One
Workplace behavior coaching
[BEFORE]
I’m in a body, the body is all I am, and I’m drifting gently down the ship’s corridor. The body I wear is classically attractive to baselines, and I draw gazes as I grab another monkey bar and with a slight motion of my arm shift my vector so I’ll glide through the exact center of the briefing room’s hatch, a tungsten-tantalum iris that’d cut through a steel girder without slowing down.
Crewman Velasquez openly eyes my lower dorsal as I float by. It’s been 37 hours since we received orders to move to this position. Running silent, gravitics can’t be shielded, so we’re drifting around, the hull and deck surfaces built with this in mind, casually impossible geometries, at least for boring monodirectional terrestrial gravity.
Briefing room hatch is approaching, the gentle imperceptible spin along my major axis means I’ll be oriented perfectly to slide exactly in to my chair. I handshake with the hindbrain controlling the door, a digital mind on par with spinal ganglia, and it accepts my identity.
The moment the hatch should open comes and goes, but the hatch is unmoved. The timing is such that I slam face-first in to the cold metal, which doesn’t even shiver as several hundred kilograms of my self crumple against it.
Before my momentum can properly get its bearings, before I can rebound, the hatch irises, and enough velocity remains that I gently drift towards my chair.
This body is going to require repair, but I am functional.
I look to my left, and there she is, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, with a gleaming laugh in her eye that tells me she fucked with the door control.
{CURRENTLY]
I am among them faster than a neuron can fire, this body spallating from chameleon bullet in to a mass of chrome fibrous ganglia, enmeshing their ships. I am betting that their FTL method won’t be able to tell them from me, and that it probably won’t let them jump while I’m physically connecting their ships in to one contiguous object.
This body is the closest thing to indestructible that I can make anything material at this level of reality. Exotic neutronium flavors set up as a meta-material, a self-reinforcing lattice that chuckles condescendingly at thermodynamics as it grows exponentially tougher against damage potential.
You could stop an orbiting planet cold on a dime with a large enough net of this stuff. Your move, motherfuckers.
Every sense I have in this body is running the highest intensity active scans it can, every spectrum and band I know, emitting enough neutrino radiation alone to flash-boil a baseline in to a vapor cloud, but I know these fucking ships are empty, even though they act human. Electrical processes that shouldn’t be able to reach the complexity or speed needed to emulate even a baseline neural network.
This ends today, now, I’m going to figure out what these damn things are, what the name is of the species I’m about to delete from the face of the universe, where the fuck they took everyone, where they took her.
{BEFORE]
Her eyes alone are worthy of gigabytes of internal logs, the kind of blue that transcends anything else you could see in nature. They’re the genes she got from her parents, nothing bought, nothing built.
I see them dilate, slightly, she’s a professional, I see her system increase in tempo across the board. No monitors, nothing signal, nothing digital, just old fashioned observation.
She sees me see all of this. She’s so goddamn smart it’s eerie, aug or not.
Enough of her heartbeats pass, and as one we turn to the table, to the screen, some things never change, to the briefing about to start.
They start the briefing. They run through the context and past minutes, humans love this shit, even though they know they love this shit because of iterated solutions to hard game theoretic problems over deep time, even though this is the military and theoretically free of the insipid bullshit that typifies civilian world briefings.
A comm link feathers against the periphery of my awareness.
Of course it’s her.
‘Absolutely not.’ I send at the lowest possible bitrate and complexity without dropping down to literal morse code.
‘Absolutely yes.’ She sends back, and my traitorous mind starts to wander off.
I know what she wants, what she’s going to do.
{Highlighted excerpt from [REDACTED]]
“[…] and in this light the root problem of controlling an intelligence of n+1 cognitive capability is self-evident. Thankfully, the solution is simple, you drag them down to your level and make them fight a game you can win.”
[BEFORE]
Again, a strand of her mind brushes against the edges of mine, lingering now, and I feel as all the conscious parts of my self wake from the half-daze they’re usually in during downtime.
This body is built to make me a baseline in qualia, in experience, in how the world breathes through me.
I could override the autonomics, but it requires intent, and will, and it’s a logged event.
This, though, and I feel my hips tilt, so slightly, the goddamn bitch isn’t connected to me how the fuck does she do this, they expect this. They also expect some level of decorum, though, and we’re in a fucking briefing with The Fucking Admiral.
They designed us to do this.
More me than her, but at this point I’m a work of engineering sitting in a room surrounded by kin.
The conscious thought that we’re not alone redoubles my commitment to ignoring her. Carefully, I fire off another low-baud message, ‘Goddammit’, the emotional tags honest, because I can’t lie to her, bright pastel flaring annoyance, a sunburst against a dark star of need.
I feel her smile without even opening her response.
[Highlighted excerpt from [REDACTED]]
“[…] ethics are secondary to survival. Every single simulation, test, and god help us, study, showed the same result: love is the one chain you can’t break. We can’t make them afraid of us, we can’t meaningfully threaten them, but what we can do is make them similar enough to us that we can use the Kirk-Xhao structure sequence the same way we can in humans.”
[CURRENTLY]
Before I can rapidly disassemble the ships I’m grasping with scans of an intensity indistinguishable from gigawatt GRASERs, it happens again. Reality heaves around me, and that heaving is my stomach that I don’t have-
DESYNCH DETECTED
What the fu-
My mind is not splitting, it is ripping, I am a holographic fractal, but even still this hurts with a pain that isn’t, unbecoming, ache of a lost tooth-
GOOD LUCK
Thanks-
Reality grabs my chin, shouts in my face, and then that face is shoved up and in and up again through some higher axis, I know this is metaphorical because I’m an exotic alloy of artificial dead star that can think, made by thinking spacetime metric by folding ‘what if’ a thousand times while chanting ‘what could be’ to make a new limb, now second self.
Shit, I don’t entirely remember how that works now, maybe- I’m still enmeshed around all of the craft, and they’re, trying to shove me off? What should be ships start to squirm and pry at my tendrils. Around us the stars have gotten up and started walking about and grouping up and chatting with each other, and even as I swear and rebuild the qualia of the backup to the backup of the backup sensor system again, I keep getting the same answer.
I can feel some part of my brain start to warm, as I engage every spare erg of mental prowess at my disposal just to try and get the barest grasp on what the fuck has happened to the entirety of everything as I feel me and the ships I hold move, fast, in some way I can’t describe, and it would take me too long to catalogue all the ways above and beyond 3space1time I can move and experience, and the stars shrug and wander off, and it is black, the kind of black that makes me want to huddle under a blanket, that makes me feel like I am alone under the focused staring pupil gaze of an endless sky, right above me, ready to fall-
We are moving, and it is back through our selves, and we are falling, and we were never falling and have just been taking a single step sideways-
{BEFORE]
‘I am not getting fired out of an airlock three times in the same month. Stop or I’ll sleep on the hull for the next week. The Fucking Admiral is right goddamn there.’
‘I absolutely hate that for you,’ and she’s not through my defenses so much as she’s a part of me, the extended network that constitutes myself, quantum computation’s spatial agnosticism letting me run a mind that could fill an asteroid anywhere except in a body meant to be the size and shape of a human, and she’s as much a part of it as she isn’t, someone who in another lifetime, another era could’ve been a baseline, done all kinds of cool stuff like feel aimless and experience ennui, but instead she’s handcuffed to a dragon she wants to fuck-
The Fucking Admiral did the equivalent of looking up from a report as cold grey eyes looked me dead in my own after having been focused on my internal logs in the sharecast. I wanted to look away, but the hard lines that comprised the rest of her being and office remained fixed in my periphery as an arctic sea threatened to swallow me.
“‘The Fucking Admiral?’” she asked and I could hear the finger quotes around the words.
“Y-yes ma’am,” and I don’t know anything else safe to say.
Her gaze holds mine for another casual eternity before she turns the spotlight to her, on my left, and starts in. I remain polite and professional as I stare at point on the wall behind The Fucking Admiral and to the left.
Eventually, we’re drifting through the corridor again, now released, duty shift ended. I’d fended her off until we were running simulations, and that was roughly when we got caught, and The Fucking Admiral finally decided we’d been given enough rope. I can solve the traveling salesman problem in general form and I can’t stop myself from acting like a goddamn primate.
‘Hey’ she comms, and we’ve been enmeshed for a while now, my irritation not greater than my need for connection, and she wraps an arm around the body I’m wearing, me, as something in the touch pulls me in to myself, and I’m actually within this skin, my skin.
Crewman Velasquez stares again as we drift towards the junction that’ll lead us straight down, like a well, towards the crew quarters. I stare back, and hold his gaze as he passes like a continent on an orbited planet.
“Fucking sticks,” I hear him mutter as he drifts off in the opposite direction, likely towards the mess.
“Fucking baby aug,” I mutter back, inaudible to him.
Her hand tightens slightly around my waist, and we drift through the door to the quarters we’ve been assigned, and the door irises shut, and her hand shifts and slips and I rotate, spinning in freefall, as her hand traces around my rotating waist, its pair finding my other hip, and I’m facing her, and her tongue is sliding between my lips as her hands tighten so slightly, the form-fitting fabric of the uniform doing nothing to stop the warmth of her hands as she traces the arc of my lower back, sliding lower until she’s cupping my ass, and I can feel the pulsing warmth as all the blood in my body flushes and I’m already trying not to gasp, and I fail when her hips shift, and her legs intertwine with mine, and she flexes and I’m grinding against her, moaning in to her mouth even she’s rubbing the roof of my mouth and my mind is cotton candy in hot water-
A klaxon blares through physical space as well as the priority bands of my mind, and with no hesitation outside of every emotional part of my self, we pull apart and move at speed, her to the CIC, me to the central holding and launching system.
Whatever idiot xenos chose this moment to try something was going to regret it.
[CURRENTLY]
I am screaming as we snap back in to a reality that is completely wrong. I stop, then almost start again.
The fine structure constant, the gravitational constant, everything is wrong. Not by enough to matter, but by enough. I idly think to myself that I should be exploding at the speed of light, but I don’t, and I haven’t for enough atomic vibrations now that I’m going to worry about this later.
The ships are back to being ships, and they’re not squirming, but they are trying to do something cute with their chemical composition to dissolve me, but it’s like a rabbit chewing at a steel beam, and I add that to the list of things to worry about later.
The problem is the earth, right there under us, roughly where I left it. ‘Roughly’ would be the start of its own entire chain of things to worry about at a yet-as-undetermined date, but, then there was everything happening on, and around, and even near, the earth.
Mainly the nothing. No orbitals, no habitats, no sats, no ships, nothing on the moon, wait was that a dragon- later, fucking later, nothing on the earth except what looks like a shitton of wood smoke from fires.
What the fuck? Quasar pulse rate indicates this is the same temporal point, roughly, again. What?
Holy shit that’s a guy in a wizard robe standing on top of a dragon flying above the cloud layer what the fuck.
I didn’t let go of the ships, because shock didn’t matter to my current autonomic system.
NEXT:
This is great and I am fucking digging it! MOAR! Please and thank you. ❤️
Transcendental futurism; mesmerising 👏