11

One thing I came to hate about Galactic was having to do all my work in micro. Sure there was some radical alchemy you could only do while weightless, but ordinary repairs on the gauntlet became so much more annoying. Like trying to put together a puzzle when every piece refuses to lay down and quit moving. Even just taking notes in a lecture meant strapping yourself into a seat and slapping your notebook down onto a grabpad just to keep everything from floating away. In the workshop, my tools would drift off out of hand if I idly set them aside instead of slipping them under catchnets.

“Good morning,” Isidro called out from the doorway beyond the cloud of metal shavings and carbon splinters polluting my workshop.

“Yo,” I grunted back at him while wrestling the glove into position for filling another crack.

“I got you something,” he said as he tossed a small drone into the room. “I call it ‘the puppy;’ it eats your table scraps.” The drone steadied itself with gas jets and began chasing down the bits of debris in the air with a vacuum snout.

“You’ve been up here too long if you think that looks like a puppy.”

He shrugged and said, “If you’d connect to our ARG server, it would look like a puppy.”

“Until next month it turns into an alien ship abducting my trash and I have little green men crawling around my workshop. Thanks, but my life is complicated enough without the distraction of trying to live inside a game too.”

“How about a simple distraction instead?”

“Do you want me to fix this thing or not?”

Flashing a friendly smile he replied, “I’m not in a rush. A few hours aren’t going to matter much after so many years of waiting.” Since I had first met him I wasn’t sure what to make of his nonchalant attitude. I assumed that he was just another idiot projecting bravado, but lately I had started to wonder if he might actually be one of the rare people with inner calm.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked while putting the gauntlet in a secure bin.

“I’m shuttling over to another school for a chat with their student council. Not even an overnight cycle trip, we should be back in time for a midnight snack.”

“Can’t you convince that maniac to do something about the confectionery printer? The cookies that come out of that thing taste like sugary sludge.”

I rose from my nest of tools and aether batteries to make my way toward the door. As I crossed the room, the new drone abandoned its cleaning task to come up to me and demand attention. There must have been some artifice driving its behavior, but the movements looked so distinctly like a dog dancing back and forth excitedly that it was unnerving. I no longer doubted at all that Isidro was a highly skilled programmer and an expert in raising AIs.

We went separate ways from my workshop; he headed down to the docking bay and I went back to my bunkroom. It was in a state where I thought it could use a puppy; I was glad Isidro hadn’t come with me. Quickly I swept a bag around the tiny space to capture some of the trash and living debris, then I peeled the flightsuit I was wearing off and washed with a few wipes. It was like a small closet in comparison to the room I’d had at the other university, but I was becoming attached to my dim little cave.

I threw some things in a backpack and headed out to meet up with Isidro. He was waiting inside the shuttle reclined peacefully on a crash couch and waved as I came through the hatch. “Hit the starter when you’re ready,” he called out, so I went to the cabin and launched the autopilot.

As the system went through its departure checks and cycled the airlocks, I slung my bag on the opposite couch and sat down. It had been awhile since I had time to just sit and do nothing. Lately every time I closed my eyes I found phantasms of blueprints and circuit diagrams floating in my darkness. The shuttle came loose from the station with a hiss and a clang, fired maneuvering thrusters a few times, then became quiet. We rested comfortably for a little while before Isidro spoke up.

“So, how are you getting along at our little station?”

I thought for a moment before replying, “I’m glad I made the move, but I will never get used to the attention. It’s not like we were doing fan meet and greets like idols back in the day.”

“I would have been first in line for a handshake! I read over the blogs the Knights put out hundreds of times.” He cut his enthusiasm short in embarrassment, but added seriously, “I still look over them every now and then.”

“That was all my brother. He was the one who had a way with words.”

“According to William, Sebastian credited you with the ideas he put into words.” His words irritated me. I felt an impulse to say something to try to downplay my role in the whole mess, to avoid responsibility.

“Yeah well, that was more like the two of us just chatting about things we already felt the same way about. We saw eye to eye on pretty much everything, until we didn't. Before that, he was the real leader and I was just parroting his thoughts.” I remembered something suddenly, a scene of Sebastian teasing me and calling my blunt, childish way of stating my feelings a godsend for helping to clarify his own.

“Do you still feel the same way about the world?”

I did, but simply admitting it was embarrassing. I had been a child when I’d come to my conclusions about how unfair things were, how every nation operated under some version of the same system of crushing its citizens down and either enslaving or abandoning them. I’d seen first hand how those who were useful, like my parents, were controlled for the benefit of oligarchs richer than the most fabulous kings of old, and everyone else was left to fend for themselves in the squalor of some urbanized strip that had ten million residents and not one owned anything more permanent than what they could carry with them from one shack to the next.

If I had felt this way as a kid, then they must be childish feelings, but the world hadn’t seemed to ever change for the better and I still wanted to weep and rage when I thought about the nearly global standard of brutal, authoritarian oppression. Military-industrial complexes on opposite sides of the planet waged proxy wars in developing nations as a normal feature of the international economy. I wanted to do something about it all. When I was young, I joined my brother in fighting against powerful institutions to try to break the system. But it wasn’t just that simplistic impulse, so much of it was childish nonsense.

“Honestly I wish I could go back in time and smack that dumb kid I was. ‘Knights of the Blue Rose?’ How pathetic.”

Isidro sat up on his bench and said, “I still admire what you stood for back then, the stand you took against all of the people exploiting the masses. Who cares about a bit of pageantry? I don’t think it’s pretentious when you’re actually trying to accomplish something so meaningful.”

“No it was totally pretentious. I mean, think about it for a minute: knights were the aristocracy back in the day, all the lording over peasants and everything. Chivalry is like a literary invention; the real code of conduct was just what you needed to know to ransom off the nobles you just beat because it was understood that slaughter was really for the common soldiers and the elite had to be protected.

“But you wanted to stand for that literary version of the ideal, is it really that bad?” he asked in a small voice.

“Oh god, you want to use some cool name for whatever it is you’re putting together on Galactic, don’t you?” The smile of someone caught dead to rights spread across Isidro’s face as he flushed and broke eye contact. I prompted him to spill.

“Look I’m not as quick to this stuff as you are, all I’ve thought up so far is maybe referring to the station as ‘Avalon’ or ‘The Round Table.’”

“So you’d be knights too or something?” I snorted in amusement.

“Hey don’t laugh, I won’t care if anyone else laughs but coming from you that’s gonna break my heart.”

“No one else knows just how stupid it all is in order to laugh at it.”

“Don’t make me change my mind. I’ll start wearing sunglasses and we can call ourselves something super tryhard like ‘Black Spears International Contractors.’”

“Which side are you on now?”

“At least those PMC guys won’t make fun of me when I say stuff like, ‘We knights have gotta go regroup in Avalon.’” He put on an overly forced gruff voice as he spoke. We laughed and filled the shuttle’s small hold with the sound of our chatter. It had been a long while since I’d had such a good time. Our fun made the minutes pass quickly and suddenly the radio crackled to life with the voice of a control tower operator. It was time to dock at the other school.