by Scott Baron
Daisy concentrated on lowering her surging adrenaline levels.
“Tough love, huh?” Sarah mused, but Daisy just ignored her, focusing instead on her breathing as Fatima calmly paced in front of her.
“You have great powers locked away in your mind, and you’ve begun to realize how to tap into them, but you cannot let that remove you from what is happening around you at the same time. Submerge within yourself, but do not lose sight of the world around you.” She sipped her herbal tea and observed quietly for a moment.
“Situational awareness and inner awareness can work in tandem, Daisy. Like Yin and Yang coexisting as one. If you practice long enough, eventually you will learn to wield the powers of your conscious and subconscious together. When that happens, you’ll be unstoppable.”
A few minutes later, their warm-up exercise was complete, and Daisy allowed herself a little smile.
Time for the fun part.
Another small obstacle course had been arranged in the cavernous work room, a smattering of unusual challenges for her to overcome. The tasks were always changing. Fatima made sure to keep her on her toes.
One week she would be focusing on speed, recognizing probable paths and executing her moves with as much speed of both body and mind as possible. The next week the course might morph into a series of tiny, technical handholds, forcing her to slow to a crawl and focus all of her mental powers on determining the best route forward, be it balancing on a step the size of a deck of cards, or hanging from a beam by merely a finger as she attempted to traverse the room.
All the while, Fatima would chat with her.
At first, Daisy had found it distracting, but that was the point. Multitasking. Achieving objectives while forced to handle other stimuli. Within a few weeks of beginning her training, she had found herself able to carry on complex conversations while simultaneously working her way through Fatima’s obstacles, and she had only gotten better at it.
“So, tell me again,” she said to the silver-haired woman. “I’ve been trying to figure the logistics. You actually dragged Sid all the way into Dark Side on your own, despite having four broken ribs, a fractured humerus, and a massive concussion?” She looked at the slender woman. It just didn’t seem possible.
Fatima paused a moment before replying.
“Yes, Daisy, I did, though I must admit it was not one of my most pleasant experiences.”
“That woman is way tougher than you’d ever guess.”
I know, right?
Daisy continued across the chamber, hopping from one wobbly step to the next, her route suspended by cables several feet from the floor.
“So you somehow found Sid, got him out of his pod, where it crashed after he was ejected from his command ship, then dragged him across the moon’s surface and into the facility? But how did you get him plugged in? It seems like you should have run out of air long before then.”
Fatima got a far away look in her eyes as she remembered that day.
“Of course, you’re right, Daisy,” she said. “I should have run out of air long before I could get Sid installed and the oxygen scrubbers fired up.”
“So what happened?”
A slight shadow flashed across the woman’s face, but was gone in an instant.
“I…” she began, haltingly. “I scavenged the dead.”
“But I thought they used up their suit air,” Daisy said.
“Inside the base, yes. Outside the base, they had died from traumatic injuries, mostly. Ruptured organs from the shockwaves of the attack, or shattered helmets, or shrapnel cutting them down. But once their vital signs ceased, their suit oxygen shut off.”
“But the suits aren’t designed to swap oxygen units in a vacuum. It’s a safety thing.”
“Indeed, but the moon isn’t quite a true vacuum,” she noted. “Rather than existing with a complete lack of atmosphere, it possesses what is known as a surface boundary exosphere. It’s still far too thin to sustain life, and is more or less equivalent to the outer rings of Earth’s atmosphere, where each cubic centimeter contains just a minute fraction of the molecules as sea level. Nevertheless, it was enough to allow me to override the lock-out protocols to a degree.”
Daisy took a cautious step, then lunged across a gap to pinch-grip a narrow ledge as she hugged her body to the rough-textured climbing wall Fatima had installed for the day’s drills.
“So, you tricked the safeties into letting you swap out your oxygen unit with theirs. Pretty ingenious.”
Fatima’s smile faltered.
“Yes, it would have been, but the tank couplings on their suits had frozen from all those years on the surface of the moon. Oxygen was there, but I couldn’t reach it.”
“But you did, eventually. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here telling me this story.”
“Yes, I did, by dragging the deceased to the barely functioning wreck of my ship. I had just enough power to fire the engines for a few seconds, but that was enough. I know there’s no way I could have smelled their burning flesh through my helmet, but it’s an odor that I sensed nonetheless.”
“Oh my God. That’s horrifying,” Sarah said. “No wonder she survived as long as she did. Fatima is a total badass.”
A set of rungs awaited Daisy, and with a powerful lunge, she threw her body upward, one rung at a time, her fingers barely reaching the widely spaced metal bars.
“So that’s how I thawed the couplings and got the tanks free. But that still wasn’t enough. I had almost gotten Sid plugged in when my last oxygen unit ran out. All I had was the air in my suit, and no way to power up my wrecked ship to salvage any more tanks. That’s when I had the idea.”
“What was that?”
“I breathed as shallow as I could and retrieved the nearest bodies whose suits were intact. They had died from the concussion of the attack, you see, so the air in their suits was still there. I only needed a few more minutes to install the AI I’d found on the surface. Of course I had no idea if it was even a viable unit at that time, but it was my only hope. Once it was connected, the presence of a viable AI would activate the base’s emergency systems automatically, sealing the doors to the exterior and repressurizing any compartment with vital signs.”
“But you said you couldn’t get to the oxygen in those suits.”
“No, Daisy, I said I couldn’t get their oxygen units. What was inside those suits, however, was there for the taking.”
A mental image began to form, and Daisy was not liking it one bit.
“Fatima,” she said as she slid hand over hand across a slender rope, “what did you do?”
“I think you know, Daisy,” she replied, casting an odd look her way. “I gathered my tools and fixed a mental snapshot in my mind, then I took my last, deep breath of stale air and took off my helmet. Oh, it was cold. So very, very cold, but I closed my eyes tight and stabbed a sharp piece of metal through the wrist seal of one of the dead crew’s suits. As soon as I felt a hiss, I sucked air from it like from a mama’s teat. It tasted horrible, of course. Decades of cold had stopped any decay inside the suit, but nonetheless, it had left the air foul and funky all the same. Anyway, thanks to the low-g gravity, I was able to drag the body with me, holding the arm to my mouth with one hand while finishing my work with the other.”
“And you did it? With your eyes closed?”
Again, Fatima paused.
“Obviously. I’m alive, aren’t I?” she said, looking at Daisy with an odd expression. “But it took three suits worth of air to finally get Sid plugged in, and for a second, it looked like he wasn’t going to integrate with Dark Side’s network. But then, just as my air was about to run out, he linked into the base’s systems. The doors sealed shut, and the command chamber flooded with oxygen. I’ve been here ever since.”
Daisy completed the last segment of the course and hopped to the ground, looking at Fatima with a newfound awe.
“You survived without a helmet for minutes! Nobody does that. It’s utterly amazing.�
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“Yes, perhaps,” Fatima replied. “But it took over a year of skin grafting and stem cell therapy in the med lab to fully recover from the deep frostbite. I was pretty delirious by the time the air scrubbers and heat came back on. My AI boost was damaged, but nevertheless, it was probably the one thing that kept me functional as the rest of my body threatened to shut down from the cold,” she said. “Anyway, enough storytelling. Come on. Back to one, Daisy.”
Daisy walked back to the beginning of the obstacle course, climbing the four steps to the elevated starting position.
The lights went out.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“You know the course, Daisy. You’ve run through it dozens of times. You don’t need your eyes to tell you what you already know.”
Silence.
“Well? What are you waiting for?”
Daisy hesitated, then dug deep, visualizing the course in front of her.
“Ah, fuck it,” she finally said, then stepped out into the void.
The crashing impact with the floor hurt her body far less than her pride.
Fatima flipped the lights back on and assessed her with a disappointed look.
“Okay, maybe something easier for now. Here,” she said, pulling out a plastic bin containing roughly twenty parts to a 3-D model of a very basic transport ship. “No instructions. Put this back together.”
The image of the ship was printed on the box, but that was all Daisy had to go on.
Great, another mental acuity test, Daisy lamented, picking up two pieces and trying to figure out which went where.
“I don’t see why I need to keep doing these, Fatima.”
“The designers had these models created so they could better visualize the ships they were working on in a three-dimensional setting outside a computer screen. It was to help them learn how every aspect functions and connects without having to run a real ship through an energy-sucking reconstruction cycle. Of course, it’s different in the case of combat emergencies, where pods need to be hot-swapped on the fly, but until the invasion happened, it was all theoretical, so they had the time to do it right. Now you’re the one who has the time, so get to it, Daisy.”
Daisy grumbled as she reluctantly started the process of figuring out which bit went where. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, only more complex, in three dimensions, and with pieces that would only fit in a few specific configurations.
“Couldn’t I just use the neuro-stim to learn all this stuff? I mean, why the puzzle game?”
“You know the limitations the override you used placed on your system. Yes, you can still use it as a supplement to help reinforce new material, I know, but there’s a risk in running anything beyond a slow drip of data. We can’t take chances, not until Chu and the AIs are able to figure out what exactly you did to your mind, and how your new neuro-wiring will react to a larger data stream. I mean, there’s no telling what another information spike might do. It could lobotomize you for all we know.”
“Well, I do have some pretty vivid dreams now,” Daisy admitted.
“Like what?”
“Some of them are about things I don’t even remember knowing. Like, I had one that I was a farmer, out working in the fields, and then these Chithiid suddenly dropped from a ship right in front of me, and I had to fight for my life.”
“Sounds like one of Tamara’s nightmares, to me. Daisy, you may have inadvertently tapped into some of the other crewmembers’ files. The Váli was supposed to have all of that firewalled, and Mal was there to make sure everything went smoothly, but I don’t know. The impossible seems to follow you, doesn’t it?”
“Follow me? Sure. Maybe I had a quick surge of know-how right after I accidentally downloaded the whole freakin’ universe, but since those first few days with all that stuff running around my head, it all seems to have tapered off.”
“More like gone away, if you ask me.”
Way to be supportive, Sis.
“Well, it’s true. After that neuro spike, you seem to mostly have returned to your old self.”
Except for the neural clone of my dead sister living in my head, yeah, I’m totally normal, she shot back.
“Daisy?” Fatima was staring at her. “You just zoned out on me there. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Well, as I was saying, I think there’s a whole lot more in there, just waiting for you to learn to control it. How to utilize it.”
Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my ass, she grumbled to herself.
“Your potential is just waiting for you to unlock and embrace it, Daisy,” Fatima said with a smile as she glanced at Daisy’s project.
“Will you people stop saying that? I keep telling you, I’m not special.” She looked at her hands. The small ship model was complete.
Huh. How did I do that?
“Don’t ask me. You’re the one running the hands.”
Daisy looked over the model again. Indeed, it was correctly assembled.
“So, what now?” she asked.
“Over here,” her mentor replied, leading her across the room.
Fatima had her stand a few meters in front of a wall as she rolled what looked like a potato cannon a slight distance in front of her.
“Um, Fatima? What’s that?”
“Something I rigged up to help you work on your reflexes and build your motor skills.”
She powered the machine on. It hummed menacingly for a moment, then, without warning, launched a beanbag projectile at Daisy’s stomach. Daisy, while not expecting it, nevertheless managed to dodge it at the last second.
“Not bad, Daisy. Let’s go again.”
“Hang on a second. I don’t think that’s a good––”
The machine fired two beanbags, one at her head and one at her waist. Again, she dodged them.
Hey, I’m pretty good at this.
“So what’s going on with Vince?” Fatima asked, distracting Daisy, resulting in a beanbag to the thigh.
“Ow!” She scowled. “There’s nothing with Vince. We’re just friends. Or whatever he is.”
“But you loved him, didn’t you?”
Another beanbag, but this time she was ready, easily dodging it.
“Good. You didn’t let yourself react emotionally,” Fatima said with a smile. “But Vince is all about emotions, isn’t he? Obviously, he loves you. Anyone can see that. But you love him too.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. Or at least, you did, didn’t you?”
“No. I mean, yes. But there’s that thing in his head. He’s a machine, so it was all bullshit.”
“Am I a machine too?” Fatima asked as Daisy narrowly avoided a pair of beanbags.
“I suppose you are.”
“Daisy, the mechanical parts of our bodies do not define our humanity.”
A quick dodge to the left, then a duck and dodge to the right.
“No. That’s not true. An AI in your brain? That means it’s a machine doing most of the thinking in there, and how could I ever love a machine? He’s just a meat puppet with his strings pulled by a computer.”
Fatima hid her annoyance well, but the flurry of beanbags that pummeled Daisy spoke her true feelings more clearly than words. She eyed her difficult pupil, then made a decision.
“Okay, that’s enough for now. Meet me back here in three hours.”
Daisy brushed herself off and moved for the door.
“Oh, and Daisy,” Fatima added with a grin the look of which left Daisy feeling a little worried. “Make sure to have a hearty snack. You’ll be needing the energy.”
Chapter Eight
“You shouldn’t have said she was just a machine.”
Daisy ignored Sarah’s all too accurate observation and continued with her arduous task. Fatima had been right to recommend a snack. She would need all the energy she could muster.
I didn’t say that. Not exactly, anyway, she lamented as she ran the deceptively simple-looking route arou
nd the periphery of the base. Naturally, she wore a suit. To do otherwise would mean certain death, and a very unpleasant one at that.
Fatima had sent her outside with a sneaky little smile on her face. Daisy should have known by the tell-tale helmet hair she had been sporting that Fatima had arranged something torturous for her.
“Come on, Daisy, clock’s ticking!” she heard in her helmet’s comm link.
Hurry, Daisy. Come on, Daisy. You’re special, Daisy, she griped. Shut up with that crap already!
She didn’t dare voice that out loud, of course, lest Fatima send her on an even more sadistic training run. This one was bad enough as it was, and Daisy had her hands full—literally—as she raced around the perimeter of the base, searching out the scattered bits of another model ship.
This one, however, was over forty pieces, and strewn about a half-square kilometer area. The real challenge, besides collecting and reassembling it, would be making it back to the airlock before either the clock, or her air, ran out.
Fatima wouldn’t put me in that much danger, though, would she? Daisy wondered.
“I don’t know. There’s something lurking under that serene exterior. I wouldn’t count on it, if I were you.”
I was afraid you’d say that. Well, keep a lookout. I’ve got almost all of the pieces, but without those last few, I won’t make the cutoff.
“Is it that important?”
No, not really. But you know how competitive I can be.
“Noted,” Sarah replied. “This would be so much easier if you had super-cyborg legs like Omar—Hey, is that one over to your left at eight o’clock? Thirty meters out.”
Indeed, it was, and Daisy moon-bounced her way over to it in loping strides. She scooped the piece up and added it to the bag containing the others she had collected. The ones she was desperately trying to assemble as she also ran a basic search grid.
Nice catch, Sis.
“Why, thank you.”
“How’s it coming out there, Daisy?” Fatima asked from the comfort of inside the base. To add insult to injury, she was probably sipping a nice warm cup of tea while Daisy toiled in the low gravity.
Daisy keyed on her comms.