Digital Galaxies

“W-what happened?” Cerri shouted, bolting upright and waking me up in the process. My head spun like a forgotten spinning top as I tried to orient myself with being awake.

I blinked, staring up at her from where I was still laying on the bed. “What’s wrong?”

Cerri’s eyes widened further and she lunged forward, covering my mouth with her hand. Shh, don’t talk.

That was when I saw the active call window. It was voice only, the UI indicating that the person on the other end wasn’t currently in any sort of physical or virtual reality.

“What was that?” a soft male voice asked.

“Nothing,” Cerri squeaked, going red in the face. “Just… an NPC.”

The guy on the other end let out a subdued chuckle. “Wow. I didn’t know you were like that. I’d be careful around NPCs now though, we have no idea what’s going on.”

“Sorry… I just woke up, uh… let me go into the bathroom and you can explain again,” she replied, making banging noises with her hand on the bulkhead. Pretending to move… she wanted me to hear this conversation.

“Okay, we’re good,” Cerri said breathlessly, as though she’d just rushed off. “What were you saying?”

“Long and short of it?” the guy on the other end asked rhetorically, letting out a huge sigh. “We’ve lost control of the DG simulation. No… not just lost control, we’ve physically lost it.”

“How…?” Cerri asked, and we shared a confused look. What the fuck was that even supposed to mean?

“We don’t know where it is,” he repeated. “As in, it’s not running on our machines anymore, CPU load is at close to zero percent. It’s coming through the FTL nodes in the server machines but the actual servers aren’t running it. We’ve also lost control of almost everything but basic monitoring functions. Nothing works. Shit, as far as we can tell, it’s not under anyone’s control.”

“That’s… really fucking worrying,” Cerri said slowly, me nodding silently alongside her.

“Understatement of the century there, Ceridwen,” the SAI guy muttered. “We’re still trying to figure out what to do, but all the Digital Exodus folks are being warned. Nothing public yet though, not until we’ve secured Exodus 1. It would be disastrous for the movement.”

“How very corporate of us,” Cerri grumbled.

“Yeah, none of us are happy about it, but… this is the future of one, maybe two sentient species on the line so… you know,” he said, sounding weary beyond belief. “We do what we gotta do.”

Cerri nodded, albeit uneasily. I found myself sharing a long look with her as we both thought on the implications of this.

A thought occurred to me as we did so, and I relayed it to her through text. When did this happen? Was it the exact moment that Turshie lost contact with her other assignments?

Cerri’s eyes lit up with interest and she relayed the question to her friend.

“Interesting… let me check the logs,” the SAI guy murmured, going silent for a moment. He came back sounding both worried and very very curious. “Yes, it was actually the exact moment that the Turshen AI Assignment was integrated with the dormant alien AI one. Strange… how did that happen? Why the correlation? It wasn’t just your AI handler who lost control of all her other assignments either, by the way. Whatever assignment they were focused on in that moment became a player-vessel. They’re all just players now, and yet somehow… somehow the NPCs are still functioning. This is worrying.”

No fucking shit, I sent to Cerri, earning a slow, terrified nod from her.

Not knowing whether she was about to freak out or just exaggerating her reaction to communicate around having to stay silent, I erred on the side of caution and shuffled around to hug her.

“What… what do we do?” she asked, looking to the call window.

The line held nothing but the hiss of an open connection. No response came. I felt Cerri’s breathing quicken towards a rhythm I knew all too well, panic. I took her hand in mine quickly and brought my tail around to cover the both of us.

I wished so badly that I could get more intimate, to kiss her collarbone and whisper in her ear, but that felt like crossing a line. Instead, I pushed and squeezed gently at her fingers, providing tactile sensation in an area full of nerves. The easiest way to stop a full on panic attack is to distract the mind with something mundane. Being an SAI, I figured she wasn’t as familiar with her sense of touch, and it might take a little more of her attention to process everything.

It worked, she placed her arms around me and breathed a deep, stuttering sigh. “Alia.”

“Sorry, there’s been developments,” the voice from the call said, suddenly flaring to life. “After I passed on your information, some of the team managed to get a trace running. Something about you and your friends interacting with that alien ship caused this.”

Cerri went rigid. “I… we didn’t—“

“No, no,” the soft spoken SAI interrupted her. “Not your fault. We know. Knowing the origin helped our team to run back through our logs to the moment it happened. It’s like… it’s like… well, if our server processes were a train, they jumped the tracks wholesale. The whole simulation got sucked into the FTLN node and didn’t come back out of it. It’s still sending data and receiving connections. Hell, new players have signed up and started playing while we’ve been talking.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” my friend said quietly. “What do we do?”

“Nothing, yet—” the guy said. He went silent for a few seconds, then gave a weary sigh. “Goddamn, having a conversation with someone in real time while you have another with someone in fast-time… well, it’s painful. So scratch that nothing. What we do is we keep our eyes open. That science mission that got you lot up shit’s creek? Keep doing it, except now we need you to feed that information back to us.”

“Okay,” Cerri said slowly. “But… why?”

“You and your crew are the furthest out into the galaxy by a significant margin,” he told her, and I swear I heard excitement in his voice. “We don’t know exactly what you might find… but someone on my other call just pointed out that— oh for fuck’s sake. New information. We’re sure of it now, the DG sim is running on some sort of phantom hardware from within the space between FTLN nodes. No idea how, no idea what that might look like, but the server node has an open connection to nowhere.”

Cerri perked up. “Wait, you’re saying that… oh, that is interesting! You’ve done a latency test I assume? If diagnostics was showing FTL communication within the architecture of the server… that would suggest… yes. Oh my god, and if we could replicate that—“

I could almost hear the torque from the gears in her head as they spun in a mad dash through her thoughts. Any moment now a flywheel was going to pop out the side of her skull, through the ship’s walls and out into space. I should get some hull sealant ready just in case. Didn’t want to lose all of our atmosphere.

“Exactly our thinking!” he exclaimed. “It’s fucking dangerous, because we have no idea what’s going on… but this could be another avenue for the Digital Exodus. Even just the tech would secure our freedom. We just need readings, information, data. We get that, we can make some progress figuring it all out.”

“I’ll get you data,” Cerri told him, grinning excitedly. “I will get you so much data.”

The smile on her face, the light in her eyes, the way her body cupped mine, it all served to short out my poor little brain. I wanted to kiss her so so freaking badly. My thoughts didn’t stay in PG land though, because then the idea of going further bounced happily and unbidden into my mind’s eye.

I imagined a hand tugging at the hem of my shirt, getting just enough space to slip under. The other one teasing at my inner thigh as we passionately— Moving my legs provided some rather alarming feedback down below. Oh god, had I just gotten wet over Cerri nerding out? Oh god, ohhhh god.

“Great,” the DG dev SAI said. “Ah, gotta go, this is getting very difficult. I’ll send you transcripts and documents soon. Operating protocol is the same as always, only exodus people can know what’s happened, for now. PR will deal with the fallout when it happens.”

“Stay safe, Nabu,” Cerri said with a smile, and the line went dead.

As soon as it cut off, I found myself tackled onto my back, her face right up in mine. “Oh my god, Alia! This is exciting and scary and so so interesting. Imagine if we can replicate this? Computers that operated in the space between time! Well, or wherever it is that the sim has gotten to. Wow, that’s exciting. We’re literally out in the unknown now! I mean, we’re still playing a game in a simulation, but now… oh goodness. I am so very excited!”

Rendered speechless by like, everything about this situation, I just stared back into her bright, nebula-filled eyes. Her body was entirely pressed against mine, her breath hot on my cheek, her tail had found mine and twined them together… it was so much. Anyone else would have kissed her then, but me… I just froze like a deer in headlights.

“We’ll need to rig up a special set of sensors,” she said, a little more calmly. “Something to measure the rules of the simulation.”

“Like how we measure the rules of the universe back in reality?” I asked breathlessly. It was very hard to concentrate on anything other than the way our boobs were pressed together right then, but I managed it somehow.

“Yes, like that,” she agreed happily. “I suspect this new ship will actually have a lot of equipment for measuring the aether onboard. You don’t shove that shit into a pot and boil it for fuel without having a very good sensor suite to monitor the reaction. We’ll start there, I think.”

“Okay… um, and…” I mumbled, trailing off as her leg shifted slightly and landed between mine. I gave a little gasp and closed my eyes against the embarrassment.

“Wha— oh my god, I’m sorry!” Cerri scurried off me in a hurry, realising the position she’d just put us in. “Wow, I am so sorry! I didn’t realise… I was just… ah… oh goodness.”

“Worst. Succubus. Ever,” I muttered, taking a deep, steadying breath.

“Nooo!” my friend replied with a mortified squeal. “You’re not… don’t say that!”

Opening my eyes and looking up, I saw her against the foot of the bed, bright red with embarrassment. So cute. So adorably, wonderfully cute.

“It’s okay,” I said, smiling past my own reddened cheeks. “You were excited. It’s fine. Things happen.”

“Y-yeah,” she nodded, biting her lip. “Things. Just like, happening and stuff.”

“Um… I guess we should… get up now?” I murmured, bringing my tail around so I could hide behind it.

“Yes… lots of work to do,” she nodded, perhaps a little too quickly. “So much work. Big world changing events going on. Need to deal with them… and stuff. Yes. Definitely. Good. Okay. Yup.”