Digital Galaxies

“I’m coming up on the hulk now,” I said into the main comms channel. “It’s all twisted up, looks like it was melted.”

“A lot of the wrecks look like that,” Cerri replied absently. “Must have been some pretty crazy weaponry they blasted each other with.”

She wasn’t wrong. A good number of the wrecks were nothing but metal spaghetti, especially further along in the planet’s orbit. The one I was aiming for was about at the edge of that zone. Everything behind me was more conventionally blasted to bits.

God, space was beautiful though. People always talk about how dark space is, how black it is and all that. Really though, it was actually super bright compared to that. I guess that was down to most people seeing it through an atmosphere full of light pollution. Out here though, it shone with little twinkling pinpricks of light, billions and billions of them. Like Cerri’s eyes and horns.

On a whim, I flicked a private message to her, I’m having a hard time figuring something out.

Her reply came in swiftly. Hmm? What is it?

What has more stars in it, space, or your eyes?

This time, I heard her stifle a giggle on the open comms. Alia!

A grin spread over my face and I had to bury my face in my tail for a few moments to keep from squealing. What? Are you blushing? Just so we’re clear, I really like your eyes. Did you make them like that for the game?

Stooooop! You’re meant to be the shyer one! Why are you… no. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

Cute. I was smiling so hard it hurt. I really liked Cerri.

Hmph. I made them like this before, actually. I really like space. It was part of the reason why Gloria was able to convince me to come and play this game. The horns and tail were added in character creation though. I could see her smiling on the video feed as she typed it out by hand on a datapad. Her tail was doing this thing where it curled and twisted like it was dancing. Did that mean she was happy?

The screen flickered for a moment, jerking me back to the task at hand. Yes, space was beautiful, but it was also dangerous. Only a thin shell of various materials kept me from dying a painful death.

“I have about one kilometer left,” I said, reporting back again. “Can’t see the fab from out here but… I think I can see a way inside on my cameras.”

“Alia, do you have any weird electromagnetic readings on your side?” Warren asked suddenly.

I frowned and pulled up Bundit’s sensor readout. “Nope, not seeing anythin—“

As soon as I began to speak, light flashed across my view screens. What the fuck, what the fucking fuck? A massive… no, a gargantuan arc of electricity had just flickered silently between two nearby hulks. A moment later and another bolt snapped between two different hulks further away.

“Nevermind!” I exclaimed, staring out at the light show with growing awe and fear. “I don’t know how or why, but there’s lightning outside.”

“We saw that too,” Cerri said, voice strained but calm. “Get to the wreck as quick as you can. We don’t want one of those strikes to use you as its target.”

“Now we know why everything looks melted,” David commented dryly.

I shook my head, even if he couldn’t see it. “No, the damage to the ships looks different from what lightning would do. Those wrecks should also be mostly insulated from electricity. They wouldn’t get very far into space if they weren’t.”

“Then why are they currently conducting electricity?” he asked curiously.

“Well, not all of the ship will be,” I said. From what I knew, a good portion of the ships from the badger aliens was built out of non-conductive material, but I wasn’t sure about the cyborg zombies. “I’m guessing it’s flickering between support beams and stuff.”

“There shouldn’t even be lightning out there,” Cerri muttered, sounding more and more stressed as she spoke. “Lightning can’t travel through a vacuum unless there’s some pretty wacky shit going on.”

“Does a slight but detectable atmosphere count as wacky?” Warren asked in a high pitched squeak. “Because that’s what our sensors are telling us.”

Wait what? I turned back to my own sensor panel in a hurry to find that yes, there was an atmosphere out there. As thin as my tolerance for big parties, but it was there. Hold on… it wasn’t just there. It was getting denser by the second.

“It’s getting thicker,” I said, tapping away on the screen to get more detailed readings. “I’m reading… fifty five percent nitrogen, thirty one percent oxygen, eight percent helium, and a mix of like five other gasses.”

“That’s what we’re getting too,” Cerri said, to the backing track of furious screen tapping. “It’s increasing in density at a massive rate. Pressure out there will be at Earth normal in approximately ten minutes. What the fuck is happening?”

“The atmospheric composition matches the default for the Turshen II, why?” Warren mused to himself.

“Either way, I’m making for the hulk as fast as I can.” I wasn’t going to nerd out while I was still one roll of fate’s dice away from frying.

Slamming the accelerator, I was kicked back into my seat by the force of the new alien thrusters all firing at once. In moments, I was gasping for air, but I didn't slow down. At any moment, a bolt of lightning could choose me as its next grounding target.

By the time I'd reached the relative safety of the hulk, more weirdness was going on outside. Namely, clouds. They were billowing up into existence out of sheer nothingness, like one giant middle finger to everything we understood of physics. They were angry and dark, and if they had existed in a gravity well, I'd assume that rain was coming. Out here though, they just swirled and bubbled, their strange dancing movements lit from within by the flash of lightning.

I could hear thunder now too, the atmosphere outside more than enough to transmit sound now. I'd lived through a lot of thunderstorms in my day, but it was downright eerie to have orbital scales of space illustrated via the pause between flash and thunder.

Decelerating to avoid blowing past the hulk almost knocked me out, the little gravity plate inside Bundit overwhelmed by the force put out by the new engines.

Still, I raced inside the wreck on all fours and hid myself within its dark, ghostly confines. I probably shouldn't have been thinking about spooky things, because when a shadow slowly drifted across the path of my floodlights, I straight up screamed.

"What's wrong, Alia?" Cerri asked, sounding tense with worry.

I coughed and sputtered for a moment as I simultaneously took long calming breaths and tried to figure out what I was looking at.

It was a figure, frozen and inert as it drifted slowly through the dark interior I found myself in. Wait, no way…

"Dead badger alien," I finally replied, staring in awe. "One of the crew of this ship, I think. It gave me a fright."

"We can't see it," she replied anxiously. "The video feed crapped out about half a minute ago. Connection strength is failing due to the storm, I think."

"Fuck, that really isn't good. Are we sure the Turshen will be alright?" I asked, suddenly aware of the fact that we had no idea if it could withstand a hit from a massive bolt of lightning.

Planetside storms were one thing, but some of these lightning strikes were hundreds of kilometers long and like several dozen meters wide. Hell, the force of the sound waves might be enough to shake things loose.

"We don't know, this kind of thin—" the line went dead in the middle of her sentence. 

Instantly, panic slammed into me like a kick to the chest. Had they just exploded? Did something happen?

Then something else occurred to me. Hold on, Bundit had FTL communication equipment! How the hell was a storm messing with that? It shouldn't even factor into the signal strength!

Alia?? Are you okay?? Cerri's message popped into my HUD via the FTLN, outside the game.

Alia: Yes, I'm okay! Are you all still there?

Cerridwen: Yes. Nothing's wrong on our end.

Alia: How is the FTL comms down?? Shouldn't that be impervious to electromagnetic fuckery?

Cerridwen: The storm is only a byproduct. The alien aether sensors are showing intense activity on the other side. The aether is going nuts. Power is fluctuating all over the ship. It looks like the aliens knew about this type of phenomenon though, because the ship's systems are getting it under control automatically. Reactor is in safe mode, less power and the containment chamber is working overtime to keep the reaction separate from the storm.

Alia: Okay. So long as you’re safe.

Cerridwen: Are you okay too? What’s happening on your end?

Alia: I’m fine. Just hiding inside the hulk. Visibility is crap with these clouds. I might try to find the fab while I wait for this to die down. Assuming it does, of course.

Cerridwen: If you die, I’m quitting the game.

Alia: No you’re not. We’ll find each other again ingame and hang out in VR whenever we can.

Rather than reply, she sent me a selfie that she probably thought was showing a grumpy, unhappy expression. Really though, it was just a cute pout. I was so lucky to have her in my life.

We exchanged a few more messages, but she had to concentrate on keeping the ship in one piece so she had to go in the end. As for me… I took stock of my situation. I had food for a few days, plus water. The oxygen recycler would probably give out first, I hadn’t changed the filter in a while. Gah, my laziness was coming back to bite me. At least the atmosphere outside was breathable, although I’d probably get high off the increased oxygen content.

For now, I guess I’d just stay inside the hulk and do my job. That seemed like a safer bet. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.