Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 61 - Disconnect

Episode 61

Linuka needed to convince the man that she was not a threat.

By telling a simple story, not bending the truth too much. She found one, but then it was gone. She couldn’t hold on to a single convincing thought.

Her mind turned into the ocean, and her words floated away, got pulled underwater, sank into a dark abyss. Her mouth opened, then the ocean zoomed out of focus; wet became cold, cold became frightening. Fear made numb.

A muffled thud. Forehead pain. Dull paralysis.

She never lost consciousness, but consciousness lost her. Empty plane, empty mind.

When the waters returned, the words came along like debris, fragmented and nonsensical. They flowed over her, the water pleasant, but the fragments hurt when they hit her head.

Her? Her. Linuka. Her numb body lying in the white void, just as she had considered for giving up. Did she?

The man? Him. He never had a name. He was on all fours, trying to rear his head.

“What was that?”

Did she say this, or him?

“I don’t know.”

They exchanged a glance, as primal as it was innocent, like the first people to exist, fully human, but clueless about their next move.

Linuka had wanted the man to take her from the void. He had second thoughts and hesitated. But maybe he did take her, and the voyage caused the disorientation.

“Was this… the bus?”

“What?”

“The thing you wanted to use to take me. To your part.”

The words could not keep up with the urge to say them. She sat up and looked around.

“Away from this.”

“The bus? No, we’re still in your…”

His face went blank. He was struggling for words, too.

“Your part of the system.”

“Haven, version 4.”

Linuka shook her head. Version 4. She chuckled. Again, but louder. A wave of laughter erupted.

“The magiimuus version thing. It’s still going.”

He giggled.

“It is. I guess it means we’re not dead, ha.”

Linuka fought her outburst.

“No, we’re not.”

She panted. She hadn’t laughed that hard in… Not in… Never. Linuka hadn’t laughed about anything as far as she could remember.

“Did you think we were dying?”

“Well,” said the man. “I don’t have much experience with it, but I felt my mind draining out of my body. Always assumed that’s kind of what dying would feel like.”

Linuka staggered to her feet.

“The draining. I felt that, too.”

She offered her hand to the man, who grabbed it and pulled himself up.

“Thanks.”

He released his grip, unawkwardly.

“I’m not a bad person,” said Linuka. “I’m not dangerous.”

People outside of this system thought otherwise.

“Do you think someone tried to delete this memory segment?”

“Delete it?” asked the man. “With your data in it?”

What if the Assembly decided not to keep the ghost of Linuka Omga around? Pulling the plug, purging the memory bank—done.

“Yes. Isn’t that possible?”

“Why would they do that? I don’t have much experience with government conspiracies, but if they wanted to get rid of you, there are easier ways than this consciousness upload. I think the only reason I got spared was that they still wanted something from me. Don’t know what that is really, but otherwise I’d be dead already.”

The man was right. For everyone else but Linuka Omga, he was. But she was not easy to kill outside this machine. Linuka Omga—her name. So familiar, yet so abstract when she thought about it.

“I’m Linuka.”

Omgas were dangerous. The man smiled. Linukas were fine.

“Rooy Prrash.”

“That’s very Old Galactic.”

“I told you our peripheral dustball used to have a busy darkstring leading into the core.”

“Yes,” said Linuka. “I remember. Does it feel strange to you?”

“Having an old name?”

“No, remembering things. Like you have to pull them out…”

“… of the mud?”

“Yes, exactly.”

His smile disappeared. Rooy Prrash probably just realized that coming to Linuka’s part of this cursed system was a mistake.

“I’m sorry you got—“ He shushed her.

“Someone’s coming.”

His head turned, quickly scanning the indefinite horizon, like prey that had sensed a predator. He was right. The flickers had returned—in numbers.

“Found you, stone boy!”

A brutish man stepped out of the void, next to Rooy, grabbing him by the loose, open collar of his jumpsuit. Rooy held on to the man’s wrist; if he was trying to break out of the grip, he was failing badly. The avatars were full simulations. And they could interact. Rooy had said she was the only girl. More men appeared, shorter and less muscular than the first, who still held Rooy like a child holds a puppet, but each one still made her look tiny, small-framed. Weak.

Her instincts made her step backward. Her Uurmi would have prevented such a foolish gesture. The movement won nothing, except the men’s attention. Stares, cold and uncomfortable.

The brutish man nodded toward Linuka, then faced Rooy again.

“Is this why you’re here? Leaving our cozy little company to conspire with an operator?”

“I’m not an operator.”

Linuka was always quick to respond, asserting her position, righting a wrong. The Shaajis, the hero’s daughter, the immortal reality shifter—she could afford it. Risk a confrontation. Wipe off the blood after. Linuka, the girl, could not. Too late.

The brutish man’s gaze slowly turned back to her, first considering, then dismissing. He was just like the Linuka outside the machine. Not one to turn down a challenge. Not one used to stern backtalk.

“An instructor, then. Haven’t seen one of you kaatsak in a while. You’re coming with us. Grab her.”

The other men, four in total, moved as one, like Cha Dzeeny’s marines. Unlike the marines they hesitated when closing in on Linuka, as if there was an unseen barrier.

“What you’re waiting for?”

“She… is an instructor. We can’t just take her.”

“If you haven’t noticed, the system is magii. The rules don’t apply anymore. Grab her and pull her to the bus. If her protocols still work, she could just disappear.”

“What if she does? And then fries us in here?”

“Something tells me she won’t.”

The brute walked toward Linuka, effortlessly dragging Rooy along.

“She won’t? How do you know?”

“Fear. You can smell it.” The brute grinned. “This girl’s afraid.”

He was half right. Linuka had sensed fear before, faced formidable foes, near-certain deaths, but the permeating sense of helplessness was the worst of all. What do they want with me?

“You’re going to witness what you did—and then fix it.” This man could see right through Linuka.

“Fix what?”

“You messed with the clock rate, or the interfaces, or whatever. You did this.”

The thought of what Linuka allegedly did emboldened the four men, who were on the move again. Careful, probing, but just steps away from her robed avatar.

Linuka shook her head. “No.”

“You deny it? The system glitches, everyone goes down, leaving most of us stiff on the ground, and then you show up. In this low-level part of the system. I don’t believe in such huge magiis coincidences.”

“We,” said Linuka, “went down, too. Almost unconscious, but not quite. More like a temporary… amnesia.”

“You know what it is, then. You’ll fix it. Or you’ll regret it.”

Linuka didn’t know what hurt more. The pressure of rough hands pulling her arms behind her back, the popping of her shoulder, or her own words. Amnesia. Widespread partial amnesia, the telltale effect of an unleashed causality bomb. There was only one person who could have talked the slave AIs into using the weapon: Linuka. Her body wasn’t helplessly wasting away in the connector chair. It had unplugged itself and walked off. A tear rolled down her face. She had worried about the symbiont being alone. Her Uurmi didn’t suffer at the hands of Assembly experimenters; it had taken the chance of a lifetime and walked off with Linuka Omga’s body.

The Assembly was not trying to delete her mind. They had no idea she was in here. And they would likely never figure it out with their minds blasted catatonic by the alien device. Linuka wasn’t just disconnected from the real world in a box in a lab. The real world got disconnected, too.

“I regret it already.”

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