artificial gravity by way of rotation or magnetic plates in the floor of the ship. In fact, there were no identifiable floors or ceilings. No ups or downs. Just a length of circular corridor roughly two meters wide covered in ribbing that served as handholds for passengers to move around the vessel interior, intersected by a couple of other corridors farther towards the front.
“Follow the lights to the bridge.”
I followed his instruction, pushing myself in the direction of a set of small blinking lights embedded into the corridor.
There was a distinct lack of intersections and other corridors between the entrance hatch and the bridge. Just one uninterrupted corridor. There seemed to be irregularities in the surface of the passage that might have been doors or perhaps access panels for maintenance.
The bridge itself was an oddity. The room was spherical. A large viewing screen took up most of the front portion of the room. There were no chairs and no terminals. Save for the outline of smaller monitors on the side of the room, the walls were perfectly smooth. It was a relatively small area, five meters in diameter. The large screen displayed Midgard, obscured by a cloud of slowly expanding reddish-brown dust. I could see the larger meteor, moments from plunging into the cloud to deliver the deathblow.
“I call it Ragnarok,” Skinfaxi said without showing himself. “I’m moving us away from it. The impact is going to be incredible.”
I stopped looking around for the pilot and stared at the screen. For a while nothing happened. Dust kept billowing, and more meteors kept disappearing in the cloud. Then there was a brief flash of light. Within seconds the dust cloud was blown out as large chunks of the moon were thrown in almost every direction. More dust bubbled out of the impact site at incredible speeds. Midgard didn’t so much explode as disintegrate, like a sandcastle hit by a wave in the rising tide. Most of the larger pieces of the moon kept up with the momentum and direction of Ragnarok, but several chunks, some kilometers in width, sped in our general direction.
“Okay. We’re out of here,” Skinfaxi declared with relative calm, still from apparently nowhere.
The image on the monitor rotated from the planet, giving me a dazzling view of the gas giant Asgard before pointing toward open space. The stars blinked for a second, and the ship rotated back, Ragnarok now a small, bright crescent in the darkness, and the remains of Midgard barely visible despite my advanced optics.
I stared in silence. I interrogated my internal equipment and found I had officially been online, out of the Nursery, and into this body for a little over two hours. I had seen meteors ravage a space station, traveled to space, boarded a spacecraft, and witnessed the destruction of a moon.
“Is the life of a Capek always this exciting?”
“Oh-oh! You haven’t seen anything yet.”
I floated around the bridge for a few more minutes, digesting what I had gone through and twisting the mnemonic core in my hands. The cylinder of melted metal and pulled wires housed a self-sustaining memory loop. The impossibly complex information that represented a whole world’s history, with billions of individual personalities, was stored in this tiny electronic miracle. Without the processing power to animate the artificial world within, the core had settled into a repeating pattern that refreshed the information inside at a very low energy cost. The internal battery, assuming it was in good condition, would keep this virtual universe frozen in time for over a century.
I became restless waiting for my host to show himself. I hesitantly began to prune the loose wiring and burnt plastic from the mnemonic core for a moment before losing patience.
“Skinfaxi?” I asked, trying to mask my irritation.
“Mmmh?” the voice came back, still omnidirectional. Still disembodied.
“Where are you?”
My host remained silent for a moment before
“Follow the lights to the bridge.”
I followed his instruction, pushing myself in the direction of a set of small blinking lights embedded into the corridor.
There was a distinct lack of intersections and other corridors between the entrance hatch and the bridge. Just one uninterrupted corridor. There seemed to be irregularities in the surface of the passage that might have been doors or perhaps access panels for maintenance.
The bridge itself was an oddity. The room was spherical. A large viewing screen took up most of the front portion of the room. There were no chairs and no terminals. Save for the outline of smaller monitors on the side of the room, the walls were perfectly smooth. It was a relatively small area, five meters in diameter. The large screen displayed Midgard, obscured by a cloud of slowly expanding reddish-brown dust. I could see the larger meteor, moments from plunging into the cloud to deliver the deathblow.
“I call it Ragnarok,” Skinfaxi said without showing himself. “I’m moving us away from it. The impact is going to be incredible.”
I stopped looking around for the pilot and stared at the screen. For a while nothing happened. Dust kept billowing, and more meteors kept disappearing in the cloud. Then there was a brief flash of light. Within seconds the dust cloud was blown out as large chunks of the moon were thrown in almost every direction. More dust bubbled out of the impact site at incredible speeds. Midgard didn’t so much explode as disintegrate, like a sandcastle hit by a wave in the rising tide. Most of the larger pieces of the moon kept up with the momentum and direction of Ragnarok, but several chunks, some kilometers in width, sped in our general direction.
“Okay. We’re out of here,” Skinfaxi declared with relative calm, still from apparently nowhere.
The image on the monitor rotated from the planet, giving me a dazzling view of the gas giant Asgard before pointing toward open space. The stars blinked for a second, and the ship rotated back, Ragnarok now a small, bright crescent in the darkness, and the remains of Midgard barely visible despite my advanced optics.
I stared in silence. I interrogated my internal equipment and found I had officially been online, out of the Nursery, and into this body for a little over two hours. I had seen meteors ravage a space station, traveled to space, boarded a spacecraft, and witnessed the destruction of a moon.
“Is the life of a Capek always this exciting?”
“Oh-oh! You haven’t seen anything yet.”
I floated around the bridge for a few more minutes, digesting what I had gone through and twisting the mnemonic core in my hands. The cylinder of melted metal and pulled wires housed a self-sustaining memory loop. The impossibly complex information that represented a whole world’s history, with billions of individual personalities, was stored in this tiny electronic miracle. Without the processing power to animate the artificial world within, the core had settled into a repeating pattern that refreshed the information inside at a very low energy cost. The internal battery, assuming it was in good condition, would keep this virtual universe frozen in time for over a century.
I became restless waiting for my host to show himself. I hesitantly began to prune the loose wiring and burnt plastic from the mnemonic core for a moment before losing patience.
“Skinfaxi?” I asked, trying to mask my irritation.
“Mmmh?” the voice came back, still omnidirectional. Still disembodied.
“Where are you?”
My host remained silent for a moment before
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