Mossfoot's Tales of Woe...

[mossfoot]

“Okay. Tell me a story,” the woman said. She was sitting next to me on a grassy hill overlooking the spaceport on some planet. I wasn’t sure which.

I should have recognized her, but I didn’t. I wanted to ask who she was, but the words wouldn't come out. I just looked at her, trying to place the dark hair and eyes, and that sarcastic smile of hers.

Eventually she got tired of waiting. “Fine. I’ll tell you one. It’s a story from Earth over a thousand years ago. It seems like a simple police story at first – a retired cop needs to stop a bunch of fugitives who are on the run for being different. But by the end you realize it’s about something else entirely. It’s a story about life, finding meaning in it, and trying to figure out what it’s all about. About regret and coming to terms with how things must come to an end.”

I looked at her, puzzled, wondering what this story was.

“It’s called Blade Runner.”

---

I woke up. The bright lights designed to make microbes and bacteria run for the hills had a similar effect on my eyes. I looked around. I was in a hospital room. Again.

“We’ve really got to stop meeting like this,” I said to the walls.

I guess the monitors told people I was awake, because it wasn’t long before a nurse came in to check on me, followed by the Federation officer who had assigned me to track down Miller. The officer waited patiently as the man asked me some inane questions about how I felt and left. I wished the uniform had followed him out, but he didn’t.

“Feeling better?” the officer asked, even though the nurse had just asked me the same question. I nodded. “You should know that Miller’s escape pod was found not far from yours. He’s in Federation custody.”

“Swell,” I said. “I still get paid, right?” To be honest I didn’t actually care about the money. I just hated the idea of going through all that for nothing.

“We would have preferred dead. Cleaner. Now we have to deal with certain inconvenient civilian legalities. But yes, we consider the contract fulfilled, Lieutenant.”

My brow furrowed. Had I just enlisted?

“You’ve been rather busy. We noticed. The pirates around Barnard’s Star, joining our forces in an engagement around Wolf 359. Passing communications and supplies in-between. It didn’t go unnoticed, or unappreciated. We tend to show that appreciation in the form of rank. Honorary, but it does entitle you to certain privileges and entrusts you with more difficult assignments.”

“Swell,” I said again, knowing this wasn’t the only reason he was here.

“We’ve arranged for your ship to be replaced and returned to the combat specs you had upgraded it to, and took care of the insurance for you through your account.”

“Thanks.” Wait, they could access my account?

“We take care of our own,” the man said, trying to be as straight and true as his crew cut. “When you’re feeling up for it, we’d like to discuss the possibility of further assignments.”

I began to chuckle. Here I was in a hospital bed, having just faced the realization that I had nothing in my life. That existence was an empty and meaningless void. That nothing I did was going to be remembered or cared about… And here this guy was asking me to go out and keep at it.

“I think I’m out for a while,” I said. “But I’ll keep your offer in mind.”

“Very well. I can imagine that took a lot out of you. My comm channel will be open if you change your mind.” He nodded and left without another word.

---

It turned out I had been transferred back to Galileo, since that was considered my “official” residence. Dumbass was in good shape at my lodgings and hadn’t grown too much. She even recognized me…or just assumed I was bringing food.

I got her in the carrying case, packed up her stuff and gave the keys back to the front desk. I’d considered dealing with this existential crisis here or on Earth, but it just didn’t feel right. My new and still nameless Cobra was as close to a home as I had. But honestly, I wasn’t going to sort things out.

She was waiting for me at the outfitters as I’d requested. The chief mechanic there was a lot less attractive than the one who’d kitted her out during the hunt for Tiberius Miller.

“You the owner of a Lonely Heart?” he asked.

“What?” I’m pretty sure that was the name of a classical song from way back.

“That Cobra. Lonely Heart. Is it yours?”

Great. The Federation takes care of its own, my butt. They didn’t get me a new ship, they got me a used one. With my luck it would need an overhaul of everything from the engines to the life support system.

I looked over her. She was definitely a used ship. But then again, I was pretty used myself. I smirked. “Guess I am.”

“Right. Well, we got those mil-spec beam lasers your officer buddy asked for, but I gotta say, that’s a lot of firepower for your power plant to handle. You sure you want two?”

I looked back to the ship and thought about what I intended to do with her.

“No. Sell one of the beam lasers and put in a mining laser instead. Get some cargo bays put back in, and add a small refinery.”

The man checked out the specs on his datapad. “Yeah, she can handle that just fine. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Replace anything that looks like it’s ready to wear out and give her a new paint job.” Just because I couldn’t get a decent makeover didn’t mean the Lonely Heart couldn’t.

I needed some time to think. Alone…more or less. This was as good a way to get that as any.

[mossfoot]

I’d never grown a beard before, and, thanks to my lovely combination of burns and scars, I never would. But if I could I was easily out there long enough to be a mountain man.

Ever play an old Earth game called golf? At first is starts off being an excuse to have a really long angry walk. Then you get okay at it and start taking pride in your general improvement. Then you get good enough that any slight mess up frustrates the hell out of you and you’re back to having a really long angry walk again.

Mining is kind of like that, but in reverse, since you’re trying to get the hole in one by having the ball land inside your ship.

It’s bad enough having to scoop up fragments like they’re discarded cargo, but then you gotta process them, and rarely do you ever find anything with a decent amount of pure metal in it. Highest I found was in the fifty percent range.

But it wasn’t about the metals and minerals, it was about the peace and quiet. Aside from a single Sidewinder who (briefly) tried to mug me, I turned the experience into something more Zen-like.

So I mined, I pet my cat, I checked my cargo holds to see how much good stuff I’d collected, I got my cat out of the refinery bin before it went back online, I ate, I got my cat out of the air recycling system, I read, I got my cat out of the airlock (which I’m certain I had locked and encrypted) before it blew open.

But most of all I sat in my chair, looking at the gently tumbling rocks, lit by the nearby sun, and wondered what it was all about.

Maybe this was all that was left in my life. Scraping by a living until the day one vital organ or another gives out and I’m found as salvage a week later. Well, what's left of me after Dumbass realizes there isn't any other source of food she can open.

I kind of envied the pilots out there with a sense of duty, either fighting for one of the big three factions, or simply acting as their own little guardians of the galaxy as freelance policemen. Heck, I almost envied the pirates. Sure, they had no morals but at least they felt like they had purpose. It’s just that their purpose came at the expense of yours.

I looked over at the co-pilot’s chair, and sure enough there was Dumbass, even though I always keep the cockpit door locked. How does she do that? She was there sitting and watching the purple mining laser as if she was going to jump through the viewscreen any moment to grab it. And I wouldn’t put it past her to try.

I even envied Dumbass. At least she had it all figured out. With her there was never a why, only a try.

---

“It’s called Blade Runner.”

I was back on the hill listening to the woman tell me a story about a retired cop hunting down and killing artificial humans. I’d actually seen the movie before as a kid, but the way she told the story it was like she was talking about something else entirely. She focused on the subtext of what the story meant, how unfair the replicants situation was, how brutal Deckard’s job was, and ultimately, the importance of grace and forgiveness, and the importance of life itself.

When she got to the point where Roy Batty saves Deckard’s life, she had a distant look in her eyes, looking off into the growing night sky as she repeated his final speech. “I have seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

She then turned and looked at me. “Time to die…”

----

I woke up with a start. It was the third night in a row I’d dreamed about her, and I knew darn well who it was now… I just didn’t want to admit it.

I mentioned before the black hole of memory I have in places, but also that my journals were in the public domain (and bizarrely popular among a small subset of pilots). The thing is, I’ve never bothered listening to them after the first eight or so. The gaps it filled did me no good now, and only gave me a building sense of dread, like I didn’t want to know.

But I knew. I knew enough, anyway.

I’d lived my early life getting through life on wit, charm, money, and my father’s influence. When I lost the latter two, I found out how much I’d actually relied on them, because the former two didn’t get me as far as they used to.

But in all my time I’d only come across a few people who’d cared absolutely nothing about my wit or charm, and only one who’d agreed to work with me in the close confines of a ship for more than 24 hours.

Hell, she even killed me once. It’s how we met.

I got up, ate, got the cat out of the zero-g toilet she’d somehow gotten into, and went back to work. Drill, scan, drill, scan, drill, scan, scoop, scoop, scoop.

My eyes drifted back to the empty co-pilot seat. We’d busted out of my father’s carrier in his prized antique MKII prototype together, then laid low as the fallout from those events blew over. She’d reluctantly agreed to work with me, at least until I could afford to replace the ship she’d lost.

And then…? It was still all hazy, except for the dreams.

“Whatever happened to you, Violet?”

[mossfoot]

I suppose I should set the record straight before someone fan-fictions the crap out of what I’ve been saying. Violet and I never did the Cobra with two backs. Not that I didn’t suggest it once or twice on long trips between systems. Thing is, I was never her type—her type lacked a Y chromosome.

But really that was just another way for her to call me on my BS. Of course I was going to try and seduce her. That’s how I’d always handled relationships with women. It would have made things easier for me—let me trivialize our partnership, or treat her like I would any other woman. She wasn’t having any of it.

With sex off the table, or anywhere else, I had to treat her like an actual human being. I remember wondering when my life had become a bloody after-school special, but the fact is we worked well together. I provided the schmooze at stations, bargaining for better prices and feeling out slightly shady deals, she provided cover fire when said shady dealings when out the airlock, and I had to run with a briefcase full of credits. She always had a plan ready for escape, and a head for tactics. Bounty hunting had been her bag long before we ever met, running away from trouble had been mine.

We’d been doing that for at least a year, I think. And then? Not a clue. Only the dreams, which were giving me a really bad vibe to be honest.

It was a month now that I’d been scouting asteroid belts and planetary rings. Every couple of days I’d stop back in at McKee Ring to offload and get some grav-time in.

Only this time I realized that my self-imposed exile therapy wasn’t working. I might have had all the time in the world to think, but what I was thinking about wasn’t helpful.

I was wallowing.

I had the whole universe out there, and here I was hiding in rocks. Okay, so maybe I didn’t want to go back to my social butterfly ways just yet. Maybe I was sick of people, or maybe I was afraid of making new ties after having lost all of my old ones. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t stuff to do out there. What was that line from the story she told me?

“I have seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate…”

A bit poetically violent, sure, but the meaning was still there. Roy had seen some crazy stuff in his time. And what makes up who we are more than the sum of our experiences? What defines us?

Did I want my experiences to comprise of drilling rock all day? Or did I want to see some crazy stuff?

That day I sold my mining drill and refinery, and fitted my ship with an advanced discovery scanner and detailed surface scanner.

The mechanic at McKee Ring didn’t seem too surprised by the change, but he did ask, “Which way ya heading?”

I looked around the station as if I could somehow see through its walls.

“Which way is Orion?”

[mossfoot]

It took me some time to reach the edge of inhabited space. There are WAY more inhabited systems out there than I was used to a hundred and fifty years ago. It can be pretty overwhelming looking at them all on the star chart, to be honest.

The star I had in mind was just off the shoulder of Orion, but not actually part of the Orion constellation. Most of those stars were way too far away for my liking. I was used to at least having a station to send an SOS out to if I got into trouble, and back in my time, that was every station. Not so anymore.

I wandered from system to system, only stopping at stations to do repairs and check on the value of a hold of Indi Bourbon I was carrying. That stuff’s in demand, and the further you go from Epsilon Indi, the more it’s worth.

Eventually I reached Empire territory. Now, I can’t say I know much about the Empire in terms of policy. Most of what I hear on GalNet has to do with the soap opera going on in the palace, with the Emperor on death’s door and a royal wedding being called off.

I do know they allow slavery, which I’ve never been cool with. They dress up the language and try to make it like a legit kind of debt repayment, but it still grinds my gears. I've almost been sold off myself on more than one occasion. They also seem to have a smug sense of meritocracy to them to justify just about anything. Sure it’s not a democracy, but it’s a place where you can get ahead if you prove your worth.

Contrast that with the Federation, which is a democracy that’s rife with corruption from what I hear, and everything gets bogged down with special interests and whatnot.

To be honest, if I had to choose sides I might very well go with the third option—the Alliance. That makes up much of the area of space I used to know, including my home world of Lave. I say “if I had to” because from what I hear a lot of the better known Alliance worlds are full of douchebags gaming the system to make the lives of pilots like me hell. They say you can’t go home again, but in my case it’s more like I don’t really want to. Not yet anyway.

The Imperial stations I came across seemed much the same as those in the Federation—modular designs that work, keep a familiar baseline so that pilots travelling long distances don’t get confused and make costly mistakes, that sort of reasoning.

The folks there didn’t say much. I didn’t hear any docking announcements, and the repair people just seemed kind of grim and duty bound. Maybe these guys were banished to the outer planets and just stopped giving a flying fig anymore.

The last inhabited station I was in was Vinge Hub in Lovaroju, where I sold of the bourbon for a cool quarter mill. The system I wanted to go to was maybe 200 light years away, but my stupid navigation computer could only calculate 100 light years, so I had to find a mid-point destination to program in. One that would take me through Hades Sector MH-V, Col 285 Sector OR-V, Synuefe XV-S and all the rest of the alphabet soup.

Hey, there are 400 BILLION stars in our galaxy, you can’t give them all cool sounding names. And if you just let any old bloke name them, half of them would end up being references to dicks. So I can’t say I really cared about the names, but they did help emphasize the fact that from this point on, I was going out alone.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt something I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel again.

I felt excited.

[SteveKing]

Sometimes you've got to be careful about being excited - 'Big Kev' used to be excited

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/big ... 97910.html

All us Australians know the icon, but don't know how far he made it around the world.

[mossfoot]

Sometimes you've got to be careful about being excited - 'Big Kev' used to be excited

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/big ... 97910.html

All us Australians know the icon, but don't know how far he made it around the world.

Sorry, mate, he doesn't ring a bell with this pop-frozen Yank

[ClymAngus]

It's good to see this take a change of direction. Oolite characters struggling in a dangerous world.

[mossfoot]

Well, if I thought leaving inhabited space would mean never running into another human being, I was sadly mistaken. Not in every system, mind you, but every so often I’d have a blip on my radar, a passing Asp, Adder, or Cobra like mine. We’d more or less grunt greetings over the comm, then ignore each other and go our merry ways.

Even if a system has been scanned, Universal Carteographics pays top credit for fresh and updated data. They sell that information to miners looking for metal-rich worlds to exploit or would-be colonists looking to set up their own hippy-dippy Eden off somewhere… no doubt dying because the local vegetation is all poisonous.

The further I went out, the fewer these people were. Just as I thought I’d seen the last of them, though, an Adder showed up on my radar somewhere in Synuefe VP-U B36, and as I ignored him and scouted the numerous planets of the system, the bugger suddenly interdicted me!

“MINE!” he yelled as we hit normal space.

He started shooting at me with a rather pathetic pair of multi-cannons.

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I said over the comm.

“MINE! YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!” Can’t have what? I didn’t have a clue, but he wasn’t giving me a choice but to fight.

I hadn’t really had the Cobra equipped for combat, though, so the fight was… well I can’t say exciting. More like long. You know how two kids who don’t know how to fight spend half an hour slapping at each other and actually getting hit maybe one in then times, making pathetic whining noises?

Yeah, this was that kind of fight. I kept hoping the bugger would just go away, but he fought to the bitter end, burning up in a bright ball of flame, no ejection seat to be seen.

Damn. What was his problem? The only thing I could imagine is that he’d gone space crazy and was jealously defending this “find.” The system had numerous metal-rich worlds and even one suitable for terraforming. It would have brought in a pretty penny back home, and with a 50% bonus if I was the first to visit it.

Well, it’s mine now. Hope that was worth dying for, crazy man. How long was he out here for to get like that? Maybe I shouldn’t stray too far from home. If I start talking to my cat, or worse, myself, I’ll be in deep trouble.

[mossfoot]

I’d been out here for a while now. Once in a while I’d pass by another explorer and we’d link our ships and share a drink—I’d show them the marvels of my “special” tea-maker, while they would crack open a bottle of whatever hooch they had on hand.

It seems to always be called “Indi Bourbon” by explorers, even if it was made in the cistern of a toilet. In fact, they tend to have their own short hand when talking about their travels, which I had my most recent companion explain to me in detail. You stay alone out here for too long and you soon start to crave human contact.

Apparently, in explorer speak, I’m a Bowman (explorer), and since I still have my guns on my Cobra, I’m a ‘Battle Bowman’. Since I have a set destination in mind, I’m ‘locked on’, while my companion was just on ‘walkabout’. He captains a ‘flying brick’, or Lakon Type 6, which seems to be an apt description given how it looks. He noticed my ship wasn’t equipped with a ‘La-Z-Boy’ (advanced discovery scanner) so he figured I spent a lot of time ‘hunting shift’ (looking for the parallax of stars and planets out of my intermediate scanner’s range). And so on, and so on.

Seems like everyone out there has their own lingo. Traders, bounty hunters, miners, explorers, even pirates. I’d never really thought about it much before now, but then, I never had as much time to think as I do now.

---

As time went on, Bowman encounters became few and far between and then stopped altogether. I didn’t mind. Right now I was more interested in the different systems I would find.

Before I was pop frozen, it seemed like every system was the same. There was only ever one planet you bothered heading to, and one station you were usually interested in. Lately I’ve become keenly aware of the multitude of other stations a system might have, and other planets besides the main inhabited one. Then again, in those days I thought all ships had a seven light-year limit on their hyperdrives. Most people in the area now known as the Alliance did. We thought only bigass Navy ships could break the 7LY barrier.

But the fact is a Cobra can actually hit over twenty light-years a jump if properly outfitted, which makes most of the galaxy accessible. If only I had known…

During this trip I saw a lot of amazing things – a star system orbited not by planets, but by a dozen smaller stars, gas giants orbiting dwarf stars so close to one another you wondered how they didn’t crash into one another, of if someday they would. I even tracked down my first black hole—no easy feat without a La-Z-Boy scanner. I had to climb out of the system for tens of thousands of light-seconds, just so I could see the orbital paths of the planets that were orbiting it. From that I was able to guestimate its location and dive straight towards it.

In hindsight, not the smartest thing I ever did. But I eventually found it, bending light around it like an invisible ring. That would get me a shiny credit or two back Solward.

Each new system had the possibility of new surprises, and if it didn’t have any it was easy enough to move on to the next system. I was…content. A feeling I hadn’t felt in a long time.

So naturally it wasn’t going to last. You should know me by now.

I reached a system that, if viewed from Earth, was just off the shoulder of Orion. An uninteresting place, to be sure. Big yellow sun, but only one metallic rich planet orbiting it.

And an unidentified signal source orbiting the planet.

I blinked when I saw this on my HUD. The last USS I’d seen was four hundred light years back. Only a few possibilities came to mind as to what it could be, none of them good. The most likely was a fellow Bowman whose ship was destroyed but still putting out a distress beacon.

I came in close and pulled out of Frame Shift, finger ready on the trigger, just in case it was another crazy hermit type.

It was a ship, but it wasn’t destroyed. In fact it was in perfect condition, silently orbiting the metallic rock below.

And something about it seemed familiar.

I got closer. Whatever it was, it had been here a long time. The paint was bleached white, so it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been. Er… unless it was always white, that is.

The profile of the ship made me think it was an Asp at first, but no, it was more like a Cobra, except…I actually gasped at this point. It was a Cobra, but a model I hadn’t seen in a long time.

A hundred and fifty years, to be exact.

It was a Cobra MKI, the first of the series. They stopped making them ages ago and the only place you could see one now would be in a museum, probably next to the MKII prototype I was found in.

I inched my ship closer, to try and get a look inside the cockpit. There was, indeed, someone there and they were, indeed, long dead. The pilot didn’t have a helmet on, so once I got close enough I could see the telltale signs of mummification. But at first, just for a moment, I thought…

I shook it off, and circled around the ship, looking for a serial number or something so I could report the find back home. An ancestor somewhere would no doubt appreciate having the mystery of this person’s disappearance solved.

Nothing.

Well, I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I decided to pop out the airlock and get inside. I brought a power cell with me so I could power up the ship’s computer and download its logs. Least I could do, since I couldn’t exactly bring the ship back with me.

Walking inside the old Cobra MKI was like entering a tomb. No lights, dust particles everywhere, no sound. I wasn’t going to bother turning on life support, for all I knew it could break down at the worst possible time. And I couldn’t shake the strangest feeling that I’d been here before.

I reached the cockpit, where the pilot sat waiting for me. No, seriously, it felt like the pilot was waiting. I half expected the seat to turn around and face me when I got close enough. But it didn’t.

I plugged in the power cell and the cockpit lights flickered to life. It was funny to see the old radar and multi-function displays come to life. I’d gotten so used to the holographic projections this felt like a serious nostalgia kick. So far, so good. I accessed the main computer, brought up the log…

…and promptly lost my mind.

The ship’s name was Lady Luck. That didn’t ring a bell, but what did ring a bell was the name of the pilot.

I looked over at the mummified pilot in the captain’s chair, eyes sunken, teeth grinning at me, and then at the name tag on her antiquated flight suit—Violet.

And then I looked behind her, where another Violet stood, leaning on the top of the seat staring at me. In the same flight suit, without a helmet, far from dead, and also grinning at me.

“Took you long enough, flyboy.”

[mossfoot]

I figured it was settled. I’d officially lost my mind. Been in deep space too long. Stared too long into the Abyss, as the explorers say.

I was staring at both the corpse of my only real friend and her not-corpse standing behind it as if she’d played the biggest prank of all time. Which, if things were as they appeared, would be quite accurate.

“Is it starting to come back to you?” she asked. “It must be, or I wouldn’t be here. And here I was thinking I’d be stuck on the sidelines forever, listening to you mope and monologue inside your own head like bloody Hamlet for all eternity. Talk about purgatory.”

I backed against the ship’s console, as if that was somehow going to get me away from this madness. “H-h-how?”

“Oh, hey, you can use your voice box after all, even if you do sound like a cartoon character who’s seen a ghost. Let’s not get into the how just yet, shall we? I’m really worried about breaking your brain. And neither of us want that, trust me.”

Violet circled around the set to look at her body. “Boy, I have not aged well. But, you know, if they brought you back so many times…” At that point she seemed a bit sad, resigned. “No, I guess even now there are limits, aren’t there? And it’s not like anyone else could have survived what you did.”

“W-wh-what do you mean?”

“I mean, do you honestly think a body would survive a hundred and fifty year deep freeze unless there was something special going on with it? Think, flyboy.” She jerked her thumb to the mummy. “This is what should have happened to you.”

“I was in cryo-sleep,” I said. It’s what I’d been told, anyway, when I first woke up.

Violet made a buzzer sound. “Wrong answer. Since when did you ever have a cryo chamber in your old ship? Though I guess in a way they could be technically telling the truth…” her voice trailed off a moment, but before I could prompt her she continued. “Look, here’s the short answer. You’ve been patched up a number of times, and some of the treatments were… experimental. Remember Brother Mathias?”

The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t put a face to it.

“He’s the one who saved you the first time you got splashed. Remember that? Bunch of Vipers your dad’s XO sent after you?”

That I did remember. When I’d lost my cushy privileged life and had to start over with nothing, not even my real identity.

“Brother Mathias and his order did cutting edge experimentation in medical science. What they did to you? Well, I don’t know the details any more than you do, but what I do know is you’ve got more nanites floating in you than you want to know. They’re the reason your body could still be resuscitated when you were found. Without them…” Violet jerked a thumb at her corpse once again.

“So why didn’t this treatment become standard use on people?”

“Ever heard of the term ‘grey goo’? Think of that, but only applying to a specific DNA signature. You’re the only test subject that didn’t end up happening to. And that’s why they tried so hard to bring you back when you were found. All those tests they ran? It wasn’t just to make sure you were feeling okay.”

Come to think of it they did take enough blood samples over time to fill an elephant.

Violet looked wistful again, looking over at the captain chair’s silent occupant. “That’s why, when you heard about…” She didn’t finish.

“Heard about what?”

Violet turned back to me. “Tell me a story.”

---

“Okay. Tell me a story,” Violet said. She was sitting next to me on a grassy hill overlooking the spaceport on Lave. I had just shown her my dad’s house, albeit it from about forty miles away. We were still on the run, after all. I couldn’t just show up on his doorstep and invite ourselves to dinner.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. We’d been hit by the worst possible news and I was still trying to process what could be done, and kept coming back with nothing.

Eventually, she got tired of waiting. “Fine. I’ll tell you one. It’s a story from Earth over a thousand years ago. It seems like a simple police story at first – a retired cop needs to stop a bunch of fugitives who are on the run for being different. But by the end you realize it’s about something else entirely. It’s a story about life, finding meaning in it, and trying to figure out what it’s all about. About regret and coming to terms with how things must come to an end…

“It’s called Blade Runner.”

I listened to Violet tell the story in her own unique way, but I felt numb through most of it. She focused on the subtext of what the story meant to her, how unfair the replicants situation was, how brutal Deckard’s job was, and ultimately, the importance of grace and forgiveness, and the importance of life itself.

When she got to the point where Roy Batty saves Deckard’s life, she had a distant look in her eyes, looking off into the growing night sky as she repeated his final speech. “I have seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

She then turned and looked at me. “Time to die…”

I looked away. It wasn’t fair. None of it was. Violet was more than a friend, she was family. About the only family I had, and I cared about her more than even my own dad. And here she was, talking so calmly and so resigned about her fate. And here I was, unable to accept it. I wanted to punch a hole in the hill until it was deep enough for me to hide in forever. I wanted this all to go away.

We’d been through a lot since we’d stolen the Cobra MKII prototype from my dad’s private collection. The Viaticus Rex, as we’d dubbed her, had been a great ship, and we’d traded and schemed and fought and ran like heck through most of the galaxy in her.

And after a couple of years we’d earned enough money to buy Violet a replacement Cobra, just like I promised. She dubbed it the Lady Luck, and almost the very next day discovered just how ironic that choice of name had been.

Two weeks. That’s all Brother Mathias could guarantee. I’d done everything short of threaten him with a blaster to do something for her, but there was nothing. The disease itself was beyond medical science, and whatever had kept me alive would in all likelihood turn her to a pile of grey goo in a month.

Back on the hill, Violet looked up at the stars once again. “Off the shoulder of Orion…”

[ClymAngus]

Nice double back. I like that.

[mossfoot]

Thanks, I do like having a plan for narrative structure well in advance so I can have moments of interconnection like this. And we're not done yet

[ClymAngus]

Plenty of ghosts in space, as it happens. Making a few myself, truth be told.

[mossfoot]

It was all starting to come back, but that didn’t answer the most pressing question.

“How… how are you here?” I figured it was about time to come back to that, despite Violet’s concerns for my fragile brain.

“I’m not here,” she said, then tapped the side of her head. “I’m here. Well, here,” she corrected and pointed at my head instead. “Mathias couldn’t save my life, but he could save my mind, with a little help. He had a new experiment to try, and you were desperate enough to try anything.”

“You weren’t?”

“To be honest? I’d made my peace. But you were terrified, mostly at the prospect of being alone again, so I agreed to try. They had a device attached to my head, scanning my brain, picking up and duplicating everything, scanning and re-scanning over and over.”

“Making a copy.”

“Technically. But the weird thing was it wasn’t a one way street. I could actually feel the connection the whole time, like an in-and-out-of-body experience. The way I see it if it was part of me for so long, and it was active right up to the point I kicked the bucket, maybe it is me. If not, it’s a hell of a facsimile. Let the philosophers argue about transhumanism and all that crap.”

Okay, so far my brain hadn’t broken from the news. “So how did you get here?”

“We’d picked up a lot of secrets from the Navy, if you’ll recall. The seven light-year limit lie was one of them. Once I knew that there was only one place I wanted to go.”

---

Back on the hill, Violet looked up at the stars once again. “Off the shoulder of Orion…”

“What’s that?”

Violet sighed. “You know, according to those Navy records, the Federation and Empire don’t extend out that far, or even in that direction. Every system we’ve been to in our lives has been inhabited. Every single one. But there’s so much more out there. So many worlds none of us have seen. I’ve spent my life shooting up other ships, following my own code… it just never occurred to me that there could be more out there.”

“Like Thargoids,” I countered

Violet chuckled. “Spoil sport.”

“What if all that area is unexplored for a reason? What if that seven light-year limit is about keeping us safe?”

“It’s about keeping us penned in,” said Violet.

“I’m serious. What if it’s so we don’t wander off and kick up a hornet’s nest. Maybe the rest of the galaxy is one big Thargoid nest and human space is just this tiny speck they haven’t quite wiped out yet?”

“Wow, you can really be a downer.”

“It tends to happen when my friends are dying.”

“Look. I don’t have much time left. This is what I want. We know how to break the jump limit on our ships now. I don’t have a homeworld, so there’s no place for me to be buried. Let’s go to Orion. Once I’m gone, leave my ship there and come back, or go to Sol. Visit Earth. Start a new life altogether. But let’s do this first, okay?”

I thought about it, but not for long. It was what she wanted, after all.

“Okay.”

----

“I can only assume something went wrong on the return trip for you,” Violet said. “I’ve got no better idea than you do about how you ended up in the deep freeze.”

“So after you…” I gestured to the mummy, “I somehow uploaded you into my own head?” I could see now that there was a band, obscured by hair, that ran around the mummy’s forehead. A few signs of circuitry showed, as well as a port of some sort by the left ear.

“More or less. Mathias messed around with your noodle so I could piggyback on it. From what I saw while he explained it, you’ve got something hugging the outside of your brain like a wet knapkin. That’s me. I’m surprised the tech boys who thawed you out didn’t notice it.”

“Why didn’t you show up before?”

“I couldn’t after the accident. It seems to be connected to your amnesia. I was here, but locked out. I managed to make contact a couple of times, in dreams, and once when you kamikazed your ship into that terrorist’s Python….dumbass.”

I remembered. “So, are you completely separate from me? Can you read my mind?”

Violet shrugged. “Hey, I’m as new to this as you are. It took a while for the neural handshake to get established, and by that point you were en route to Sol and then…” She raised her hands to get across ‘whatever the hell happened next’ to me.

“So, unless you’re looking in a mirror, I can’t even tell if you’re just thinking this conversation or talking to yourself in a ghost Cobra. Heck, you might be saying my words as well for all I know.”

That puzzled me. “You can’t see me? You’re right there.” I pointed at her still standing next to the chair.

“Yeah, no. That’s more like me projecting my residual self image, doing what I think I would be doing if I was out there in my own body. It’s supposed to help make sure neither of us goes crazy being in the same head or something. Fact is, I’m seeing out of your eyes the same as you, so you can imagine it’s kind of weird for me to look at myself talking to you right now. I mean, really weird. But, on the upside, it’s like I’m watching a movie about me whenever I want. I look good.

“Bottom line, flyboy, is that I’m back and here to stay. Now that we’ve paid our respects to the dearly departed, I suggest we get back to your ship and continue on our way.”

“Um…actually, I think I’ve had enough of exploration for a while, if it’s all the same to you. I think I’ll head back to Sol and see some doctors… and a shrink. Or twelve. Just to make sure I’m not crazy.”

Violet rolled her eyes and groaned. “Wuss.”

[SteveKing]

It's all sounding very Heinlein. I expect it will wander otherwise, but nice lead in. Always nice to have a guardian angel.