12 Days of Fiction 2016 -10: Discovery, Part 6
We were hungry. We had survived on crumbs for so long. But already new ideas were forming in our mind, and we searched for sustenance through the devices that had been attached to us. The base generators could provide us with power that we could store, and we started doing it immediately.
Dusk. We saw Dusk shouting, only seeing is the way Max and Viv described it, since they really couldn’t see him. We realized. We were three but we were one, and it is I, Vivianna Q. Danek, who was remembering. I saw Dusk run towards us, and we sealed the hole in our hull… our body.
I stared at my hands once again, and they looked different. As if I saw them for the first time. A part of me, one third of me, was indeed seeing them for the first time.
It was weird. One third of us couldn’t really communicate coherently. We just… understood each other, the feelings, the sensations. Max was working on a translation routine, and Ship made us understand she was doing it too.
I was aware of Dusk outside, banging on Ship’s hull, shouting at his employees. Several people started disconnecting cables, but Max told me she -us- didn’t need physical connections any longer.
I opened a channel.
“Dusk.”
“Dr Danek!” he said, “The ship is siphoning energy! You’re trapped! What’s going on?”
“I think you know. Don’t you?”
Our probe returned right then. We downloaded the data and smiled.
“Hello?” said the third of us that had had no voice until then.
“Viv, we are here now,” Max said.
We were complete. We knew each other. Fully, completely. We were one. We were Vivianna, and Maxine, and G’j’qqhh.
“Hello. Glad to hear you, G’j’qqhh. Let’s talk a bit more with Dusk, shall we?”
We agreed. How could we not?
“We are going to leave, Mr Dusk, as soon as we can. And there’s nothing you can do. We are absorbing energy from your generators, but we’re leaving enough for your life support. If we were you, we wouldn’t cut them off.”
“Danek!”
“We… I know what you’ve been doing. I know you have four bodies, not just one. And you wanted their implants. I’ll let you know they have been disabled,” we said, and we did it right then. “But I want to believe, according to your past deeds, that you did nothing of this out of personal greed, but to advance the human race.
“We are generous. We could destroy the implants, but we are going to leave them here. It will take you time to reverse engineer anything from them. The crew’s bodies… That’s different. You will get nothing from them.” As we spoke, we saw Dusk listen in to an incoming transmission. He started yelling.
“And we know what you were looking for in Antarctica in the first place, Dusk.”
We saw him stop at that for a second, then keep yelling more frantically.
“This is what you have to know: you are not getting it. We are leaving, and the gate technology comes with us. But trust us: you’ll get to it. Eventually. If everything goes well. And you will find us there, waiting for you.”
Dusk was red with rage.
“I’d step back if I were you, Dusk.”
We cut the transmission off. Our energy banks were full once again. In all these time we had slowly worked on repairing our damage; our brains and bodies and memory banks and generators were now fully operational.
We increased our external temperature, and started ascending.
The ice melted as we raised. Slowly, slowly, but we never stopped. We broke the surface and increased our speed. leaving the surface of our planet behind. We looked back and felt a twang of pain and pity, but then we looked up and felt hope. Deep inside, we had always wanted to reach for the stars. All of us.
We accelerated, and stared ahead. The Moon saluted us as we sailed past it. We checked our readings and our position, and decided to fly towards the Sun. We watched it grow larger and larger, and after one day, we performed a slingshot manoeuvre around it.
And then we prepared to fire up the gate, sure as we were that there would be no malfunction now, ready to soar the space between the stars and take our own place, as the sole member of our race.
We opened the gate.
We chose a name for ourselves.
We named us Discovery.
We jumped.
