Rebel's Construct: Sim-Verse: Book 1, page 3
“Yes, we woke you. We accidently damaged your ship and needed to warn you,” Taven said. He moved toward the woman who had again grabbed Ferah by the wrist.
With white hot hate in her eyes, the woman screamed, “You woke me!” This time she didn’t wait for a response but instead attacked Ferah—grabbing, scratching wildly at her face.
Fortunately, Ferah was able to dodge most of the blows, but the woman still had her by the arm and wasn’t letting go.
Taven grabbed the woman from behind, and she reflexively elbowed him in the lip. He bear-hugged her, pulling both of her arms down and forcing her to relinquish her grasp of Ferah.
The woman writhed and continued screaming. She was not calming down, and Taven felt like he’d grabbed a tiger by the tail. He couldn’t hold her forever.
“Let her go,” Mack insisted.
Taven thought for a second, couldn’t understand his meaning, but was glad to have an excuse to get away from this mad woman.
He moved back three steps, and the woman in zero-G spun out of control, her arms and legs hitting and kicking wildly as she maintained her high-pitched squawking.
Mack suddenly lunged forward toward the woman. He tapped her with his hand and quickly stepped back.
“That should work,” Mack said.
Taven didn’t see any changes, and he couldn’t tell what Mack had done. The writhing woman continued to squall, but in mere seconds Taven noticed her mad flailing started to slow.
Then her voice dropped pitch until, moments later, she was quiet, still.
“What did you do?” Taven asked.
Mack strutted proudly up to the woman like a rodeo star with his roped calf. He placed a hand on the spinning body and stopped her in midair. Then Taven spotted it: Sticking out of the woman’s neck was a syringe, one of the auto-inject types that non-medics were trained to use.
“Tranquilizers,” Mack beamed. “I spotted them in Ferah’s bag early on. Just say it’s my prerogative to think ahead.”
Taven wanted to be angry with Mack, especially for claiming to think ahead. Nine times out of ten, Taven was having to do all the thinking for his second-in-command, but this time—Taven was just glad to have the situation under control.
“You okay?” Taven asked Ferah.
“Yeah, I think so,” she answered.
“Come on, let’s see,” Taven said, looking at where the woman had grabbed Ferah’s arm.
Ferah raised her arm and rolled back her flight suit sleeve as far as she could. Taven took her hand and examined her arm. He could see she was a little shaken up, but she was putting on a brave face, especially in front of him. Or maybe it was Mack she wanted to impress. Taven noticed bruising already beginning to form.
“She really had ahold of you,” he said.
Ferah nodded, looking down. Then she raised her eyes to his. “I’m not sure why she reacted that way. Obviously, she was confused, and that’s to be expected when coming out of a long coma. But I’ve never heard of someone having such a violent outburst like that.”
“Me either,” Taven agreed. “She just kept repeating the same line over and over.” Then he realized he was holding on to Ferah’s arm too long, and he let go. There was a long silence as they pondered their predicament.
Then the door to the hallway opened, and Stevens stepped through. The look on his face said it all. “Taven,” he said, “I’ve got bad news.”
CHAPTER 5
TAVEN HAD HEARD Stevens loud and clear, but the words bounced around in his head like it was some storage chamber where thoughts went before being processed.
“They are together, like, right now?” Taven asked.
“Yes, their consciousnesses are interfacing with the ship’s main computer, right as we speak. Presumably they are able to communicate with each other, but beyond that, I have no idea what they’re doing,” Stevens said.
“A neuronal interface,” Ferah whispered in amazement.
“They aren’t sleeping?” Mack asked, incredulously.
“Not in the literal sense, no,” Stevens said. “Their bodies are in some kind of stasis, but their minds are alive and active.”
“How long do they have?” Mack asked.
“That much, I don’t know,” Stevens answered. The young man was already the quiet type, Taven thought. Now that the messenger was in danger of being shot, he seemed extra skittish.
“But you’re certain?” Taven asked.
Stevens nodded, looked down, then said, “We just hit them too hard with that chunk of rock. They probably were in a weak orbit to begin with, so it didn’t take much.”
“What were they in orbit around, anyway?” Mack added. “We’re out in the Belt.”
“Same thing as everything else in the Belt,” Stevens answered, sounding like he’d reclaimed a bit of his pride, “the sun.”
“That’s . . . that’s how many miles from here?” Mack said, turning to Taven for confirmation. But Taven didn’t have to crunch the numbers. He knew Stevens was right. The question that remained to be answered was why the Hudson was even out here and what these people were doing in stasis.
“I can say with certainty their orbit isn’t decaying,” Stevens said to Taven. “They aren’t going to crash into the sun. We knocked them the other direction, away from the Belt. My guess is they’ll end up catching up with Jupiter.
The mere mention of the word crash made Taven cringe. He didn’t like the fact he was made responsible for contacting this ship, but the thought that he would be at fault for a ship full of who-knows-how-many souls crashing to their deaths—that was too much.
“Get back on the console.” Taven ordered. “If you need to, go back to the St. George. But whatever you do, figure out how long we have before the Hudson gets away from us. If we’re going to radio Meyer Corp for help, we’ll need to be more specific.”
The momentary relief Taven experienced for having hit the ball back into Stevens’s court evaporated quickly, replaced by the reality that this was all on his shoulders, and if he wanted to get through this unscathed, he needed to act quickly.
Taven did the math in his head. Unless the Hudson was moving incredibly slowly, they would be up a creek if they had to wait for help from Meyer Corp. Not only did it take more than a month for a rescue ship to travel to the Belt, but it would undoubtedly take a couple of weeks of negotiations between the Miners Union and Meyer Corp before deciding to send help. It wasn’t simply a matter of whether there were lives at stake; blame needed to be passed around along with determining who would foot the bill and whose heads would roll.
“How is she?” Taven asked.
Ferah had the patient down on the floor, clasped with heavy-duty magnetic straps. “She’s stable,” she said. “But I still have no idea why she reacted that way.”
“Which means we woke her up for nothing,” Mack huffed.
“Not necessarily,” Ferah said. She looked at Taven knowingly, then back to her patient.
“She’s right,” Taven said. He looked at the empty sleep pod, its mass of tangled wires and cables spilling out in all directions.
Mack studied his foreman’s words and gestures, then said, “You’re not seriously thinking of—”
“What choice do I have?” Taven answered.
“About a million is all,” Mack snapped. “Where does it say in the new Union agreement that you have to plug yourself into a . . . um . . . what do you even call this?”
“A neuronal interface,” Ferah offered.
“It’s not just my tail on the line,” Taven said. “Not now. Not after what Stevens said about their orbit. If we don’t warn them, we’ll be responsible for hundreds of deaths.”
“But who says what happened to her,” Mack said, pointing at the woman on the ground, “won’t also happen to you?”
Taven turned to Ferah. The thought had crossed his mind, but he hoped she had some technical knowledge he didn’t that might give him reason to be optimistic.
“The difference is,” Ferah said, “this woman didn’t want to wake up. She wasn’t trying to come out. We forced her. If Taven goes in, he’s going to want to come out of it. Think of it,” she said. “This ship has hundreds or thousands of people aboard, and none of them are awake. There’s no one—as far as we know—that’s here to wake them up from the outside. That means they have to have some way to consciously exit the construct. It has to be that way. They had to leave themselves an exit.”
“And you’re willing to risk the life of our foreman on that little hypothesis?” Mack quipped.
“I’d be okay with you going instead,” she shot back. “And one more thing—these people have been in stasis for a long time. There’s likely a big difference between pulling someone out after three hours versus three years.”
“Alright, settle down,” Taven said. “If anybody’s going in, it’s me. Ferah, do you think you can get me in?”
She was already tinkering with the pod’s side console, neglecting her sleeping patient. “If I’m understanding this,” she started.
“And what if you aren’t?” Mack interrupted.
She shot daggers at him before continuing. “It seems pretty simple.
“But you said before there’s no regression procedure,” Mack blurted out.
“We’ve already established that,” Taven said, getting tired of Mack’s incessant fussing. Taven knew it was out of concern for him, but at the same time, Mack was the reason they were in this mess in the first place.
“Then there’s nothing I can do to stop you?” Mack said, stepping between Taven and Ferah.
“Look, it’s not a death sentence. Ferah says she can get me out.” He looked around Mack at her for support. She nodded in approval. “And there’s a fair chance I can find the exit from the inside.”
“But you don’t even know what inside means,” Mack insisted. “All we’re going on is what Stevens was able to figure out.”
“But these people are somewhere,” Taven said. “Their brains aren’t asleep, just their bodies. We owe it our best shot. Listen, if I can’t get through to them, we’ll drop this, send a rescue message to Meyer Corp and head home. But in the meanwhile, I need your help.”
“You name it,” Mack said, responding to the tone of Taven’s voice.
“I need you to help Stevens, learn more about this ship, about the construct, and, if there’s a way, communicate what you find to me inside. Especially if I’m gone for long. And I need you to radio the St. George. Make sure they follow us in case we get out of slicer range and need a pick-up.”
“I’ll do it,” Mack said, his eyes locked earnestly on Taven’s.
“Then get to work. Now,” Taven said, slapping Mack on the shoulder.
The obedient second-in-command marched out of the room and left Taven and Ferah alone.
“That worked better than I thought,” Taven said with a grin.
“He’s nothing if not persistent,” Ferah said.
“One more time,” Taven said as he stepped closer to the pod. “Is this thing going to kill me? I mean, I didn’t want to talk this way around Mack or he would never let up.”
“The truth?”
Taven nodded.
“I have no idea,” she said flatly. “At this point, you know as much as I do. Everything you told Mack about it is accurate as far as I know. But there’s just no way to know without waiting for Stevens or Mack to figure out more—”
“And we can’t wait for that. Not with this thing drifting away from the Belt.”
“Agreed,” she said, looking down as if avoiding eye contact.
Not a good sign, Taven thought. Finally, after a silence that felt like forever, Taven said, “Let’s get this over with.”
CHAPTER 6
AFTER FERAH EXPLAINED the induction procedure—it wasn’t complicated—and Taven was about to slide into the pod, his wrist console buzzed with an incoming message. He glanced at it, expecting it to be from the St. George, but the icon showed it was a patched-through message from Earth.
“I’ve got to take this,” he told Ferah. “I’ll be right back.” He paused at the doorway. “Should we do something with her?” he asked, pointing at the woman.
“I’ll continue to monitor her,” Ferah answered. “I’m not too worried about her waking up. Not after Mack gave her those horse tranquilizers. After you go under, we can transport her to the St. George. If that’s okay with you?”
Taven nodded though something about going under didn’t sit well with him, and he felt a bit of relief as he momentarily escaped his obligation and stepped out into the hallway. There, he saw Stevens and Mack standing by the wall computer. They waved and turned back to whatever they were doing.
Taven stepped around the corner, finding a quiet spot. This was what all distant travelers who were lucky enough to receive messages from home did; like a dog looking for a place to hide its new-found bone, Taven needed a quiet place to unwrap his present.
He paused briefly, hesitating with the momentary question of what the message would bring before finally clicking the icon on his wrist console.
The screen flickered. Then a familiar face, his wife Amy, appeared. She smiled, and he had the urge to touch the screen, to feel her.
“Howdy, stranger,” she said with an accent that was only slightly exaggerated from her natural southern drawl. “Miss me much? Well, I know this is your last day—that is, if you got Mack to behave and get his work done. That’s what your last message said anyway. So . . . ”
She drew out the word and exhaled as if all those words had been hard work. An inside joke that had lost its humor years ago but remained like some vestigial tail. It was those kinds of things, the unnecessary details that really connected with you out in the Belt. The little things that you forgot until you heard them again.
“Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that we miss you and that—oh, Evelynn’s at my mother’s, in case you’re wondering. She misses you too.”
Taven scowled. He missed his two-year-old little girl. It was bad enough that he had to miss seeing her grow up, that she would think her daddy lived up in the sky like some venerated saint she never touched or felt. But why couldn’t Amy put her on the video messages? Why couldn’t she understand the importance of things like that?
“I just wanted to give you a heads-up about our plans for when you get home,” Amy continued. “I’ve got it all set up. Jamie and her family are going with us on a two-week tour of NorAsia. She helped me find all these cute little bed-and-breakfast places that dot the countryside. They have a natural history tour of the old rice plantations and a whale watching expedition that—get this—you can view them above and below the water. And Shanghai is going to be spectacular.”
None of that sounded very good to Taven, especially the whale watching. The last thing he wanted to do when he got home was to go aboard another ship. She stopped and smiled through the screen.
He knew she was thinking of what he would say, what he would think about what she had just said. And the fact that he knew she could accurately predict his reaction made it that much more frustrating. It meant she knew he wouldn’t be happy with the planned trip. The last thing he wanted to do was travel on his furlough, and she knew it.
He’d been away too long, too many times. What he needed was something normal, something simple and fun. He wanted to wrestle with Evelynn in the floor, make her laugh. He wanted to wrestle with Amy later in the bedroom. He wanted to eat cheeseburgers and fries down at Gus’s in Montreux, the next town over from where they lived. He wanted some sitting around time, not sleeping in a different bed every night, spending all of his early-return bonus—something he may not even earn if things didn’t turn around soon. And on top of it all, he was going to be stuck with Amy’s friend Jamie. She was his least favorite person in the Milky Way, and she brought out the annoying qualities that ordinarily lay dormant in his wife.
He clicked off the message and fumed. His frustration seemed to bubble up, increasing with intensity as he sat and pondered the situation. Why did Amy want to spend every last credit they earned? It seemed to him that the more he was away, the more she spent. The more he earned—the pittance it was—the more extravagant the excursions. He was digging his own grave one trip to the Belt at a time. Just like his dad, and if he didn’t do something, change something soon, he was likely to catch a stray meteorite and come home in a body bag the same way his father had.
He loved his dad. Or, at least, he thought he did. The problem was he died when Taven was six, and the years when he was alive were mostly spent away in the Belt. Taven didn’t want it to turn out that way again. Not for himself, and especially not for Evelynn.
He wanted to send a message back, but he didn’t know where to start. And the bitterness he felt for having to handle additional burdens during an already impossible situation promised to make things worse, clouding all objectivity.
So, he decided it could wait. He could reply to Amy’s message after he finished whatever it was he had to do on the Hudson. He told himself it wouldn’t take long, that it would probably be as simple as a conversation with the first inhabitant he could find. Spread the word, warn them, and get out of there.
Then, maybe, he could think more clearly.
CHAPTER 7
TAVEN WALKED THROUGH the doorway into the chamber with the pods, and for a split second he thought he’d entered the wrong room. It was entirely possible, after all, since this whole ship was full of identical compartments. But then Ferah stood up beside the opened pod, and he regained his orientation. Except, the look she gave, her welcoming smile, disarmed him.
“There you are,” Ferah said. “Everything alright?”
She seemed so genuine, and Taven felt his attraction for her surface again. Once more, he hit the brakes, stifling his impulses. He was doing it again, he knew. But it was all artificial, he told himself. She was young and beautiful, of course, but that never mattered much—not this much—on Earth. It was only out here in the lonesome, away from Amy, and especially after that last message, that Ferah seemed so inviting. He reminded himself that the only real reason she paid him attention was because he was her boss.
