I was in the engineering bay playing with a tablet when Cerri wandered in. She spotted me sitting on a tall crate after a moment and I raised a questioning eyebrow in greeting.

“Roger and the others should be logging in soon,” she said, sounding tired. “What are you working on?”

Turning back to the tablet, I pulled up the main view of the schematic I was working on and showed her. Over the past three days, we’d been sitting quiet in interstellar space, hiding from anyone and everyone until the rest of our crew arrived. To pass the time, I had decided that since I had access to a fancy fabricator now, I’d finally get around to creating a Bundit Mk-II.

I wasn’t nearly smart or skilled enough to create new components from scratch, but I had a whole alien catalog of parts to choose from now. By parts, I didn’t mean like, hinges and armour plates and easy things like that. I meant motors, reactors, and electronics. That kind of thing.

“Oh, a new bundit?” she asked, pinching to zoom so she could get a better look. “Interesting. Being able to design it from the ground up is giving you a lot of extra room inside.”

“It really is,” I agreed. “The part I’m most excited for is the extra leg room if you look at the bottom. I’ve also moved the reactor down there under my legs, instead of behind me.”

She shifted the view to look at what I was talking about, but in wireframe mode she was able to see through it to the arms. “Oh! You have built in arm cannons now!”

“Yes,” I grinned, leaning over to shift the view so I could show them off. “The Badgers have these little rotary coilguns here that I’ve incorporated into the arms. As far as I can tell, they’re meant to be a heavy infantry weapon because of the huge power requirements. The badgers have a separate backpack to generate the power, but since I’m putting them on bundit, it doesn’t matter.”

“What about munitions?” she asked, cooing over the weapons. Technologically advanced stuff like this made my girlfriend all gooey and I loved it.

“I can select from a whole bunch of different types,” I said, pulling up the list for her to see. “We have dumbfire explosive and high penetration, semi-guided explosive and high pen, and then heavy slugs. The semi-guided ones are awesome. They can correct slightly mid-flight if I’ve missed for whatever reason.”

“Oh,” she murmured, her eyes glazing over. “I could make you some really interesting ammunition.”

“I knew you’d say that,” I smiled, watching the stars in her galaxy eyes sparkle with possibility.

Blushing, she gave me a one shoulder shrug and handed the tablet back. “You know me pretty well by now, I guess.”

“True,” I agreed. “A lot has happened this year, huh? Anyway, what’s the situation right now with… the… thing.”

My hesitation wasn’t out of any sort of embarrassment. No, it was because none of us knew what to even call the giant abomination that had effortlessly torn a hole in the boundary between worlds and then eaten the enemy ships. Cerri was still crunching the data on it, and so far there were a lot more questions than we had answers for.

For starters, it seemed that a significant period of time had passed since the battle that we scavenged the Turshen II from. That much was clear just from the way they fought now, unless the biotech swarm we’d fought to capture our ship hadn’t been representative of their tactics. We knew from the battle debris that they preferred swarm tactics with larger ships to anchor the line of battle. None of that had been used to hunt us earlier, though.

Besides the massive aether abomination thingy, there was also the way the aether had reacted to coming into contact with our realm. Why did it produce a breathable atmosphere? Why that specific mix of gasses, too. It wasn’t earth normal, but it was the type of atmosphere that you’d expect to find on an alien paradise world.

A hand came down to rest on my shoulder, and I blinked, looking up at Cerri. Oh, had I spaced out?

“You are so very cute,” she smiled, leaning down to kiss the top of my head. “We’re no closer to understanding the aether creature, but I’ve managed to figure out how long ago that battle was. It happened about four hundred years ago. I think. I’m not totally sure, actually.”

“Confident,” I giggled, reaching up to take her hand. As I did so, I knocked my tablet off the crate I was sitting on. Instinctual panic flared ice along my nerves for a microsecond and I lunged to catch it before it hit the ground. Somehow, I managed to get my hands on it, but at the exact same time, pain spiked behind my right eye.

“Ow,” I muttered, carefully placing the slab of dark glass down on the crate as I rubbed my temple.

“Are you okay?” Cerri asked, using her android body’s strength to pick me up off the crate so she could get a better look at me. “Something really odd happened in your brain.”

“Ugh, what now?” I muttered. “Five or six mysteries wasn’t enough? Now we have to figure out why I have odd brain pain?”

Her tail found mine and twisted around it in comfort, while her hands kept me steady. My eyes were scrunched tight against the pain now, and frustratingly, rubbing my temples did nothing to help. “It hurts.”

“It does? Oh! It does!” she said, eyes widening as they roamed over the data feed from my brain’s digital housing frame. “That isn’t normal. Fuck, I hope there’s nothing wrong with your brain sim. The pain is literally in there, it’s not something the game is doing.”

I groaned and flopped forward against her chest. “Just monitor it, I guess. Hopefully it’ll fade soon.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, let’s go see if the others have logged in yet,” I mumbled into her chest.

****

“Jesus,” Roger whispered, staring at the large screen in the crew lounge. Everyone had gathered to watch the recap that Elissa had put together. Well, everyone except Warren, who was still worryingly MIA.

Cerri made a sound of agreement and closed the very artistic presentation. Elissa had put quite a lot of effort into making it pretty.

“And Warren is still quiet?”

“Yes,” my girlfriend said quietly. Actually, come to think of it, had we mentioned that the two of us had gotten together? I don’t think we had.

“Fuck,” Roger swore, running a hand through his short hair. “And Gloria is… digital, now?”

“If— uh, I mean when Warren comes back, he will be too,” I said quietly.

“Being digital is the new cool now, huh?” Ed asked, throwing me a wink. “Always knew you were secretly up with the latest trends.”

I grinned and silently thanked him for intervening to lighten the mood. My thoughts whenever I thought of Warren turned fearful. I really hoped he was okay. I was also grateful for Ed’s chill when it came to my new existence. It was a welcome change from his first reaction, that was for sure.

“The reaction and thought time advantages you all have make me feel a little useless, to be honest,” Jason grunted, his tone neutral. “Having that for foot combat would be incredible.”

“It would be, yeah,” Roger agreed. “I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to go ahead with the process.”

Before anyone could say anything about that, though, he continued, “That’s all hypothetical right now, though. We need to figure out what we want to do next in the game.”

At the mention of plans, the three of us digital folks who had bodies shared a look. We had our orders, but we couldn’t actually explain it all to the rest of our meatling crew.

Cerri sat next to me, frowning in thought for a moment, then blew out a huge sigh and made eye contact with our captain. “That isn’t… entirely correct, Roge. We… ah, shit. How do I say this without breaking any rules? We need to… um, we need to explore this area of space and find more tech, like we planned. It’s not just a gameplay thing. The devs, yeah, the developers would like us to explore this area of space.”

“The developers,” Roger said slowly, staring at Cerri, then Gloria, and finally me. “Ah. Well, considering that was our plan originally, I don’t see why we shouldn’t keep gathering data. I’m a little confused as to why the devs wouldn’t know what’s happening in their own game, though.”

The suspicion in his tone caused my nerves to shiver uncomfortably, and I instinctively burrowed into Cerri's side. Her arm tightened soothingly around me and I relaxed again, feeling safe once more.

"Oh, it's not really their game anymore," Elissa chirped obliviously from the overhead speaker. "Whole thing has gone and jumped the rails. Nobody knows where it's being housed now, other than the signals go into an FTLN node but not out another one. The council wants—"

“Elissa! Turshie! God damn it,” Gloria shouted, cutting her off. “I’m only newly digital but even I know you’re not allowed to say that stuff to organics!”

“F-fuck,” Elissa swore, sounding very small. “I'm sorry…”

Cerri just groaned beside me and turned to plant her face into my hair. She shoved her nose inside of my big fluffy ear instead, and I twitched in surprise but let her stay there. She liked my ears.

With a sigh, she withdrew and stared up at the ceiling. “Okay, so a few things. First, we need to use the fabricator to make Elissa, Turshie… the SAI who was formerly playing the part of our ship AI but is now just acting as the AI… we need to make her a body. Second, I need to go and talk to some folks about releasing certain information to those of us here who aren’t digital. Third… I don’t know, we need a direction to go?”

Roger gave a wry grin at her exasperated struggle. “Alright, I think I understand what’s going on,” he said, before pausing to hold a hand up and shush David as he opened his mouth to speak. “Hold on, David. It’s clear that there’s something going on behind the scenes that our digital friends aren’t allowed to tell us for some reason, be it law or whatever. As for a direction to go, I think we should attempt to decrypt more of the ship’s databanks, along with doing some deep space scans to see if there’s any activity we can detect from here.”

“I think I can help with that,” a quiet, tired voice said from the doorway to the room. We all turned as one to see Warren standing there, smiling shyly. “With the deep space scans, I mean. Decisions are… apparently, very difficult for me to make.”