PrincessColumbia

  The mission was simple; Katrina was left mostly in charge of herself with a couple of hand-picked people Norma selected to keep things running in their absence. Diane, Norma, and Russe would take the newly built Ad Astra on her maiden voyage to Mortan to pick up the completed component much faster than it could be handled otherwise, and Daffyd would contact the company that could manufacture the component on-demand to have it ready by the time the ship got to Mortan.

  Daffyd’s work on the station’s computer core would be finished well before they returned, “And ss, I’ve got too many stops to make. The whole reason for this instaltion is to test it on as young a system as we can to see if it’ll work, then we’ll be implementing it as far and wide as we’ve got seed stations. In the meantime, I’ve got too many fires to put out.”

  Diane found herself feeling sad the somewhat hyper scientist was only in her orbit for such a brief period of time but understood as well as anyone that adulting sometimes meant missing out on chances to simply have fun...even in a game.

  Russe, it turned out, had some experience helming a ship, and since the ship belonged to Diane, she cimed the captain’s chair. That left navigation to Norma, which she took to eagerly. Apparently, her fallback dream if the whole ‘running the station’ thing hadn’t worked out was to hitch a ride on a passing starship and become a crewmember with the eventual goal of making captain. Being Governor with the chance to do occasional trips was apparently enough to scratch both itches.

  Diane wasn’t disappointed, per se, that she didn’t feel more overwhelmed and awed by the experience of being on the bridge of a starship. She wasn’t quite sure what she was feeling. It was like the joy and excitement she’d expected were...bottled up, far away from the bridge of the ship that was carrying her and her tiny crew across the stars. She wondered idly if it was just due to the intellectual knowledge that she was actually in a pod on the thirteenth floor of the agency building in Houston behind the wall from the perspective of the rest of the people in the game. That, however, didn’t track. She knew just as well, no matter how she looked in the mirror or even just looking down, that she wasn’t actually a woman in real life, and yet the emotional part of her brain just accepted what she was perceiving at face value and decided it was the best thing since all the best things ever and that she needed to be occasionally reminded, very forcefully, that it was very, very happy with her virtual body. So, if such a simple thing as the perception of a pair of breasts and a somewhat alien set of genitalia were enough for her lizard (heh, dinosaur) brain to get hype, the perception of being on a ship travelling through space should have been just as effective.

  She decided to fill her time with reading some sci-fi avaible outside the wall, catching up on the U.N.’s version of “news” (heavily edited and censored, she was sure, that’s how the media was handled in America, after all), and reading up on some game mechanics she hadn’t had a chance to during the rushed mission prep.

  Such as the Ethics tree, which she wasn’t able to find any documentation on. Of course, it turned out GU:MC was such a massive game that even the Ships trees (yes, plural, one for each css of ship) were woefully incomplete in the wiki and game FAQ spaces, and not a few trees were either specific to certain races or csses or could be purchased for real-world money or won through in-game events. This made it somewhat frustrating that she was staring at the next node she needed to unlock and was unable to derive its purpose.

  “She Should Be at the Club”

  “Description: All Work and No Py make the Commander a dull girl. Duty is good, but self-care is good, too. Stepping outside of your comfort zone is the only way to get what you haven’t got.”

  What in the world does that mean?!

  She was very outside of her “comfort zone” already. She was in an alien body on a spaceship in a game thought to be infested with rogue A.I. with no backup or support. She didn’t even have the comforts she’d managed to assemble in her apartment. Perceptually, she was lightyears and literal years from anything resembling her “comfort zone.”

  If this damn tree weren’t so cryptic, I’d probably have unlocked half of it by now!

  It had been a considerable surprise when she settled into her cabin after they were underway to open her HUD and discover she’d already unlocked a couple other nodes and met the requirements for a few more. The problem was, they were still locked behind nodes she hadn’t yet opened, and so other than seeing that they were unlocked and part of their names, she didn’t benefit from them at all or gain any understanding of what, precisely, she’d done to achieve them. At the moment, the “She Should Be at the Club” was blocking access to three unlocked nodes, which looked pretty important as they also fed into the same part of the tree that had the “WWCFD?” node, and that blocked node, itself, was blocking an entire branch.

  She swiped the HUD away in frustration, revealing the darkened bridge of the ship. They’d settled into a routine over the st week, and though they weren’t going as slowly as Katrina had quoted in her projections, they were still over 48 hours away from their destination. She sighed and kicked her legs up on the comms panel. With navigation and helm being as task intensive as they were, many of the incidental tasks fell back on the captain, which Diane was more than happy to do since it gave her something to do during the long stretches of space where nothing happened.

  Which wasn’t to say she wasn’t enjoying herself. It was like the st road trip her parents had taken her on to see her grandparents in Kansas the year before they passed. And just like that road trip, it was the st stretch that was the most aggravating. You knew you were super close, and sure; you could pour on more speed to get there just a little faster, but the difference wouldn’t be big enough to bother with. So, she watched the FTL tunnel shimmer on the screen as the lightyears got eaten up by the ship’s drive.

  She leaned her head back on the captain’s chair’s headrest and closed her eyes. Morvuck physiology apparently was adapted for a thirty-hour day-night cycle, meaning she was still wide awake even though it was practically the middle of the night by human standards. Her people...her character’s people seemed almost superhuman to her. There were downsides; she couldn’t let herself get too cold (which sucked, she preferred the cold) and there was the whole ‘constantly eating’ thing. She’d had to down an extra ration pack every meal and kept going after the energy bars Katrina had insisted she have stocked. But with the added strength? The overall endurance? The body that just seemed to demand action and activity that meant she’d never, ever stop moving?

  Her first week aboard the station she’d sought out the fitness center (located on the floor above the sickbay in the Ops building) and proceeded to do her normal workout...and it felt like she was strolling through the park. So, she upped the weight on the machines. And again. And again. Eventually, she was curling 450 pounds. She managed to dead lift three-quarters of a ton. Endurance running seemed to be her only major weakness, as was anything that required prolonged use of rge muscle groups. That was, apparently, one of the key differences between Morvucks and humans; humans are persistence predators, Morvucks were descended from ambush predators.

  So having to sit still on a small ship that was stuck in FTL for over a week was giving her a severe case of the fidgets. Her toe was tapping the air, her fingers drumming out a rhythm to nothing in particur, and her head bobbed gently back and forth. She hummed a bar or two before she realized she had the complete privacy of the bridge at night when the two humans were asleep. Her fidgeting slowed and her fingers went from a fast beat to a slow, almost casual 2:2 time as she started humming a particur tune, letting the intro py out before she started singing the lyrics, “I watched the night turn into day...time isn’t on my side...”

  “Wow...” came an almost whispered voice behind her.

  She started so violently she actually fell off her chair, “Fuck, shit! The fucking...!” Her head had thunked the seat when her butt had unceremoniously slid off and deposited her on the floor.

  She cupped the injured spot and took a deep breath as the other voice said, “Ohmygosh, I’m so sorry!” Norma gently put her hands under Diane’s armpits and assisted the taller woman back in her seat.

  “No, it’s okay, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have used that kind of nguage,” Diane groaned as she settled back into the captain’s chair.

  “You banged your head, I think you’re allowed,” Norma gently ughed, “Let me take a look at that, did you get injured anywhere else?”

  “Just my dignity,” Diane said as she let Norma pull her hand away from the back of her head.

  “Well, I’m not seeing any blood...wait, Morvuck blood is red, right?”

  Diane nodded gently, grateful that the injury wasn’t compounding itself with a headache, “Iron-based, gonna be red.”

  “Right, well no blood, and...” she felt along Diane’s skull, “No real bumps or obvious responses to a fracture, I think you’re just slightly bruised.”

  Diane turned a pained smile to the governor, “Did you study medicine during your time on the station before I got there?”

  “No, dork,” Norma shoved pyfully at Diane’s shoulder, “I had to learn a lot of that kind of thing...first aid, emergency procedures, field medicine...simply because someone had to.”

  Diane leaned back gingerly, taking a deep breath to settle herself again, “Yeah, that makes sense. So, Doctor, will I live?”

  “Do~o~ork!” decred Norma. They regarded each other in companionable silence for a moment before Norma said, “You’ve got a really pretty voice.”

  Diane blushed, unable to meet the other woman in the eye, “I...guess? I don’t...I didn’t like it...before.” Best to keep this part vague, she thought, “I...stopped singing around other people for a long time. I like music but growing up and my voice...” she realized she was about to talk about growing up as a teenage boy and just let the unfinished sentence hang, the silence its own conclusion.

  “Let me guess, your teenage years?” inquired Norma.

  Blush deepening, Diane looked briefly at Norma in surprise. “Yeah, just...it wasn’t pleasant growing up with a voice like mine around a bunch of teens.”

  “I can only imagine what a Morvuck might have to deal with, your voice box probably has completely different qualities than a human’s.”

  Diane huffed a small ugh as the corner of her mouth turned up, “Yeah, that’s a thing.”

  Norma turned the navigator’s seat around and sat down, smiling with what could only be encouragement to underscore her next words, “You should try it! Sing for me, I mean.”

  Diane felt a little sick to her stomach as she stared at Norma in open shock, “What?! But...I’ll sound awful! I haven’t sung in years!”

  “That’s not how it works, dork,” chuckled Norma, “Just open your mouth and sing! This isn’t a concert hall, it’s just you and me in a private little spaceship.”

  Apparently, my new nickname is ‘dork,’ Diane thought, “You probably won’t even like the songs I know well enough to sing. They’re downright ancient!” Not to mention some of them are distinctly American and would point me out as a citizen of the Republic in a quick second. I really don’t think I should be breaking out into a rendition of, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” no matter that it started as an anti-svery anthem.

  “Hah! I knew you were a nerd! You know cssical music better than pop or contemporary!”

  “It was ‘pop’ when it was composed...” Diane grumbled.

  “Fine, so let’s hear something! Sing it, sister!” Norma practically bubbled.

  Diane had to admit the other woman’s enthusiasm was infectious, “Okay, fine, if it’ll get you to stop pestering me about it...” she sat back in thought, trying to figure out something that would be a good, easy tune that she could render from memory. Can’t do a church hymn...well, I could, but too many of them are built around venerating The Second and won’t win me any awards outside the wall. Wait, that might be... She grinned as she remembered one particur song that stuck in her head that she knew had origins prior to the Republic’s ascendancy.

  Now if I can remember the minor-key original well enough that I don’t slip into the major-key adaptation for the hymnal... She said, “Computer, py an instrumental-only, no lyrics karaoke version of ‘Hallelujah’ from early 21st century Earth.”

  “Indexing,” came the pleasantly female monotone from the ship’s computer, “Appropriate track found, pying now.”

  “Cssical nerd,” smirked Norma.

  “I thought I was a dork?” snarked Diane right back. Before Norma could come up with a retort, the computer started pying music.

  Diane was, at first, slightly confused as she didn’t remember orchestral strings pying the refrain at the start, but then a piano came in with the familiar notes of the start of the song and she opened her mouth and, for the first time since her mother died, sang to another person.

  “I've heard there was a secret chord,”

  “that David pyed and it pleased the Lord,”

  She was a little surprised to see a window appear on the main dispy of the lyrics, filling in as she sang them. Must be because I specified ‘karaoke style.’

  “But you don't really care for music, do ya?”

  “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth”

  “The minor fall, the major lift”

  “The baffled king composing ‘Hallelujah’”

  Oh, good, these are the original lyrics, she realized as she sang the ‘chorus’ of the word ‘Hallelujah’ repeated several times. Her mother had taught her the original song, at least parts of it, because she had firmly believed that a person needed to know and learn from their history, especially if others ignored it.

  “Even for a hymn?” young Dyn had asked in that exasperated way only children and tweens can properly express.

  “Even for a hymn. Maybe especially for a hymn. Sermons and speeches in church change from pastor to pastor. But the hymns are consistent, the same from congregation to congregation. More church doctrine is taught in hymns in some cases than from the pulpit.

  “Baby, I've been here before,”

  “I know this room, I've walked this floor,”

  “I used to live alone before I knew you.”

  Huh...the verses are out of order... Even for the official hymnal version, the verse this was adapted to came after at least two more refrains of the chorus.

  “And I've seen your fg on the marble arch,”

  “Love is not a victory march,”

  “It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah,”

  Her eyes started to sting as she remembered her mother’s role in her knowledge of the song, this song was probably her mother’s favorite and the one she’d sung more often than any other, church hymn or otherwise. It was Diane...then Dyn asking about why she was singing it so weird that prompted her mother to teach her the song’s history.

  “The original artist wasn’t a Christian, he was Jewish.”

  “What’s ‘Jewish’?”

  Dyn’s mother sighed in the long-suffering sigh that mother’s everywhere experience when they know their child will ask more questions than they have time or knowledge to answer, “It’s the faith that came before Christianity. They don’t believe that God sent Jesus as the Messiah and they never heard of The Second before he was appointed President. They believe...different things that you would need a Jewish person to teach you about.”

  “Oh...are there any Jewish people around who can teach me?”

  Diane would never forget the haunted look in her mother’s eyes, “Not in America, sweetie, not anymore.”

  “Maybe there's a God above,”

  “But all I've ever learned from love,”

  “Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you,”

  “But...you didn’t do anything wrong!”

  Sad eyes didn’t match the indulgent smile on her mother’s face, “Of course not, Dy. That’s not what being sick is. That’s not what cancer is about. You can be the best person in the world and come down with cancer and the worst person you will ever know could live into their 100’s. It’s not a punishment, it just is.”

  “So...what does this mean?”

  Her father spoke up for the first time since getting home from the doctor’s office with her mother, “It means we have to love your mother so much she’ll have so much love-baggage when she arrives in heaven that they’ll have to seriously consider sending her back because heaven won’t have enough room.” His voice was croaky, something she’d ter learn meant he’d been holding back tears.

  “And it's not a cry that you hear at night,”

  “It's not somebody who's seen the light,”

  “It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah,”

  She was crying by this point, tears streaming down her face and her throat was feeling tight, like she’d choke to death if she stopped singing. “Hallelujah...hallelujah...” came out of her mouth as she blinked her eyes open, her eyes fixed on the screen. It wasn’t that she forgot Norma was there, it was simply that it didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was singing her mother’s favorite song.

  “I did my best, it wasn't much,”

  “I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch,”

  “I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya,”

  Oh, God, that’s a lie. That’s so much a lie. When did my life become a lie? All of it, my face, my body...what I tell people about who I am. When did I stop being the man my mom was teaching me to be?

  “And even though it all went wrong,”

  “I'll stand before the lord of song,”

  “With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah,”

  She was dimly aware of having stood by this point and no longer meekly piping out the words just loud enough for Norma to hear, she was almost shouting them now, pouring her broken heart into a hymn to God as though he’d send her mother back for just a little more time. The music, apparently some version of the song performed by an entire orchestra, swelled to a crescendo like a tidal wave crashing into a cliff. An accompanying choir had been recorded, repeating the chorus and filling the bridge with sound as she croaked out the final repetitions of, “...hallelujah...”

  The music had stopped, as had her final ‘hallelujah,’ and she realized that not only was Norma hugging her tightly, but she also felt Russe’s arms around her as well. Must have woken him up... she thought distractedly as she tried to choke back her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” came Norma’s voice from somewhere in the vicinity of Diane’s breasts, “I shouldn’t have...I’m sorry.”

  Diane couldn’t answer, when she tried her breath felt like it was being forced out in the form of a sob. She just shook her head as emotions she thought she’d left behind a long time ago came bubbling up on the heels of her memories of her mother.

  “Sooo...” said Russe gently, “That’s a thing that happened.”

  Diane wiped her nose with the facial tissue Norma had provided her. She had no idea where on her person the woman kept the things (probably in her jacket somewhere, that thing was so bulky she could probably outfit an entire penetration team just with the contents of the visible pockets) but she was grateful she didn’t have to scavenge through the ship for them. “Yeah,” said Diane muddily, “Sorry for waking you up.”

  “Yo~ou didn’t actually wake me up,” said Russe, “At least, not directly.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean at some point when you were singing, the entire ship’s lighting changed. All the lights either went up or down in luminosity to match the bridge.”

  Diane and Norma gave each other confused looks before turning back to Russe. Diane asked, “What, like, did the ship script it or something?”

  Russe pulled his mini-tablet from the pocket of his cargo pants (Diane found out these small devices weren’t called ‘phones’ in this version of the future anymore, just ‘mini-tablets’) and tapped the screen a few times before what looked like an automated log appeared on the main screen. “This is when you started singing,” a line appeared between two entries, “Here’s where you stopped singing,” a second line appeared significantly ter, “And here’s when the lights suddenly altered,” a box bracketed a series of reports from, if she was reading the log right, environmental controls. Sure enough, every single environmental light on the ship logged a confirmation of completed order, but the logs didn’t show any orders being sent to the lights.

  “Before I checked the logs while Norma was helping you recover, I thought maybe it was just the ship having a pre-programmed response to its captain’s emotions or something, but if that was the case we’d see a script being invoked here,” he tapped on his mini-tab and a little red ‘tap-touch’ dot blinked on the screen on the space between two of the log lines, “Instead, each of the lights adjusted to match the bridge’s lighting automatically without prompting, then told the computer they had finished with the command to do what they just did...without being commanded. During your song.”

  Diane gave him a skeptical squint, “That...has to be coincidental.”

  Russe shook his head, “Computer,” he instructed the ship, “Show the security recording of the bridge and the rec space at the time index you started pying music, then py at normal speed. Show the logs as they were being recorded during the same time frame.”

  “Oh, god, the computer recorded me singing?!” Diane wanted to crawl under the deck pting.

  “Stop it, you dork, you sound wonderful!” Norma said from her seat at Navigation.

  They all fell silent as the video of a self-conscious Diane began timidly singing along with the music the computer was pying, the normal call-and-response of the computer’s automated systems were logged dutifully, including the command to find and py the audio track and the ship-board digital assistant registered that a request for karaoke necessitated a dispy of the lyrics to be sung.

  Diane watched herself singing, emotions pying out on her face that she was feeling the echo of now. As tears started falling from her eyes on the screen, suddenly the computer started receiving the mystery completion log entries and the lights in the rec area dimmed to match the same level and intensity of the bridge.

  “...okay...so there’s a little bit of maybe coincidental corretion, it could just be a glitch. What’s your point with all of this?”

  Russe smiled timidly and set down his mini-tab, “I think...well, you’re not just the station commander, I think you’re a Commander.”

  Diane’s brow furrowed in confusion as Norma rolled her eyes, “This again? I thought you were serious about all this!”

  Russe shook his head, “I am serious. Commanders are...appearing all over the gaxy.”

  Diane’s brow pinched in confusion, “You want to expin what you two are talking about?”

  Norma groaned and gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes as Russe leaned forward, like he was sharing a conspiracy theory he was convinced was real. “Okay, so, I’ve only seen one other Commander,” she practically heard the capital ‘c’ when Russe said it, “He was a Terran captain, he seemed like a pretty normal guy, but seemed to almost...not realize there were other people on the ship, mostly because he just always seemed to know exactly what the ship or the mission needed at any given time. I mean, sure, when people talked to him, he’d respond, but it was like...he was in another world entirely half the time. And sometimes he’d react to things only he could see.”

  Russe pointed an index finger at nothing in particur and bounced it like he was scolding the universe, “But he had this trick, any personal carry weapon he picked up an assigned to himself in the weapons master’s log he could just...summon. Like, he could be on the other side of the room from his pistol and he’d just hold out his hand and the pistol just zipped right into his palm.”

  Russe leaned back in his seat, “I was just a special tech for that trip, they brought in a group of freencers to tackle some derelict alien ship. I never did find out what they did with it after we cleared it for towing, but that was the st assignment before I hitched a ride for, well, your station and...” his eyes flicked to Norma.

  “So...what, was he Morvuck, t...no, that’s stupid, he’d be a woman if he was,” she shook her head, trying to piece the puzzle Russe was presenting her in her head.

  “Oh, it’s not dependent on race or home system.” He picked up his mini-tab again and found what he was looking for pretty quickly, “I’m part of some message boards that talk about this sort of thing. We’ve started putting together a gactic map of sightings of people with abilities outside of their species capabilities.” A map of the gaxy popped up on the screen, remarkably simir to the one Tyler had shown during his part of the briefing prior to her going into the pod. Russe stood and rounded the helm station to stand in front of the screen, gesturing across the charted gaxy where hundreds of dots were pced. “Green is whenever someone thought they spotted a Commander, but further observation proved they weren’t one. Yellow is a freshly reported incident. Could be a sign of a Commander ability, could just be a fluke of the universe. It’s a big pce and can get a little weird at the extremes, right?”

  Diane nodded with a wry smile, I wonder what this guy would think of Q?

  “Blue dots are the spotting and confirmation of unusual abilities or talents but nothing further. They could be commanders, but we can’t be sure yet.”

  Russe tapped a red dot with his knuckle, “These are confirmed Commanders.”

  He does know how to milk a presentation, she thought as she said, “So what confirms a ‘captial-C’ Commander?”

  Norma snickered at Diane’s somewhat sarcastic emphasis, but Russe still looked dramatically grim as he said, “They can’t be killed.”

  “...say again?” Diane finally asked.

  “They can’t die...or rather if they do die the come back. That Terran captain I told you about? He’s known for staying behind when his crew needs some covering fire or a distraction that’s going to be lethal...then some time after the crew knew for sure he was dead he’d reappear in his ready room and continue captaining as if nothing strange happened.”

  Pyers! Diane suddenly realized, All these people with unusual abilities and ‘can’t die’ are pyers, and when they’re killed they’re respawning at their nearest safe respawn point! “Ah,” she said, keeping a note of skepticism in her voice, “We’re not going to be testing that. Like, at all. You can only be wrong once with that one, after all.”

  Norma smirked, “Yeah, let’s not try to kill our brand new station commander.”

  Russe chuckled with some embarrassment, “Well, okay. But I’m still putting this down as an unconfirmed...”

  “No, you’re not,” she snapped. He gave her a look like a kicked puppy, but she remained firm, “In fact, I want everything done to get rid of that map. Even if it means I, personally, have to visit each and every one of those so-called ‘Commanders’ and let them know they’re being monitored by a bunch of well-meaning people on the ‘net. That’s a huge invasion of privacy.”

  There was a lot about that directive that was legitimate. She was always one of the people that was telling her fellow church parishioners they needed to secure their home’s firewall. But it was also pusible reasoning to keep her own information off of an apparently publicly avaible map. Plus, if I really did track down other pyers using this, I could gather more intel and possibly discover a rogue masquerading as a pyer.

  Poor Russe looked like he’d just realized he accidentally drove a steam roller over a basket of baby bunnies. “Oh...I didn’t...I don’t think we...I can’t imagine...”

  Norma gave him a gentle smile, “We get it, you got more excited about some wild theory about legendary super beings or something and it ran off with you. But Diane is right, don’t put her name and location in that thing.”

  Russe sighed and shook his head, tapping his mini-tab to clear the dispy, returning the main viewport to the FTL tunnel they’d grown familiar with for the st week.

  Norma got up and crossed the step it took to get to the captain’s chair, “Why don’t you go to your quarters? You’re probably pretty wiped out after all that. Even ‘Commanders’ need their beauty sleep, right?”

  Diane closed her eyes and sighed with a wry smile, “Yeah, that sounds like a pn. Thanks, guys. For everything.”

  They wished her a pleasant sleep and she went back to her cabin, stripping down to just her shirt and panties and practically throwing herself into her bunk. Wondering if she could get an idea what her ‘commander’ ability was, she brought up her in-game HUD and saw two notifications pending. She tapped the first and found a tired smile sliding up on her face.

  “She Should Be at the Club - Unlocked”

  “Description: All Work and No Py make the Commander a dull girl. Duty is good, but self-care is good, too. Stepping outside of your comfort zone is the only way to get what you haven’t got.”

  “Perk: Activates Commander’s Ability”

  Now pretty sure what the second notification was about, she tapped through to the next notification which took her to her character screen. She saw the highlighted section and tapped to zoom in.

  “Commander’s Ability: Moving to the Music”

  “Level: 1”

  “Manipute computers with the power of song. Level this ability to increase your range of control.”

  Well, at least that wasn’t cryptic, even if it did seem out of pce in a sci-fi game. Then again, she thought as she started to drift off to sleep, Star Wars has the whole ‘Force’ thing, which always seemed like handwavium level BS to me. I’m sure the Warsies are loving the commander’s abilities in this game.

  PrincessColumbia