Austin Grossman - You

You step over a shattered barricade of piled-up lockers and pace down the corridor. A skeleton lies slumped against one wall. It wears scraps of blue and gold braid, and bits of colored metal lie among its ribs, the trappings of a lieutenant junior grade in the navy of the Second Terran Empire. It shows no obvious cause of death. Nearby there is a gray card, thin as a fingernail, chased with pulsing blue lines. A locked door, likewise outlined in blue, can now be opened, admitting a blast of warm, moist air.

You’re in a sewer, because what would a video game be without a sewage level? In the medium of your heart’s choice, dim lighting, mossy corridors, and aggressive rats are eternal artistic verities. This one just seems to see more use than a derelict spacecraft’s should.

You are just a few tiles from the exit ladder when a trap closes around you, walls that slide into place, obviously a designer-driven effect. So much for interactivity. There’s no way out.

“Hello?” a boy’s voice calls. “Don’t you know not to go in there?” he asks. He sounds angry. The grating overhead gives a squeal of neglected metal workings and starts to open. You hear the quick slapping of sandaled feet running away.

Climbing against the centrifugal force of the spinning ship, you see the geometry where a long-ago explosion ripped into one great metal-lined swamp. Brackish water drops past you, outward to the stars.

It’s a fallen ecosystem of genetically warped felines and avians and simians, arachnids and carnivorous plants. You learn to harvest toxin sacs from mutant koi in the shallow ponds. You learn where the security cameras are, and the exact range of the door’s proximity sensors.

The boy returns occasionally. He says he’s a prince; he calls you an idiot.

Water-damaged carpeting, silent ranks of anachronistic arcade cabins. You are attacked by a robot that once taught fencing; its untipped foil is caked with old blood. You knock it into a hot tub, where it sparks out the last of its misspent life.

You find a library containing old mocked-up news photos of the ship, called the Concorde, as it was being built, exposing the honeycombed space inside. The Concorde should take 800 years to reach a destination 4.37 light-years away; it should have been there already. You should be combing the galaxy for Mournblade and kicking bugs off your to-do list. Instead, the ship has now been adrift for three thousand years, almost four times its expected life span. The tolerances engineered into its biosphere and its flight capabilities are strained beyond imagining.

And in the office it’s late, eleven o’clock, and you already know tomorrow you’ll regret the lost sleep and the wasted time when you could have been working out or reading, but you’re too distracted. The world is broken; you have to fix it.

The prince paces you on the far side of a metal grillwork, so you can talk but not interact. He’s afraid of his older brother, who stands to inherit the mantle of king, who plans to go to war against a tribe two decks in. His brother dreams of reuniting the world under one ruler. He doesn’t know what the Concorde is; no one does.

A thin trickle of water flows through a damaged seal overhead and forms a silty pool on the deck plating. There’s an object at the bottom, a gray steel disk with blue plastic inlay, stamped with a long serial number. On-screen, your HUD morphs to become more complicated and dangerous. You can’t believe they waited this long to give you a gun.

A cramped world of palettes stacked with spools of thick metal cable, dormant terraforming machinery, prefabricated huts, farming equipment, fertilizer, seeds, and water purification units. An Emerald Green Key-Card sits at the center of a giant web strung all the way across the entry to a disused dining commons. You do not find the spider.

You don’t know why you left home. You don’t even know why you sat down to play this game instead of going home or getting work done. But definitely life in a mining colony sucked; as a chieftain’s daughter, you knew you’d have to marry whomever your father said to marry, and the day was coming. And you looked at your mother’s face and saw that she wasn’t going to save you. She wasn’t even going to fight for you. You stole a one-person ship, and as you felt the acceleration subside and you drifted in the black nothing, you felt the absence of a pressure you’d been feeling without knowing it for all your fourteen, all your twenty-eight years.

Where would you go? Ganymede? Jovian orbit? What if things are just the same there? You warmed up the engines. You rotated the ship to point in-system, toward forbidden Mars and devastated Earth, Venus, and Mercury, or straight into the sun if that’s what it took to feel anything different. There were stories of long-dormant defense systems from the days of the stellar siege, of rogue mining robots gone sentient, of ancient Martians returned, of old-world technologies long forgotten.

You were asleep when the proximity detector sounded and showed you a ship where no ship should have been, in the darkness between Mars and the outer planets. The largest ship ever built, maybe, straight out of the legends of the Second Terran Empire.

A chalked symbol informing you that the last sailors of the Second Terran Empire Fleet hold the territory beyond, although they’re a little hazy about what they’re doing there. In the end you are permitted to boss-battle the prince’s older brother with stun weapons for the right to live and enter the sacred refrigeration and storage deck and look upon the Sleeping Ones.

The crowd lines an arena that was once the sunken floor of a two-story food court. The prince is watching; you feel his sense of fear, sense of awe. You’re a girl and you’re about to fight the brother he could never match. You face him across multicolored tile.

Normally you hate boss battles, a highly conventionalized way of staging a climactic moment that is purportedly dramatic but that usually devolves into hitting a supertough enemy’s weak points over and over again until he disintegrates or his head flies off and becomes a rocket-powered helicopter with its own special weak point; repeat as necessary.

The brother’s head does not turn into a helicopter. You throw chairs, scale the side of the food court, dodge through the crowd. You reactivate the sunken fountain and roundhouse-kick him into it. Press N to decline his offer of marriage.

The prince’s brother shows you the secret treasure-house of the world. Inches under the glass, you can see a teenage girl who looks maybe a year younger than yourself, but she must have been born well over two thousand years ago. You see Ley-R4, queenly and unmoving; you see Pren-Dahr, her captive, who elected to come with her. She doesn’t even know the empire’s fallen or that her ship got lost. She’ll never even know you or the prince were there. You must save her.

You see now that you originally landed two miles up from the aft engines. If the ship were Manhattan, you’d be walking from Houston Street to the Bronx, block by block. The ship is big enough to have its own seasons, which work their way up and down its length with the stale air and recycled water. It creaks and sighs. It’s getting colder. You have a lot of walking to do.

The tramway flooded when the ballast tank in the middle of the foredeck was breached. As you watch, a monstrous vertical fin taller than a man breaks the surface, followed by a column of gray-green muscle. You’ll have to find another way around.