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Leona walked back into the lab. Ramses wasn’t there, at least not in the
main area. He did have that room in the back that he asked others to stay
out of. Surely that didn’t apply to her, though. They were partners. She
contributed a lot to rebuilding his lab, and the slingdrive array, which
were their most important assets. She opened the door to find him naked on
an exam table, at a high incline, a gaping hole in his abdomen. “What the
hell are you doing?”
The robosurgeon stopped moving out of an abundance of caution since Leona
did not step into this room decontaminated, or even very recently showered.
Ramses wasn’t under anaesthesia, though, so he was annoyed. “Get out!” he
demanded. He looked at the little surgical arms. “Get back to work!”
“Belay that order!” Leona countered.
“You don’t have control over this thing,” Ramses dismissed.
“Tell me what you are doing to yourself.”
Ramses sighed. “This was incredibly tedious and irritating. I cannot lose my
forge core again. So no more pocket dimensions, no more bags of holding.
This thing is being stored safe and sound inside of me, and if I lose that?
Well, that means I’ve lost my entire substrate, so I don’t know what else I
could try.”
“This is insane. You don’t have room to spare. What are you taking out to
make space?” she questioned.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m sick of repeating myself! What will you have to take out!”
“Just some of my voltaics, and my sleep regulator. Okay, most of my
voltaics. And my nutrient booster, and my water recycler, and two of my
metallic oxygen reservoirs. But that’s it.” He stopped, but it looked like
he wasn’t done yet. “And part of my liver, but it’s fine. I’ll just have to
sleep more, and eat more, and I won’t be able to survive the vacuum for as
long as normal people do. Not a big deal.”
Leona shook her head. “I know that this was hard on you, but this is not the
way.”
“I’m already using an upgraded body,” Ramses reasoned. “It’s not like it
will reject it, or go septic, or something like that. People have all sorts
of implants, and some even use artificial organs all the time, mixed with
their organic ones. It really is okay.”
“Do you know why we aren’t telepathic, Ramses?”
“Because I couldn’t figure it out.”
“That’s a lie, and we both know it. You didn’t give us telepathy, even
though it would make a lot of the things we do easier, because you decided
that that was a bridge too far. Every posthuman has their line, and that was
yours, whether you’ll admit it or not.”
“It’s not a spectrum,” Ramses argued. “It’s an array, so if your claim were
right, it would be more like excluding something from the array.”
“Metaphors aside, you’re not a mech.”
“And this isn’t cybernetic. It’s a...flesh pocket.”
“That’s not what that term means,” she warned.
“A storage cabinet,” he amended. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m doing
this, so you can either squirm and watch, or get out and breathe.”
“It’s a slippery slope. That’s what I’m trying to say. Because there
will come a time when you have to escape this body unexpectedly, and
it will prompt you to try something more drastic. You could lose a part of
yourself trying more and more. You could lose our pattern. You would be off
the team.”
Ramses frowned. They stared at each other for a while. “It wouldn’t be the
first time a version of me lost the team.” He looked at the arms. “Keep
going, surgeon. Take out the legacy parts.”
“There’s a better way. I think you should take more time to think of it.”
Leona opted to leave. She didn’t want to watch the procedure. She didn’t
know if she was in the right, or if there was nothing wrong with what Ramses
was trying to do. She just didn’t want him regretting it, or doing something
that couldn’t be reversed. She stood in the main lab for a couple of
minutes, hoping that he would change his mind and come out. When it looked
like he wasn’t going to, she started to walk away.
Ramses came out, still pulling his shirt down over his bandaged incision
site. He set his forge core on the counter.
“Ah!” she screamed, “I changed your mind!” She reached out and took him into
a bear hug.
He pulled away, still rather sore. “Careful, careful.” The local
anaesthetics conflicted with the liquid bandage, so he would have to switch
to painkillers. “Yes, you did change my mind.”
“What was it? Tell me what did it exactly...in case I need to say it again.”
“You told me I should look for a better way, and I think you’re right,” he
answered. “I think I have one.”
“Lay it on me,” she encouraged.
“Bioprinting.”
“Bioprinting?”
“Bioprinting.”
“What does the method of substrate fabrication have to do with anything?”
“The science wasn’t there before, but it is now. What we need are brand new
upgrades, complete with new parameters. Instead of just a handful of nanite
implants, they will be evenly distributed under the skin, ready to emerge
and form even faster than now. The forge core is still a part of the plan,
but I don’t have to take anything out to make room for it. I just need a new
design. I’m going to work on it now.”
“We were hoping to leave now,” she reminded him. “We need to take Meyers to
his new home on the other side of the galaxy.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ramses said. “Someone else can handle that. I need to
focus.”
“I thought you didn’t want this to be a permanent lab.”
“And it won’t be. I have a new idea for that too. But I can’t waste time
going off on a side mission for some hermit that I have no strong feelings
about. You can go if you want to, or collaborate with me on my new projects.
But from where I’m standing, the other five can handle it without us.”
“Four,” Leona corrected. “We need at least three at each location.”
“Sure, sure, sure, let’s do that. You make that call, but I’m not going to
be on the away team. Not this time.”
Leona studied him as he turned around, and started pulling down tools,
preparing his workspace for his new plans. He was instantly engrossed in the
flood of ideas, he wasn’t paying attention to her, and didn’t notice when
she snagged the forge core before teleporting away. She jumped to Olimpia,
who was alone, but she wanted to talk to everyone. Well,
most everyone. She tapped and held onto her comms disc, opening up
for a voice command. “Group call to all team contacts, except for Ramses.”
“What?” Olimpia questioned. “Why?”
“All team contacts except for Ramses Abdulrashid. Channel open...”
the operator announced.
“Everyone convene at my location. Don’t tell Ramses.”
“Why are you leaving him out of it?” Olimpia asked. “What’s going on?”
Leona waited for everyone else to arrive before explaining herself. “Ramses
is obsessed. He’s working on a new project, which places him in danger. He
wants three or four of us to take Mr. Meyers to his new home, but I am not
comfortable with that. I know what’s going to happen. If we use our new
slingdrive array for the first time ever to separate, we will stay separated
for an extended period of time.”
“Did you speak with a seer, or something?” Marie asked.
“It’s not that I know it for a fact. It’s more that that’s how our lives
always go. We don’t really know where we’re going, and I’m formulating a
hypothesis about how the slingdrives work, which I don’t even think Ramses
has noticed. I believe that their scope is smaller than we once thought, and
every time we use them, we risk running into someone that we don’t want to.
I would rather we all be together when that happens. I’m sure you won’t like
it, but I have admin access to the array, so we’re going to sling, and
Ramses is coming with us, whether he wants to or not.” She held up the forge
core. “Wherever we end up, we’ll at least be together, and we will rebuild
from there. Even if that means ending up back here anyway, I would prefer
not to take the chance.”
“You’re the captain, honey,” Mateo pointed out.
“I’m not asking you to be on my side about it,” Leona went on, “but I wanted
to tell you ahead of time, because after we land, he’s going to be angry,
and he’s going to have questions. I don’t want to have to answer to you five
while I’m dealing with him. So ask your questions now, so when we do go,
we’re only worrying about him.”
“I have a question,” Romana said, holding up her hand.
“Okay...” Leona prompted.
“Can I go warn Ramses?” Romana couldn’t keep a straight face with that.
Leona scoffed. “Any serious questions?”
“Yeah, when is this happening?” Angela asked.
Leona asked her husband. “Is Meyers in stasis?”
“He is,” Mateo confirmed.
“Then we’ll leave right now, or as soon as you all have everything you
need.”
“Our pocket dimensions are back in order,” Angela said, “so I suppose
there’s nothing more to pack.”
Leona’s gaze drifted over to her wife. “Oli?”
“I don’t agree with this. We don’t keep secrets from each other. We don’t
trick each other. We have enemies, and we treat them how we must to survive,
and protect others, but we’re only able to do that because of the trust that
we’ve built within the team. I wouldn’t have asked you to marry me if
I thought you were capable of something like this.”
“You didn’t see what I saw,” Leona tried to explain. “He was mutilating
himself.” She shook the forge core. “He was going to stuff this thing under
his liver, and take out a bunch of his transorgans to do it.”
“That sounds like his call,” Olimpia argued.
“And this is mine. I’m still the captain here, even without a ship. You all
spent a great deal of energy convincing me of that. So which is it? I’m your
leader until you don’t like a decision I make?” Leona questioned.
“Yes, exactly,” Olimpia concurred. “That’s what good leaders do. They listen
to their people, and change their minds when reasoned with.”
“I’ve not heard a good reason not to do this,” Leona decided.
“Then you’re not listening. Captain or no, I have my own agency, so I’m
going to go talk to my friend. I agree that we should stick together, but
we’re not going to do it as a surprise. Thank you for making sure he keeps
his forge core with him, but he may want something else, or he may need to
turn off some machines, or place an AI in dormant mode so it doesn’t go
insane in the void of time. This is irresponsible, and I won’t stand for
it.” And with that, she disappeared.
There was an awkward silence in her absence, which Mateo broke. “She has a
pretty good point.”
“I know that!” Leona snapped back. She tapped and held on her comms disc
again. “Team lurk mode. Admin authorization Dolphin-Racecar-Kangaroo
one-niner-three.”
She listened to the conversation between Olimpia and Ramses in secret. The
former wasn’t selling Leona out. She just appealed to the logic side of
Ramses’ brain, reminding him that the slingdrives were brand new and
untested, and it was too dangerous to let them go their separate ways. They
all had to go together. She promised that they would find a place for him to
continue on with his projects, either here, back on Castlebourne, or
somewhere else entirely. Ramses was understanding, and persuaded. While
everyone was making sure they had everything closed up and secure, Ramses
shut his lab down, and gathered the last of his belongings. He told Leona to
go ahead and keep the forge core that she had taken as it was only one copy,
and he had another. He was considering making five more of them so everyone
could have their own. They were fairly user-friendly, and getting easier to
operate with each iteration. Their main function was to rebuild his lab, but
they could also just construct some other structure, which could come in
handy if they did ever end up getting separated, and stranded somewhere
hostile.
Pribadium glided into the room. “All ready to go?”
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Mateo said to her.
“Is that what you would call it? I was pretty combative,” Pribadium noted.
“Let’s just call it passionate,” Mateo decided.
She smiled. “Thank you for doing this. If he wants to be a hermit, I don’t
have a problem with that. I just don’t want him to go back into the system,
and try to scrounge up the energy credits. He’s not much of a contributor.
He’ll never save enough if he relies solely on passive income.”
“Energy credits?” Romana asked Leona in a whisper.
“I’ll explain it later,” Leona whispered back. “We don’t worry about
credits. We generate our own energy.”
“No problem,” Mateo said. He pressed a button on the stasis pod so it
started hovering over the magnetized floor. Rambo, could you take the other
end? Leona can drive.”
“Yeah.” Ramses held onto the pod, just enough to make sure it was
transported with them. He was still a little perturbed, but hopefully he
would be able to return to his work quite soon. Perhaps they would carve a
chunk out of Linwood’s new celestial body, or something nearby, and stick
around for a bit while they rebuilt.
“Wait,” Pribadium said. She went over, and planted a kiss on Mateo’s lips.
“I know you like the ladies.”
“What has become of my reputation!” he questioned rhetorically.
“Better step back, Pri-Pri,” Leona suggested.
Pribadium saluted them, and then disappeared.
“Prepare to sling,” Leona said as she was tapping on her arm band. “Yalla.”
They left.
