Digital Galaxies

I spent a long week in the bowels of our ship making sure all our wiring was actually functional. We really didn’t want a repeat of the ordeal with the turret.

I found a few areas where the wiring looked a little dodgy, so to be sure I just replaced it all with much more robust wiring. I swear, once I was done with this ship it wouldn’t even remotely resemble the base model.

Sadly, the refurbishment of our wiring had meant that I didn’t get to hang out with everyone as much as I’d have liked. Cerri had been hard at work on taking preliminary long ranged scans of our intended target, so it had been hard to find time to hang out together as well. I missed her, or rather, I missed spending most of my day in her company.

Six days into the process of retrofitting the wiring and I was finished, slumped back into the sofa in the rec room. It was the middle of the night by the ship’s time so the lights were dimmed accordingly and no one else was around. It was just me and the quiet hum of a ship well maintained.

Or at least, I thought that’s what the humming was.

Then Gloria turned the corner, looking tired and rubbing at her face with one hand while the other gripped the doorway. She stood there in the hallway, staring at me as though she was trying to figure out if I were really sitting on the couch.

I gave her a wave. Hi…

“Hey there, fluffy,” she smiled, stepping in as though invited. Silly vampire, she was allowed into the recreation room aboard her own ship. “What are you doing in here so late?”

I shrugged, pulling my legs up to my chest so I could rest my cheek on them as I wrote out a reply. Just finished with the wiring refit. Now I’m sitting here while my brain bullies me.

Joining me on the sofa with a weary sigh, she gave me a long look. “And just how is it bullying you?”

Just the usual. It never shuts up, I told her, feeling too tired to even attempt explaining the chaos that raged within my skull.

Anxiety had always ravaged my thoughts, but never so much as the middle of the night, when I should have found peace in the stillness. Instead, I got a play-by-play of everything that could ever go wrong in my life and everything that had ever gone wrong.

It tortured me with every embarrassing fuck up I’d made at work, or taunted me with how things could have been if something had gone different early in my life. One particular scenario always seemed to play through my head, and oddly enough I sometimes found comfort within its fantastical confines.

Would my parents have accepted the type of person I had become if I were a girl like I was within this game? Almost certainly, and maybe in the process I wouldn’t have been turned into this person in the first place.

The type of person who went red in the face and stammered uncontrollably when confronted with an angry client. The type of person who wilted under a single hostile glare from a competitor, unable to even engage their voicebox in order to speak. The type of person who was fired by their own parents…

“Why don’t you go and find Cerri?” Gloria asked, nodding towards the door. “You two seem to have something, you might find comfort from your mean brain with her.”

I shook my head, more in surprise than actual denial. We don’t have anything… I mean, other than friendship. Plus, I could never like, actually be with her.

The pilot squinted at me, suspicion and a little defensiveness now radiating from her posture and expression. “Why couldn’t you be with her?”

She doesn’t… I mean, I’m not the person she thinks I am, that any of you think I am. Not out there… In here, yes, I am Alia, but out there I am… um, different. I explained, stumbling over my words even in my own thoughts, my uncertain stammering transcribed into text as the little computer in my head dutifully typed it all out.

“We all are,” she sighed with gentle exasperation. “I’m not as hot as I am in here, that’s for sure. Why is it different for you?”

I’m really different out there, I typed, shaking my head.

“Huh,” she murmured, staring at me with that long, soul-piercing look again. “Who do you like being more, the person you are in here, or the person you are out there?”

The question hit me like a slap to the face, and it was all I could do not to physically recoil in shock. It was such a simple question, but the answer, that was most definitely not simple.

Anxiety rose up in a wave from within as her question took on a life of its own inside me. I didn’t want to know the answer, but once a seed like that had been planted in my mind, I couldn’t help but let it grow.

My gut reaction was to say that I liked who I was outside the game more, as that was me, right? Clay was the real person, Alia was fake. That was the simple truth.

So why did tears spring instantly to my eyes, why did my gut drop through the floor like it had been touched by Midas himself? Why did every unconscious part of me rebel at the very idea that Alia wasn’t real, that she was fictional?

I don’t know, I finally sent to her, wiping at the tears that threatened to betray just how confused I was.

“Really?” she asked with apparent disbelief. “You seem pretty happy with us on the ship. What you just said about yourself out in the real world implies that you don’t exactly like who you are outside. The answer seems obvious, to me at least.”

I shook my head, panic taking hold now, sand blasting my consciousness bare of thought. It’s not that simple! I mentally shouted into the transcriber, It’s just not!

“I enjoy being Gloria more than I enjoy being the person I am outside, that’s for sure,” She continued, seemingly oblivious to the damage she was doing to me.

No, she wasn’t going to get me twisted up like this! No… I needed to get away, I needed to get away from Gloria and her damned question.

With a wobble, I stood up from the couch and made for the door, ignoring the girl on the couch like my life depended on it.

“Alia?” she asked, worry evident in her tone.

“That’s not my name,” I whispered, shaking with the effort of saying those words.

Oh god, why did my brain feel so hot? Fire seared every nerve with fear and confusion as I rushed for the door. Gloria was fast, leaping up from the sofa as I made it to the door. Her feet hit the carpet with a thump, and I knew it would be mere seconds before she cornered me, before she demanded an answer.

Seconds was all I needed though, seconds to flick through menus with the speed that only constant use of the ocula could give you.

The gravity in the room flicked off with a lurch, catching my friend off guard and sending her crashing against a wall. “Sorry,” I muttered, voice dead with the pain that had erupted within me.

She had no hope of catching me as I made my escape, rushing down the hallway to my bedroom. When the door clicked closed, I sat down heavily on my bed and flicked open the VR menu with a finger. A quick tap and I was staring at the button to leave, to get away from the confusion that this virtual body brought me.

A whimper escaped me as I tried to make sense of my thoughts as they rushed past me, too fast to even gain coherent form. It was just flashes of emotion, bone deep fear, the frustrated anger of prey cornered, wrongness given physical form, and most potent of all, a profound longing.

Dropping my arms and abandoning the button to hang uselessly in front of me, I wrapped them around my chest and pushed myself back against the wall. My tail twitched limply on the bed, frightened by the stare I gave it.

What the hell was happening to me? It was like my skull was splitting open, two halves of my mind fighting for dominance over a single soul.

I didn’t want to log out, I didn’t want to go back out into the real world. I knew that if I did, I’d never want to come back inside, come back to this false life that nevertheless gave me so much comfort and happiness. Oh god I actually liked it in here, I really liked it.

Tears trailed down my cheeks as I stared at my fluffy tail with its little tuft of green fur on the end. I didn’t want to leave, but I was nearing the end of how long I could stay within my pod. As good as it was, it wasn’t rated for long term storage. I had like, maybe another month at best.

“Alia?” Cerri’s sleep ridden voice caused me to jump with fright as it came through the intercom on my door. “Gloria said you were upset, are you okay?”

Fuck. I really didn’t want to deal with her right now. Of all the people on this ship, she caused the most confusion within me. My friend, a girl I’d become so close to in so little time. She only knew the lie, the fake version of me that was a cute fox girl. She’d despise the real me, a rich dude moping about losing his high paying job. A job only gained through nepotism in the first place.

That was it, really. That was why I liked it in VR so much more. Alia wasn’t a fuck up, she was just a shy mechanic who was damned good at her job. Especially considering she hadn’t known anything about fixing a spaceship until she’d gotten on this one.

Clay on the other hand, he was a failure. Shit at his handout of a job, he was a shit son. He was even shit at just being a man, like seriously, what kind of guy blushes and stammers when a pretty girl smiles at him. What kind of guy starts crying during a boardroom meeting because someone realised his fuck up and threw a hardball question at him. What kind of guy shits all over his family legacy like that? A failure, that’s who.

I couldn’t leave, but I had to leave. What did I do?

“Please let me in,” Cerri begged from the other side of the door, reminding me that virtual reality still existed.

Spontaneous action propelled me up off the bed to where my toolbelt hung from the wall. I grabbed it and clipped it around my waist, then knelt next to a panel on the floor. With nimble fingers, I got it up, revealing a small crawl space beneath the room.

Two blankets and a pillow in hand, I disappeared into the hole, sealing it shut behind myself. I didn’t want to log out, but I didn’t want to deal with everyone else prying at my shattered mind with horrific questions. I needed solitude, and no one knew this ship better than me. They wouldn’t find me until I let them find me.