Андреа Хёст - The Starfighter Invitation

Realising I’d once again stopped in the middle of a walkway. I found the nearest seat and gazed at Mars, and then an overlay map of the station, which was shaped interestingly like a crown. The promenade was built into the circular base, while spike-like towers pointed away from the planet. There were three zones of gravity, with Earth-normal at the base, and zero-G at the tower tips.

It was difficult to tear myself away from the business of Looking, to continue to review the Challenge list, applying different filters until I had a list of top contenders to work my way through.

RED SKY DIVING

Adventures in the Janitor Corp.

Solo

Timed

Length: 30 minutes

Supplied Biosynth

"Is there an actual Janitor Corp?" I asked, as I followed the usual arrow. "It seemed like Constructs take care of all the cleaning and maintenance."

[[The Janitor Corp is a galaxy-wide Challenge series designed to give Bios some glimpse of the support system behind their, ah, stables. There’s a leaderboard involved, achievements, set collection. It’s quite popular.]]

"Sounds like, well, I guess everything non-lan is filler, isn’t it?"

My arrow led me into the zero-G zone, and I took my time on the trip, practicing moving from handgrip to handgrip, and bouncing across rooms.

"What happens if I strand myself out of reach of everything?" I asked, as I glided down what would probably be an elevator shaft if gravity were turned on.

[[After I stop laughing? I could call on a Construct for recovery. Though most Bios simply flail about, trying to generate momentum, then have their own Renba tow them.]]

I gave my sparrow-sized silver shadow a dubious glance, but had to admit the thing moved effortlessly through all the gravity variants I’d encountered so far.

"What about during a Challenge?"

[[Flailing. Until you either give up the Challenge, or the time limit runs out.]]

"Noted."

The arrow took me to a Soup vat, which I found difficult to pull open in zero-G. I swam into the mirror-wall exposed and, after a tiny, confused interval, I found myself swimming out of the same vat, except as a different me, and then I wasted the first few minutes of my timed Challenge gaping down myself. The biosynth. I’d expected a metallic human, but this was…

The body was a navy fibre weave. There were four arms. And tentacles. So many tentacles.

The reflection in the Soup showed that I maintained a humanoid structure. Head, torso, legs and arms in roughly the same position, with some adjustment for the second arm set, which was the source of most of the tentacles, although both my legs also tapered into amazingly long tentacles that writhed and coiled as I watched.

I was wearing goggles that made it a little difficult to see my face clearly, but through them I looked back at myself with massive blue-black eyes, with no visible sclera, and multiple transparent eyelids that slid up and down in double-blink. My visual colour range seemed to be the same. No nose or mouth or hair. Ears that were sculpted indents into the skull structure, rather than bits of flesh sticking off the side. It was a whole step beyond being a different sort of human, or a cat. Jellyfish-octopus-oid.

Not forgetting that I was in a timed Challenge, I noted an arrow pointing in a new direction, but ignored it in favour of methodically testing my movement: flexing tentacles, craning my head back and forth, bending and shifting. I didn’t seem to need to breathe, and had no sense of a heartbeat, but found an extreme awareness of the movement of my limbs through the air around me. Only after I had turned somersaults, and tested moving up and down the corridor, did I head in the direction my Challenge guide was pointing.

To an airlock.

I froze as soon as I recognised it—though continued floating forward. It’s an extraordinary thing to feel extreme excitement, to be at a pitch of nervous anticipation, and not experience any of the sensations that usually accompanied the emotions. No shaky breath. No racing pulse. No sick-tight sensation in my stomach. A biosynth had, somewhere within, the necessary biological substance and support system needed for a Bio to maintain lan, but that was a small part of a much greater whole. In a way I was my own spaceship.

And through this double-door chamber…

Space.

"I spent a good ten minutes just outside the airlock, gaping. Fortunately the Challenge itself wasn’t too difficult, or I’d have failed it."

"What was it?" my mother asked. "Cleaning the outside of the windows?" She glanced up and around at said windows, and that drowning view of Valles Marineris.

"Using a thing like a butterfly net to collect space debris. The artificial gravity apparently causes a lot of flotsam to cluster outside as if lightly magnetised."

"So you’ve saved us from seeing crisp packets float by?" my father asked.

"It was a weird collection. Little white chips of the stuff that our Snugs are made of, as if they’d been colliding with each other. Space rock. Various metallic somethings. Mostly greyish splooge that Dio—that my Cycog says is escaped sealant."

"So they even gamify space splooge," my father said, putting a hand up to take off glasses he wasn’t wearing, and then smiling ruefully. "I keep forgetting I don’t need them."

My parents—my parents' Core Units—were familiar strangers. They had reverted to their early twenties. Dad was taller, my mother shorter, though she was still at least an inch taller than him. They both had a lot more hair than usual—in fact, they were wearing almost identical hairstyles: long, silky hair pulled up in a high tail. My father’s short-sightedness had obviously been corrected, and they had the clear-complexioned vitality that most of the Core Units shared, along with some tiny shifts to their features that I guess represented the same thing as my longer legs and less stocky look.

"How’s your guild managing?" I asked. "Sticking to your rules?" I’d never really been able to keep up the strict roleplaying between members that my parents' guild maintained, though it was often fun to try.

"Relishing the set-up. The concept makes it very easy to stay in character, since we can claim to be from a human-only Enclave that pretends to its citizens that it’s the original Earth. We haven’t decided whether to have a guild position on trying to bring down The Synergis, or let everyone go their own way, but we’re having a great time exploring."

"And have you decided whether you personally want to steal a ship or stay?"

"I don’t think that’s the decision that matters," my mother said thoughtfully. "The question is not whether The Synergis is a utopia, but whether the game itself comes with a catch."

My father reached for absent glasses again, and grimaced. "It’s tempting to believe in this idea of the Starfighter Invitation."

"Someone goes off to join heroic space battles, and the rest of us just get to play a cool game?" I said.

"I don’t object to joining an intergalactic defence force," my mother said. "But if either of you are recruited, leave a note."

"I’m not anywhere near the top of the leaderboards, but sure," I said.

"What if the important thing is to decide to steal the ship?" my father asked. "If Dream Speed is a recruitment tool, perhaps it’s looking for those who will strongly resist pampered servitude?"

"Surely they’d present The Synergis in a worse light?" I glanced around for Dio, but te wasn’t visible.

"We’ve only just started," my mother pointed out. "There is a galaxy to explore in this game, and much opportunity to find what has been swept under the carpet. At this stage, I am disinclined to take my ship and run, however. Tadori feels more like a friend than a…controller."