Labor Pains

So this is the inside of my pod. Smells of plastic and chemicals; much better than the training pods at flight academy: even when cleaned and sterilized, you could smell fear and stress. Stretching my arms out my fingers just touch the walls, the alloy slick and sticky at the same time; one of so many things about pod life are just... wrong. It was only after I started the academy that I understood why my father looks the way he does, the nervousness, the distant gaze, the constant cocking of his head when he's alone as if he were straining to hear a distant voice.

"Welcome aboard, Captain" the ship says in my COSMOS implant. "When you are ready, I will begin installation." When I first heard those words in school, it took a moment to realize she didn't mean injecting a VirAware program through my port. In a pod, I am the program. But I won't go so far as to call myself a virus, I'll save that term for the pies and rats.

"When you are ready, I will begin installation." Alright, alright. Pushy ship. I quickly strip off, tossing my clothes into the recycler just outside the pod iris. Turning to face the front of the pod, I can hear cables slithering off the walls behind me, electrical tentacles reaching for my sockets and orifices. Yeah, this part is never pleasant. Nothing *hurts* mind you, the plugs and tubes have an instant anesthetic; it's the pressure you still feel as everything slides and worms into place. And then the mask that reaches for your face, the sensation of headbutting a block of jelly as it envelopes the front half of my head. I would probably be in a blind panic of suffocation if my face didn't go numb a moment later, my lungs thinking they are continuing to process oxygen supplied through the mask material oozed into my mouth and nostrils when actually it is coming from the OxyFlow liquid drizzled straight into my blood stream from one of the sockets on my back. The flaccid muscles feel like they are sliding off my skull; installation feels a lot like having a stroke. Pity some pilots continue to fly that way after wards.

"Sync up initiated. Sync up complete" the voice shifts between the two sentences from the COSMOS speakers embedded in my ears to sounding as if she is in my head with me. I suppose more accurately, I'm inside her head. I can feel the ship all around me; not in an "as one" sensation of being the ship, but I am aware of every part of it, every subsystem, wire, and thruster. My own body has disappeared for me; I know that the capsule is filling rapidly with the inertial gel that suspends my body in its protective cocoon, but that is just another blip of data coming in the stream from the ships sensors. I am the disembodied controller, the ghost in the machine. Amazingly, everything seems to be right and in place; I guess those C students knew what they were doing. Or got lucky.

"Awaiting instructions, Captain." There is no real voice in my head; the piloting VirAware I was injected with at the beginning of school rearranged my neurons to translate incoming information into a form I can comprehend. It is still rearranging neurons as the hours and days go by, awake or asleep; improving, strengthening, and multiplying connections. It also causes my brain to imagine it is talking back to her. "Request Squeeze Out. Oh, and don't call me Captain. My name is Fischer."

"Squeeze out request accepted, Captain" she continues in the same attractive yet even tone as before. I knew it wouldn't happen, but I had to test it. The VirAware geneticists implanted a few specific safeguards in their software after the first couple of batches went out. A statistically significant number of early capsuleers had fallen in love with their ship's AI and couldn't stand to be uninstalled from them. Ironic, as the personality is as entirely a fictional creation of the brain as the voice is; yet another coping mechanism. DNA was spliced, and our brain's piloting software is no longer capable of turning our ship into the woman or man of our subconscious dreams.

"Undock". I feel all the latches and umbilici separating from the port and we drift under power out of the niche into the main bay. I am a natural resident of it now, a part of the ebb and flow of traffic within and the space of the main bay no longer disturbs me; it just is. I fall into the outward stream, my sensors straining to reach out far beyond the station walls, beyond the pinhole in space that is C.V.12. I am no longer human; I am capsuleer.

Then the euphoria fades as mood stabilizers are injected. Whew. "I am capsuleer," damn, that was cheesy even for me.