Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 65 - Dead Reckoning

Episode 65

“We’re dead,” said the short man.

He sat slumped on the metal chair, burying his forehead and eyes in his hands, trying to hide his tears. Nobody had gotten up from their individual port connectors since they returned from the lab. After discovering the bodies, the urge for further exploration evaporated. Fidelity in the machine mind stopped, and the group returned to the docking station, their collective mind prison—the only home they had left.

“How can that be?” The tall man, standing in front of the group, arms crossed, had stayed behind and not shared in the gruesome discovery. “We’re still here, talking. How can that be if we were dead?”

“The upload,” said Linuka. “It’s not a copy. It’s a transfer.”

Her mind was in here, and in here only, having set her Uurmi free. The symbiont stole her body, but maybe that kept it safe from whatever happened to these labs.

“That’s draash nreedz! When you uploaded into that Krrut machine, you were still here. Phased out, yes, but still breathing, sitting right there in that chair.”

“The upload into the Isonomih core is different. These are not our bodies here; they’re avatars. But out there, these are the real physical bodies.”

“And they’re dead,” said the short man. “As dead as they can be!”

“Yes,” said the brute, making the simulated cheap chair emit a squeak when his simulated hulk rose. He turned to Linuka. “They’re dead indeed. Everyone, me, them, even stone boy as far as I could tell. But not you.”

“What do you mean?” asked the tall man.

“I mean, there were only male corpses out there. The women who were here before, maybe the lab people got rid of them. But this girl here, her body, wasn’t there. And yet, she is here.”

The short man jumped up. “I knew she was an instructor!”

Linuka sighed. “No, I’m not. I came in here through a different system, remember? I didn’t enter through the lab we had seen out there. My body is somewhere else, and I don’t have reason to believe it’s in any better shape.”

“Does it matter?” asked Rooy.

All eyes turned to him.

“Honestly—did the lab out there look like there were any instructors around? Or anyone else?”

“What are you saying, stone boy?”

“The world we knew out there has changed, radically, and not for the better. The super secret sterile government lab has turned into a ransacked trash heap. I don’t think they have any instructors left on staff. None of these things matter anymore. Our minds, including hers, were dawdling on ‘slow’ in here, while the outside turned to nreedz. We’ve been dead for orbits, and didn’t even know.”

The short man sat back down. The brute broke his stare. The tall man’s shoulders slumped.

“For orbits?” he asked. “How do you know?”

“I’d been on several ancient dig sites out in the deserts of my world. Sometimes we’d find mummified remains, and I was taught to assess how long these people had been dead.”

“Why did that matter?” asked the brute.

“Because if they’d been dead for 200 orbits, they were basically part of the ruin and belonged to the bio-archaeologists, but if the corpse was 5 to 10 orbits old, investigators would come and take them. It was mostly—”

“How long have we been dead?” asked the brute.

Rooy closed his eyes. “Tissues were dry; some exposed bone. The lab suit fabric turned flaky. Bodies looked collapsed—”

“How long?”

Rooy sighed. “10 orbits, maybe 15.”

“Magii,” said the short man. “15 orbits?”

The tall man sat down on the rubbery floor, avoiding the chairs as if they were directly connected to bad luck. “I still don’t understand. What happened to the world?”

Linuka knew. But should she tell them? Over-sharing information had not exactly worked to her advantage in the past. Drooping heads with long faces, even the brute couldn’t bully his way out. Rooy gave her a nod. What did that mean? Was she so easy to read that he sensed a reveal? He had diverted the angry attention away from her—again. What for? Linuka was grateful, but couldn’t see his plan.

“I know why the ride was so smooth,” said Linuka.

“What?” asked the tall man.

“When we were one with the machine, someone remarked that the ‘ride was smooth’. The Isonomih was easy to control, without any hallucinations or dream states.”

“Yes,” said the brute, and Linuka wasn’t sure if that meant “you’re right” or “so what?”

“I know what these hallucinations are. The Shaajis of Aloo Dash had them, too.”

“She was crazy?”

“No,” said Linuka. “She was multi-aware.”

Strangely, Rooy looked the most confused. Whatever he had attempted to signal her to do—bringing up this topic had not been it.

“She could see other realities, worlds, other ways how situations could unfold.”

“Isn’t that what the Krrut can do?” asked the brute.

“Like in the solar sailor legends? Predict the future?” said the tall man.

“The old skippers could do it, too,” said the short man.

The legends dated back to the Galacticide, and Linuka had underestimated how deeply they had permeated the galaxy. These men appeared like they could be from any corner of human-settled space, yet they all had accepted multi-awareness as part of their cultural fabric. She had grown up multi-aware, and always considered it kind of a family secret, curse, or superpower, but these men made it sound mundane.

“Oh, so you know,” was all she could reply. She shook her head. “But did you know why you are here?”

“To learn how to control the machines,” said the short man.

“No,” said Linuka. “To learn multi-awareness. From the machines.”

“The women… “ said the brute, but did not finish his sentence.

“Yes, the women were deemed better at it, or maybe were, but their minds got overloaded by the experience. I assume they were not in the room with… your bodies, because they didn’t make it.”

“And you didn’t dream?” asked the short man. “Had the multi-thing going when we were out there?”

“No. There was only a singular, clear state of mind. Only one reality. That’s why there was no interference with operating the Isonomih body.”

“Why?” asked the brute. “Was the Krrut broken?”

No, thought Linuka. The machine was fine—fully operational. The world was broken, from the wall screens to the fabric of causal existence. The Isonomih did not flood their minds with splitting realities because there were none out there. The Assembly world drifted through spacetime, on an irrelevant orbit around stars hardly anyone remembered. Its bubble of relevance had shrunk to whatever the blast radius of the causality bomb had been, and the outside universe got cut off. Or did it?

“I don’t know,” said Linuka, lying to the brute, but honestly answering her own question.

Why did he still remember the Krrut? Or Rooy his homeworld’s deserts. The other men seemed shaken, agitated, but also functional.

“Your friends, who fell into a coma—where are they from?”

The men once more looked at the brute, as if to receive permission to speak.

“They weren’t friends,” said the brute. “Locals. We hoped they could help us once we escaped. But now they’re useless, in here and outside.”

“Locals. Everyone else here is from off-world?”

“Enough with the questions, girl. If you know something, spit it out. As stone boy said, we’re all on board the same vessel now.” He grinned, but it wasn’t a friendly grin.

Yes, their world lines all pointed in the same direction now, closely entangled. Those men comatose on the floor—their world lines had never touched the universe outside the Omech Chaa system, and the causality-negating device had turned their reality into a senseless world, void of causes and effects, nothing left for a human mind to latch onto.

The other men—the ones staring at her with a mix of anger, unease, and anticipation—they had cast their world lines across the galaxy, now becoming their lifelines. Their minds still connected to a reality where the passage of time revealed change, and a stonemason showed a head wound because someone smashed his face on a desk. They could still feel, fear, and reason.

The causality bomb radius was not an absolute event horizon. Her hope pierced right through it. But they needed more than hope. She scanned the men’s faces.

“We need to go out there and fix it.”

“The Krrut machine?”

Linuka sat down on the upload chair. “No—the world.”

Click here for next episode

---

Copyright © 2026 Bert Oliver Boehmer. All rights reserved. No part of this serialized novel may be reproduced, reposted, or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the author. The creation of any derivative works (including translations, adaptations, or other transformations) is likewise prohibited without permission. The use of any portion of this material for training or developing artificial intelligence or other machine learning models is strictly forbidden.