Intergalactic Summit

I think it was Onsooh where we were. My ship was an old mining vessel named Quadrillion. He was built in the shipyards in Fricoure and still had ORE's previous generation pentatoroidal relays and manual laser coherence calibrators. I, too, enjoy the roughly synthesized atmosphere on crew level decks and sometimes I prefer it to my Pod.

Unbeknownst to the crews on my ship, their controls are always totally nonfunctional and vestigial and all ship controls are reengineered for control directly from my Pod. This adds roughly 4 to 4.5 million signals to my neurointerfacer and if I must step out of Pod, a spiderwork of wires must follow me, all attached by special surgically grafted neodymium-gold plugs on either side of my spine. The crew believes that they contribute to the operation of the ship, but in truth my paranoia would never allow this illusion to be truth.

I enjoy walking amongst them, my crew.. my cattle.. as they watch me stroll through passageways and control rooms completely covered, except for my eyes, in a cobalt blue magnetooptical interface suit with long wires that trail back to my Pod. Many of them look twice as I pass them. Some even kneel. Whenever I'm not inside my Pod, with its perfectly measured seventy parts per million gin, twenty two parts per million nicotine, forty five parts per million caffeine, in a electrolytic saline base, I feel out of place and light-headed and sometimes the thirst can kick in.

I've always found the nebulas at the edges of Onsooh to be mesmerizing, perhaps even familiar to me from another life which I have long forgotten. The crew that day were especially gracious. As I'd wandered to inspect a sinusoidal power droop in Quadrillion's reactor, they'd brought me purple bean cakes from Amamake, a chilled cup of strawberry wine, and a chocolate twirl with vanilla sprinkles. My left eye was bloodshot, the result of a slight calibration error in Pod Goo density during our last warp cycle, my fault of course. As I sipped the sweet wine, I could feel it slip down past my tongue and drip over the ledge of my throat. It was warm, and though I was fully covered I felt a chill that longed for more of it. Another sip. I blinked and I could see the blood vessels drifting in view of my left iris.

And then it happened.

It must have been a hex torque displacement spanner. I'd picked it up and slammed it into someone's chest, I think an engineer from fourteenth deck. His ribs caved in, like spider legs smashed with a newspaper. Blood covered his white jumpsuit. Wires and hair followed me as I swung again. This time into a face. That time into an arm put up defensively against the displacement spanner, to no avail. The control room erupted in screams and almost suddenly went quiet when I'd finished. Only the sound of Quadrillion's star engine and the faint squish of blood exiting and dripping down onto the metal floor could be heard.

I closed my eyes feeling every inch of my ship. Every thruster, every servo, every circuit breaker was still available to me at a moment's thought. Good.

I wandered upward to the next deck.