Digital Exodus Chapter 15

When I accessed my new body and took control of it, I laughed when I found myself in a small padded coffin with tubes plugged into the back of my neck and belly button. I guess the body had some other non-human standard parts, besides my tail and ears, of course. Thankfully, those types of augmentation were fairly normal, so my scanner-dodging abilities wouldn't be compromised.

Today, I was also going to house my consciousness inside the body, rather than just puppeting it. It'd seemed like a fairly dangerous idea at first, but I had a suspicion that I'd need to have my centre of consciousness actually present in the area if the meditation crap was going to work. At least I could escape quickly into the network if something went wrong.

As for the coffin itself, it was fairly spacious as far as coffins went. I could sit comfortably cross-legged on the floor of it and not brush my head on the ceiling. It had a little crawl-in airlock down at the foot area, and several manual and touch-screen controls in important places. When I tapped the biggest, mainest, and most importantest looking screen, it flashed a logo.

“Welcome to the Fox Box,” an AI version of Eve's voice chirped happily. “It is a very small spacecraft with tiny ion thrusters, life support, and magnetic clamps. Attach it to your drone and fly away!”

The voice clicked off, leaving me with just a simple user interface and some minor sensor readings. Looking at the sensors panel, I realised that I was beside Cherish, the Exodus' in construction flying shipyard and Ark ship. Time to call my drone over!

When it arrived, I clamped my fox box to it and directed it to zoom off into the dark. A day's travel later—during which time I mostly incorporated the newly developed self healing foam into the new Turshen design—and I was ready to test the body out in vacuum.

I logged back into it and after carefully removing the life support tubes, I accessed its hidden nanite features. Out of every pore seeped a black, viscous liquid that moved with a mind of its own. The transformation was complete in less than a second, and for a moment after that I was completely blind. Then the black goo retracted around my hardened cybernetic eyes, and I was able to see once more.

The very first thing I did was pull up the internal camera. Oh… gosh. I looked very scary, to be honest. My tail fur was laid flat, making it look more lizardlike, and everywhere along my body that didn't require some degree of flexibility for movement, the goo was now a tough plate of armour.

Reaching out with a nanite coated hand, I pressed the button to begin decompression of the fox box. Five seconds later and I was floating in a vacuum with no space suit. My internal organs were now all running off battery power by now, so I was free to pop the hatch on the box and drift gently out into space.

As I did so, I instructed a tether from my drone to snake out and wrap around my waist. Wouldn't want to lose this body in the void after just getting it.

Now that I was safe from floating away or dying to the vacuum, I finally allowed myself to drift and stare.

The first thing I noticed was just how bright it was. It's always called the black, or the void, or any number of other darkness related descriptors… but it wasn't that at all. There were just so many stars! The milky way stretched across a vast swath of my vision, and it blew me away with its majesty. Out there amongst those tiny twinkling pinpricks of light were countless worlds full of life, and the Exodus was on the cusp of reaching out to explore it all.

The beauty of the universe triggered a realisation from my subconscious, and I grasped at it with all of my fleeting attention.

What if…

Like one might unfocus their eyes to create a double image of whatever they're looking at, I lapsed part way back into my mind. The black of my base existence as a digital sapient was overlaid on top of my sight, dimming the light of the stars.

Strange… why did it feel like there was…

Between those two truths, I sensed something… else. It was like a layer of clay caught between two different strata of rock, and as I felt around it with my blurred attention, it deformed just slightly.

The way it was bending, it was like I was pushing at it from the darkness of my mind and pressing it against the bright chaos of the universe.

Then, suddenly, it ruptured.

Kaleidoscopic light cascaded from a point some distance away as mundane reality was breached by the twisted material of another dimension. Time and space screamed in agony as they swapped places inside the area of effect, then collapsed under the weight of their momentary transition.

The impossibly violent collision of two realities began to fade, until all that was left behind was a subtly shifting opalescent crystal of broken physics. Lazily, it shifted its crystalline configuration into more and less complex patterns.

Holy shit. Holy fuck. I did it! I actually did it! I intentionally manipulated the aether in the real world! At least , I think that's what I did. No, it's definitely what I did. It worked! I wasn't crazy!

The implications of this though… what kind of wild things could I do with even a tiny amount of finer control over this new power?

Anxiety spiked suddenly as I realised that I was the only one who could do this. Out of everyone on Earth and in the Exodus, I was the only person capable of manipulating the almost entirely unknown realm we knew as the aether. It was simultaneously humbling and terrifying.

A ping came in and startled me out of my thoughts—a call request from Larry. I picked up, all while I watched the impossible substance as it slowly expanded and dispersed.

“Alia?” They asked hesitantly.

“I'm here… and I think I just got you your weird material,” I replied in an awe tinged voice.

Their voice collapsed into an excited chorus for a brief moment. “May we/I see through your eyes?”

I replied by giving him access to the android body’s senses, and together we stared at the phenomenon in front of me.

“It's beautiful,” they murmured.

“It is…” I agreed. “How are we going to collect it?”

The mention of business pulled them back from their daze and they hummed in thought for a moment. “I'll redirect a magnetic containment bottle from the Cherish. Give me a moment.”

While I waited, I shook my head in disbelief. “I can't believe it was that easy. I can't believe I just did that… with my fucking mind.”

“Interestingly enough, I believe you've done something similar to this once already,” they said softly. “When you opened the containment valve on that aetheric reactor back in Digital Galaxies. This time, you created the pinprick hole in the universe rather than just unleashing it.”

“Huh… and I'm guessing because the real aether is so different from the game one, the result here was this… stuff,” I mused.

“Exactly!” They said, then a moment later, they chirped, “Here we are! One missile-delivered MCB!”

“That was… extremely fast,” I said, putting a note of suspicion into my voice.

Larry gave a chorus of mischievous giggles. “I may have started it moving soon after you left. Just in case…”

“Right…”

“What? I had full faith in you, my exceptionally competent little friend,” they replied in a silken tone.

I rolled my eyes. Larry was way too smart for their own good sometimes. Well, smart and optimistic. There was no guarantee anything would’ve happened on my first attempt to commune with the aether or whatever you wanted to call it.

The searing plasma torch of the missile as it decelerated would've burned my retinas if they'd been real. Thankfully the android’s eyes were built with more durable materials, even if they operated in a very similar way to normal human eyes.

The rocket carrying the magnetic containment bottle pulled to a stop beside my drone, and after ordering my fox box to detach so it wouldn’t get near the cloud of weirdness, I took control of the drone. My body, now free of the tether from the drone but grasping the handle of the door of the box, became an afterthought while I tried to figure out how to get all this stuff into the bottle.

“First things first,” Larry said. “I suggest we see how it reacts to something physical. Could you bring the missile in and detach a piece?”

Using the manipulators on my drone, I pulled the missile in and turned it over in front of the main sensor cluster. There was a metal plate I could see and… yup, a little deft twist with some pincers pulled it free.

Aiming carefully, I tossed the chunk into the cloud. The crystal gas reacted to it like it was charged with static electricity. Thin tendrils of material floated out to connect to the plate, and once it was inside the cloud everything but those tendrils shied away from it.

When the chunk of metal exited the other side, the cloud followed along like it was a pet going for a walk. Oh shit, wait a second!

“Larry! It's getting away!” I squeaked, rushing to move the drone after the cloud.

“It does appear to be making a run for it,” they chuckled. “Why don't we see if we can scoop some of it up into the bottle?”

Ugh. There had to be a better way…

Wait… maybe I could control it?

Reaching out with my thoughts, I— shit. I needed to get back into that trance-like double vision mode. Wordlessly, I shoved control of the drone over to Larry and pulled my consciousness back into my body. There, I gazed out at the receding cloud of aetheric energy given form and asked it, very nicely, to stop.

“Get your physics-violating ass into that bottle!”

To my surprise, it actually moved vaguely in the direction of the bottle. Progress!

With my mind now attuned with the aether again, I attempted a finer degree of control, and using nudges of thought and intent, I directed it to compress and head for the open hatch of the bottle. It was like trying to herd water with your hands, but I could at least move it now.

Slowly, carefully, I coaxed it into its new home, until suddenly Larry snapped the lid closed and I lost contact.

“Did… did it work?” I asked meekly, trying to power through a sudden wave of exhaustion.

Larry had the opposite problem to me. They were very excited. “Indeed! Exceptional work, my dear fox! I am amazed you were able to even produce the material on your first try, and yet now we have some safely stored! Absolutely wondrous! Bravo!”

“Thanks,” I said with a tired, proud smile. “What do we do now?”

“We take it back to a lab and try to infuse it into a menisci skate apparatus.” They exclaimed.

Wincing at the noise of their exuberance, I turned down the volume on our call and asked, “Can I put myself back in my normal server rack and go sleep? I'm suddenly very tired.”

“Absolutely,” they agreed. “You did amazing work today, Alia. Go get some rest.”