“Warren!” I squealed, leaping up to tackle him where he stood in the doorway. “We were so worried!”

Chuckling, the small, thin boy gave me an awkward pat on the back, and I let him go to zoom back to my place beside Cerri.

“She’s right, you know,” Roger agreed. “What happened? We know that the hospital you were in was attacked, and there was something about your health getting worse?”

Making his way to the table we were all at, Warren pulled up a chair and sat down with a heavy sigh. I watched him curiously, noting the way his shoulders seemed to be… higher? More proud? I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but he seemed to be a little more sure of himself.

“Well, I don’t know how much you got, but some whackjob terrorists with suspiciously good training attacked the hospital. The SAI had no way to get us out physically, so they gave everyone a choice. We could either die at the hands of the terrorists, or follow them into the FTLN and become digital humans,” he explained, giving me a smile as he did so.

Cerri shifted beside me and nodded in Gloria’s direction. “She’s digital now too.”

“Really?” he asked. “That’s great, actually. Makes me even more glad I picked the path I did.”

“You were considering dying to the assholes with guns?” David asked, his big heavy brows knitting together in a frown.

“No,” he laughed. “My family were, but in the end they chose to get digitized. Took their time on it though, god damn. If it hadn’t been for a girl from the next room over taking control of a surgical bot and slicing up some of the attackers, they wouldn’t have had time to do their dithering. My choice was… more complicated than that.”

“Basically, because I’m on this crew, the SAI from… shit, Jason, David, Ed, and Roger are still flesh and blood,” he said, halting halfway through his speech. “Well, the digital minds here will know what I’m talking about. I could either stay with my family in the virtual housing they’ve set up for the refugees, or I could come back here. I can’t do both. I spent the time I was gone talking to my family, and then decided I couldn’t leave you all hanging here.”

Understanding dawned on me as he spoke, and I shared a look with my lover. Warren wasn’t allowed to stay in the housing if he was going to begin working for Exodus, and therefore he had to decide between his two families. At least until they were cleared by the investigators who were screening the refugees for spies.

"This secrecy thing around being a digital mind is getting really old," Jason groaned, his tone more chill than his words seemed.

Gloria grimaced, and made to speak, but Cerri cut her off. “I know, Jason. It won’t always be the case, but you do understand, right? There’s too many like those terrorists in the world. People who want to see us erased from existence. We have to protect ourselves.”

“We’re friends, though, right?” David asked, saddened. “Who can you trust, if not us?”

“Unfortunately, since we can’t go around vouching for every physical being that is friends with a Digital Mind, the policy is zero tolerance,” Cerri explained diplomatically.

“Makes sense,” Roger said, intervening to keep the peace. Roger was a good captain.

"What about all those evil SAI that the Americans made?" Ed asked, puzzled.

Cerri winced. "We call them Warped AI. They aren't included in the… thing."

"Regardless," Roger said, clapping his hands together once. "Warren, we're very glad to see you're alive and well. Now that you are here, we can begin to figure out what our next move is, besides random exploration, that is."

"I swear we've had this conversation like three times now," Jason muttered. I caught his eye and grinned. We definitely had.

Gloria kicked his leg playfully and mimed zipping her mouth. Jason poked his tongue out at her.

"No point rehashing this without a destination, cap," Warren chuckled, flopping down into a beanbag to watch them pinch and shove at each other like bickering siblings. "Let's collect a bunch of data on nearby systems from where we are, then figure out where to go from there."

"Good point," Roger nodded, giving the rough housers the side eye. "Okay, that's the plan. Cerri, Warren, you both get to surveying. Alia, see what you can do to boost their sensors. Everyone else, get in the simulators and start training."

"Aye captain!"

****

Cerri's face lit up with a huge smile when I tiptoed into her cabin. She wore a set of loose fitting coveralls that would have looked boring and drab on someone less visually beautiful.

"Hey, little one," she greeted me, shifting on the bedroom sofa to give me some room.

I crossed the intervening space between us at a pace that wasn't quite running, but wasn't walking either, and jumped onto the sofa with her. I couldn't wriggle into her arms fast enough. Something had felt off in my head for a few hours, and it took me way too long to realise that I needed Cerri.

Words were something lost to me right then, even typed ones. I felt like some sort of frenzying snuggle vampire. Cerri seemed to get that something was up, and in a mere moment I was wrapped up in a warm, loving embrace.

Her fingers worked their way into my hair until they hit the base of my ears. There, they began to scratch softly. Oh goodness, that felt lovely. One by one, tense muscles throughout my body began to relax, and I groaned happily.

I felt so safe in her arms. Like nothing and nobody who meant me harm could reach me.

A few minutes of that, and her hands shifted to drawing circles on my back. "You okay now, little love?"

Nodding, I wiggled back slightly to smile up at her. I think? I have this weird ball of worry in my stomach and I'm pretty sure it's just aimless anxiety but I don't know.

"Aw, Alia," Cerri whispered, leaning down to kiss my forehead. "I love you, and I'll fight whatever is making you anxious. With my claws, if need be. I'll protect you."

Warmth and gratitude suffused me, and I dipped forward again to snuggle against her. "You're so good to me."

"I just love you," she said, sighing happily. "So much."

My tail whapped contentedly against the sofa and her thigh while I tried to burrow even closer to her. "Okay. I think I'll be okay. Especially if we snuggle more."

“Good. How about we go to cuddle up and sleep now, so we can get started on the sensors tomorrow?” she murmured, keeping her voice soft and low.

I nodded again and stood up, waiting to see whose bed she wanted to sleep in.

****

The next day, Cerri, Warren, and I worked together to fine tune the sensors a little, in an effort to get some more juice out of them. It turned out that there wasn’t a whole lot I could do on my end. The physical apparatus was as good as it was going to get without a redesign and some better tech.

So, I left them to their own devices and scurried off to my workshop. The room was technically also the secondary cargo hold, but I’d appropriated most of the space for my engineering experiments. It was here that I was going to create a masterpiece.

“What do you say, Bundit?” I asked, turning to look at my large, silent shadow. “Is it time to build the Mk2?”

The design I’d been working on with my tablet had evolved since the day the others logged in, because I decided that I wasn’t being ambitious enough. Why stop at hard mounted coilguns when I could mix and match as I needed? So, I was going modular.That way, Cerri could design way more than just fancy bullets for a single weapon.

The mech didn’t reply to my question, obviously, but it would be able to soon. Hopefully. You see, back when I was a tiny little egg, —That is the term, I think. For a trans person who is still in denial— I liked to watch a channel for a girl who would play old games and see if they still held up. This chick once played a game called Titanfall 2, and gosh was I hooked. Something about having a big sentient mech suit that was designed to fight with me, protect me, and help me with my goals, had captured my imagination.

So now I was here, thinking those big dreams again. Bigger dreams than a day or two ago. Or should I say, enhanced dreams? Anyway, first, I needed to get that reactor printed and assembled. Everything else hinged on the power it could output. Second, I wanted to incorporate more space for the new alien computing systems, so that Bundit could act more independently. The third important thing I wanted to focus on was range of motion for the limbs. There’d been a few times where I was trying to do something but armour or cheap articulators stopped me.

The most exciting part of all this, if I had to admit it, was to work with all these alien parts. These things were real. They could be built outside of the game. Somehow, wherever the servers were running now, they had enough computing power to create real, working blueprints. Actually, what if it wasn’t computing power, but rather… it had a better understanding of reality? 

Most VR games, environments, simulations, and whatever else, they all ran on what were called reality engines. Basically, like the game engines of old, these things were a collection of extremely advanced code and scientific data that when combined, created realistic base simulations of reality. I wasn’t sure which engine Galaxies ran on, but… yeah, it had clearly changed, become much more accurate and advanced. I’d have to tell Cerri about my thoughts when we spoke next. She’d love to dig in and do some tests to see how accurate it had become.

Anyway, back to alien components. There were motors that produced twenty percent more torque and were half as big, there were miniature capacitors that would give me a ton of room to use for other things. Oh, and the best part were the crazy aetheric cooling shunts that could push excess heat into the aether. Those would allow me to remain in a low emission stealth mode indefinitely.

Walking over to the printer, I began to queue up the parts to build the reactor and the internal frame of the mech. It was time to get to work.