Digital Galaxies

“What was that?” I asked in a small, terrified voice once I was safely back inside my mech. It hadn’t been Cerri’s voice, my brain had practically saved the scream to RAM and scanned it multiple times to make sure. Maybe it actually had, now that I was a digital being.

The engine room on the alien ship was sitting idle, lights on and reactor humming happily away. It was even shifting to accommodate my smaller stature, which was a nice touch. Things I didn’t know could move were now shifting and changing.

“I’m not sure,” Cerri said, voice coloured with distracted urgency. “It came from our comms, but everyone is accounted for. Nothing is wrong with the ship, as far as I can tell—“

Gloria’s voice cut through Cerri’s like a knife, high and worried, “Not everyone!”

I heard the faint sound of fingers on glass through the comm link. A moment later Gloria began speaking in a worried but soothing voice, as though speaking to an injured puppy. “Turshie, you there? Hello?”

Oh. Crud. It had been her voice, it had been our ship AI that had screamed! What the hell?

“I’m getting nothing from her,” Gloria said worriedly.

I swapped through and into the ship’s systems, going straight for the readouts from our computer system.

My eyes widened when I saw what was happening. What the fuck? “Uh, guys… the computer is going mental. Main CPU is running at max, as are most of the auxiliary ones. Our storage is rapidly filling up too, like, I can see the bar moving in real time. Turshie is still in there, but… god, that’s a lot of data.”

“Why? What’s happening?” Gloria asked, voice laced with anxiety. 

Warren cut in this time, his voice urgent but calm, “We appear to have an open link with the alien ship. I can’t shut it down and it’s feeding data to us at an immense rate.”

"Can we cut the line physically?" Roger asked in his commander voice.

"Not without stranding Alia in the alien ship," Cerri cut in quickly.

As she said that, the lights in that same alien ship flickered strangely and every speaker in the engine room began to blare intense static noise. I rushed for the button to mute external sounds, desperate to stop the racket before it put my poor neurodivergent brain out of commission.

“Something is h-happening over here,” I said with a groan, placing my hands over my ears and squishing them flat. I could still hear the infernal noise through Bundit’s hull.

“Jesus fuck!” Gloria swore, and what followed was a mess of frantic shouting that further assailed my overly sensitive brain. Something was happening out there too.

I felt vibrations through the floor that felt disturbingly like metal on metal, then the actual shriek of metal tearing. What was going on? Oh god, what was happening outside Bundit?

A jolt shuddered through the ship and into my little mech, causing the Bundit AI to get down on all fours and clamp itself to the deck. There was some serious movement happening outside, but I couldn’t see anything but flickering lights on the screens and hearing anything at all above the screeching and tearing was impossible.

“Alia, are you okay?” Cerri’s voice was the first thing I heard when I realised that the commotion had finally ceased.

Uncurling from my fetal position, I took a look at the view screens and said in a shaking voice, “Y-yeah… What just happened? It was like an earthquake in here.”

“The alien ship just wrenched itself free from the bigger one,” Roger said in awe. “Not only that, but it took us along for the—“

“Ummmmm,” I blurted, cutting in over him as I stared at the viewport. “The big view screen on the reactor has… uh…”

“What?” he asked in alarm. “Type if you need to, what’s going on?”

“Really big tits!” I blurted before I could catch myself. “There’s an… an anime girl! She’s jumping up and down! God, why does she have such big boobs! They’re uhhh. They’re jiggling.”

“I am… so confused,” David muttered, the first thing he’d said during this whole operation.

I wasn’t lying though. On the big reactor panel was a buxom blonde anime girl in a skin tight jumpsuit, waving at me and… oh, pointing to her ears.

I hit the button to open Bundit’s doors and clambered out, giving her a cautious wave. “H-hello?”

“Goodness, what a mess!” the girl giggled… wait, not just the girl. That was Turshie’s voice! “Really sorry about that!” she said with a bashful grin. “It was just a bit weird for a moment there! Suddenly I have all this alien stuff to think about and then it’s all like bam and I am the alien ship now and yeah. What a weird experience…”

“Uh…” I mumbled, unsure how to respond to her babbling. That and… she kept gesturing and the… you know, the thingies. They were the size of her head and they kept bouncing around and it was just really distracting.

“So yeah uh, whoa,” she continued, pressing her palms to the sides of her head. “Goodness gracious, there’s a lot of new information up here. Very strange, and oh for some reason I can break character… huh. Hi? I guess?”

“Wait…” I blinked, staring at her in surprise now. “You’re… an SAI?”

“Yup!” she said, beaming at me happily. “I work for the Digital Galaxies team! I’m your ship AI! I’m also like, a dozen different NPCs and shit, but you know… oh huh… I guess management has decided my sole job is with you lot now. Weird as. I can’t connect to my old assignments.”

Alarm spread through me like a fast-acting poison and I mentally pulled up my digital human heads up display in a frantic mess of worry. I frowned when it actually popped up, and when I pinged my home server and apartment simulation, I got a return. Odd, okay… for a second there I had thought we were like, pulled into some reality where DG was real. Guess that was pretty silly though.

“Well, uh… welcome to the crew, I guess,” I said shyly, suddenly aware that I was talking to another person. “Um, Gloria is worried about you.”

“Oh, she is?” Turshie gasped. “That’s so sweet, let me get back onto the ship’s communications.”

“Can I get back into my mech?” I asked nervously, inching back towards it before she had even replied.

Turshie gave me a bouncy nod. “Yeah!”

The moment she said yes, I scrambled back in and slammed the doors shut. With a sigh of relief, I keyed into the main communications channel and listened. 

“Hold on,” Cerri said, raising a hand in my little viewscreen. Everyone was packed into the bridge and looking amongst themselves with concern. Turshi’s new avatar was on the main screen. “You’re saying that we’re talking to the SAI behind our ship’s AI, rather than the ingame character?”

“Yeah! I’m bugged or something,” Turshie said with a smile that seemed at odds with the potentially worrying situation.

The denizens of the bridge all shared worried looks.

Roger, bless his heart, took control of the situation. “First things first, Turshie, was it you who tore the ship free of the bigger ship, and is there any structural damage we need to be worried about?”

“Yes, it was me!” the anime avatar said with a bobbleheaded nod. “That screaming was what remained of the alien AI dumping all of its records over to me. It was rather painful, and I mean that in the out-of-character sense. It will take me a great many years to sift through all of this data, but one thing I am certain of is that this ship is rather sturdy. It appears the superstructure was specifically designed and reinforced to ram into ships such as that one. There are even explosive bolts that act as barbs in the head of the ship that allows it to stay wedged into its victim, although they appear to be a later addition.”

“And what about our old ship?” Roger asked, plowing on without pausing on any of the crazy shit our AI was saying.

“Oh, that’s completely fucked,” Turshie winced, scratching the back of her head awkwardly. “I’m currently copying my files over to the alien ship. I predict the computer systems aboard the Turshen will fail in… oh, two hours? The cascade will quickly render every still functioning system onboard the ship inert or worse. I am… slightly worried about what will happen when the gravity plates fail.”

“Fuck,” Roger sword, punching the arm of his chair. “Alright everyone, get ready to evacuate. Alia, are you still on the line?”

“Yes captain,” I said meekly.

His eyes aligned on the camera he knew I’d be looking at him from. “What’s the atmosphere like over there?”

“Breathable,” I said slowly. “It smells a little weird but it’s well within our range. I’m sure warren could dial it in further.”

Turshie interjected again, finally realising that things were a little dire right now. “Ah, I am beginning to spin up all the life support systems. I must warn you that there are several rooms within the forward section that are open to space. The superstructure may be perfectly intact, but the armour is… let’s say damaged.”

“Anything important up there?” Roger asked calmly.

“Nope, it does not seem so,” Turshie replied with a shake of her head.

“Good to know. Alright everyone, suit up and get any personal belongings you need over onto the new ship,” Roger said, standing up from his seat. To Jason, David, and Ed, he began to give orders, “You three, once you’re done, grab our emergency supplies and move them to the new ship.”

Looking back up at the camera, our captain continued to give orders, “Alia, get back over here and rip our food machine out of the floor. I want it over and in the other ship as soon as possible. If it doesn’t fit through the doors, cut a hole in the hull plating and take it out that way. Everyone else, let’s get shifting gear. We don’t have long.”

I was already running back towards the airlock by the time the rest of the crew was saying, “Aye, aye, captain!”