On internal sensors, a figure in an EVA suit strained against a tightly sealed floating crate as if it weighed a ton, despite being in zero-g. For a fraction of a second the red label tape caught the light of the cargo bay. Beneath it, Liu Yang could make out faded stenciled lettering on his sensor vision: BIOHAZARD.
>You got this? Liu asked by Neuronet message.
No response was heard, in either his ears or his head. There was only the sound of tired, ragged breathing. The crate was oriented. The gaping black maw of the airlock slid open to the bleak void of empty space. The man gave the crate a push, his magboots struggling to keep him planted in place. It slowly passed through the airlock and tumbled away into the dark…
>INTERSTELLAR CRUISE PHASE, 98.1 YEARS BEFORE PRESENT
It was claustrophobic. Liu Yang was pressed between two walls. Behind him was the false warmth of the workstation’s rear wall cushion pressing into his back. Ahead of him stood the massive face of one of the battlecruiser’s computer modules, just slightly out of reach. The diagnostic lights blinked in green flashes that were inexplicable to a nonaugmented eye, but were transparent to his neural implants. There were no monitors, as there was no need for one here. His tactical glasses displayed all the information he needed.
>Galactic coordinates: pulsar basis, 1 km error margin. Nearest star distance: 41106 AU, 1% error margin. Forward particle concentration: < 1 ng/m3 . Velocity: 0.041c. Life support: 140/150 deep stasis, 8 ready alert, 2 active. Trajectory: locked.
They all lit up in a tiny, millimeter scale dance in front of his eyeballs, overlaid with a green stellar map, uploaded to his glasses from Neuronet. Most people preferred looking directly at data in their minds without the intervention of glasses, but Liu couldn’t get used to it. Even at his age, he was still not used to looking “up” from his eyes to see such complicated data.
He was one of only two organics active aboard the DF Peacekeeper. There were only ever two in the cruise phase. The other crew, his comrades and friends, were in frozen oblivion in the stasis decks below, their heartbeats slowed to one per minute. Most of their minds were lost in the abyss of deep stasis and minimal neural activity. A few were on standby in AI curated worlds. They didn’t need to be awake for the cruise. Just two were needed on the lonely watch. One to wake the others in case of emergency during the long, dark prowl between star systems. And the other, to watch the watcher.
He remembered when he finally earned his captain rank. What a prideful day. As time wore on, the captain rank meant less and less. Years of grinding at the sensor and comms station of a space traffic controller meant long hours of sitting on your ass looking at nothing.
It wasn’t hard submitting an application for the Interstellar Fleet for those already in the military. It was a simple form that simply disappeared into the Neuronet void for most applicants, ignored and never seen again. It was only what followed an acknowledgement of application that was difficult. You had to submit everything. Neural test results. Lineage chart. Proof of offspring. The last one was difficult. It wasn’t easy being in the military and having time for a family, but he did it.
When your battlecruiser left the system, they paid your entire family as if you died. Social benefits, the military called it. Being in the System Defense Force is a job, but being allowed to serve in the Directorate Interstellar Fleet is an honor. The price? To your family, it was equivalent to social death.
His wife Luo Yue had a stone face the day the announcement came. When Liu Yang had said he put in a request for an interstellar assignment, she didn’t realize what that meant. At the time it was like winning a distant lottery. Millions of credits. Prestige. And that was just to the family. But when they got the Neuronet message, her face turned to ash.
>Congratulations. Captain Liu Yang has been selected for interstellar service. Assignment: DF Peacekeeper. Acknowledge receipt and acceptance or rejection within 10 days.
Liu had read the documents. They always gave you a chance to reject. They did not want you on the ships unless you wanted to be there.
“Your daughter needs you,” she said. “She’s been doing nothing at home for the past few years.”
“She needs me? She hates me,” he replied with a hollow laugh, trying to hide his discomfort.
His wife shook her head. “She needs a father.”
“She needs a better job. Maybe a boyfriend.”
“This is like suicide,” Luo Yue replied. “We don’t really lack money.”
He looked around him. The home had gray concrete walls. No windows - those were the privilege of those living on the outer ring of the compound. There were three rooms, quite spacious by this planet’s standards. Most only had one or two.
One of the rooms was luxuriously allowed to remain empty with just a stack of boxes and a desk remaining, the memoirs of a daughter who finally moved out a few years ago when she got married. The other room had a giant KEEP OUT sign on the door written in faded pink marker, a relic from when the person living inside was still a teenager.
His older daughter was everything a father could want - beautiful, smart, strong, didn’t cause trouble, had a good job and got married quickly. His younger daughter almost made him get a vasectomy in case more like her were born. In the end it turned out that radiation from his career solved that problem for him.
“What’s the difference? It’ll just be like being deployed,” Liu replied.
“But this is forever.”
Silence. Liu said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen with her. She has no interest in anything except hiding in a digital game world. With the money… at least she’ll have a life beyond the handouts. The money could-”
“They’re both changing to my last name if you go,” Luo Yue cut him off.
Liu Yang replied sullenly, “They don’t need my last name. The money will be more useful than a father she doesn’t speak to.”
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Bump. He hit his head against the side of the cubicle’s wall and snapped back to reality. The only light in the workspace came from the ghostly green glow of the emergency lights and computer panels, painting the darkened chamber in shifting shadows of emerald.
He sighed in a memorial to human connection.
“Open audio channel, Watch 2.” Casual talk was easier over audio than over Neuronet.
Within a few seconds, a groggy voice picked up on the other end.
“What’s going on Liu?” the voice replied directly into his ear.
“Just wanted to check if you were awake,” Liu said, grinning.
“I’m not and I don’t need to be.”
“Aren’t you here to make sure I’m not going to ram this thing into a sun?”
“Hey, hey. Relax. You’re locked out of interstellar navigation without waking the command AI, commander and auditor.”
Liu sighed.
“Want to grab a candy bar and talk a bit?”
There was a pause on the other side of the channel.
“You’re not going crazy are you?” the voice said, hesitantly.
“I’m fine. I’m already an old man.”
“Aren’t we all, Liu?” the voice replied.
“So, candy?”
There was an awkward pause. “Yeah. Primary display station. See you there.”
>Release, he commanded his implant on Neuronet.
The station responded to his implant’s call and released him from its hold, deactivating the electromagnets that had kept the restraint bands locked in place. He swam through the corridors in cold, stagnant air. There was no need for heating here yet.
Liu propelled himself out of his rest towards a ladder that rapidly turned into a corridor. For a fleeting second, the ladder felt like a void, his primate brain panicking before being quickly suppressed by his experience and combat uploads. He subconsciously felt a small comfort as his magboots made contact with the corridor’s flat floor plate, gently orienting him with a familiar pull.
Before him was the main external display, a small bank of dark panels available as a minor concession for visitors and public data visualization. To the side was a tiny slit labeled “VENDING MACHINE”.
>Display: optical, ambient.
The ship's internal structure remained, rendered as a subtle wireframe. But overlaid upon it, in breathtaking clarity, was the void. The ship's distributed IR apertures, X-ray sensors, and optical telescopes fed their data to the display, stitching together a digital panorama with no blind spots. Yet there was little to see in interstellar space, and no one to see them. In the near-darkness of the emergency lights, his own faint, green-tinted reflection stared back from the black glass of the display.
>Autoadjust sensitivity, he commanded through the implants.
Slowly, they emerged. The void was a warm, glowing fuzz of hazy beige, the combined light of a million suns flowing in a cosmic river with a subtle bend. Those ahead were distorted together with a slightly cooler tinge. It was a calculated vista of such staggering, crowded grandeur that it felt less like computer vision and more like a religious experience.
In the foreground was the Peacekeeper herself. The radiator wings, each the size of a small skyscraper, speared out into the void. They were not hot enough to shine red, yet they were not inert, instead glowing with a dim, almost invisibly dull gray as its light bled into infrared. Starlight caught their fractal edges and disappeared into their black carbon surfaces.
These were the only man-made structures for millions of km in any direction, and they looked both terrifyingly fragile and monumentally eternal. The sole other sign of humanity visible to their sensors was a pale purple pixel far in the distance, the thermal glare of a miniature solar core blended with the emission of ions heated to searing temperatures. It was circled with a simple label.
>DF-BC-3818M “Relativity”
>Asset class: battlecruiser
Sometimes it helped to be reminded that you were part of a greater machine, even if that reminder was synthesized by the machine itself.
The silence was near total. The only sound was the whisper of his own breath and the faint, rhythmic thrum of blood in his ears. Yet, he could feel the ship around him. A deep, sub-audible vibration, felt in the bones more than heard. It was the heartbeat of the battlecruiser.
Nudge. Every ten seconds. A precise, metronomic pulse, an almost ghostly touch reaching him through tiny compressions of the air. With each nudge, a tiny star was born and died in the reactor, hundreds of meters below him. A pellet of lithium 6-deuteride was crushed into a miniature sun and its remains blasted into the magnetic nozzle. Each pulse was a controlled microcosm of a stellar core, hammering the ship forward.
Nudge. Each pulse pushed them a few centimeters per second faster. A gentle, continuous pressure against the Peacekeeper’s back, like a persistent, ethereal hand. Over days, it built into kilometers per second. Over years, into a meaningful fraction of lightspeed. Forward.
There was a slow thud of someone bumping against bulkheads and ladders in near zero-G and faint cursing echoing through the empty corridors before landing on his feet. Liu Yang turned his head and closed his eyes, giving his glasses a chance to adjust. A shiny bald head emerged from behind the console, glinting in the faint green emergency lighting. It was Okeke, the other soldier on watch.
“Okeke,” Liu acknowledged with a smile.
“Captain Liu,” Okeke replied with a smile. “This better be some good candy to wake me like this. Gotta rest up for the fight.”
>Chocolate bar.
Liu tapped his hand against the vending machine. Instantly, a bar of chocolate was ejected from the small slot. He quietly opened the wrapper and broke off a piece. Small dust particles of chocolate went flying in zero-G. Liu flicked half to Okeke and then instantly reached out with a napkin to clean up the chocolate dust in mid-air.
“Fight, huh? That’s years out.” Liu sighed. “Do you know the mission?”
Okeke shrugged. “I’m locked out. I assume they’ll let us know in system. You?”
Liu silently shook his head.
“They say that you have a 99.99998% chance of waking up normally when you go into stasis. Wonder what happens to those who don’t?” Liu looked past Okeke with a blank expression. Okeke stared back at him.
“You said you weren’t crazy,” Okeke chuckled nervously as he bit down on the chocolate.
“I can never get over how young you look for this job,” Liu said, talking past him. Unlike Liu with his gaunt frame and black hair with faint hints of gray, Okeke was clean shaven and smooth skinned, clearly a man in his prime.
“What can I say, I got approved fast. Hours go quick when you are an EVA engineer,” Okeke replied with a grin.
“Your family let you go?” Liu said questioningly.
“My father couldn’t wait to get me out of the house,” Okeke laughed. “Too many of us in there, no space left.”
“Your kids?”
“Babies. Their momma live with my father and brother. They’re OK. My payout takes care of them. You?”
“Yeah. Got two dau-”
The dim emergency lights suddenly got a bit dimmer.
>Warning. Reaction asymmetry exceeding tolerances.
