The interior of the ship felt like a mansion: fine tapestries lined the wooden walls and thick handwoven carpets adorned the floors. Most of it was decorated in the same fashion, with the engines and the assorted support mechanisms and infrastructure taking up little space. According to the Prosops it was a refurbished luxury yacht. The whole den back on the Centron had actually been a shipyard, something of a hobby the Centron had taken up to spent his endless time and unlimited resources, acute intelligence and insurmountable flair. The fact that a mere hobby could reach such a scale was mind-boggling to Hilderich.
Even though Hilderich could not have known what other ships similar to this one looked like, he felt impressed by the taste the machine had shown, and genuinely believed it to be a fine ship, even though the Prosops had insisted on him using the term ‘astrogational vehicle’. Hilderich had ignored the machine profoundly on that matter and kept calling the ship, ‘ship’. He had warmed up on the machine’s name though, and now called it as it had preferred to refer to itself: Ron.
Celia had kept mostly to herself and the child ever since they found her on the Waking Man’s capsule. Ron had been evidently surprised to find out how she came about a player capsule. When they roused her from her stasis sleep, she was at first shocked and terrified, frightened of her child. But Hilderich managed to explain to her what had happened, though she wasn’t sure how she had come to be in the capsule, nor what the data slab contained. She wept openly when Hilderich told her of Amonas demise. Since then though, she rarely spoke and when she did it was merely to ask for some amenity or help.
The Prosops was a good host though it seemed to lack some real skill with handling people. Hilderich knew that unfortunately he was not very apt in that department either so he felt he was unable to help and comfort her in some meaningful way. Perhaps he felt responsible for Amonas, he couldn’t tell. He had hoped he would have met her under very different situations, but fate had decided otherwise. Perhaps in time, her grief would subside and her spirits lift. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t been as impressed by the sheer scale of the newly found cosmos unfolding before them, unlike himself who spent hours gazing at the projection screen of what amounded to the ship’s bridge.
Hilderich had been busy resting most of the time at first, but he did spend some time with the machine, which naturally saw to the daily routine of maintaining the ship, checking and plotting their course, as well as trying to update Hilderich on the workings of the universe and the general state of affairs in the civilized galaxy. It had never occurred to Hilderich that there could ever be more knowledge than he could ever hope to understand in millions of life-times, but he would sadly have to do with as much as he could manage in one life-time, which was quite a lot.
Ron had filled him in with as much detail as it could concerning the game, the shellworld and what had transpired according to what it now knew. He was shocked to find out there were literally thousands of shellworlds not very much different than his own, hosting games like the one that had been using everybody on his world as unwilling, unknowing pawns. What had really challenged his sanity though, was the sight of a world being destroyed. Celia could not bear witness, and she had remained in her quarters, tending to her lone child.
It was not something any one was supposed to ever witness in his life, and Hilderich had seen it happen in slow, aggravating detail, before finally averting his red sore eyes. At that moment he had decided to stop that from happening ever again, to the best of his ability. He had some new responsibilities now: himself, Celia and her child was everything that remained from their world. He would protect them now, not simply to honour Amonas’ memory, but because he felt it was the most important thing he could salvage from the utter destruction of their world: hope.
When he recovered from the shock, Hilderich contemplated the last moments in the Centron. After the strange man had appeared as if out of nowhere and killed Agrippa, everything had happened too fast to actually remember. Ron had filled him in, replaying a recording of the scene that had taken place. Once Agrippa died, there was nothing in the way of keeping the place running and everything happened with the speed of an avalanche, gathering incredible momentum with every passing moment.
Ron had explained to him how delicate the shellworld mechanism was and how it was structurally near-impossible to keep it one piece without the active mechanism of the bullhorns. Once that system had become inert, the gravitational forces, a natural phenomenon that Hilderich could not fully grasp yet, had torn the shell world apart within a few hours. They had barely escaped with their lives when they saw the world begin to shatter into fragments the size of mountain ranges and become a cloud of debris that within a few days time settled into a disk of detritus and dust.
Hilderich’s mind frequently replayed the fight with Agrippa, trying to fathom who that dark-skinned man had been. He had tried to save the man from certain death, as Ron had indicated they had little more than a few minutes to escape but their strange savior would not come and Ron was forced to push Hilderich aside and keep shoving him almost all the way to the nearest ship.
The machine took great pride in the fact that without his hobby they would be ‘dead meat’, as it had said in its usually flamboyant manner. It had also agreed to help Hilderich on the quest he had vowed to undertake, since as it had said itself:
“You wouldn’t survive five seconds out there; I’m telling you it’s a cruel, cruel universe. Plus, I’m out of a real job now, and though I don’t want to imply anything, it’s my goddamn ship in the end of the day. I won’t charge extra for the woman and the kid, so you can consider this quite the bargain.”
And so they were ploughing on the vastness of space, speeding away from the Binary 888. Ron was looking intently at a star chart, its black band of glass colored cyan, in a desperate attempt at trying to be, in its own words, ’rad’, a colloquialism that Hilderich never inquired further about. What he did inquire about though upon seeing the machine intently studying the holographic projection in front of him was their destination, to which the machine had said without turning to face Hilderich:
“Oh? Hmm. I had always thought that visiting such a dump would make me kill myself, but I’ve decided I needed some quiet, easy place to rest a bit. Like a vacation.”
Hilderich frowned in puzzled disbelief:
“But you’ve been doing almost nothing for fifteen thousand years.”
“Shut up. I’ve plotted a course to Sol, that dump. Should take us a couple of weeks, but it’s going to be a nice ride. Unless we get jumped by pirates. Or gethit by a smallish meteorite. Or if the astrogational charts are too much out of date. Other than that and some other factors I could make a list of, we’re going to be fine. Ooh, is that coffee? Are you sure you’re gonna drink that? I think the galley module’s busted. Did you wash today? I think I can smell the dung on you.”
Hilderich looked at the cup of hot black beverage that he held in his hands. Aromatic though it was and totally exotic to him, it had a very strong taste and had felt a bit venturesome on his part when he asked the ship’s automated galley to prepare some. He was now looking at the ever jovial machine with a hint of worry, completely ignoring the machine’s comment on his personal hygiene:
“What do you mean the galley’s busted?”
The machine made a slight bob and leaned towards him before saying with a voice that should have been followed by a wry smile:
“Gotcha!”
Copyright (C) 2011 by Vasileios Kalampakas
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