Digital Galaxies

Everyone turned out to be pretty cool, at least on the surface, and this being the future, we began to shop for a ship to buy. Everyone except Roger was from Galicorp, so we’d have a pretty hefty discount on whatever mortgage we took out.

“I think we should probably nail down what we actually want from the ship before we go browsing,” Roger said wryly, staring around at everyone who had already leapt to their phones.

“Something agile!” Gloria exclaimed, slapping a palm down on the table.

“Yes, some degree of maneuverability is desirable,” Cerri said with a roll of her eyes. For some reason she turned to look at me at the end, so I smiled at her before being overwhelmed and turning back to my phone.

“Combat potential is a must, yeah,” Roger agreed, tapping his finger on the table in thought.

“Atmospheric capability,” I blurted, my impatience to have that important note on the table outweighing my shyness for a moment. “We want to be able to fly down to planets and land on them.”

“Good point,” Warren said with a nod in my direction. “Cargo capacity will be crucial too.”

“Basically, we want the type of ship that every scrappy little crew has in every space opera ever,” Ed remarked with more than a little amusement.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Roger laughed, and sheepish smiles pulled at lips all across the table. “Well, back to our phones I guess, shout out if you find something interesting. Remember, at least eight cabins.”

“Seven,” David corrected.

“Seven, cabins,” Roger repeated with a chuckle. “Rated for atmospheric entry, has a cargo hold big enough that we could make some money shipping goods, and can defend itself when needed. Oh, and expansion mounts would be cool, so we can fit some science modules on. Science missions can give crazy good money if you know where to find them.”

Everyone did as he asked, and it wasn’t long before I found myself overwhelmed.

Spaceport Halifa was the central hub for the Halifa gas giant system, a well developed set of moons that orbited the massive planet we could see out of every skylight. Some of the moons were entirely industrial, while others were luxury planets and there was even a moon that had been turned into what was basically a very small version of a city world.

This all meant that there was a shitload of options to choose from, and that was about the time I realised another problem. What the hell was our budget? Rather than ask, because that was scary, I spent some time sifting through Galicorp’s website trying to find the answer. They still called it a website in the pretend future. That wasn’t going to get confusing at all!

In the end, I figured out that with all of us, the base we’d have from the mortgage was… 210,000 Ossus. What the hell was an Ossu worth? Did fake space future have wikipedia? Time to find out…

Oh shit it did, and Ossu stood for Ossuary, which had been slang for a currency like four hundred fake years ago. That slang, of course, referring to Crypt, or crypto currency. Dang… alright. Fuckin’ show off dev SAI with their tons of time to think up irrelevant back stories for their dumb made up currency.

Anyway, that hadn’t actually helped me figure out how much an Ossu could buy me. Let’s use… a T-shirt as an example. I did a quick search for clothing stores and found that they didn’t actually price shit in Ossu. Why? Because Ossu were actually worth quite a lot. A T-shirt was worth about one thirtieth of an Ossu in the next denomination down.

Armed with an incredibly flimsy idea of what an Ossu was worth, I jumped back into the ship search. At least I had a price range now, that was something.

“Alia?” someone asked, and I felt a hand on my back.

I twitched, a little squeak of surprise escaping from somewhere within me as I looked up to find everyone staring at me again. I cringed back, my tail coming up for me to hide behind as I wondered what I had done wrong.

“What do you think of this ship?” David asked, turning his phone to me.

It looked nice, that was for sure. It had an industrial look to it, all angles and sharp lines, with an overall wedge shape that tapered to what looked like a bridge at the front. It looked sort of like the iconic star wars venator class ship if it was way smaller and you took off the big stupid mast at the back. The cutouts on the sides were much smaller as well, and it had turrets at the tips of the wings, as well as fore and aft ones, both top and bottom.

“Does it have PDCs?” I asked quietly, trying to look for them in the picture and failing. “Do we need them in this setting?”

“What?” David blinked, confusion written all across his face.

“Point defence cannons,” Gloria supplied, turning to her own phone with a frown. “Okay yeah, it has mounts for them, but the model we’re looking at doesn’t have them. We should probably have them…”

Reaching out, I swiped up on David’s phone until I could see the name of the ship he was looking at, then got to work on my own phone.

The specs looked good on it, the aetherdrive was especially robust, which was nice. You really didn’t want that crapping out when you needed to get out of a nasty situation fast. Cargo hold was reasonable and the shields looked pretty solid. It lacked a bit in the armour department though, which I suspected was because the thrusters looked a little weak and would be unable to move more weight. Gloria wouldn’t like that.

Sure enough, she glanced up with a frown. “The normal space engines are kinda garbage on this thing, at least compared to what I know of the game so far.”

On a hunch, I took the base model name of the ship and threw it into a search. Bam, sure enough, there were other versions of this ship out there. Dialing that down to the Halifa system and I began to browse through the different models I could find.

I found one with PDCs installed, although some of the cargo hold had been converted into barracks. I guess this model was more military minded. The engines were definitely beefier, although the armour was still pretty bad. Better than the other model, mind you, but still not as good as what I’d seen on other ships of a similar price.

Two of the turrets had also been downgraded, and when I investigated why, it looked like it would have power consumption issues if all guns were firing at once. A quick check revealed the same problem on the base model.

Off I went down another tangent, learning about shipboard reactors and stuff. That was when my little mechanic bunny chimed in, telling me with a cute little text bubble a little about what I needed to know. Of course, I wasn’t paying attention the first time because it was so dang cute. It made a little grumpy face when I asked it to repeat itself.

Very interesting… wow they had really gone hard on the simulation that ran this game, because this was technical as fuck and I loved it. Very soon I was diving into the nuts and bolts of how their reactors worked and— 

“Alia!” David said rather loudly, causing me to jump again. I stared up at him in owlish confusion, wondering what was happening now. He laughed, ruffling my hair as he said, “What did you find? You’ve been typing up a storm with that phone of yours.”

“O-oh…” I mumbled, blushing and sinking into my chair. “I was just researching how um… ship reactors work. I found a model of that ship you were looking at with better specs, but it looks like that entire range of ships comes with a reactor that isn’t the best. Power problems when you’re putting all the stuff to use. I was wondering if I could boost its output somehow.”

“Can you?” Roger asked, leaning forward with interest.

I gave him a sort of half nod and with instruction from my cyberbun, I whipped my finger in a gesture that would send the page for the ship model I’d found to everyone at the table. Their phones all pinged at once, causing everyone to glance down.

There was silence for several moments as everyone glanced through the specs, and I noticed Gloria give an approving nod. “These engines are much better.”

“It has far better scanners on it too,” Cerri murmured, intent on her phone. For once, that meant I could stare at her without her staring back, and gosh was she nice to stare at. I loved her cheekbones, high and delicate and just… wow.

“The cargo hold is smaller, but… hmmm, we don’t have to use that barracks as an actual barracks,” Warren commented with a frown.

“I can weld some cargo brackets in there,” I offered timidly, hoping he wasn’t too upset about the cargo space.

“Perfectly acceptable,” he said, giving me a pleasant smile. Oh, he wasn’t mad.

“This looks like the ship we want,” Roger said, placing his phone down on the table and locking it. “After we’ve gone out and bought all the extra stuff we want for it. I’ll make sure to pick up a lot of miscellaneous reactor parts on the cheap for you Alia.”

I smiled shy thanks at him, pulling my tail to my chest to cuddle while everyone began to debate the pros and cons of the ship.

It had larger cabins than you might expect from a ship of this price and weight class, although still cramped. It had a dedicated recreation room, as well as a living room and mess, which was nice. Each was still small by the standards that we would all be used to from living our lives in buildings built on solid ground.

Reviews said the PDCs were a bit jank and could jam sometimes, which sounded like yet another problem I’d be fixing once we had the thing in our hands. Oh and apparently the beds were uncomfortable and there was a fault in the first manufacturing run of the gravity plates they used, causing them to fail every now and then. That would be amusing. I really hoped the ship we got didn’t have any of those faulty plates.

“If everyone is good with this as our first ship, I think we’re ready to get this show moving,” Roger said, mercifully cutting the discussion short.

Various levels of agreement were heard around the table, and so off we sent, out of the bar and back to the Galicorp building to form our little company of spacers. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t super duper excited.