5

A Few Weeks Ago

I awoke from my usual dreamless, unremembered sleep and resisted the realization of my surroundings for as long as I could. When it was no longer possible to ignore my body in my bed in my dorm in Polaris Technical College in this cursed world, I kicked my blanket away and sat up. I supposed that I wasn’t specifically on that cursed world anymore so much as orbiting it, and I wasn’t quite ready to extend my negativity from Earth to the whole universe yet. Despite my bed having only barely enough room for one person I’d given up a quarter of the space to a clutter of textbooks, ration packets, both unopened as well as empty, and a random assortment of electronic devices. My hand sifted through the mess almost of its own will looking for my last synthspike.

Feeling the familiar shape of the spike, I closed my fingers around it and pushed aside my hair so I could slap the emission pad against the base of my skull. The device made a brief hum when I clicked it on and I waited for someone else’s calm to infiltrate my brain. Comfortable numbness failed to assert itself over my mind and the spike went silent after only a few seconds; the spike was out of charge. Reality stayed sharply real as my weariness changed to wakefulness and I felt a stirring of care for my circumstances that would grow into a thorn in my side over the course of the day if left unchecked.

I absolutely believe in auspicious and inauspicious things. It sounds unscientific for someone whose whole skill set revolves around aetheric engineering, but that’s exactly what has made me this way. My father is a doctor and my mother a physicist, but neither one has ever been able to explain what aether is to me. I started working with aetheric energy when I was a kid. Having rich parents meant my childhood science projects got to involve technology that most kids only get to touch if they find it discarded in the scrapper dumps. I quickly got bored of the little conversions to make the stuff into electricity to power ordinary toys and appliances. The next step was to go to the borderland of legal uses of aether and make impossible things happen.

I bathed wood planks in aetherically charged solutions to make them become harder than steel. I honed knives with charged grit to make blades that slipped through those planks like paper. I felt the aether responding to my will and no one could explain what was really happening. The military certainly wasn’t giving up its secret and nobody else had figured it out.

So by necessity I came to believe in things just a bit beyond what we could understand. My grandfather tried to explain something about Jungian synchronicity to me once, but I never really got it. A certain term he used did make sense to me though: auspicious. It’s like a sign of your luck and as long as you know the signs you can see the good things ahead on your path, or the bad things. It didn’t really explain what was going on in the bigger picture, but it at least made my day to day life make a bit more sense. When we started up the Knights of the Blue Rose, I was always on the lookout for signs of what was coming each time we set foot on the battlefield.

Having my last spike run out of synesthesia first thing after waking up, all I could think was, This is a sign of a bad morning.

I stumbled into the bathroom and washed my face at the sink. The water was cold, clear, real. I glanced at myself in the mirror. Messy hair, pale skin, that joyless look. At least I could brush my hair a bit and clean my body with a few wipes before putting on yesterday’s overalls. When I was ready I picked up my bag and headed out into the hall. It was late enough that the early bird rush was done and the passages of the station were quiet. The next generation academy station was designed more like a building on Earth due to the built-in artificial gravity emission system. This made the place more a maze of hallways than a bizarre tree of tubes like earlier stations. The halls and courtyards were built with varying decorative themes and patterns to increase the variety of what you saw in the confined space, but since I took the same paths room to room the entire thing had become stale and monotonous.

I hit the cafeteria and grabbed the same basic nutrition pack as I did every morning. Fake egg, fake meat, fake veggie. The whole thing was put together by protein printers, not that I really cared. It kept me alive. Just the same as workshop number eight. It was the place where I worked, nothing more. It was the least popular workshop because it didn’t have any windows, but that made it perfect for me. I tried to avoid looking out toward the Earth.

It was definitely a bad morning; I was working on the structural supports for a mining drone’s arm and the aether wouldn’t take no matter what I did to coax it to bind with the material. I burned an entire battery uselessly trying to modify the stuff and then kicked my feet up on my desk to sulk. Eventually a stranger walked into the shop carrying a battered cardboard box. I wouldn’t normally notice or care, but I was out of synth and already gazing around aimlessly instead of working.

The first thing I noticed was that he was wearing a school flight suit. Polaris was lax with the dress code since it operated with gravity up 24/7, so flight suits weren’t really in fashion. It made him stand out, all the more since it wasn’t our school’s suit. It took me a moment to place it, then it dawned on me. It was a Galactic Horizon suit. That place was something of an urban legend, even though it really did exist. It had originally been Bigelow Aerospace Training Center, the first orbital school for the early technicians during the push to industrialize space. An older generation station, it had become defunct for a while before coming under new ownership a few years back. It was still a small place with only a couple dozen students which is part of why it was rare to see any around and they’d taken on such a legendary status.

But the rumors also went along the lines that it was a den of hackers and other unscrupulous types. When some major glitch took the lights down for a day, it was the Galactic gang. When the cloud shredded the data on your term paper, it was the Galactic gang. When the bidet was a bit weak and wouldn’t reach, it was the Galactic gang. Probably none of it was true, but that’s what people said. Some people said it with disdain; some people said it with hushed admiration.

The young man wearing the flight suit looked normal enough though. Tanned skin, black hair combed just enough to make it neat-messy, smile ready to go. It wasn’t the shielding smile of an ingenuine person, which made him the sort I hated dealing with the most. It was easier to lie and spin normal with someone else who was faking, but I hated doing it with an honest person.

He looked around the room a few times before his eyes settled on me. All I could do was watch in disbelief as he walked right over to my desk. I didn’t like my odds for this being a pleasant encounter considering all the signs I’d been getting so far. He stood in front of me with his pleasant smile and tilted the box so I could see inside. “A friend told me you might be able to help repair this,” he said casually. My blood ran cold and I ached to have a full spike of calm-synth to dump into my brainstem.

Inside the box was a thing that looked kind of like a gimmick VR input glove and kind of like an industrial remote motor control gauntlet. Most people who took a glance at it would think it was one or the other, but it was something else entirely. Well, I had used parts from both of those things when I made it, but it was a dangerous weapon rather than a toy or factory hardware. My involvement with that gauntlet’s creation was supposed to be something of a secret. It could not be a coincidence that the stranger had brought it to me; he had to know who I really was.