transformations have been more substantial than others.”
Not that I’d had a choice, but I was wondering more and more what I’d been pulled into. I cautiously eyed the side wall where the sound had come from. “May I meet them?”
“No sense in waiting.” Colren rose from his chair and headed for the door on the wall opposite the viewport. “Try not to stare.”
“At what?” I asked as I followed him.
“You’ll see.”
The door automatically slid to the side when we approached, revealing a steel-lined corridor. Struck with a blast of cooler air, I folded my arms to augment the insulation offered by the ruched white jumpsuit and followed Colren through the doorway. Holopanels and information displays integrated with the corridor walls hinted at a level of technological utilization that was far beyond anything in my day-to-day life back home, and I found myself awestruck by features that were probably commonplace for everyone else on the ship. The corridor curved gradually to the side in both directions, so it was impossible to see t
he ends. Doors lined both sides of the hall at irregular intervals, and we headed for one six meters to the right, adjacent to the room where I woke up.
Colren pressed his palm against a panel on the smooth wall. Following a beep, the door next to it slid open with a low hiss.
Scuffling sounds echoed out into the corridor, accompanied by the shout of a youthful male voice, “Relax, Toran! It’s just the commander.”
“And I have a new member for your group,” Colren said as he stepped through the threshold.
Steeling myself, I peeked into the room.
Inside, Colren had stopped half a meter inside the door with his back to me, partially obstructing my view. To his left, I could make out the refined profile of a man in his early-twenties. His medium-brown hair was styled into a faux hawk and well-muscled arms flexed the fabric of his white jumpsuit.
The young man turned to face the door, training his captivating sky-blue eyes on me. “Why, hello there.” He cracked a smile, brushing his index finger over a translucent crystal pendant hanging around his neck.
“Hi.” I smiled back, hating that my cheeks suddenly felt flushed.
“This is Kaiden,” Colren said, swiveling to face me. “He was the first we were able to retrieve.”
Kaiden mimed tipping an invisible hat to me. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“I’m Elle,” I replied.
“Nice hair,” a deep voice said from beyond the commander.
Then, I noticed the behemoth of a man who had been obscured from view when I first entered. Standing two meters tall and with the broadest shoulders I’d ever seen, the other man was a solid wall of muscle. The tattered top half of his white jumpsuit was tied around his waist.
“I rather like the new color,” I responded to his flippant comment while I tried not to gawk at his exaggerated proportions.
“And this is Toran,” Colren continued. “It’s only been two days since we retrieved him.”
“I’ve been hitting the gym pretty hard since then,” Toran said with a grin.
I relaxed, seeing his good nature beneath the chiseled exterior. “I bet I could still beat you in a footrace.”