Digital Galaxies: Epilogue

I pulled the unresponsive door to the bridge open with Bundit's strong metal arms. Honestly, we really needed to invest in a manual override for it, considering how often I had to do it.

"Everyone okay?" I asked, bathing the room in the light of Bundit's headlamps.

"Alia," Cerri cried, launching herself out of her seat. "Get out of the mech, I want to hug you."

Laughing, I did as I was told and opened Bundit's hatch. She caught me as I was climbing out and carried me back to her seat like I was some sort of doll.

Playing dumb, I looked into my lover's starscape eyes and asked, "What happened?"

In reality, what I knew was that the giant space worm had dragged our jump way off course, dumped us back in normal space, and then swam away to who knew where. The Turshen was in a bad way, with pretty much every single system related to the aether throwing confusing errors.

"Still trying to figure that out," Cerri said, while the others nodded agreement. "I'm sure you've seen the state of the ship, but as for how and even where we are, I have no clue."

"I assume you've already tried to restart the reactor, Alia?" Roger asked from the captain's chair.

I nodded. "It's refusing to start. The aether here is funky. Wrong, even. It's heavier and behaves a little differently. The reactor can't seem to coax any cloud over the threshold, and even if it could, I'm worried it would break."

"Well, I'm going to assign everyone to help you get some form of real power running," he said. "The backup generators can't power the engines, and our shields are down too."

"Okay, I'll… try to think of something," I said, unsure just how the frick we were going to do this. I'd probably have to emergency jettison the whole reactor so I could build a normal fusion one in its place.

"Uh, guys?"

Everyone turned to look at Warren, who was pointing out of the bridge window where the slow spin of our ship was bringing a massive gas giant into view. Wait… was that…?

"Anyone else recognize that big swirling spot?" Our communications boy asked. "Because to me, that looks a hell of a lot like Jupiter."

"That can't be Jupiter," Ed said. "We can't see any of the stations or the cloud cities. The Sol system is really built up in this game."

This game. This game. This game.

The threads, the different aether, and missing cloud cities.

Awed and scared in equal measure, I took one of Cerri's screens and swapped it to the communications display.

Dialling the comms array to open broadcast, I spoke, "Exodus, this is the Turshen. Do you copy?"

The whole bridge fell silent as everyone stared at me. The boys were all confused, but the girls and Warren were looking at me with growing looks of disbelief on their faces.

Cerri was the first to break the silence. "Surely not… how would that even happen? It doesn't make any sense. It's just a—"

The other line crackled to life and we heard voices in the background speaking.

“What the fuck? Dude, are you seeing this?”

…

“No, I’m not fucking with you! Look for yourself!”

…

“Does it look like one of ours?”

…

“They called themselves, uh… Turtle? No, Turshen!”

…

“From the game?”

…

“What… how the fuck did they get here? Are we in the game?”

…

"Oh right, yeah… I’ll ask them.”

“Turshen, this is Exodus Three. We read you and have you on our scopes," A masculine voice finally replied. "Would you mind telling us how you've managed to find yourselves here? We were under the impression you, your ship, and your crew were all virtual."

My throat was so dry I could barely speak. "Uh… we were meant to be. Are you telling us that this is the real life planet Jupiter?"

"Unless you lot have completely broken literally every scientific theory that has ever existed, yeah," they replied, somewhat sarcastically. "Exodus base is… well, hopefully you know where.”

Cerri made a small, surprised sound of understanding and pulled up one of the external telescopes. She manoeuvred it around until it was pointed at Callisto, then zoomed in. The actual base was underground and not visible, but the station above it was clearly there. Just like it should be, if we were in the real world.

My girlfriend turned her attention to Jason, who was in his gunnery couch, and asked, “Jason, can you please try and log out?”

“Is this going to kill me?” Jason asked. “Am I like, the most expendable?”

On a hunch, I waved my hand to try and pull up my frame UI. It popped up in my vision, but a little tiny icon in the corner informed me that I was not in VR, and therefore it couldn’t manifest in three dimensions.

Not in VR.

Jason’s joking expression turned confused, then serious when he waved his hands around and nothing happened for him either. “Guys… VR isn’t working. There’s no prompt.”

That caused everyone to start messing around with things, and less than a minute later, we had to agree that VR was at the very least not working. Knowing that I sucked at talking, I handed the screen to Cerri and motioned for her to talk to Exodus.

“Exodus Three, this is Cerridwen,” she said, speaking into the little microphone. “We don’t know how, but we appear to have found ourselves outside of the game. Can you visually confirm our ship is here?”

“Yeah, Cerridwen, it’s there,” the other SAI said. “Do you have power? Control thinks we might have a place where you can land your ship.”

"Not enough to fly, no," she replied, but I waved my arms back and forth and nodded. "Nevermind. Our mechanic thinks we can do it. Can you send flight data to our pilot's frame? Her designation should be DH_GLR_026."

"Absolutely, putting it through.”

And so began the painful task of hooking up enough auxiliary generators to the ship to power our basic flight functions. Meanwhile, those of the crew who still had meat bodies became increasingly worried by the fact they couldn’t log out. At least they were getting a peek behind the veil of the Exodus.

When I’d finally jury-rigged all the various power sources I could find together, I gave the okay for the ship to attempt a landing on Callisto. Gloria was tentative with her movements, but with her skills, flying there wasn’t hard.

The Callisto base was built into an icy cave system and it was fairly rudimentary right now. Most of the base housed the servers that ran Exodus City, plus some manufacturing and storage. As far as I knew, the actual number of people with bodies in the base was extremely small.

It was right as we were landing on the ice next to the base entrance that Cerri spoke up again. I was now in my own seat on the bridge, working away at power management so Gloria had the bandwidth needed to use the engines.

“I’ve been looking through the logs,” she said, drawing everyone’s attention. “Alia was right. Something was out in the aether when we jumped. I think I also solved the mystery of where Digital Galaxies’ servers ended up.”

“Well? Don’t keep us hanging,” Gloria grumbled when Cerri paused for dramatic effect.

“It’s inside the aether,” she said seriously. “The real aether, not the game’s version of it. The sensors were only functioning for a small amount of time once we arrived, but the picture I’m getting is… odd. Lines of data everywhere, and then out beyond the kuiper belt is a massive construct about the size of the sun. I can recognise some of the shapes and patterns within the construct as server hardware. It’s like the aether was somehow imprinted with the DG servers. That’s where we flew out of, by the way.”

“It gets weirder, though, because while the four of us…” she paused and glanced at Warren. “Five of us who are digital, have lines of data connecting our bodies to the server nodes where our brains are stored, you others who were in VR pods aren’t connected to anything. Now… I can give you news of your, uh, bodies, if you want. I used some corporate back doors to get surveillance data on the four of you.”

“Let me guess,” Roger sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “They’re on their way to the morgue right now?”

“Yours is, yes,” Cerri nodded, giving the four boys empathetic looks. “Ed and David are still in their pods, brain dead but technically still alive. Jason… well, yours is currently being loaded into a car that’s designated to be crushed and recycled.”

“The fuck?” Jason cursed, rushing over to her console to look. Cerri flicked her hand and pushed the live security camera footage onto the main bridge display.

A thin old man with balding ginger hair was busy trying to shove a lifeless doppelganger of our friend into a car, while machines hungrily crushed and recycled mountains of trash in the background.

Surprising me and everyone else on the bridge, Jason burst out laughing. “Motherfucker! Holy shit, I can’t believe it. Henry probably thinks his jank-ass pod killed me, now he’s trying to hide the evidence!”

“Uh… you’re not upset?” Elissa asked from the ship’s speakers.

“Nah, sis,” he shrugged, still chuckling to himself. “This body has like, cyber stuff and shit. I even got a vibrating d—”

Roger coughed and waved his hands frantically. “Not… not something we need to know.”

“Ah… yes,” Cerri agreed. “Well, regardless… It would appear that whatever creature was with us inside the aether followed the threads of data that led out of the servers. Due to its immense size and I believe, raw willpower, it was able to manifest itself and us outside of the servers. I can see the leftover and decaying construct that it used to do so from within the game.”

“How the hell does that even work?” David demanded, waving his hands around in confused frustration. “This is so fucked. It’s so weird. This is like, some anime shit right now.”

“The aether in the game was essentially just raw potential,” I told him softly. “If you have the means to impose your will on it in a predictable way, you can manipulate it. At least, that’s what the badgers believed. That giant space worm was probably an example of an entity that could actually do that. I bet that’s why it took us with it. It needed our lines of data as a guide.”

“This is making my fucking head spin,” Ed complained, leaning against his boyfriend for support.

Gloria raised her voice to interrupt the boys before they got too worked up, and called, “Well, hopefully it’ll spin less now, because we’re landing at Callisto Base in three… two… one…”

“Welcome to the real galaxy, Turshen. My name is Desponia, and I’m the commander of Callisto Base,” a strong, feminine voice said over the speakers. “The duty staff in control caught me up on what’s happening, and I’ll be outside in a few moments to welcome you. I have to say, I’ve seen and done some bizarre stuff in my time, but I think this blows everything else out of the water. Y’all must have quite the story to tell.”

The End

Story Continues in Digital Exodus.