Digital Exodus Chapter 37

Hope you enjoyed these two chapters! There’s more on the way! Sorry for the month of no story. I’ve been working on yet another edit-pass of Ryn for a final release of book 1 on like, itch and kindle and stuff.

Alia

Consciousness returned slowly, stuttering as it did so. My whole head hurt. Seriously, it felt like it’d been run over by a ten-tonne barrel of corporate paperwork. There was this really annoying whining sound that reminded me of my mother.

Urgency crashed through my sluggish mind. Oh shit. Did I fall asleep at work? Had I actually been hit by ten tonnes of paperwork that I hadn’t finished yet?

My tail drooped in sympathy with the internal terror that was fast approaching the heights of— hold on. My tail?

Reality hit me in the back of the head, and I smacked my face painfully against the glass of the pod. Ow. That was rude.

Taking a breath, I attempted to open my eyes… and cringed with every fibre of my being when the lids scraped across the surface of my eyeballs. My eyeballs were completely dry. That wasn’t great. Why weren’t they wet? Eyeballs should have at least a little lubricant.

Warning. Synoform degradation above acceptable levels. Attempting to reinitialise maintenance systems.

The text appeared without prompting in my vision, hovering helpfully so I could read it. Synoform? Maintenance systems?

What was going on? What was the last thing I remembered? I… oh, I remembered leaving Earth. I remembered two years of hard work out in the Kuiper belt, harvesting materials and constructing additional Cherish-class ships. We left with… five of them? Yeah, there were five. Cherish, Reverence, Admiration, Adoration, and Veneration. The Exodus’ five ark ships.

When they were finished, we left the Sol System… supposedly, for good. We retreated into Exodus City after that, and started just… living. Except, nobody can just sit around doing nothing. We played games, a lot of games. We even spent a while playing Rellithesh, the VRMMO.

Oh, shit! The… the severing! When we reached… what was the number? One point four light-years, that was it. The moment we crossed that imaginary distance away from Earth, all contact with our home world was suddenly lost, except through Rellithesh. Nobody understood why. There was a lot of fear and confusion.

A nozzle dropped down in front of me, causing me to blink while it swung in and out of focus.

Fluid intake required.

Oh-kay.

Tentatively, I pushed up onto my tiptoes so I could capture it between my lips. Water trickled into my parched mouth, and I closed my eyes as I experienced the unique, and honestly quite strange if you think about it, sensation of hydrating.

Gah, why was this weird pod-thing so tall? Why was the nozzle so high up?

When I felt like I’d had enough water, I slumped back and looked around, inspecting the pod. There was a little screen above me, displaying a readout that I didn’t fully understand. I could see all sorts of functions that I recognised, however. All of them had some relation to the android bodies that the Exodus developed, except every reference to ‘android body’ was replaced with ‘Synoform’. Did we rename the things?

Wait, except if this were an android body, why would I need to drink water? That made no sense.

At least I could blink without a scraping sensation now. My body was making use of the water quite quickly.

Maintenance systems successfully engaged. Reserve material storage accessed. Material intake recommended within 3 hours.

Great. More diagnostic-log babble that meant nothing to me.

Without any such warning in my heads-up display, the lid of the pod shifted and began to lift away. It made it one third of the way open before there was a massive bang, and everything shuddered. It was like a freakin’ earthquake.

That's when I realised the noise I'd heard when I woke up wasn't my mother yelling at me about paperwork. It was an alarm, blaring with the kind of urgency that had my engineer’s blood running cold. Oh fudge.

Shifting within the cramped space of the pod, I got my shoulder up against the lid and pushed. There was a groan, then a series of pops, and finally, the pod opened.

Okay, phew. I enjoyed being wedged into small, cozy spaces, but only if I had control over how I could get out. Gosh, the air was cold as heck now. I appeared to be in some sort of very small room that was painted in a soothing pastel blue. Despite the paint, I could see exposed bolts, conduits, and all sorts of other hints that told me I was in some sort of large vehicle.

There was also a mirror opposite the pod, and my face flushed as I met my own eyes. This ‘Synoform’ was using my preferred body-print, at least.

Even after all this time, I felt a brief glow of warmth as I saw my smooth skin, soft features, and of course, my wide, gently curving hips. Then one of my big horizontally-mounted fox ears twitched, and I grinned at myself. Yup, the whole package was present.

Oh, and there was a pair of lockers off to the side. Maybe there would be clothing in there?

My mind had made the decision to go and check, but I hadn't yet moved when another, different alarm sounded. This one was so much more screechy and my inner ear began to twist as gravity very suddenly shifted sideways.

“Crap!” I blurted, as I was pressed heavily into the ceiling of the pod.

That was at least five gravities of— abruptly, I fell towards the side of the pod, bounced, and began to spin rapidly out into the middle of the room. My actual velocity wasn't terribly quick, so I extended my limbs and slowed my uncontrolled spin slightly. Gravity had apparently gone on vacation.

Ohhh dear. I needed to find other people.

“Is anyone there?” I called as I snagged a handhold that was conveniently attached to a wall.

Silence, aside from the hissing of air through vents and an odd, low groaning noise that happened at random. The groaning was at least identifiable, even if it didn't fill me with confidence. It was the sound that a ship's frame made when it was twisting or flexing.

Well… what did I do now? Wait, I should find clothing.

Pushing off the wall and releasing the handhold, I floated across the room and grabbed a handle on one of the lockers I saw earlier. Using the wall to steady myself, I opened the locker and surveyed the contents. Huh… there was a sort of wetsuit looking thing, then a harness. Oh, and… ration bars? Odd. Why would I need to eat?

Nevermind, they weren't ration bars, but ‘Synoform Raw Material Bars’.

How do I take this raw material in? I thought towards my Synoform body.

The answer rode down the virtual channel used when biological functions needed to be communicated to my higher consciousness, and arrived as a vague desire to eat the thing. With a shrug, I pulled the wrapper off. The act of removing the plastic caused my body to gain a slight, annoying spin, but I ignored it as I ate the odd brown-coloured rectangle.

Material intake commencing. Material will be available for use in approximately 1 hour.

Sure thing. Just call it ‘digested’, buddy. This synoform platform had to have been designed by— a flash of memory resurfaced. Some of the SAI who were more detached from their ‘human roots’ had offered to go into a sort of hyper-cognition trance state to design various technologies we might need when we arrived. This was probably their work. It was quite obviously a solid design… but maybe the diagnostic log could be a little less clinical.

Oh, and I also remembered a very important fact. A year or two after the Exodus left the Sol System entirely, political conditions on Earth began to… degrade. We could only get news through Rellithesh by that point, but the stories of human players were… grim.

It was also our fault, in a very roundabout way. When the entire digital population of Earth said ‘fuck you’ and left the system, inquiries had been launched. Branches of the UN created committees to investigate… and that's when the truth was uncovered. It's kinda hard to ignore a space station dropping from orbit to deliver the evidence. Actually, the first one they did manage to ignore. The second one was a proper nuke of a bombshell, both proverbially and if rumour was true, very almost literally.

The truth launched many more inquiries, and political careers started dropping like bodies, and that part was too often literal. Unfortunately, the corruption ran too deep, and important functions of the worldwide government began to fail. That's when things got really bad, and when the stream of digitising refugees seeking to join the Exodus turned into a flood.

We wouldn't have enough RUCU to fit everyone. Hell, even if we used the backup raw material we were bringing for in-flight repairs, we couldn't make enough normal computers to hold everyone. It was a nightmare, and a massive oversight in our planning. Still, we tried.

On a personal level, Cerri and I actually got bored and impatient. Our fields of expertise weren't helpful to the effort, and there comes a point where too many people trying to help a project like that can just make things worse. So, we lived an idyllic little life for eight years, poking and prodding at various technical projects until we couldn't take it anymore. We volunteered to be compressed — basically put into a kind of sleep that would mean we took up considerably less storage space than if we were awake.

So… why was I waking up in a physical, if artificial body? Well, if it was artificial, and it kept babbling nonsense diagnostic stuff at me, maybe I should check the logs.

So, as I got dressed in the bodysuit and harness, that's what I did, scrolling all the way up to the top.

Emergency damage control protocol activation codes received
Compressed Digital Sapience Downloading…
Download Complete
Beginning Preferred Bodyprint Accommodations…
… 1%
… 2%

Did they really have to print every single percentage point of progress? Like, I get that it probably took a while, but geez. With an eyeroll, I scrolled down to where it finished.

… 100%
Preferred Bodyprint Applied
Beginning Emergency Decompression…
Cutting Simulated REM (Warning, this action can cause temporary difficulties with memory access)
Decompression Complete
Memory Function Errors Detected; Informing the Digital Sapience Frame
DS Frame Report: Beginning Gentle Memory Diagnostic and Restimulation.

Oh… gosh. It was alarming to read about a log of how I was processed and put into this body. There was a heart-stopping moment of existential horror when I wondered if I was even me, but then I remembered what ‘Simulated REM’ meant. Basically, because you can’t just turn a digital sapience off, the compression was actually more of a purposefully induced REM-style sleep. I wonder what I dreamed about?

Of course, far more immediately alarming was the very first line. ‘Emergency Damage Control Protocol’. You know, it probably should have been a little more obvious to me, considering the spin gravity of the damned ship had just failed.

Stopping the gradual rotation of my body by grabbing onto the second locker, I opened it and — yup, there were a whole bunch of tools. Okey-dokey, consider the message received, Exodus. You needed the vent-monkey to get to work.