She Who Woke Among Eternity: Chapter 2: Not Just Pixels On A Screen

[I'm scared of taking a break from VM, but I'm getting really excited about writing this story. It's honestly helping me through this rough mental health patch at the moment, so for a little while I'm just going to focus on this. Thank you guys for your support in this.

Also, this series is going to make a lot of references to other things. Many of the reference won't be explained in the story, as that will end up being part of the joke, but I'm working with a footnote system the program I write in has. This way I can reference something and be able to give an explanation for those who may not understand the reference (which I fear will happen a lot because I tend to make old obscure references.) Right now there are two ways footnotes can be formatted when I copy the text over and I'm not sure which one I prefer. This chapter will have a more traditional style of footnote at the end, but next week I'll try having it appear in brackets at the end of the reference. Please let me know what you think.

Again thank you for understanding in needed a little break from VM, and let me know what you think of the new name for this series.]

First order of business was the other side of the small room behind the cockpit. The only two things of note besides the walls filled with dead screens and buttons were a heavy-looking door with a window and a strange out of place gold sphere attached to the floor. The sphere didn’t match the aesthetic of this ship’s interior. In a strange way, it almost looked like a gold flower in the early stages of blooming.

Thankfully, the room appeared to have many places to grab a hold of, so it was easy for her to pull her way over to the door. Something told her that there was no way she was getting the door open right now, but she still couldn’t help but look through the window. She could see a hallway with a good number of doors and what looked like an open hatch in the floor around a more open part of the hallway. The surprising thing for her was that, just like this room, the ceiling of the hallway was clear glass, allowing all those inside to see the stars too.

Having that much glass on a starship can’t be safe. Well, it has to be safe to a degree at least, but still I would be so scared of any sort of weapons fire shattering it.

Turning back to the room, she looked at the ‘flowering’ sphere.

I would bet a hundred bucks that you have something to do with my being here. So what are you?

All it took was a gentle push to get her floated over to the sphere. Angling this strange body in zero-g was the problem though, and she almost missed grabbing onto the sphere. Once latched onto, the metal hands could feel no texture to the gold metal, but from looks she gathered it was smooth. Looking down into the open but she felt as if there was meant to be something small and round housed in the center, but there was nothing in there now. She had a feeling of where this was going, but she didn’t want to think it.

I don’t want my story here to just be a copy of someone else’s. But if I’m a co- Her body stiffened as a strange wave of something comparable to instincts filled her mind. -Regent.

Metal hands gripped the sphere, and if it had been gold, she was sure she would have dented it. That new feeling had such grand implications that she was not prepared to face. Other than the implications of what that meant about her existence, it just made her angry. An anger that came from being scared that something was altering her mind without her knowing (one of her genuinely biggest phobias), but anger nonetheless.

Fuck that shit. No. No! You don’t get to fuck with my mind like that! Fuck! Fuck you! Gods-fucking-dammit!

A destructive urge filled her, and she almost acted upon it, but a more rational part of her mind told her it would only make what was already happening more difficult. If she started punching walls or even her own body, she might break something important. Something she needed to get out of this predicament. This was the curse of how her mind functioned. There was a constant struggle to find a middle ground between her emotions and logic. A struggle that typically ended with logic winning, but the emotions hiding away and building strength for an explosive outburst later on. In this situation, an emotional blowup could be deadly.

Not that I’m a stranger to death now… But if I die again this time, it might be permanent.

Bowing her head, she realized she couldn’t close her eyes to shut out that sense. Since she was sure the amber hue meant she was seeing in the dark, that also meant there wasn’t a way for her to just turn out the lights. Well, if she couldn’t just turn off the lights, could she just turn off her own eyes? That was an interesting thought. Her emotions told her to figure that out now, but her logic told her to put it off for later.

Where were lungs to take a deep breath when you needed them?

Alright, let’s try to turn off my eyes. If this is my new body, I should know how to control it.

The sentiment appeased her logic somewhat, what it still told her to leave this for later, but for once she listened to her emotions instead. Though she could move her limbs and head as she had before, not much else was under control. Not that she could understand what other control she could theoretically have over this body. A strange itch at the back of her mind told her she wasn’t actually in full control of her body yet, but she could have it. Worrying about new instincts wasn’t helpful, but listening to them might be helpful.

I am controlling the body, so why don’t I feel like I’m actually in control?

Shaking her head, she pushed those logical thoughts aside and gave into that new feeling. The desire for… Well, she wasn’t sure what words could describe it. Acquisition? Control? Assimilation? That made her sound like Borg, and though she couldn’t deny that similarity with how she suspected she worked, she didn’t like it.

Commandeer. I could get behind that. Makes me sound like a space privateer.

Whatever she may call this new instinct, she gave into it. She let the feeling grow inside the very center of her being. At first, nothing happened, and she just stayed in that still position for a while. Then, just as she was about to give up, she felt it. There was no accurate way to describe the feeling of commandeering this android body, but that didn’t stop the writer inside of her.

 Like quicksilver flowing through non-existent veins[1].

The feeling was new, and so she let it happen naturally, but a part of her felt like she could learn to have more control over it. Maybe one day she could be faster than the three minutes it took for the icy feeling of commandeering to spread throughout the entire robot body. When it was over, the chill lingered, and though it was an unsettling feeling, she reveled in feeling a temperature again, even if it soon faded away. When it was all said and done, she waited just a few seconds, wondering if something else might happen, but everything remained still and quiet.

Realizing nothing else was going to happen, she tried to blink. It didn’t work. She gently banged her head against the sphere she was still holding onto. Of course, it wouldn’t be that simple. Maybe turning off her eyes wasn’t the same sort of command she was used to giving for closing her eyes. She calmed her mind for a few seconds before focusing on the idea of turning off the eyes. In a way, she pushed and pulled at the feeling, trying to find the right way to trigger it, and eventually it worked.

Her vision faded away, not even leaving her with a view of black. There was simply no sight. Relief flooded her, and she reveled in the selective ability to limit a sense. Less input to her mind helped her calm down from the craziness of this experience, but it was never going to fully satiate her. After some time, she pushed at the feeling to turn her vision back on, and after a few seconds of trying, it worked. It took time for her vision to come back, much as it had when her vision first came to her on this ship.

Alright, so not nearly as fast as blinking. I have a feeling that’s a limitation of the robot eyes, not my own capabilities. Well, that just means the act of turning off sight is going to have to be more deliberate, because the time it takes to turn back on could be bad if I needed sight quickly again.

Amber vision tilted back up to the sphere before her. Would commandeering this thing give her answers? Fear held her back from immediately jumping into action. What if it did, and they were answers that would send her into a spiral of depression? Could she handle that at this moment, or would she just fully become self-destructive, maybe even suicidal, at finding out she wasn’t a real person but an AI with false memories and history to give it personality?

I need hope and better control of my environment before I face that.

It pained her to let go of the sphere, but her desire to live was thankfully stronger than the eagerness to have the full picture. Moving fast wasn’t something she was comfortable with yet, nor did she ever push herself out of reach of a handhold. Slowly but surely, she made her way over to the captain’s chair, or at least that was what she was going to call it. Maybe there was a different technical name for it, but that didn’t matter. Hopefully, she could control the entire ship from that chair; therefore, if she could get this place running again, it would be from there.

Up close, the chair was even cooler looking. The inside of the white seats had crimson red leather cushions that looked so comfy that she couldn’t help but reach out and squish them. Even with the numbed body, she could feel how soft and cushy they were. The best part was the flight control setup. Two joysticks with the most sci-fi looking control panels sat on two movable arms attached to the front of the armrests. Sitting on arms of their own in front of the chair was a large array of screens, all with their own buttons. It put any flight simulator control she had ever seen to shame.

This is fucking sick.

Then she noticed that all the buttons and switches had labels. Labels in the modern Latin-script alphabet. Granted, some of them were obviously abbreviations she didn’t understand, but still. There was even a full keyboard that folded out from the side of the chair as well. It wasn’t a QWERTY keyboard, but it was still a keyboard.

I’m so happy this isekai has English.

She didn’t go down the route of what if English was actually a copy of this language. The route she did go down was peering past the foot controls, yes foot controls, and looked down over the edge into the hemisphere of glass.

Holy fucking shit!

Immediately she shoved herself away from the chair and what lay underneath. Her body stiffened as she just let herself float backwards, trying to process what she had just seen.

That’s a mummy…

Most might think of Egyptians when the topic of mummies came up, but there were plenty of other examples of mummification in human history. Many cultures mummified their deceased. There were even natural forms of mummification, like bog mummies, that were very well known. Ötzi the Iceman was an extremely famous natural mummy. One of the worlds oldest murder mysteries too. Was the mummy that lay under the cockpit chair also a murder mystery?

The impact of the door on her back jarred her out of the shocked state. This wasn’t her first time seeing a dead body, nor was it the second, third, or even fourth. In fact, this wasn’t even the first mummy she had seen in person. She was no stranger to the sight of the dead, but in all other instances she had known she was about to see a dead person. She hadn’t been prepared to see this body, but a small voice in her mind told her it wasn’t surprising that there might be a dead body or two on the ship. Still, a space mummy wasn’t what she expected.

What was the right thing to do with the body? Scavenging aspects of games had always been one of her favorite mechanics, and in those games she wouldn’t hesitate to loot a dead body, let alone an abandoned starship. This was in a way a dream come true, but the reality of it was almost nightmarish.

It feels different when it’s an actual body and not just pixels on a screen… Even so, if that’s the captain, they might have something important or helpful on them. Maybe they will have the literal keys to the ship. Fuck, I’m about to loot a dead body IRL.

This time she let her emotions take a backseat to her logic. There would be plenty of time to have an emotional breakdown later, and she could take this as slow as she wanted. Thanks to the impact, she was already slowly drifting back over to the front of the ship. Again she tried to take a deep breath, and though that phantom part of her body told her she was, nothing really happened.

It was only a few seconds before she was back at the helm, peering down at the space mummy. They looked human enough. They also appeared physically feminine and wore spacey, crimson, rogue-like clothes that appeared to show off those aspects of their body. Of course, that was subjective to her interpretation and had no baring on whether this person’s society considered this appearance and clothes to hold those same meanings.

They really liked crimson. Almost cowboy looking with that waistcoat too. Alright, I don’t know if this is appropriate, but I’ll make sure your outstanding clothes get loved and worn. Well, maybe not what you’re wearing right now, but I would assume there’s more somewhere. Hopefully, they will fit, and if not… Well I’ll figure something out.

There were of course a few pockets for her to search, but the thing that stood out to her most was the white metal bracer on the left arm. It was almost fantasy looking but mixed with sci-fi components like a screen and a few buttons. Reaching out, she touched the screen, unsure if it might be a touchscreen in as well. Nothing happened. She pushed a button or two, and nothing happened.

I’m not going to make any comments on how similar this is to a certain post apocalyptic series[2].

Taking it off was probably the thing to do, considering every part of her story-teller mind screamed to do so. The only problem was that truly meant she had to pull something off of the dead body. Her hands shook slightly as she took hold of the arm. There was no sound, but she could feel it almost crunch in her grip as she did her best to pull the arm away from the body just far enough to get her other hand under the bracer. Two buckles held it in place, which felt a little strange in a sci-fi setting, but who was she to complain? She liked the aesthetic of buckles.

There was a little fiddling before she got it off, and she was immensely relieved she could let go of the body. Pushing herself away, she inspected the bracer. Up close, she noticed very subtle gold filigree carvings in the white metal. She had always liked filigree. Continuing to look around, she couldn’t find a charging port. Was it wirelessly charged? How was she going to even charge it with a dead ship?

How am I being powered right now?

[1] My own words, but a nod to the Halo books I loved growing up.

[2]Fallout Series