Altered States

Dear Mom,

I killed someone today for the first time. Figure I won't beat around the bush; you always did hate that. The school sent me out on a mission to stop a vandal or saboteur or bored kid or whatever you want to call him; it doesn't matter. He fired on me and I killed him. Cause and effect, like you always told me when you were explaining thrusters, or the market.

I didn't think about it; I reacted on instinct, like the school taught me. I'd been worried when I first came out here about whether it was right or wrong, but none of that occurred to me when the firing started. I was surprised that it took such a short time; I thought it was much longer while it was happening. We fired until finally he quit, and I took his stuff.

What I don't understand is that I'm not sad or happy over it. That surprises me; that it doesn't matter whether he was a kid or not. He was the guy shooting at me. Is this a side effect of the books I've injected? Is this part of the  rewiring that virus is doing to me?

Anyway, that's how things are. Hope to hear back from you soon and hear you are doing well. Say hey to Dad.

***************************

I sat for a while after I finished, playing the message over again. The wreckage was drifting away, inertia carrying it off, eventually into deep space. They say the pod has made us immortal; that we can't die as long as we have a clone parked in a station somewhere. The pilot of that craft was a mere human, his meat still trapped in what was left of his ship; setting out on a journey of thousands and thousands of years probably. Would I still be around one day when he finally reached another system; would I be able to look in at his frozen, mangled body and say "I know you. You were my first" ?

"Close file." "Would you like me to send it now, Captain?" the ship asked. "I have found 200 Bailey Morels in the Luminaire system if you would like to--"

"Delete file. Confirm delete file." My parents probably wouldn't even open the file if it ever reached them; not since they'd found religion. I don't know if they'd even have understood it anymore. "Take us back to dock, ship. Contact my agent and let him know the mission is accomplished. Then prepare to uninstall me."

I felt like being with a mere human tonight, and having a real drink in my belly.

Expectation Is Not Just a River in Amarr

The job's simple enough: take down some scum out wrecking stuff. They say it's pirates; could just as easily be miners' kids. I can remember being so bored out of my skull on a few trips that I'd have taken a mining laser and tagged a harvester or two. Serpentis, name doesn't mean anything. File says they make illegal boosters; I probably know more than a few miners that are their customers.

Geez, what a position to be in. Probably going out to shoot at some bored kids on the premise that some corp doesn't like that their parents do boosters. And do I think the corp really cares? Let me see, who'd they give this assignment to: a capsuleer fresh out of the Academy?

I'm sure the Serpentis are shaking with fear.

"Ship, take me to the harvester." Hard heel to port; feels like muscles flexing. Bizarre that I still feel that there's an up and down out here; the piloting virus can only rewire our brains so much. Maybe another million years when we've evolved into a purely null-g race it can dispense with the gravitic illusions; but for now it's the only frame of reference we understand.

"Warp Drive Active." Everyone has phrases you hear over and over that if you charted at the end of your life would far outweigh all the others. 'Good morning.' 'May I help you.' 'Thank you.' If you're lucky 'I love you'; if not so lucky 'I'm sorry.' The graph for a capsuleer would have an enormous spike far outstripping all others, like the spike for veldspar in a belt scan. 'Warp Drive Active.' Even the good phrases become rote and ignored with time and repetition. But ours never becomes trite; it can't when it has such a profound effect on mind and body.

Roar in the ears, a kick in the butt. I swear I'm shorter; not a pleasant feeling, and the tickling of the gravitic waves around me is not helping. All experiences your normal crew never have to feel. Of course, they cannot begin to match the control I have over my ship.

The pod giveth, and the pod taketh away.

The drives cut out and I feel my guts shift up for a moment, a fullness at the back of my throat like just before you vomit; something must be not be quite strapped down in the holds. Except I don't have anything in my holds. Damn C students. I'll have to have that looked into when I get back.

Nothing out here; harvester, billboard... ah, there he is. An Impairor, typical Amarr rookie ship. Not that that means shit; sure, you'll see mostly Gallante in these systems, but a galactic market means you'll see everything fly by if you wait long enough. I'm not gonna blow some miner's kid out of the sky, orders be damned.

"Impairor, this is Agent Morel with the C.A.S." Like he would know the truth. "You will offline all nonessential functions and follow me back to the station. My guns are--" A sudden light, and a hot flash down my left side like a bad sunburn, my shields taking a hit. That was no mining laser.

Son of a mudder is shooting at me!

Squoze Out

This is taking forever.

FTL communications, but undocking still has a queue. Amazing the amount of traffic in a hub system; pod forbid, what must Jita be like? I'll definitely have to find an out of the way, dead end system with only a single gate and soon. Scanning around with my cameras I see haulers, miners, frigates, the occasional cruiser, and more than a few other Navitas and Velators making their slow way through the wide channel. Those two ships infest school systems in the Federation like pirates in a roid belt. How many of these ships have pods, I wonder... 1%, maybe 2? It's so easy inside this egg to forget why standard ships are so slow and unresponsive and make docking so much more difficult than it needs to be.

Why can't they let capsuleers have their own docking tube... yeah, that would certainly quell the complaints and accusations of capsuleers feeling elite and privileged. Can't be the first one to ever have that idea.

Out and a quick peel up and to starboard...along with about a third of the line with the same directions. No wonder they call it Squeeze Out. But I'm finally outside.

"Ship, what are local conditions?" "We are clear to depart, Captain. Standard local traffic." No threats in the immediate area on overview. What else would I expect to see in a 1.0 sec system? Any red popping up this close to the station and under Concord guns would have to be a war fleet or insane or both; either way we'd all be well and truly screwed.

"Ship, pull up journal entry on Agent Mission." "Aye, Captain. If it will help, you may call me Aur--" "STOP!" My brain shouts out the command; I feel I can almost feel the pod echo with the force. "That name will not be mentioned on board any ship i am in command of. Understood?"

"Understood, Captain. Entry on screen."

I almost believe I can hear hurt in her voice.

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.

Vertigo

I can't believe how long it takes to get anywhere in this station, and how far apart everything is. My parents would take me on mining trips spanning dozens of AU but distances on this place feel insane. Trams are only slightly better than walking; the corp that invents an in station warp will own the universe.

Turns out Monsieur Feritte is a CAS corporate agent, so his office is out in the up scale, hammer head of the station. Turns out he is a very low standing agent, so his office is way out at the tip of the hammer head. Naturally, student quarters are way out on the end of one of the opposite arms. When I figure out why you put the two locations students spend the most time at on opposite ends of the station, I'll demand an elite Entrepeneur cert. pour libre.

The tram drops me off at Concourse Y4. No observation deck or lounge down here; no tourists or bored people wander down to the grubby areas of the station. The green grey walls and exposed ducts sneer "Service personnel only. Oh yeah, *students* too... snicker." Three flights of metal stairs, stairs mind you, a long hall, and the doors slide open to the extended catwalk. At least the doors are automatic.

Oh, sweet pod... the vertigo! I quickly close my eyes and grab the rail with white nuckles. Opening them to a squint, I stare at the catwalk and quickly make my way out to my ship. Even a niche bay is huge, but manageable to the brain; it's the immense emptiness of the main bay I can see past my ship that flips my stomach.

Space is big, but you can't get any scale of it, might as well be in a room painted black. To get a true feeling of massiveness, you need to be in a void like the main bay, something with a wall so far away it makes your head spin and your stomach flop. The light of ships moving about the bay look like toys. Just keep thinking about the catwalk. And hit the pod lock.

The hand pad scans and accepts my dna pattern. "Identity accepted" coos a sexy voice in my ear. At least the engineering students got that part plugged in correctly. I think one of the students may have been a bit frustrated and thinking of other plug ins, however; I may need to dial the voice back a bit. Distracting. I step into the access way and turn right, away from the live berths and up to the pod in the bow. The hatch irises open, and I step in to become a capsuleer for the first time.

C.V.12

Cistuvaert V. Moon 12. What a shit hole.

From the station it looks much like every other ball of rock I've ever seen. What terrible lives mudders must live. My parents are miners, the backbone of the Federation; their feet have never touched dirt. Neither have mine.

I can't understand mudders; who could trust a life not surrounded by metal, nothing between me and the cold but a thin layer of air? I get queasy just thinking about it; a cold sweat breaking out so fierce I'm surprised my sockets don't loosen. I know all about gravity; my parents trained me to slingshot well lips in case my drive ever quit and I could probably do the math in my head. Don't tell me shit about gravity; I've been in station when the plates failed and everything went flying: I trust gravity as far as I can warp it. My brain understands, it's my mind that wouldn't be caught dead mud side; it's my gut that knows it's wrong living under a thin blue haze of exhaust. Let's do an experiment: I'll take getting shot at in my ship anyday and you get shot at under an atmosphere; we'll see who lives longer.

C.V.12 is a beautiful station; but whether human or station, beauty always comes with problems. It was designed to look like a dromis, one of the reptilian gliders back on Gallente; its double hammer head faces the moon, stylized wings swept back behind it in two graceful arcs curving around the central docking spine. Almost anywhere you go in here you have a clear view of space, the moon, or the multitude of ships coming and going constantly from the dock. This also means it takes forever to get anywhere, riding the tram on the long trip along the spinal arcs. Give me a squat, ugly tin can station anyday that I can cut straight along the diameter of and bam I'm where I want to be. Better yet, let me stay out of stations as much as possible. I'm only here now because I've got to get my certs. I'll bet my parents have taught me more about mining than most of the profs here at CAS have known, but the Feds won't hire you, and the corps won't take the time to shoot at you, unless you've got the certs to back it up; so CAS will own my body for a while.

At least they are fairly generous. Taxes can allow you to be that way I suppose. I've been given a room, a cybernetics book, and a Velator tucked off in a very out of the way niche of the bay. Artisticly designed stations have plenty of out of the way niches, and this one is naturally a long tram ride from my room. If I know CAS, the Velator is stored along with about a thousand others, the product of engineering classes at the school. Nothing'll give you confidence in your equipment like a ship constructed by C students.

Gotta go now. Someone named Jarck Feritte has left a message on COSMOS and wants to talk to me.