Category: Writing

One of the crew who continues to sign on is a gunner with a worrying habit of gnomically pontificating, fancying herself to be a wizened sage. It is possible, of course, that surviving for somewhat longer than average is due to some slight edge in wisdom. It’s more likely that the cumulative effect of vaporised aromatic hydrocarbons cooking off overheated weapons has sent her more than a little mad. I have come across her, on late watches when she has thought herself alone, obsessively polishing the guns and leaning over to whisper to them. I really do not want to know what she is saying.

One of her repeated aphorisms is that the loss of a ship is just a tax on stupidity. I appreciate the bloody-mindedness that this ultimately resolves to. Place that on the refiner’s fire and there’s not much left over than a nugget of truth: all consequences flow directly from conscious decisions. Nobody else is responsible for what happens to me or my ships.

Of course, I’m not happy to have had ships shot out from under me, and would prefer not to suffer the cost of the material loss, and the loss of crew who know how I want things done. But I cannot deny that every loss was a direct result of some conscious decision. So each loss gives me a chance to learn something to prevent the loss of the next ship.

I am certainly finding that my options for making a profit are evolving on a week to week basis, as I acquire new skills, and become better attuned to the difference between acceptable risk and bloody stupidity. Of late I have developed a pattern that for the time being is reasonably lucrative while reasonably safe. Not fast growth, but sufficient for the next few months as my longer term plans become clear.

There are various agents scattered about who will broker contracts to… well, let’s not be coy about it, to go out somewhere and kill a lot of ships and their crew for whatever reason they deem appropriate. They tell me they are pirates, or enemy combatants, or religious freaks. Whatever. I take my cruiser out, blow them into scrap. I return, take out the vessel I have fitted with salvage, and recover what I can. Then I pick up the bounty. It’s not consistently lucrative, but can earn nicely depending on what I find in the wrecks. Alternatively I use my exploration vessel to find pirate hideouts, and perform much the same cycle.

A side effect of this is that my crew is attracting individuals with a certain… oddness. The gunner I mentioned is an exemplar. To speak with her, initially, reveals no eccentricity. But spend too much time talking and she will start looking past your shoulder, and shifting from foot to foot, and folding her hands. It is quite amusing to keep talking, and watch her become more and more agitated. Release her attention, and she will scurry off. Follow her and you will find her polishing the guns, crooning and whispering. You may think that this is vaguely sexual – or if you think it’s extremely sexual, the thought of her slowly rubbing the oily cloth along the gleaming shafts, then I suggest you seek therapy. Instead it’s disturbingly maternal. She cares for the guns obsessively, possessively. One day I shall fit cameras in the gun room to watch her behaviour in combat. It will either be alarming or amusing. But it remains that she illustrates the result of the pressures produced by this society we have built. She is warped, distorted out of the norm of human nature, into a creature perfectly evolved to tend the machine that is her chosen love. We are a society of morlocls, less than human, more than human, requiring redefinition of human.

It has become apparent that my frequent habit is to instruct the crew, if any, on each ship that I find myself on to depart the bridge until further notice. Alone, I dim the lights and sit looking out at the deep. While the crew busy themselves with whatever little busyness and pleasures that occupy their limited lives, I watch the glacially slow parallax changes of past days.

There are structures out there too vast to comprehend, to be comprehensible, by any ape brain or slightly enhanced ape brain, or even mine. Towering gas and dust clouds; random aggregates of star systems that we impose half sensed order upon; gulfs between where as yet no sun has called to others. Even at the great speeds with which I can move within systems, no change can be seen in these, and so they flatten themselves to be painted on the interior of the sphere of heavens centred upon myself, the renaissance world view come full, ah-ha, circle.

The raging chaos of nuclear storms made utterly still by distance and magnitude sums to a bleakness that cannot be denied. I may be godlike in the eyes of apes, of earth-bound mortals banging rocks together hoping for a spark, but in truth even such as I account for nothing. Aggregated across time and space, all our striving asymptotically approaches zero.

It could be this perspective that separates me from the crew. I can brood like Ahab on the bridge while the continue to live with hopes and animal comforts merely because they choose to shut out the cold. Or they have learned a skill that I have not, some mode of thought that keeps the night at bay.

Certainly the various crews have seemed content enough in their lots. I embarked some weeks ago on a lengthy set of errands on behalf of the Sisters Of Eve, aiding them in pursuit of some agenda they presented to me as an investigation into odd outbreaks of rogue AI drones. They were lying, of course, or at best presenting only partial truths. I knew this, and they knew that I knew, but still it pleased them to pay and reward me. And it pleased me to take their money while I laid my own plans.

Over the course of those days I acquired several ships that were subsequently shot out from under me. Mostly the crews survived in part, with perhaps one or two out of five lost to the night. While they do not speak of this to me, something in my treatment of them must be pleasing or at least not unpleasant, as the survivors continue to accept contracts for whichever craft I take out of the dock.

I remain surprised – why I do not know, as I have no recollected basis for comparison – that these craft require so few crew. A handful for the frigates, a double or triple handful for the destroyers. I am told that this is in part an artefact of Gallente ship design, and that other race’s craft require somewhat more. Certainly a startling level of automation is interposed between human hand and effective action. Still the need for a crew remains. The automated repair mechanisms themselves need maintenance, the artificial intelligences need the counselling of native intelligence, and the hand of man appears necessary to turn eggs into palatable omelettes and roasted beans into coffee.

For all I know the crew keep returning because they dimly apprehend the opportunity for wealth with no more than the usual risks, and less ill treatment than they may receive from another captain. In passing I hear other captains boasting of their harshness or rigorous discipline, an effort that bemuses me. The crew have functions and my contract with them is the same as the contract with any other mechanism: I will not expend effort on any component of my ship that functions as expected and has no deleterious impact, and malfunctioning systems will be ejected and replaced.

I have spent the past few weeks wandering with little plan, merely trying to learn something of this universe I find myself in. Picking up odd errands here and there has covered costs, and recompensed the loss of ships, and given me some time to consider where to begin to make my mark. It turns out that salvaging materials from the craft I was commissioned to destroy can be moderately lucrative. To the same extent I am led to believe that exploring the less well travelled reaches in search of obscured resources and bases can pay well, if the resources can be exploited.

So there, the basis of the start of a plan: outfit a craft and acquire the skills to scan systems and exploit what is found, and outfit other craft to salvage the detritus left over from the robust execution of business. Maybe that can be my mission statement, my credo, my motto. Nothing Personal.

It could be that I woke more than 30 days ago, but the unbroken tiles of memory pave no further than that. The claim that I came into existence ex nihilo capable of speech, thought or volition of movement defies rational examination. Still the fact remains that I cannot recall anything prior to the moment I woke to the awareness that a machine voice was asking my name, and that I woke with speech, name, and a memory of having imagined that I woke from dream.

In the days that came after I sought to capture or create that dream, but disinterestedly. You may have expected that I would have obsessively agonised, sacrificed sleep, wanly rested my head on hand while perusing tomes – and I would name you a sentimental idiot. The memory was of no importance, an occasional passing minor amusement. Something about wealth and commensurate luxury, of power and desire, the power of desire, and the desire for power. If the dream had indeed been a dream, it has no more meaning than illustrating the dangers of eating too much cheese in the evening. If there had been a previous evening.

The dissonance that rang through my mind from that waking moment persisted for days. I could look in a mirror and see that I saw myself, and I could listen to the machine as it instructed me in this world and know that the name was mine, and yet I had no concrete memory. Not that I was a tabula rasa. The rapid instruction I received, the initial missions that formed tests of my instruction, seemed an act of excavation not inscription.

So there it was. I woke to a world and was told my rights, with no ritual or ceremony, but with brisk and impersonal efficiency. My rights: a sizeable level of starting funds; a more than serviceable space craft; access to training which would in turn generate more funds and grant craft; and a form of immortality should I wish it. A right to seek power, or wealth, or comfort, or to sit catatonic in front of a porthole watching the stars wheel by, as I chose. All for the price of accepting that all consequences were of my own choosing.

The machine voice, the trainers, made it amply clear that they did not care either way. Their real instruction was that I was not a special little snowflake. They are wrong. Probably. Between their warnings that I would probably fail, that I would probably fall into the depths of poverty, that I would probably lose heart, was a barely visible possibility of a path that would prove them wrong.

Watch me.