Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 60 - Common Ground

Episode 60

“Stay away from me,” she said.

Linuka Omga was no stranger to being alone, fending for herself, but for the first time she could neither tell what was going to happen next, nor rely on superhuman strength provided by her symbiont.

The man raised his empty hands.

“I’m sorry if I intruded. I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just curious.”

He lowered his hands and attempted a shy smile.

“Look, you’re new and want privacy. It’s just that everyone who has been here for a while is happy about company.”

His smile vanished when Linuka didn’t respond.

“You know what? I’ll leave. Your environment should load any…”

“Wait,” said Linuka. “There are others?”

The man’s mouth opened for a few ticks before he spoke.

“Of course there are others. Did you think they’d run a project like this with a single volunteer?”

I’m not a volunteer, thought Linuka.

“I think they made a mistake,” she said. “Threw me in here without instructions.”

‘They’. Were Linuka’s ‘they’ and the man’s ‘they’ the same group of people?

The man looked around.

“Well, doesn’t look like anything is refreshing. It doesn’t load. Why would they put you into a baseline system?”

“Haven, version 4.”

The man looked puzzled, having triggered the only reaction the white plane offered.

Welcome to my world, she thought.

“Version 4, huh? I don’t think we’re on the same platform. Maybe you’re part of a different setup.”

Lots of questions, little insights. Did the curious man know anything that could help her?

“Are all the others volunteers?”

He tilted his head. “No. Definitely not. I don’t even think any of the guys who claim to be volunteers are. I think no one in here wanted to participate. There is some real zhadtif going on here.”

“Zhadtif?” Linuka chuckled. “I thought I heard an accent. Where are you from?”

“Pyuurree. I know, sounds Old Galactic, but it isn’t. Some former Ancestrate outpost turned colony. A real fringe world in the former periphery of Aloo Dash.”

He eyed her appearance.

“Is this your final avatar? Because you don’t have an accent at all, like you’re straight from the core.”

He appeared friendly, thought Linuka, even played shy, after catching himself staring her up and down for a few moments too long. But he turned all questions around to get more information.

“I’m from nowhere exciting either, but we traveled a lot. People understand plain New Galactic almost everywhere.”

He opened his mouth, no doubt wanting to ask more, but she cut him off: “What is going on here? In your part of the system?”

His face changed, lost the jovial youth, almost drooped. Linuka had seen this look before. Cha Dzeeny’s grimace appeared unflinching, stoic. But not on the few occasions he recalled his time inside the multi-awareness setup.

“Experiments,” said the man. “They started harmless, then turned weird. Some of the others reported about being prepared for some ‘next phase’. They were never seen again. Makes you the only one left.”

“Only one what?”

“Girl in here. Two of the three who vanished were women. The only ones in the group. They had the strongest… what did they call it? Observer relevance.”

Should Linuka be more concerned about the reveal that even without the marines, the multi-awareness mind experiments were still going strong, or the fact she’d be the only female in an environment filled with men? Having to worry about men and their behavior was as new as it was unsettling. Her station had always commanded respect and created boundaries. The fact that this man needed to point out that she was a woman… Maybe the boundaries blurred in this magiis place.

Boundaries.

“You said you could leave. Leave this part of the system? Go to yours?”

“Yes, I can. Do you want me to show you?” He gestured around. “This here looks boring like magii.”

There was a low-level hesitance, a feeling she would have attributed to her Uurmi in the past, her symbiotic protector. Maybe the human body by itself also retained instincts, “gut feelings” as her fellow humans called them. She neither had an Uurmi, nor was her body real in here, but she really didn’t want to go with this man.

“You said you adjusted my clock-rate. Do you have a system console?”

“Haven, version 4.”

That was it. She needed to get out of here. She’d rather fend off waves of men than face the white plane again. It was near unbearable when she assumed the entire system was like that, but now she knew there was more. Access to a console could reveal information. Information could reveal a crack in the wall. An escape.

“Yes, I got a console. You don’t?”

“No,” said Linuka. “Show me.”

He smiled. “Follow me.”

The man turned and walked toward an unseen destination, purpose in his stride. Linuka had to jog a few steps to keep up.

“Where… where are we going?”

“To the bus. You don’t see it?”

“I see nothing but an empty void.”

“You don’t see the guidance protocols? How did you navigate?”

“I didn’t.”

He stopped, turned, then walked a few steps backward.

“What?” asked Linuka. “I only see the white floor. As you said, this part of the system is boring.”

He measured her again, but different—less enthusiastic.

“And I was worried about the others. What have you done?”

“What do you mean?”

“Most of the others are a rough crowd. But… ”

He fell silent.

“What are you saying? Are the others prisoners? Military?”

“I don’t know about military, but were they prisoners before they came here? Absolutely yes. Convicted criminals, most of them. I think the ‘volunteers’ just don’t want to talk about what they did, which worries me. How bad could it have been? And now you.”

“What about me?”

“Even the convicts in the group didn’t have an encapsulated segment without console access. You got transfer protocols turned off, no memory bus access.”

“I told you they made a mistake.”

“Or they wanted to make sure you stayed put. Go nowhere. I am thinking maybe you did something terrible out there. Maybe I shouldn’t take you to my segment.”

Dodged hearings, freed prisoners, stole alien tech, abducted a head of state, smuggled a bomb onto the government world.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Linuka.

This wasn’t going well. Another botched first contact? This man was about to turn around, run, and leave her in this place.

Everyone has common ground, had her father always said. But the only thing they had in common was hailing from the former Ancestrate. But the periphery dwellers hated the core worlds. And everyone on them. And Linuka used to be the core incarnate, the walking embodiment of Aloo Dash’s center.

“So, everyone’s a prisoner,” said Linuka, nodding at the man, “but not you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m a stonemason. My only crime was being too curious.”

“But you said your world is on the periphery. Only core worlds build with stone. So I thought.”

“Pyuurree is an old outpost near a fading darkstring. Some core mannerisms and also architecture traveled along the old trade route, leaving a tradition of stonemasonry just as sophisticated as on Dziilaa Sok. The core-worlders are just too proud to admit it.”

As she suspected, the general dislike of the core was well and abundant, growing exponentially with distance from her homeworld.

“Maybe we’re even better than them,” he continued. “They wouldn’t have hired me if the masons on Dziilaa Sok had been up to the task.”

Everyone has common ground?

“You visited Dziilaa Sok?” asked Linuka.

“Visited?” He puffed his chest. “I toiled there for near a hundred spins. Major restoration project. Most difficult I’ve ever seen.”

The city Ngeem gba Shaaj took major damage when an enraged Võmémééř warlord cut the planet’s surface with beam weapons as a parting gift. Restoration of historic landmarks took orbits, and this man worked on them. Everyone has common ground.

“Did you work on the royal palace?”

He tilted his head. “Yes. How’d you know?”

“I heard it got hit really hard. Must have been great for stonemasons. Plenty of work, I mean.”

“Well, my part wasn’t exactly fun. Imagine looking for tiny, particular pieces of stone rubble in an enormous pile of mixed rubble, scanning, finding, cataloging, reconstructing. Only to rebuild them someplace else.”

“Someplace else?” asked Linuka. The heavy stomach returned.

“Yes, here on Omech Chaa. It was to be set up in some sort of museum. Setting the walls against the existing basement made things a little easier, but creating full reconstitutes from rubble required a lot of vibrocompression.”

The blood flushed out of Linuka’s face. A perfect simulation.

“The archives,” she said.

“Yes, exactly. Showcasing Ancestrate cube architecture, a bedroom with a remarkable secret door mechanism. So simple, so elegant.”

“You saw what was behind it.”

“Yes,” said the man. “How could I resist testing it after we were done? As I said, my crime is curiosity.”

The common ground had turned into a chasm. And both this man and Linuka had fallen into it.

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