NOVEL NEXT 3
“Well, if you are done, then I will explain some things while we wait for your body to be printed,” she said with a businesslike clap of her hands. “Let me get you a chair.”
The chair she was getting me appeared out of thin air, which was highly convenient. It was a nice big armchair, soft and warm. As I eased myself into it, I was struck by how different this simple experience was. I mean, I still fit in the chair, but it felt sort of weird with how big it was. In a strange turn, my instincts told me to pull my legs up and nestle them under me. Then my tail was all you’re squashing me, so I shifted that around to the front and laid it down on my lap. Ah, perfect. That felt comfortable.
“Good, let’s get started…” the woman said, sitting down in a chair of her own. “Again, we at Galicorp thank you for using our services.”
“Sorry, uh… my memory is a little… jank right now,” I said, trying to keep in-character, so to speak. “What services?”
She gave a small snort, followed by a nod. “Space is a dangerous place, but living, working in and traversing it are key to our society. As such, many companies such as ours offer the service of transforming your average human into what is known as a Spacer. Essentially, your mind has been digitized and placed within a cyborg body. As a basic model, most of you is organic, with only your cybernetic brain and eyes differ from the norm. Well, and the tail is new, but that isn’t cybernetic.”
“The tail is pretty great,” I agreed, fluffing it up and running my fingers through it. So damned soft, I loved it already.
She gave a laugh. “Indeed. Regardless, your brain is highly unique in one simple function. It is linked to the galactic net. If you are killed, instead of being lost forever, you will wake inside a freshly grown body at the nearest hospital. This service is free, although the body will not contain any additional modifications you have made unless they are paid for.”
“Oh, that’s… pretty cool,” I said, raising my eyebrows in surprise. “Universal healthcare is nice.”
“Indeed,” she said again. I think she liked the word. “This reduces much of the risk associated with a spacefaring life, although be warned, if you accrue a bounty and respawn within its jurisdiction, you will face charges.”
I nodded. “Understandable.”
“Now, on to what Galicorp can do for you, and what you can do for Galicorp,” she told me, leaning forward now, a funny look in her eye. “We will be releasing you out into Spaceport Halifa within the hour, but we need to talk about your life after that point. You have the option of going along your way, you paid for the transformation. But a spacer is nothing without a ship, so we have an offer. You may enter into a contract with Galicorp, whereby we offer up a loan to help you buy one.”
“Right, but I can find a group of people and we can make it a group loan, right? Like, we form a spacer company and the loan goes to that?” I asked tentatively.
“Yes, although the Galicorp discount will only be applied to a portion of the company’s loan, based on the number of Galicorp spacer graduates within its ranks,” she explained.
“Fair,” I said, giving a smile that to my surprise, didn’t feel all strange. “What else is there?”
“We are also supplying you with a basic spacer kit. This includes a basic wardrobe, space suit, sanitary products and other such things that a person needs for their daily life. You may either take them upon leaving, or have them sent to a destination later on. We recommend that you do this once you have a ship to store them,” she told me with a wink. “There is a lot, and you have chosen a body that does not seem particularly capable of carrying all of it.”
“Also fair,” I laughed, lifting my arms up and dropping them for emphasis.
“Good good,” she hummed, and a holographic pad appeared in her hand. She tapped away on it for a second, then tossed it over to me. It slid through the air and seamlessly into my hand, a far cry from what would have actually happened if she’d done that. “Please fill out this form, it’s to construct your spacer identity. Again, you may simply copy your previous identity over, or create a new one.”
“Oh, sweet,” I mumbled, already reading through the form.
Okay… so first off, name… we’ll skip that for now. Gender… female. Uhhh, Wow there was a lot of random shit here. As I filled it all out I began brainstorming ideas for a name. I kinda liked the letter A at the start of girl’s names, so I tried to think up names I knew that started with A. Anna… Amelia… Audrey…
Wait… what about Alia? I liked Alia… a lot. Like, a whole lot. I put down Alia, surname Cassilius, because that was a cool sounding sci-fi surname.
Name chosen, I moved on to the next hardest decision.
“Uh, what exactly does it mean by, AI assisted packages?” I asked, glancing back up at her.
“As part of your spacer transformation, you are allowed to purchase two beginner level AI learning packages,” she told me amicably. “These will determine what jobs you may take. For example, if you choose a rifleman package, you will be able to take jobs as a marine onboard a combat vessel. A navigator package would qualify you to take on that role, etcetera.”
“Oh, cool! Thank you.” So this was where I chose my class, basically. I’d already made myself with the idea of working on a ship’s parts, so I picked mechanic for my first option, but the second was a little more difficult. I guess it would be fun to get into combat, but I wasn’t really keen to get up close and personal, so I chose the light craft piloting package.
I watched them pop up in my hud, each had little emoji faces that were currently just smiling gormlessly at me. Alright, sweet. I had little friends now.
The mechanic face was a little bunny wearing goggles, grease on its face while it brandished a wrench, while the pilot face was a little bunny with an old timey pilot’s helmet on its head. They were adorable and they were mine.
The next part would be… more difficult. I had to choose a background. This game didn’t have stats, per-se, but instead you had to learn everything yourself. It looked like the background gave you other learning packages that were more immersion breaking. This was because they weren’t allowed to just squirt knowledge into our brains.
I had about a million options, but I needed to think about what would be useful and also what would make my character more interesting to play. There was a whole shitload of stuff tied to backgrounds.
To narrow my choices down, I figured I should stick to things that would benefit me in my mechanic role. That, of course, only helped a little.
Oh, wait… I had to choose a homeworld first. I should probably pick city-world, since there’s no way in hell I’d be able to pull off being from a more rugged colony world.
I did so, and it gave me a set of options. Ah, options from different empires. Nevermind, I needed to choose which nation
I was from first. Jesus, this was complicated. Alright…“Do you have like, a map with lore and stuff on it?” I asked, motioning to the menu I was in. “Because I have no idea what I’m choosing between here.”
“Certainly,” she said with an amused smile, summoning and chucking another holographic tablet to me.
I caught it and began to explore, finding a map of known human space first. There were a lot of separate factions, empires and all sorts out there, but I knew I needed one of the highly developed ones.
There was the Fremont Collective, which sounded like a libertarian corporate hellhole. I think I’d pass on that one… I wanted something that was less overt with its corporate hellishness. Basically, I needed the UNC but in space.
What if I went and read up on the ancient history of this setting? That might allow me to get an understanding of things, as well as figure out where my best bet was for finding the type of nation I wanted.
From what I could see of the early lore, climate change had been allowed to run out of control for a lot longer before the world moved to try and curb it. Rather than a third world war, earth was embroiled in a bitter space race, a sort of lukewarm-war where everyone’s goal was to get their populations the fuck off earth before it was uninhabitable.
Early FTL drives were still incredibly slow, taking a good long while to get from A to B. The FTL stuff was based on recent scientific theories, large fields of something that had been termed aether inhabited a sort of sister-plane to ours. When a ship dropped into the aetherscape, they needed to navigate around these massive obstacles or face instant obliteration if they hit them. This meant that while the galaxy was vast, human exploration of it had been confined to small corridors and pockets of open space within the aetherscape.
Navigators were meant to keep track of the subtle, glacial movement of these clouds of aether to keep their ships from exploding. Explorers used special equipment to map these clouds and try to find routes through it all. Normally they didn’t shift around a lot, but there had been instances where worlds that had previously been accessible were suddenly cut off by the mysterious movement of the aether.
Anyway, back to history… let’s see… there were several SAI generation ships early, those have never been heard from since, then Europe got its first FTL colony ships out there. They formed a union of nations that seemed like a place I’d actually like to live in called the United European Worlds.
The UNC, China, Russia, Brazil and half a dozen others all launched their way out into the sky not long after. Corporations also rushed out with their own ships too… aha! The UNC ships had founded the rather pretentiously named Empire of United Humanity. That sounded like what I needed.
Sure enough, I found all the telltale signs in their history of the type of thing I wanted in my origin story. Dystopian space empire with a veneer of happiness!
I picked one of their well developed urbanized worlds called Galea as my homeworld, and then went and took a look at the much more manageable list of backgrounds. I went with street urchin as my childhood, but stalled out on the occupation after that.
I needed something that was adjacent to mechanic, but not exactly on it, so I could have a broader range of skills to start off with. Wait… cyber thief! Oh that was totally cool, with this background I spent my late teens and early twenties sneaking around and hacking into places to steal shit. Yes, that would be perfect! It also gave me underworld contacts and stuff, knowledge of how the criminal underworld worked would be pretty good.
A smile expanded across my face as I watched a third little bunny join the other two, this time a digital stylised graffitibun. Alright, I was happy with that! Onwards to the next thing!
