Chapter 5: Life After Death

When we got up the next morning we proved that the sleep-training worked. I used the bathroom and got out, then while Diana was in there I proved that I could get my coffee and donuts from the replicator, all without having to either stop and figure out how things worked or even ask for help. I was just realizing that I could probably function without the coffee when Diana came out, and we had breakfast - scrambled eggs and sausage for me, over easy with toast for her, coffee and orange juice for both of us.

While we were eating breakfast, I asked the AI what our schedule was today; what were we supposed to be doing? It told us that we were to report to the Admiral for a briefing when we were ready. What? He's an Admiral. Isn't that "As Soon As Possible"? No, he's with some other people, so no sooner than 15 minutes and 30 would be better. Let's find out if the shower works for two. It did, and that could have led to other things, but we had a schedule to keep. I promised Diana that we'd look into that more later, when we had some time.

I was trying to put my new suit on, and having more trouble than I thought I should, when the AI said that that suit would no longer fit properly; there was a new one for each of us at the replicator. I threw the old one in the recycle slot. It was right. The new one fit better. I was wondering if there was a problem with the materials, did they only last one day? That was useless for a combat protection garment, but before I got around to demonstrating how stupid I was it occurred to me that maybe the problem was me. I was changing.

My mind was working far better than it normally did this early in the morning, and I realized that I didn't really need my second cup of coffee. I was just doing things from habit. If the Confederacy could cure caffeine addiction they truly were an advanced civilization that deserved protection, and the human race should get behind this war effort and start pushing. Maybe it's a little thing, but that's what convinced me that we were doing the right thing.

We were walking down one of the passageways when the thing that had bothered me yesterday came into focus. Either this passageway was spinning, or it was twisted, or something even weirder that I couldn't explain. We stopped at some hatches about in the middle, and I asked Diana to walk back to the end that we entered it from and stand at that hatch while I stayed there and watched.

Sure enough, I didn't feel like I was moving or anything. Diana was walking at an angle before long, and she was standing at a 45-degree angle when she turned around at the end hatch. I called for her to stay there, and I walked on to the far end of the passageway, where it entered the main ship's hull. Everything felt fine. But, when I turned around, Diana was standing on a wall, 90 degrees off from me.

I gestured for her to come on, and I watched her gradually change from walking on the wall to walking on the floor in front of me.

"That is disturbing. Do you know what is going on?"

"Well, we know that these people have artificial gravity, and I think we just proved that their version doesn't have to be flat. Hmmm. AI, can you show us a see-through drawing of this ship for us?"

We got a kind of half-drawing/half-model of the ship, with little people in it. The two of us were outlined in red. I waved my hands over my head, and the little Roger mimicked me.

"Neat! Okay, can you show the floor for the path we just took, from our pod to here?"

That was it. The ship had several decks, like any ship. We were on the middle deck, which appeared to be somewhat larger than the others above and below it. The main hull was a cylinder, just like a submarine, so yes the middle deck would be wider than the upper and lower decks. Sticking out from the main hull were spokes which connected to several rings like in an old science fiction movie, and there were pods attached to the outside of the rings.

The important thing at the moment was that the main hull had gravity "down" towards the lowest deck, but "down" for the rings was towards the stern of the ship, not in the direction "from the highest deck to the lowest deck". In order to make those two match, the "spoke" that we had just walked through to get from the ring to the main hull was twisted 90 degrees. Your inner ear might or might not notice, depending on how distracted you were, and you wouldn't be sure what was going on until you watched someone else walk it.

I'd be willing to bet that people like gymnasts who lived off a highly-trained sense of balance wouldn't like that walk. I was going to have to find a way to get a parakeet up here, just to see if they could fly down the corridor without going crazy.

Should I talk about the ship here? As big and complicated as it was, I got the impression from the sleep-training lesson that the Confederacy considered it to be just about the smallest, simplest, cheapest, and most economical ship possible. Anything else we met would be bigger, more complicated, more powerful, and cost more, both to build and to run.

Anyway, think of a toilet plunger. That's the main hull and the business end of the main engines. Now, poke a hole in the middle of a round bath sponge -a loofa- and cram it all the way down until it's mashed up against the plunger. That's the engineroom, fuel tanks, and other important stuff. Next, drop three space-station rings down the plunger handle, but space them out some from the sponge and each other. Each ring has cargo pods attached around the circumference.

After that, find a child's bath ball, poke a hole in it, too, and shove it down to the middle of the handle. That was where everything was that wasn't in the engineroom. Control room, crew berthing, hydroponics tanks, in-use storerooms, shuttle bays, everything that wasn't cargo or engines.

Last, drop three more rings with pods onto the handle -don't forget to space them out some- and top the handle off with a little cap. That was a passenger lounge with huge picture window, forward docking point and emergency conning station, kinda like the one on a submarine's sail.

The only time you would use the forward conning station was if you were docking nose-first to something and you wanted to actually see what you were doing. Or if something had happened to the main control station, of course, whispered my naval engineering background in the back of my mind. I whispered back that I couldn't argue the point.

When we walked into the conference room -I was pretty sure I'd been in this one before, now that I knew my way around- I opened with "We're not dead yet. We can go home if we want."

Of course the Admiral bit. "What do you mean?"

"Mr. Robinson said that if we didn't come back from fishing, we would be assumed lost at sea and eventually we would be declared dead without a body. However, we didn't go fishing. We were in our house and just hopped on his magic transporter pad. Our boat is still in our yard, isn't it? Right beside our garage? Aren't our cars still home? How would anyone know we drowned? We can't be dead until after we take the boat fishing and some wreckage is found."

"Yes, but you're one of us now. You can't go home again."

"We can go home again, we just can't stay home. We're on board with this, we're coming back, but we've got to come up with a better story. If nothing changes, we're going to get added to that website of people who disappeared. Can we actually go fishing, and take one of those transporter pads with us? If we leave the truck and trailer at the ramp, that will tell people that there's still an 18-foot boat out there somewhere in the Bay. We'll get a receipt for the ramp fee and leave it on the dash and they will go looking and find the boat but no people. All we have to do is figure out how to get rid of the transporter pad."

The Admiral looked up. "AI? How can we recover or destroy the pad after it is used, if there is no one around to pick it up?"

<The transporter pad can be provided with nanites to disassemble it. All that will be found is some dust that cannot be identified with your technology.>

Diana, the Admiral, and I all started laughing. A ship or boat at sea always has dust and dirt everywhere. You can't get away from it. If nothing else, just the salt water spray leaves a rime when the water evaporates. Forget identifying the dust. No one would even notice a little bit of extra dust drifting around, on an abandoned fishing boat.

With that out of the way we moved on to more important stuff. Namely, my performance in bed last night. I asked Diana to cover her ears because I was going to say something that sounded disrespectful if you weren't one of the boys, then reported to the Admiral that those med-tubes appeared to do their job. I had my health back and I had fucked the SHIT outta that ho several times last night. Further, I was willing and able to do it again as soon as the opportunity, um, arose. I appeared to be fully functional again.

When I was done, I pulled Diana's arms away from her head and told her she could listen again. We all pretended that she didn't hear what I had said while her ears were covered.

I wanted to talk about how wonky walking the access tube felt, but I got immediately shouted down. Aside from Diana and me, they were unanimous. Don't say anything. These ships are wonderful. If you can't say anything nice, just don't say anything.

George-the-soldier waved for quiet, then asked the AI "Can you show Roger what we had two weeks ago? An interior view?"

Suddenly I was in a huge tank with curved sides. I wasn't on the bottom, I was on the side. Or, the tank was on its side and I was on the side that was on the bottom. I was on a walkway with equipment, cargo, and various unrecognizable stuff all around.

ALL around. There was stuff on all sides of the tank as the sides curved around up and overhead. There was stuff on the top of the tank, a hundred or more feet above me. In the very center there was a shaft of some kind.

And, my eyes were watering. The whole tank had 'grey' as the base color. Blue-grey, dark grey, light grey, with various colors mixed in and a lot of them hurt. No human did this, and no human could stand this for long even though Diana could probably give the proper names for every shade.

My viewpoint turned and I was going along a path, up the wall. Nothing changed except that various stuff was going by. The tank looked the same. I turned around and saw someone where I had been, halfway up the wall and waving at me. He was standing out from the wall so he looked "down" from me even though I had to look "up" to see him. My head was beginning to hurt. I could feel the chair I was still sitting in, in the conference room, but all I saw was this huge tank and my stomach was thinking about getting rid of breakfast.

The Admiral said "That's enough, I don't want to get sick" and the tank went away; I was back in the conference room.

I got to the point. "What the fuck was that?"

The Admiral answered "That was the first ship they gave us. The Darjee, the people who brought it here, had bird-like ancestors and they prefer that kind of open space, or maybe, that kind of open sky. We, on the other hand, don't like land that curves like that, we don't care about the open space, and we REALLY don't like things that look like they are going to fall on our heads. We were spending all our time looking up instead of at what we were doing. We lost people because they weren't watching what they were doing."

"Every one of us complained of headaches, of nausea, and we demonstrated illness often enough to convince the AIs we had serious problem. They finally admitted that they had some older ships that had flat decks like the seagoing ships we build, and when we saw their plans we staged a strike until we got them. We love these ships, and we don't want to hear anything bad about them."

George said "We aren't built to live in that kind of ship. We need this kind, with flat floors."

The Admiral and I both said "decks" at the same time. Army guys. They aren't floors. They're decks.

"What's the difference?"

I didn't have a quick answer, but the Admiral did. "What's the difference between a Captain and a Major? A howitzer and a cannon? An APC and a tank? A cupola and a turret? You're on a ship. It's a deck."

George stood up, saluted the Admiral, and said "Aye, aye, Admiral" before sitting again.

All I could say was "You don't salute inside a building or ship unless you are covered. Don't they teach you Army guys anything?"

Back to business. "So, other than being a big trash can and making us sick or having decks and being normal, what differences do they have?"

"None at all. Both styles are the same on the outside, with rings holding pods. We're pretty sure that the different species in the Confederacy outfit the insides of the ship to suit their own needs. If we have it right, the first set we got were active ships being used by Darjee when they were sent here, and these we have now are unused ships outfitted for other species that the Darjee had in storage. If they don't want them, we certainly do." That was Randall, the intel guy.

"Mothballs. You don't just put a ship in storage like a pair of shoes. You go through a process to preserve them. It's called putting them in mothballs."

"It is so nice to have someone else who can teach these guys how to speak 'ship'. We spend half our time arguing terms." The Admiral.

I was almost immediately forced to back down from my "no remote-control shit in my brain" stand. It was all just too useful. I didn't have any emotional problems with any of the improvements -everyone wants to be the Six Million Dollar Man- I just wanted to retain control of it. That took some negotiating with the AIs, and some development work with all the headaches (literal in this case) that included, but we ended up with a set of improvements to the human body. Yes, we were all "fixed up" in that our bodies were all repaired back to perfect health, and then on top of that our bodies were modified as we wanted within reason, but we also got some improvements.

After the med-tubes were done with me I had what a human doctor would call "perfect hearing", yes, but I also had the option of turning on an augmented system that made my hearing much, much better. For instance, if I wanted I could listen to a motor's hum in any frequency range I chose and predict not only how long that motor would last but how it would fail when it went. Not that the aliens seemed to use the kinds of motors we used down on Earth but I'd find a use for the skill.

Vision was the same way, although that was driven by our fighter pilot (Frenchy) and our armored combat officer (George). I suspect that the Army really sent George up to keep an eye on Randall (What is that intelligence officer really doing up there?), but he had practical experience in an important field that the rest of us knew nothing about. Frenchy and George both wanted a tactical heads-up display that was built-in, no helmet or other hardware required that could fall off, get fogged up, or need batteries.

What they developed could give direction like a high-end GPS, highlight important objects (read that as "targets"), give ranges, vectors, and detailed information on those items like available weapons, keep track of current inventory (missiles, ammo, for all I know how many knives George was carrying), and so on. Since the hardware behind their HUD was programmable, upgrades happened instantly whenever they decided what they wanted.

And, yes, I got my goddamn red line back. I didn't mind too much. I'd made my point. Part of that system was two-way silent communications with the nearest AI; I could think myself asking a question (just not actually opening my mouth and making noise) and either hear the answer through the audio channel or see it, if that was more appropriate, on my own personal HUD. Once we got used to it, it was a lot more useful than a radio in my helmet that only helped when I was wearing my helmet.

That think-talking took some practice. The AIs insisted that they couldn't hear our thoughts. They could use the implant to drive impulses in our auditory and optic nerves that we interpreted as the AIs talking to us or whatever they wanted us to 'see', but that only worked for incoming audio and video. If we wanted to talk to them, we had to do something to generate nerve impulses they could collect and analyze. To do that, we had to pretend to talk. Some of us got it right away and some of us took longer. I expect that part of that was the AIs having to calibrate their implants at the same time the guy was trying different things. Sometimes they would hit on something that worked immediately, and sometimes it would take them awhile to get together.