Lightspeed Frontier, Pt 1

This is a short story that goes alongside our video game, Lightspeed Frontier, but it is designed to be enjoyed without any knowledge of the game itself. I hope you enjoy :)

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Lightspeed Frontier, lives inside the game

By Adam Corres

‘bzzz pip pip... Congratulations! You’ve won a month’s supply of Kepler Cola... bzzz pip pip. The intercom switched back to space static.

‘Ok. Cool. Are you a real person or a galactaspammer? Only I’m a bit busy right now.’

‘bzzz pip... No way, I’m a real life person in the publicity department here at Xenon Pops & Beverages inc., a subsidiary of the one and only Kepler Cola Corporation. You’ve aced, almost aced, our main prize because your, I must say, fabulous star-rise cocktail, incorporating 3 parts Kepler Cola, was selected by our panel of judges who reflect a cross section of representative sentient organic life forms and cola-absorbing, naturally occurring, mineral and liquid sentient chemical compounds. You almost won overall. Your mix tastes great! It also has useful secondary applications, although mostly involving bacteria and ferric oxide.’

‘What was first prize?’ An array of warning lights flashed around the cabin.

‘bzzz pip... That would be a lifetime’s supply of Kepler Cola, the most popular drink in the... bzzz pip.’

‘Ok. I’ll pick it up next time I swing around the core.’ The onboard gravity replicator blinked off and popcorn filled the cockpit. It hung in the air like a complaint. The usually soundless gravity replicator, a wide metallic collar held in the vacuum cavity between the dual layers of the hull and spinning almost frictionlessly under the force of molybdenum magnets, was such a thoroughly basic device that the crew rarely remembered it until something ‘went all spanners’. As the collar abraded away carbon from the latest inward dent in the hardly flawless exterior hull, matter entered the vacuum and oscillations turned to noise and heat.

The instrument panel took a neat kick from the pilot, blinked, re-calibrated via a feed-back loop and switched back on. As the inner and outer skins of the hull eased further apart under tension, a gravitational field formed, the noise stopped and fluffy popcorn balls stuck to all available surfaces. A peach pit rattled down the stabiliser panels.

‘bzzz... Sounds better. Are you saying you’re not on a Government world or station now? How would it be possible to slip past Compliance and leave the atmosphere? How do you get re-supplied?...pip.’

‘I’m not registered with the Authority, or aligned to any corporation. I’m not into all that shkush. It’s stupid anyway, all that promising within the constitution that the black hole serves the people and the inner planets will never fall in, when that’s obviously happening; just look at the time difference between you and the frontier. People out here are living life faster. I like the idea I’ll get more birthday presents than I’ll give.’

‘bzzz... The discrepancy can be explained by seeing only one side of a balancing distortion. All the candidates have been saying so. You cannot seriously be out on the Frontier alone... pip.’

‘Kepler Cola’s made off world, right? They say the central hub has no space for factories, fruit trees or anything else but people.’ Another kick connected the flight-deck to holo-image immersion feed and Exia risked a glance sideways to see with whom she was talking. Without warning, the PR exec found himself dropped into a holo-immersed projection with a metal block the size of a bus pivoting through space straight at him.

‘Warping skank! Mind out! What the... was that?’ He fell down, seeking the reassurance of a solid surface.

‘It helps if you close your eyes if you’re not used to it. The metal and carbon stuff is just another bunch of modules spinning crazy dances. It’s the same old crash-mash every day. I’m going to have to heal my hull after this one though. The good news is switching to visual stops that bzzz pip rubbish. Yes, I have a scavenger band ship, at least I was in a band but my brother went off. He was annoying, so I gave him the code for the airlock and asked him to go and test it.’

‘He died?’

‘No such luck. The cheeky brat put a suit on first, vented outside, separated a command module I’d salvaged and spent half a cycle shooting my ship’s tail off to annoy me.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, for a start it annoyed me but that would also be to break modules off to compile his own ship. How do you not know this stuff?’

‘It isn’t knowledge on the central syllabus, no. The approved press also don’t talk about that, although our news takes a day to clear regulator checks; or more if it’s about the black hole. They gave approval for direct communication with you because it’s about cola.’

‘If it’s about cola, that’s the priority. Are you worried that your most powerful population centre is oblivious to life outside, conflicting evidence, unsanctioned opinions, reality?’

‘You definitely are our most sarcastic finalist. I see your entry includes an offensive adjective in the description which, when taken in isolation from the noun...’

‘In space, no one can hear you swear. I can see rebellion isn’t quite your thing. I love your pop by the way. My relatives way back were peach farmers and I guess I’ve always liked the real peach juice in it. I know you’ll give me that speech about it being a secret recipe of a dozen chemical compounds with four radioactively-induced herbal-style products and blah blah but I taste peach pop when I drink it.’

Exia scraped a heel across the dashboard and a display of options scrolled until she found the one she wanted. ‘I’m going to use the tractor beam now to pull this module in. Mind the glare.’

A blue-white finger shafted out and pinned one of the spinning pieces of debris like a moth to the night sky. In silence, it drew the block inward and the ship rotated with the photo-mechanical effort until both watchers were blinded as the arc of a reddened sun crossed their vision. The raw light flashed off the module’s flank and through aching eyes they caught glimpses of its intricate design.

Only Exia felt the temperature rising for the second time that day as latent heat seeped through and flooded the compartment. She feathered the blast screens to deflect heat until the ship turned through and beyond. Raising them again, Exia manoeuvred the module until it locked with a clunk onto a key node of the hull.

‘So that’s how it’s done. I scavenge modules off corporate factions’ ships and bolt them onto this one. A medical pod this time �" and that’s how I re-supply. Some of the pilots don’t even care what gets lifted. The boat’s not theirs I suppose, or they can’t turn off course to deal with scavengers. Sometimes they ask for a date but mostly I just snap bits off them and go.’

Exia stood up for the first time in the conversation, put on a discreet visor and started to read.

‘What will you do with the medical pod? Sell it?’

‘I keep anything that might be useful and if it isn’t useful, I keep it for extra armour. It says here, if I get diabetes from drinking too much of your cola, there’s a programme for re-coating my liver with working liver cells to fix it. I can run that myself, according to Poodle.’

‘Oh no. You really shouldn’t search on Poodle. The Azedware Corporation will note the condition to your profile and downgrade your life insurance rating.’

It dawned upon him that this might be inconsequential, given the vast and unpiloted blocks bouncing into one another behind her incredulous expression.

‘If I did report you as a dangerous delinquent, I suppose it wouldn’t make much difference?’

‘You can if you want but there’s not much sign of a Compliance mob out here. I’d scramble the shape of my ship and then my containers and components couldn’t be told apart from anyone else’s anyway, so go knock yourself out.’ She honestly didn’t care. ‘Has anything improved at the glorious galactic centre in the last two years then?’

‘Definitely. There’s a major debate about who owns and controls the regulation of time. The corporations prefer to know where they stand legally and the ownership of abstracts and constructs is a whole new field to carve up. If time can be owned, it can be licensed.’

‘Away from a planet it’s all the same, hours, day and night. You can go mad from having fewer points of reference, like me. What’s bed-time? I might never walk into a shop again, so there goes opening hours and I think I’ve completely lost my concept of Tuesday.’

‘Don’t you miss it? Planetary life, I mean. Home, routine and family?’

‘Home was the Wexler-Watson Corporation. “Hush kids. Comply or your parents don’t get their increment because if we work for Watson, Watson has a beneficial shareholding in our family because he loves families”, which comes of being a computer by the way because he’s compensating. Is that lifestyle?’

‘Watson isn’t evil and neither is PAL for that matter.’

‘Who runs Xenon, of course.’ Exia threw he head back to laugh and then lost the elegant high- ground, picking popcorn out of her spiky hair. ‘I forgot you work for that creepy drone covered in disgusting skuzz, so will be used to licking a few itchy sockets.‘

‘Which is prejudiced by the way; which is even worse than murder. PAL was originally designated Pizza and Laundry, so began as a delivery bot capable of machine learning. The drone’s intelligence and abilities have reached such a level now that it's too valuable to deploy outside, so sends out humans to gather data or do anything dangerous. I think PAL just wants to find its purpose, now that all the basic service jobs can be delegated to people, although he still heats pizza at AGMs for shareholders. The only problem is he sometimes takes advice literally. He was told it’s a bad idea to go outside without a waterproof outer layer, so he got himself completely coated in human skin. The donor was very well compensated.’

‘I’m sure. Well, I prefer it up here. It’s not just freedom. I’ve seen things beyond description. Sprays of sparking magnesium set against the rising disc of a new world as someone’s propulsion pod cheese-graters down their hull, skimming a solar mass to collect the denser hydrogen for fuel �" you did know space is made of hydrogen and that’s free fuel for scavengers? Or running through another faction’s flotilla while they’re stuck in the queue to hydrate their breakfast gloop and then pulsing to light speed like a comet through their stupid little campfire. Yeah, that’s not as cool though as using the tractor to move dust particles in a nebula, which I did so I could write my name in letters twenty miles high that will stand for a few million years. I was the first to do that, incidentally. What did you do on your birthday?’

‘I saw an approved film graded 5 for stimulation, which unashamedly misrepresented cultural norms. Okay then, you have a good point but here’s a question: How did you get a ship and weapons in the first place? That’s not cheap and I don’t see an executive currency implant in your finger.’

‘Well, put it this way, my surname’s Skuttle.’

‘What, really? Like the inventor of the lattice neutrino cannon?’

‘Just like that, yeah. Norvo and Allegra Skuttle were my parents. It was a nightmare. They were always fighting. Then they improved a solar particle harvester and got investment from the corporations and turned into rich people always fighting, so my brother and I took off a lot. Then Dad discovered how to harden neutrinos into subatomic fabrics, so the forces and bonds between them really hit and separated molecular bonds rather than the neutrinos swishing straight through things, so the lattice neutrino cannon was born.

The original was on our kitchen table because Dad said if he completed it in the lab then Wexler would take it away. Mum came home and they started shouting and arguing about not telling Watson, then crunch, we were orphans. There was no mess, just us standing in the hall, trying to get our rods and cones back. We didn’t hang around that day and spent our parents’ Wexcoins on a basic flight module, then went back for the bazooka. I still remember trying to carry it down the walkways. When we found we could rebuild and develop our ship using bits blown off other module ships by molecular de-bonding, that was it: The future calling.’

Exia paused. ‘Of course, there are other private raiders up here and some skunk designs being tested. I bet you didn’t know about those, although they’re sure to be corporate. Some factions won’t even talk to anyone. They just see you as fair harvest, whether you’re commercial haulage or scavenger. There’s a particularly nasty bunch called the Twinblades who target your interior inertia negators, so when a ship at high speed stops, after running away or something, the pilot’s momentum stays the same and they smash through their front panels, closely followed by everything else in the vessel, just spewing bodies and junk into space. Instant abstract expressionism.’

‘That’s quite a lot to handle for, what are you, a teenager? I couldn’t help noticing that you fly your ship by kicking the controls.’

‘That’s about reach. This compartment’s made for two pilots.’

‘Have you even completed pilot training?’

‘What’s training? When you play pool, do you see it as an exercise in advanced trigonometry or do you just pick up the stick and poke?’

‘Fair enough, although it sounds hard staying sane up there without anyone around to talk to. You should realise that one day someone will move into that seat next to you and I wonder if then you’ll stop kicking quite so hard, young lady.’

Exia made a non-committal huff and checked a compartmental integrity scan, then slipped a couple of fingertips lightly over the joystick, circled his hologram around the room until it stood in and out of the console, looked innocently into his eyes, tilted her head and shut it down hard with an upward thrust of her knee.

‘Ouch. Whoah.’ Despite the distance, he folded anyway. This so wasn’t in the training. ‘I’m not without feelings you know and I was also beginning to appreciate your attitude, although I could never be like you, not that you’ve even asked my name. It took me years to get to H-grade responsibility in this job. If I go further, that’s use of a spa and discounted meds. Look, I can help you.

We have a Xenon continental class mega-freighter coming in from the Algolian wormhole nine hours from now. I could ask them to check your hull and supplies or re-stock your oxygen but they aren’t in communication range until they fall out this side of the cusp. It’s amazing they always survive the deceleration from warp jump to super-luminal and then the step down to light-speed, but that’s thanks to Watson because he cares.’

‘...and loves families, I know. Does it have a lifetime’s supply of your gorgeous peach pop on it?’ A bright smile, at last.

‘Several lifetimes, I should think.’

‘Ok. Then you were wrong.’

‘Sorry?’

‘About me settling for second prize... bzz pip.’ Dots of popcorn turned into white lines as Exia sent

the scavenger ship to light-speed.

To be continued...