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A room, off-white in color, with a four-bladed fan on the ceiling, blades cutting out slow arcs as they idly spun around and around. Too disorienting to watch for long... eyes drifting down to the walls, white lace curtains set behind thick crimson drapes, sunlight behind them through the open window--the source of a calm, pleasantly cool breeze--the light softened by filtering through the thin curtains. A wooden desk, dark wood... mahogany, perhaps? in a very old style, the kind with the roll-back top, and a comfortable-looking wooden chair of similar wood with white pillows on it. Back over, along the wainscotting... still an odd word... over to the mahogany bed table, holding a lamp of blue-glazed pottery, white crinkled lampshade, brass fittings, black plastic knob-switch under a bulbous glass sphere with a thick neck, little wires inside. Generates light and heat through incandescent resistance... tungsten filament... bedside table beside a bed of a vaguely organic style, made of whitewashed cast iron tubes. Seemed familiar...
Around to the other side, flitting over the headboard, pipes curling into and through each other in graceful spirals... over... old, careworn face, white hair, Caucasian, human.
"Hi 'Bane," I managed weakly.
The avatar smiled. "Hello, Shal."
I blinked slowly. "My forehead's cold."
Smiling still, the warship leaned over and removed an archaic compress from my head, fluffing it slightly. I heard the ice crackle inside as she said "I do what little I can," then replaced it on my head. It was comforting, oddly enough, because my head certainly did hurt. "Nasty fall, that was."
The red dot reappeared in my mind; I brushed it away with a shudder as I fought towards coherency. "How nasty?"
"Not nasty enough to stop you," she replied simply with a gentle smile. "Simply nasty enough to make rest a good idea for a few days. I hope you don't mind the bed simulation; I did it rather quickly and didn't quite have the greatest source material to go on--"
"It's fine, 'Bane, really." I nestled a bit under the soft maroon covers. A bit alien to me, as bedclothes are hardly a universal concept... but comfortable. I could see why they were popular. "What happened?"
"Your hindbrain essentially manually overrode the IVSAR input due to sensory overload, causing an unfortunate overreaction in your autonomous nervous system's dodge response which led to a rather violent concussion. Or, rather, you dumped and jumped with your full strength out of your seat and right into a wall."
"I had the lap belt on..."
"Shal, if you hadn't torn the belt from its hinge, you would've brought the chair with you. The doctors are debating whether to advise you to use the full harness next time or to just cut off your legs now and save you the trouble."
I chuckled quietly. "Not funny, 'Bane."
"It is and you know it. Laughter is the best medicine, after all, and I've had two and a half centuries to work on my technique."
A guilty sensation. "Didn't hurt, did it...?"
"Did what?"
"The chair."
The warship blinked, then laughed, holding her sides lightly. "Oh... that's a good one. Here... let me show you." Lightly gripping the sides of my jaw, she held her mouth open as she lightly scraped the inside of my cheek with one fingernail. Even if we are essentially mechanoids, the mouth is still a high-attrition area; the 'synthetic' tissues there still come away rather easily. Quietly observing the dark-colored mass on the tip of her fingernail, she said off-handedly to me: "Did that hurt?"
"Point taken." I shrugged very lightly under the covers. "Though you wouldn't simulate the pain if it would've... would you?"
'Bane shrugged in return. "Technically, I don't actually have to as psychosomatic response is usually sufficient. Also, emergency external stimuli such as pain are purposely not blocked by IVSAR... which is why I took precautions." She lightly tapped the cold compress on my head.
I thought for a moment. "What about the sensor?"
"That did sting," she said with a nod, "but it is such a minor subsystem that it is nothing in comparison to, say, a hull breach. I suppose the organic analog would be getting lightly poked in the eye... painful for a short time but not dehabilitating nor lingering. It was, unfortunately, the sensor that your station was primarily routed through. I'm sorry for that much, I should have cut feed." She looked truly guilty and perhaps a little distressed.
I shifted my hand under the covers to lightly press against her wrist. "You had bigger things to worry about at the time. It's not a problem."
She chuckled wryly. "You haven't seen what you look like. One could say you got lucky."
I managed another slight shrug. "So I was unlucky then lucky in the same moment. I'll settle for breaking even... and can I--"
"No." The response is gentle but most firm. "Is there anything other than that I can do for you?"
"Thinking just makes my head hurt more."
The old woman nodded. "Well, when you can think of something, please tell me. While I appreciate your understanding..." She paused. "...please just ask if I can help."
I tried nodding, then decided it wasn't a good idea. I must've done a number on my head, and without my arms to break any momentum... it stood to reason that the results were pretty nasty. Us Volanti are hard to break, which tends to concern people when we do... "I will... hm." I looked up at the fan. "Maybe a little more breeze?"
A nod from the ship and the lace curtains flapped just a little bit, the breeze through the window just a little stronger, a little cooler. I smiled. "Not exactly what I expected, but that works too." Closing my eyes, it's surprising how quickly I drifted off... in a simulation, memory in wholesale lots.
I may have dreamed about electric sheep; but if I did, it was just 'Bane letting her sense of humor shine through.
Elsewhere, a thousand years distant reckoning by light, a Warrior lay in some cramped transition quarters aboard a small shiv-like destroyer, his carapace dulled by abuse and sickness. Next to him sits another ragged member of his phenotype, eyes half-open, jaw hanging slightly ajar in fatigue. The past cycle had not been kind to either; the death of Oomlok ripped off the entire port side of the lighter and Xonmik had kept the ship on minimum power, hoping that pretending to be debris would keep him from the notice of the Zoners... even hours after the hit-and-run attack faded away. It took him a great deal of effort to coax any power out of the starboard energy modules and move the lighter on some course; a few destroyers that survived the massacre picked up the shuttle.
Now, on his orders, they were on their way to the last remaining whole superbattleship. The rest of the Reaver fleet was in constant flux, here, there and everywhere, constantly jumping at nearly random intervals to make another such maneuver by the Zone unfeasible. He took the situation in his mind, pondered it, and thought of the doctrine that could be applied to solve it... and it did not look good. After that last probing reconnaissances-in-force, the only way to certainly remove the Zoners for good would be a single full-scale attack. The expected losses he calculated in his mind were easily two-thirds to four-fifths of his fleet strength, leaving him with insufficient forces to hold much more than a few systems and completely helpless against any sort of coordinated Thaurian repulsion operation larger than a few squadrons, forces they could easily scrape up. A constant bombardment schedule would wear down the Zoners, but it would also deplete his expendable munition resources and fuel reserves rather quickly, resulting in an unacceptable period of field-resupply that would inevitably be used for a counterattack that would once again put him on the defensive disadvantage.
He had wrested the initiative from the Zoners once again. The only problem is, now how do I use it?
A groan from Pikbuuv beside him broke the Warrior from his thoughts; Xonmik took a coarse cloth in cold water and, after wringing it out, dabbed it soothingly over the feverish Warrior's brow. How odd that sometimes the simplest solutions are best.
Waking up with a yawn, I blinked slowly as I sat up from habit. Sleep, oddly enough, always seemed to cure headaches for me. After throwing on a red-dyed terrycloth bathrobe I found folded on a chair near the bed I wandered over to the window, looking out over the green fields, brighter now under an only partly cloudy sky. I idly watched the clouds, their wispy edges like the borders of fractals as they wandered... if they were lonely, I found myself thinking, that was only because they didn't work very well in groups; still, poetry was never my forte.
Comfortable and content, the moments of cogency previous no more pressing on me than bad dreams, I wandered into the tall, narrow hallway and down the stairs, wood creaking gently from my weight, the whitewashed metal railing cool to the touch. The ground-floor hallways were wider and brighter, lit now by open doors and windows up near the ceiling that allowed light to filter in from other rooms, and paintings appeared on either side. Standing in the hallway, I looked them over as somewhere a mechanical analog clock ticked quietly, the air slightly dry, as would be appropriate for displaying paintings. I couldn't identify them; then again, art history never was one of my strongest suits. One was a traditionally Terran Impressionist rendition of the manor, the colors gently fading together and blurring the image as appropriate to the astigmatic style; next to it was a very abstract piece of color and shape and line, not looking like much of anything but the colors contrasting well with the piece beside it; between them was a smallish Realist painting of a four-nacelled Surreal-class cruiser. Peering at the little bronze plaque set into the simple wooden frame, I read the title aloud to myself in a very quiet voice.
"Self-Portrait"
This was about the time I remembered I was living in another person's imagination.
'Bane smiled as I wandered into the kitchen. "Good morning, Shal. Did you have a good night's rest?"
"It wasn't dark when I fell asleep," I responded with what I imagined was wit at the time.
The starship nodded slowly. "Hrm, yes. I suppose I will have to start simulating that. Not a problem--I am sorry, but lacking a true circadian rhythm such things are somewhat foreign to me. I tend to forget how important it is to beings that evolved having to deal with a day/night cycle."
"Not a problem," I chuckled, pulling out a chair and sitting down slowly. All of my movements were slowed... just by my thinking about them, oversensitive to the ultrarealistic unreality of the situation, thinking in general.
"How do you feel?"
"Rested, and the headache is gone. I guess that means something must be happening on the outside"--I motioned idly 'out there' upwards with one hand--"seeing how you can't prevent me from feeling pain."
'Bane nodded. "True. Generally, anaesthetising the brain is a very poor idea, which is why they are using a white-noise EE-dampening system on your hypothalamus. You are still constantly receiving pain signals; they are simply being negated through the use of destructive interference." I found myself mildly annoyed even though she said it with a gentle sympathy and thinking instinctively that my eyes probably changed color, and 'Bane surprised me by picking up on it. "I am sorry for speaking so blithely about your condition. I am only working on personal experience from my many times in drydock being told exactly what's going on in the most technical terms."
"Err, no, it's just the thought of 'you're in pain, but you don't know it...' and... ah..." I pointed momentarily at my eyes.
"Yes," 'Bane replied, "I can read them."
"How? You simulate that as well?"
"No... avatar simulation is entirely done user-side and then transmitted out. Your ThinkUnit implant by default uses the image you consciously associate with yourself, which is in most cases the face you see in the morning. Updated in real-time, it acts very much like a conventional body would, right down to unconscious reactions such as blush response for humans and eye color for you. Apparently it can be tweaked with; common directions are for the Unit to ignore several kinds of unconscious reactions which could be unpleasant in social situations or else to display a wholly different avatar. User-made avatars tend to be somewhat cartoonish or puppet-like in nature, however--not sufficient effort put into them--and so they're not as common."
"Essentially it works the same way as full-immersion netdiving does?"
"Essentially." Another nod. "This is just the military grade, so there is no need to rely on cartoonish iconography to minimize bandwidth draw."
"That's the second time you've said 'cartoonish' in as many sentences."
"I," 'Bane says with a regal air, gently placing one hand on her chest, "am a starship. I am supposed to be slightly elitist that way."
I chuckled. "Fair enough. What's the news from the outside?"
"Our little expedition into Thaurian space has been made public, and apparently we are the puppets of House Garbog and the Inquisition... or at least that is how SNC is portraying it. If we are just pawns in their master strategy, it must be a most foolish strategy indeed."
"Then it sucks to be the pawn," I muttered.
"Perhaps not. It is the bad strategies that tend to protect the pawns. Still, public furor over our being manipulated has made our military situation politically untenable. We are expected to be ordered to disengage within the day."
I hummed softly in quiet suprise. "We're leaving the galaxy to the Reavers?"
'Bane frowned with obvious disgust. "It seems so. Honestly, I believe we're being far too conservative in our strategy... but, then again, I am biased. Even though I have constructed a primarily English persona for myself, I do have a good streak of the Italian in me."
Eyes changed color again.
"There is a reason the word 'vendetta' is Italian."
"Ah."
Monsters, demons of gleaming white armor everywhere and no way out. Through is blocked, and away lies defeat, and the gnashing teeth are coming to get him--
Pikbuuv awoke with a start, finding himself cushioned in the arms of Xonmik before he could bring his head in contact with the ceiling of the recessed bunk. Eyes darting about wildly, they slowly settle on those of his confidant and friend.
"We're safe, sir. We're on a destroyer en route to rendezvous with our last superbattleship, and the Zoner information channels say that they'll be gone soon too."
"Gone?" Pikbuuv said in a quiet voice.
"Yes, sir. Gone."
"But... they can't be gone. We're still here. They don't want us here."
"Their people also don't want to put forth the effort to dislodge us from here. They are not united as we are."
Pikbuuv chortled in a mix of relief and sarcasm. "We're safe, but that just won't do. Not at all."
Xonmik blinked. "What?"
"We're here to draw them away. To keep them busy. If they're not here, with us, then they're there, with more of us. And more of them. Too much more of them."
The captain drew away very slowly. "Are you all right, sir?"
"Hrm? Yes..." The general seemed to calm himself, slowly working himself down, taking special care with his words. "Yes. I'm sorry... it has just been... rough."
"It has. No argument."
If Pikbuuv's actions had been manic before, they were certainly sedate now, every motion seemingly calculated. Xonmik keeps his mind clear of any analysis, not while Pikbuuv watches, feeling the general's mind getting reacquainted with the situation. "Right. We should prepare to press the advantage, then. The moment they leave, capture the shipyard and the Thaurian warships in it. We will need them."
Xonmik blinked again. "The ships, sir? They're inferior ve--"
"Our force strength has been diminished. They will suppliment us."
"Unless we plan them to fly themselves, we'll need prize crews, which will spread our effectiveness thin--"
The general lanced out with his mind, snarling as lips pulled back from yellowed teeth. Xonmik recoiled across the room, cringing and looking back at Pikbuuv like a struck puppy. "You have done well, Captain, in my temporary absence. Do not let that fool you into believing you have authority... beyond your means. Give the orders to the fleet. We will converge the moment the Zoners leave."
"Yes, sir," is all the other Warrior could manage.