by Huss, JA
But he doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t even raise his voice and argue with me.
He just walks out of the ship without another word.
And hours later, when I’ve found my way and plotted our course, he still hasn’t returned.
CHAPTER FOUR - BRIGIT
It’s bright and sunny today. Like always. It rains, but just enough to wet the dirt and nourish the plants.
This world wasn’t here when I arrived. Tray made it for me. He’d say things like, What color should the sun be? And how much water do you want? What kind of animals do you like? Things like that.
And I’d answer. Or sometimes I didn’t really know the answer and then he’d explain his question again. Like animals? I had seen vids of them. But I’d never seen one in person. And Tray was like a little database of information. He’d pull up pictures for me to look at.
“This one will eat you if it has a chance,” he’d say.
“Why would I want that?”
“Because without the big meat-eater, the leaf-nibblers will take over and trust me, they get annoying.”
So we populated the world with animals. And plants too, so the leaf-nibblers would have something to eat and wouldn’t require any more interference from us to keep them going.
Then came buildings, and utilities, and all the other things until one day he made people. Fake people. Just constructs. But even back then Tray was very good at making virtual things and he only got better as time went on. So that now, here, it’s simply lovely. Peaceful, and pretty, and perfect.
I really couldn’t ask for a better fake life.
I have a job. I work at a café three days a week because I crave interaction, but you could get by reasonably well here without working. Credits are like a game. You can find them places. Under rocks glittering in the sun, sometimes. Hidden in the back of your closet in an old box you’d forgotten about, even in other people’s muddy shoe prints. And if you do something worthwhile, like help your neighbor carry their grocery bags inside, the world just rewards you for being thoughtful and credits just appear in your account with a little cha-ching sound.
Things still have a cost. This apartment we have, for example. It costs me five hundred credits every thirty-five days. But even if I didn’t work at the café three days a week it would not be that hard to conjure up five hundred credits to pay for our space.
That’s five hundred good deeds. Pick up a piece of trash, cha-ching! I have a credit. Say something nice to a person who’s down, cha-ching! That’s another credit. I mean, I get these little bonuses at the café all the time when I ask patrons how their day is going. One credit here, one credit there. It all adds up.
Plus, I don’t need the credits. This is Tray’s world. He created it. Call it a cheat, I guess. But my account never goes down. I always have credits in there.
In fact, sometimes I think I’m the bank.
Even if you didn’t have the credits to pay for your space the world would provide. Somehow. People would suddenly need your help and if you recognized that, and helped them, your debt would be erased.
No one has ever been kicked out of their space since I’ve been here. And I’ve been here a long time.
People still die. Well, maybe not die. But they do disappear. It’s based on some unknown clock that Tray has never fully explained to me. Everyone’s life here is finite. Everyone but me, apparently. They stay a while, gather up stuff, make friends, live a life, and then poof. They’re gone. All their things go with them.
I think Tray rotates them into other places inside his Pleasure Prison virtual. The main one. He’s never actually told me that because I’ve never asked, but I think that’s where they go.
If you’re a planner you can leave your stuff for someone else. Some of the fake people are more real than others and they think of things like this. There’s a community building in the center of the town with a sign-up sheet. You put your name on the list and when people go poof and your name comes up, you get their stuff.
You can liquidate it and take their credits or you can keep it. You just check a little box on the roster and it’s all taken care of.
Tray calls this place Utopia. He says that word means ‘perfect’ in the real. I’d never heard of it before here. But my life in the real was very short. I didn’t have much time to learn the ways of the world.
“Hellooooo, Brigit!” my friend, Aieena, calls from inside the community garden fence. She’s weeding her little heart out. Terrible gardener, this one. Just terrible at it. But she likes the work and that’s how she pays for her space, so everyone else in the garden club just lets her do her thing. I’m pretty sure they earn credits for leaving her alone. Aieena killed your tushberry bush and you didn’t freak out because she meant well. Congratulations, you’ve earned ten credits for being patient with her!
I would call Aieena my best friend at the moment. She’s been here a while. One of the longest, presently. Still looks the same as the day she arrived. And she’s just as bad at gardening as she was back then too.
These ‘stock characters’, as I call them, don’t mature much as they age, meaning she’s never going to be a terrific gardener. It’s pointless, what she does. She is who she was created to be and that will never change.
But Aieena is sweet. And, for a stock character, she’s interesting too. She’s funny. And she’s got more patience than Tray. Which is saying a lot. He has this aura of infinite patience that surrounds him.
Nothing ever bothers her. Aieena is perpetually good-natured and happy.
Plus… she’s very real. At least to me.
I’d say at least half of the people here are boring. No matter how much you interact with them, they’re always the same. Limited vocabulary, limited life goals, limited personality.
The other half are like Aieena. Kinda cool. Kinda weird. Kinda… unique.
So Utopia isn’t a bad place to be stuck in. Not at all. There’s nothing to complain about.
But that’s my problem. I want to complain about things. I want things to go wrong. Not like ‘Aieena killed my tushberry bush’ kind of wrong, either. Like… someone stole my shit, or an earthquake ruined some buildings, or hell, I’d even settle for a good hot fire that burned the nearby forest to a crisp.
I suspect this makes me less… noble than the other Utopians.
But I don’t care.
Perfection is highly overrated.
I want war. I want to fight for something. I want to be challenged beyond my limits and then either fail, and lose everything, or win, and move on to some other phase in my life.
But there is no movement here.
Tray says it has to be that way because of the way he’s set up time. If things changed too much then time would speed up and then it would fuck everything up on the outside.
I think speeding up time is a good thing, to be honest. But what do I know? I’m just a prison princess.
I walk over to the tall garden fence and hook my fingers through the wire. Tray says the wire is there to keep the leaf-nibblers out. And OK. I just go with it. I’ve never seen any of the leaf-nibblers who live in the nearby forest come raid the gardens, but maybe that’s because there’s a fence? Or maybe the leaf-nibbler-eaters take care of them?
Sometimes I wish they would come eat the garden. Just nibble it all down to nothing just so I could see people freak out when they came by to prune their plants.
Never happens, though.
“What’s up?” I ask Aieena.
“Oh, you know.” She shrugs, deliberately not looking at the golden wheat grass she’s presently in the process of killing. “Just the usual. You going to work?”
“Yup,” I say, pressing my lips into a tight smile. “It’s a work day. So that’s where I’m going.”
“There’s a party tonight. Wanna go?”
“Um… depends. Whose party is it?”
“Some new guy called Draden.” She waggles her eyebrows at me. “He’s kinda hot.”
Ninety percent of the time they are super boring. Oh, all the stock people have a great time. They laugh, and dance, and smoke, and drink, and some of them even have sex in the hot tub. There’s always a hot tub too.
But it’s all so programmed. You know? Does that make sense to anyone but me?
“No,” I finally decide. “No. I’m not going.”
“Oh, is Tray back?” Aieena asks.
Not everyone can see Tray. In fact, most people cannot. And the ones who do, like Aieena, don’t ask a lot of questions. This is one of her stock responses. Is Tray back? She asks me this about once every hundred days.
Which just kinda makes me depressed. Because it reminds me that time is passing. It means a hundred more days have passed and he’s still not back.
I miss Tray so much. I miss his quirky grin, and his thick, dark hair, and the way he touches me at night. That’s what I miss the most. Being touched. I could, theoretically, have sex with anyone I want in here. I have a sneaking suspicion that all the other virtual worlds Tray has built are all based on sex because people do a lot of fucking here.
But I don’t want fake love.
Why would I when I have the real thing with Tray?
I just want him to come back.
He’s never coming back.
It’s not rational. I realize this. Tray’s avatar body is sleeping in the spare bedroom, breathing just the way he’s supposed to, and I know this because I checked on him before I came outside. So all this doubt is irrational.
He leaves me all the time, but he always comes back.
He will be back.
But still, there is that little fear inside me that says, He’s gone for good now. He’s not coming back. I’m never going to see him again and I’ll be stuck here for the rest of my life.
And that leads to this little germ of a worry… is this a life?
“Brigit?”
I shake myself out of my introspection because I realize Aieena has been talking to me. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I was asking where Tray was.”
“You were?”
“Yeah, he’s been gone a long time. Where is he?”
“Oh.” I wave my hand in the air. But I frown and furrow my brow, trying to remember if Aieena has ever asked me where Tray is before. “He’s working. He’ll probably be home soon.”
“Hmmm,” Aieena says. And now she’s frowning. “Well, I’ll stop by the café when your shift is over. Maybe you’ll change your mind about the party?”
“Sure,” I say, even though I won’t.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because there’s the tell-tale cha-ching! sound in my head telling me I’ve earned a credit for being agreeable.
I wave goodbye and walk off towards the café for work, then wonder… would the bank take credits away if I was suddenly rude?
CHAPTER FIVE - TRAY
The station is still dark and creepy. That hasn’t changed. It’s too big to keep everything running like it’s inhabited.
It’s also too big to find Valor if he doesn’t want to be found.
“Valor!” I yell into the silent darkness of the station.
But he doesn’t answer.
One interesting thing about this station is that it’s built like Harem. Hundreds of levels intersected by a wide-open space through the center of the ring.
This was a unique feature of ALCOR Station when we first arrived because it’s not a common blueprint. I can’t say it’s rare because the number of stations I’ve visited is maybe half a dozen total. Including this one. But I’ve met and talked with enough people over the last two decades to know Harem’s layout is more uncommon than not.
“Valor!” I yell again. “We need to go!”
Nothing but silence answers back.
OK, Tray. Think about this rationally. Where does Valor hang out?
Inside the docking bay there’s a break room that has a decent autocook we got running. That’s usually where he eats. And there’s an entertainment screen in there. So he watches that sometimes. If he’s noticed that the shows are weird and unrecognizable, he hasn’t commented on it. They’re weird and unrecognizable because we’re in the wrong galaxy. Which he knows now, but didn’t know before I told him earlier. So something tells me that Valor isn’t paying much attention to the entertainment screens.
So he’s been thinking, probably. Trying to figure out what I’m doing or, hell, maybe he’s plotting to overthrow me and leave on his own?
That would suck.
Anyway, he’s not in the break room. I checked there first.
So where would he be in here?
The whole place is dark. I think all stations have a personality. Kind of like ships do. Even if you don’t have a super-sentient AI running your ship, they still have their quirks. This wall vibrates, this console makes a weird noise, and this system panel hums. This chair gets stuck in the ‘recline’ position, or this screen always flickers, or this gauge is always off. Shit like that.
So this station has a personality and I don’t like it.
It’s got an ALCOR vibe to it even though there is no super-sentient AI like ALCOR running it. It’s got an AI the same way the ship I’ve been working on has an AI. It was programmed to run things but when they break, they’re broken. It can’t conjure up a solution. And if you get yourself into a bind, it can’t save you either.
So I don’t like the thought of Valor walking around here all by himself.
“Valor!”
An echo answers me. There’s water dripping somewhere. Condensation from some reactor, probably. But that’s it.
He would not be in here. It’s too big. Too many cracks and crevices to get lost in.
Or he would, Tray. Because he doesn’t want to be found.
Possibly, but not likely. He’s not a child, for fuck’s sake. He’s not playing hide-and-seek. He’s doing something.
What is he doing? What could he be doing?
And then I know.
He’s leaving. That’s what he’s doing.
He’s done with my bullshit and he’s leaving.
I find him on the total opposite side of the station ring working on a ship.
He glances at me when I approach. He’s got the bay airlocked so his enviro-suit is only half on. The shirt portion is hanging loose at his waist as he works on the open guts of the giant hull.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“What’s it look like?”
“It looks like you’re fixing this ship.”
“You’re very fucking smart, Tray.”
“We have a ship.”
“I’m not going with you.”
I think about this for a moment. Do I need him?
Yes. Unfortunately, I really do.
If things go well, I might not need him for very long, but I won’t be able to figure that out until we grab Brigit. And I can’t grab Brigit until we leave here, which means he has to leave here with me. Not alone.
All that rationale makes me sound callous and cold. And OK, I am pretty callous and cold, but I’m not going to let him leave for another reason too.
He’s my brother. I love him. Not the way I love Brigit. Brigit is the closest thing I’ll ever get to a soulmate. I’m not like Valor. I’m not like any of my brothers. There’s no princess in my future. Just Brigit. And I won’t give her up without a helluva fight. No matter what it takes. And if that means I have to lie to Valor to make him go along with my plan, I will.
I decided that months ago. But I also made a promi
se to myself. I got him into this and I’m going to make sure he gets back home safe. I can’t do that if he’s got his own ship and won’t stay on Team Tray.
“You know what bugs me the most about you?” Valor asks.
“Hmm?”
“You use people.”
“OK.”
“And you have no feelings.”
“Didn’t bother you before. You were the one who wanted in on this, Valor.”
“Yeah,” he says, tossing a tool onto a nearby cart. “Because you said we were going to save ALCOR. You told me he’s out there, somewhere, waiting for us, and we were gonna get him back, bring him home, and fix this shit.”
“We’re still doing that.”
Valor takes a step towards me. He’s bigger than me in two ways. Slightly taller, though not much. But he’s got a lot more muscle mass than I do. I’ve never been much of a fighter. But ALCOR made sure all of his ‘boys’ could kick ass. I can hold my own with people who are not my fully-mature Akeelian male brothers. But of the whole group of us, I’m definitely the weak link in a brawl.
So when Valor erases the space between and we stand chest to chest, and he sizes me up—he’s more intimidating than I’d like to admit.
“Right after you… do what, exactly?” Valor says, narrowing his eyes at me.
OK. It’s decision time. I can see that he’s gotten to the end of his patience with me and when Valor makes up his mind about something, that’s it. He’s done and moving on. So this ship he’s working on is not some idle threat to make me talk. And this conversation isn’t about trying to establish dominance.
It’s more like… one last chance. If I blow this, he’s gonna throw me away. And no matter what I tell him after that, it won’t matter. He’ll just be done.
“OK,” I say. “I’m going to tell you something but… I need you to keep an open mind.”
He shakes his head at me. And he’s pissed. “What the fuck did you do?”