SWWAE Chapter 6: Dream of Electric Sheep?

Her new voice was beautiful and filled her with so much gender euphoria that she couldn’t help but cry a little as she talked to herself. Well, her body wasn’t actually crying, but the audio she put out sounded as if she were crying. Her body also moved as it would have if she were crying. It was such a strange feeling to be doing all that without actually feeling herself cry. Another time she could focus on how uncomfortable that made her, but for right now she was just going to bask in the joy of a voice that made her feel beautiful.

“This is such a pretty voice. Thank you.”

Though she knew how long it took her before she went back to her searching, she didn’t want to repeat the disturbing feeling of acknowledging the time down to the millisecond. Just as she was pushing her way back to the hall, she realized something. Something she should have thought about a little while ago; her arm. Looking down at it, she found it mostly fixed. Bending it she felt no pain.

“So I am self-healing without even needing to focus on it. That might come in super handy. Though, like most things with this new form, I don’t know to what extent that will work.” Just hearing her own voice made her feel so giddy inside.

Finally, she realized all the new small items floating around the hall were all personal effects. Clothes, books, bedsheets, and other knickknacks. Floating around the corner, she looked into what must have been the captain’s bedroom. The glass ceiling extended into this room as well, which would be awesome to look up at from lying in the large circular bed, with crimson sheets. Well, only the fitted sheet was on the bed; the rest were out in the hallway.

“I hope this room got you laid, Heather. If you were ever interested in sexual exploits.” There was a part of her that wanted to rummage through all of Heather’s stuff, but she would have plenty of time to do that later. For now, she had other rooms to explore. Pushing herself to the other side of the hall, she almost made the same mistake of opening it without equalizing pressure. Then, looking at the gizmo, she realized that the atmospheric systems for the ship weren’t up and running yet, so she wasn’t able to equalize the pressure on either side yet.

“Great… though I have an idea.” With a touch, she began commandeering the door controls, and felt a strange sense of unease at the realization that she was still commandeering all the other places she had touched. One would think by now her actions would have taken over a major power line to power more of the ship, but every time she hit one, the connection was severed. There must have been a sever in the lines somewhere further down the line, which would explain why the chair said connections were corrupted.

Once powering the door and in control of the panel, she broke the airtight seal just a crack to let pressure equalize at a safe speed. She ended up doing this for all the other doors in the hallway. It was slow going, but it was working well. The only problem was the high-pitched squeal of air coming from every single door. By the time the first room was ready, she had realized that she could turn off her hearing like she could with her vision, but that would mean she couldn’t hear her pretty voice.

She found a bunk room that could fit three people (again with a glass ceiling), a toilet and shower rooms (separate which was nice), a walk-in pantry stocked with dehydrate and frozen food, a room that contained what she presumed to be three personal escape pods, a cargo bay stocked with a decent amount of differing stuff, and then, finally, what looked as if to be the reactor room. Not only the reactor room, but the systems hub for the ship.

“This is it, baby. Let’s get you jump-started and figure out what the hell is going on.” Those intentions weren’t as easygoing as she would have assumed. For starters with the reactor, or what she assumed was the reactor, did not look simple to understand, and she felt hesitant about where to start with her commandeering. If she went to the wrong place, could she accidentally set off an explosion?

“Fuck, this is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t thing, isn’t it…” So before she dove into taking over, she did a slow visual inspection of the entire four meter long device. “You look like a mix between a warp core[1] and Trinity[2].” As she floated around the reactor, she found a small compartment near the center with a glass door. It looked almost like a housing for something that appeared to connect to a bunch of wires and cables, but that something was missing. “What goes here? I assume something important and fundamental to the reactor, but where have you gone? Has the ship been looted? But this room still had air still in it, and nothing else appeared to be taken.”

She hesitated for a moment before she reached out and opened the door. Was this a good place to start her commandeering? There was only one way to find out, so she gave all the wires a little tap and started her takeover. Pulling away, she started moving again, tapping more spots of the reactor, intending to speed up the process. With that underway, she guided herself over to what looked like the computer mainframe of the ship. Without thinking, she started commandeering that too.

“Well, nothing to do but sit back and let th—Ow, fuck!” Migraines were something she had the ‘pleasure’ of experiencing at least once a month in her human body, so in a way she was used to the pain that wracked her mind now. That didn’t mean she was okay with it. The force in the computer that fought back against her was far stronger than the one she had encountered with the android and gizmo. It lasted a solid fifteen seconds before she felt her being win over the programming. If she had been organic, she probably would have been panting from the now-ended strain.

“I did not like that…” However, she completed the deed, and though she was still spreading her commandeering through the hub, she controlled all the systems. A screen on the hub lit up, and just like the screen in the cockpit, hundreds of error messages popped up. “All systems are running in the hub, but something disrupted the connections to a lot of major powered systems.”

The reactor didn’t start, as she had a feeling it wouldn’t with missing components, but her commandeering finally hit a main power output line from the reactor. She almost expected the power to return to some systems, but nothing else turned on. The power wasn’t heading to any other systems except the table in the cockpit. That was receiving its full power output from the reactor. “Has all power been rerouted to the table?” With no need to look at the screen on the hub, she knew that all connections along the primary power supply were severed, all except to the table. It was even odder because she wouldn’t have thought the table needed cables that could transfer the entire output of the reactor.

Floating back out into the hall, she looked down it and to the sphere still connected to the table. “You didn’t just drain the power; you fucking rerouted everything to make sure you could get all the power from every single system.” The sphere made no response to her statement, nor did it appear to power up. “Now I either have to commandeer every system to power it, or I’m going to have to undo all the rerouting you did to get this ship up and running. That’s going to take so gods damn long. You motherfucker…”

For nearly an hour and a half, she lazily floated around, focusing on her very slow commandeering of the ship. In that time, she learned a few interesting things about commandeering. The more focus and stronger desire she put into a specific area made the process move faster. The only issue was with her commandeering being spread across fourteen locations, all of which varied in difficulty because of the complexity of the area; it was actually getting tiring for her. Whether or not she wanted to acknowledge it, to continue doing what she had been doing, her mind had to be focused, even if was just a minuscule amount, on multiple things all at once in a very computer-like fashion.

Though her regent part of her being was telling her she was more than capable of doing such a thing, even at a scale that scared her, the human wiring of her mind was not yet capable of handling being divided like that. For that reason, she filtered down her commandeering until eventually she stop all together. She felt mentally drained and ready for sleep that way, but there was no physical sense of being tired like her old body would have.

“Will it be this tiring in the future? If it gets easier, does that mean I’m losing more of my humanity?” She was silent for a moment as struggled to move past that thought. “How tired can I get in this body? Will the still-human wiring part of my mind need sleep? Would I dream of electric sheep[3]?” She gave a light but existential laugh.

Still needing a break from commandeering but feeling that she needed to do something, she pushed her way back out into the hall. She hadn’t tidied up any of the items floating around and now felt like an alright time to do so. Might even let her get to know Heather a little better. Getting the bed sheet first, she made it into a bit of a sack to carry everything in. It took time and three separate sackfuls before she had returned everything to the bedroom.

“You really had a maximalist style of living quarters, and I really appreciate that. The only problem with it is that now I have to organize all of it, which is my fault, really. If I had thought about air pressure beforehand, some of these things might have been a little less chaotic.” She made the sound of sighing before sorting through everything.

Heather really liked rocks, and a lot of them had labels. The labels didn’t appear to be the rock types, but sometimes there were what appeared to be names and other times there were long strings of letters and numbers. If she had to take a guess what they meant, she would say these were the names of planets she had taken these rocks from. If that was the case, Heather was extremely well traveled. As she was about to set rocks on one of the many dozens of shelves in the room, she realized that there was no way for her to ensure that anything would stay in place whenever gravity returned to this ship.

“Of course… There looked to be a lot of boxes in the cargo bay. Hopefully, I can find some empty ones to store everything in safely.” It didn’t take long to gather up a few metal cargo boxes, and then it just became a game of sorting like objects into boxes. Though it wasn’t mentally draining like with commandeering, it was in a way emotionally draining. She was packing up Heather’s life, and it just reminded her she was the reason Heather was dead.

With everything now packed away, she explored some of the compartment doors in the room that had remained closed. None of them gave a little puff of air when opened, so they weren’t airtight, but they had been strong enough to stay closed with sudden decompression. Again, there were more pieces of Heather’s life, and again it just made her sad. That was until she came across one long and skinny compartment.

Opening it revealed a sword safely in its sheath and secured to the wall. The style of the handle and crossguard was extremely similar to that of the gizmo. Enough that she couldn’t imagine them not having been part of a set. “Swords are cool, but I imagine not practical in a sci-fi setting.” Then something else caught her eye. There was a cable coming out of the pommel that connected to a small box. “No way.” Pulling the sword and box from the wall, she inspected the handle and found a small crimson button. Getting excited, she pulled the sword from its sheath.

One side of the blade pushed further out than the other and ended with a flat back like one would find on a saber. The other end other side was at least a centimeter shorter than the flat back, but there were occasionally small nodes that would pop out every few inches along the blade. With glee, she pressed the button, but nothing happened.

“Well, this didn’t appear to be plugged into the ship, so I guess enough time has passed for the power to self-discharge.” That’s easily fixed, though. Feeling it would be a little safer, she started her commandeering on the cable between what she presumed to be the battery and sword. Within seconds, power had returned to the sword, and she pressed the button. A red beam grew from one node to the next until that edge of the sword was fully ignited. A thrum filled the air as her ghost body inside the machine smiled.

“It’s a protosaber[4]. Fuck yeah.” Carefully, she waved it around and laughed. “I stand corrected about swords in this universe.” There was no cool sound as she deactivated it, just a gentle fade of the thrum. It did make a satisfying sound when she put it back in the sheath. Setting the sword back in its place, she realized something. “Are there only swords here?”

Looking down at the bottom of the compartment, there was a wooden lock-box engraved with the words Last Resort. It was of course locked, unlike literally anything else on the ship. The upside was that… “I have a key.” Not having pockets meant she left it in the cockpit. Having to take time to get it only built up her anticipation, and the box did not disappoint.

“Holy shit,” she said with a laugh as she pulled out the handgun. “Hand cannon more like it. You look like the Malorian Arms 3516[5] and Hawkmoon Ashen Wings[6] had a baby.” It was a genuine work of art, and one large enough that she was curious how it would feel in her hand with gravity. “Is Last Resort your name or are you meant to be a last resort? Wouldn’t a gun like this be the first resort over the sword?”

[1] Star Trek

[2] Atomic bomb test

[3] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. The book Blade Runner is based off of.

[4] The early form of lightsaber from Star Wars.

[5] Johnny Silverhand’s pistol.

[6] Fan made variation of the Hawkmoon hand cannon from the Destiny series.

[Lots of references in this chapter. I think I'm happy with how my export of the chapters handles footnotes. I am curious of how many you guys understood without having to look at the bottom of the page.]