kittyboy: "You have a ship engineer on board?"

  I asked the Valkyrie crew member, whom I shall call @valleyman.

  valleyman: "Of course."

  kittyboy: "Excellent. Can you take me to them? We get heavy gravitational waves that disrupt an asteroid this small. Have had some ships get dark matter annihilation problems in consumption. Not a huge deal, but we've seen quantum spikes in the blockchain that prevent DEAD drives from working."

  I was talking out of my ass, thinking aloud about what could kill a DEAD drive other than taking direct damage. I admit that I don't know much about science. Jargon, jargon, jargon. Throw in the word quantum for good measure. It was mostly nonsense. I couldn't get an outbound signal to pull legitimate information off the Extronet, so nonsense it was.

  I kept rambling, getting more heated and concerned, trying to irritate @valleyman enough to want to offload me to someone else - in this case, the ship engineer - and it worked beautifully.

  valleyman: "Yeah, yeah. I get you. I'll take you to @stardvark."

  On the inside, the Valkyrie was chic but no-nonsense. This was a clean ship, designed with purpose, beauty, and function. The floor was the color of dark metal, but I can only describe it as soft. It looked like they put an overlay atop the metal, so it was firm but comfortable and grippy. The side panels and machinery up to the ceiling were a lighter gray metallic.

  Walls and ceilings were white in the hallways, where the light was bright but not unpleasant. Every room with a terminal quickly pivoted to dim lighting, and the walls, ceiling, and floor were black to reduce the light further. Small lights on the ground showed just enough for you to keep your bearings. All the chairs were leather, the orangish-yellowish color of butternut squash.

  I figured this was about a 50-person ship. They would have a medical wing, a mess hall that was probably intermixed as a game room or lounge, a dorm area, workstations, a command center, an armory, an engine room, and a cockpit. Probably, they had a few holding cells as well. All spread across a few levels.

  I kept mumbling the whole way.

  kittyboy: "If you don't flip the discomfort imbalancer for that situation, the spark you get from the flange imbulator creates enough energy to short out the other chip."

  kittyboy: "When that happens, you're in upsy downsy electromagnetic flow, and the capacitors aren't built for that over a long period of time."

  kittyboy: "So you see? At some point, it's just going to decentralize."

  kittyboy: "How can you possibly annihilate dark matter then?!?"

  @valleyman got me to the hall where the engine room was. They pointed over to the right and started walking away.

  valleyman: "@stardvark's down that way."

  kittyboy: "Thank you. Remember! Don't stick your finger in the …"

  A door closed behind the fleeing @valleyman, cutting me off.

  "Turbuloculator," I finished out loud.

  That wasn't so hard after all.

  Now that I was alone, I could technically take my chances wandering the ship. However, since I had a reason to be in the engine room already established, and someone who would vouch for me since they left me all by myself, I figured my best move was @stardvark, so I walked toward the engine room.

  Lying Rule 5: When in doubt, follow the existing lie. It's easier than establishing another lie.

  kittyboy: "@stardvark I assume."

  I waved. @stardvark looked like what I figured an old Alcubierre Drive would look like. He'd been expanded and contracted too many times. He was old and thin, and he walked like a squirrel (not an aardvark).

  Somehow his beard and mustache were dark brown, while his hair was entirely white-ish gray. He wore yellow engineering scrubs with lots of pockets, hooks, straps, slots, and attachments. Yellow was supposedly to make them easier to see if they got stuck out in space.

  It was extremely rare to find someone in an older person's body. It's acceptable to port your mind into a younger version of yourself, to pick the age you want your clone to be. At least, it is for many people. Not for me. The Alliance Starmada picks my optimal age based on the mission. We've also solved the aging problem with our wonderful nanobot technology.

  Finding an old person in military service meant that they were extremely important or they were cloned to be old by design. Some people believed that allowing their clone to age was more authentic, so they embraced the aging process. In the military, you needed a high rank or special connections for that to be allowed.

  I hadn't really formed a philosophical opinion on that myself, if I wanted to age. It was irrelevant to me. The starmada decided my age and gave me anti-aging nanobots, so that was that. But, I admit, aging could lend itself to being more authentically human. Ashfield's Law of Authenticity certainly supported it.

  Long story short, @stardvark was old, and that fascinated me.

  stardvark: "Hello. Welcome to the heart of Oblivion."

  Oblivion! Awesome name! I approved.

  I needed something to talk with @stardvark about, so I figured I might as well complain about the DEAD engine problem on my i35. I had either damaged the engine unknowingly or it had glitched out on me.

  Lying Rule 1: When you need to lie, use the truth.

  kittyboy: "Thank you. I'm honored to be here. Just checking in with you. We've had reports of DEAD malfunctions on a few ships in the area. No clear diagnosis yet. When attempting to bubble, the DEAD is unresponsive."

  @stardvark said something I didn't quite understand, but he sounded like he might know what was going on.

  stardvark: "All this to say, it's probably the quantum battery. People post about this stuff all the time online, and it's always the quantum battery. Nanospark plug? Maybe. But did you try replacing the battery?"

  I had not. My ship was blown up.

  kittyboy: "Yes, I did. Still no luck."

  I needed to get him to do something, anything to keep him occupied, so I could try uploading a memoryshard and accessing ship logs.

  kittyboy: "I was thinking, could you run a diagnostic and send it over to us? I've been collecting readings to run statistical analysis on the problem. Since you just arrived, whatever it is might show up now compared to an older report."

  I was happy that this all seemed to actually make sense. Well done, me.

  kittyboy: "If you can send an older report from before you arrived, too, that would be fantastic."

  @stardvark rubbed at his arms, thinking, then nodded a few times to himself and started moving to one of the consoles.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  stardvark: "Suppose there's no harm. It'll take several minutes to run. Who should I send it to?"

  Shit.

  kittyboy: "Tell you what. I'll sit with you, if you don't mind, while it runs. Then you can just dump it to a datashard. That way I can completely eradicate it when I'm done."

  @stardvark shrugged and got to work. I sat at a nearby console, pretending not to notice the little ports to plug into. I gave him a few minutes before making small talk (or big talk).

  kittyboy: "Must be nice to work on a Valkyrie."

  stardvark: "Why, thank you."

  stardvark: "I mean, it IS nice, but I'm actually a shipbuilder by trade. Most of this is my design."

  kittyboy: "So even nicer to be able to work on it."

  stardvark: "Yes, yes. I keep playing around with it. Swapping modules is a bit more laborious, but I've customized Oblivion a bit. Played around a lot with the settings and configurations. I even added another ship mode to her."

  kittyboy: "No way!"

  stardvark: "Yes, sir, I did. Now we have (1) Cruise, (2) Battle, (3) Stealth, (4) Medic, and a mode I call (5) Obliteration."

  That sounded so fucking cool that I wanted to hug him.

  kittyboy: "What is Obliteration mode!?!"

  stardvark: "It routes all the power to weapons, shields, and engines. Basically, you are fast, agile, and extremely powerful - also a tank of a beast."

  kittyboy: "Why not run that way all the time?"

  He shook his head at me.

  stardvark: "You didn't listen. I said, 'All the power.' That means nothing left for gravity controls, heating and air conditioning, you name it. All the life support systems go offline. But turn that on, and Oblivion becomes unstoppable. She's a flat-out MACHINE."

  I thought about that. Made sense. You'd be on a time clock for Obliteration mode, but it would be worth it for the time you could use it.

  kittyboy: "What about jamming signals?"

  stardvark: "Those go offline to. All power is focused on one thing: Obliteration. Besides, we want our enemy to talk about it. It spreads the fear."

  I was about to ask him why you couldn't just get more power from somewhere else. Couldn't you just plug in another quantum battery or something? But I suspected it was something so basic, so fundamental, that if I asked, it would give up my cover.

  So I just nodded.

  kittyboy: "Brilliant!"

  stardvark: "Program's running. Can I get you some coffee? Or tea? While we wait. I am personally fond of tea and keep a stash of some unique blends."

  kittyboy: "Sure. Tea would be wonderful. Mint or any green tea is fine. A spoon of sugar, too."

  kittyboy: "Actually, I take that back. Surprise me."

  stardvark: "I have an oolong tea from a farm deep in the fault canyons of Miranda, aged in silicate rock, that will be perfect."

  @stardvark smiled and hopped to it. He slapped me on the shoulder as he walked by, then was off down the hall. I imagined he was headed to the mess hall or lounge area. Based on the ship layout, he would have to go up a level and off to his left. I probably had at least five minutes and at most seven while he prepared the tea.

  So, now was my moment. I reached for my left arm, grabbed a qwire, and plugged in.

  I needed to authenticate.

  Not a problem. I had lifted an ID signature off of @valleyman while I was boring him to death with gibberish. I really just needed that way in. AI algorithms and a bit of self-direction would take care of the rest. As I said before, I can tell the future. But that's not the important part. The important part is how I do it.

  I can run multiple scenarios, and I can run more scenarios than most, and my scenarios are better because I see connections better than most. This is a unique trait of my brain. I see connections that others don't. Give that ability a supercomputer, and I'm a precious commodity.

  In hindsight, I've probably undersold myself to the Alliance Starmada and masked too many of my capabilities. There was also the time I was licking suckers and sticking them to switches all over the starbase. The Alliance Starmada frowns on things like that. I had my work cut out for me if I wanted to stay on their good side.

  I just wanted a quiet life, honestly, so I made a resolution, there on that Valkyrie ship, to start impressing my superiors. Even being on the Valkyrie would be a huge win for me. But no one would know unless I could somehow get the information into the hands of the starmada.

  I kept scanning, following different paths as my mind worked through the intersecting data.

  Fuel consumption log. No.

  Holiday schedules. No.

  A rendezvous near 3551 Verenia. Curious, but no.

  As I searched, I replicated bytes of myself, storing memories and a livestream of the information I was capturing onto the ship's computer. For good measure, I threw in a little catnip virus of my own. It would activate the bits I put into storage and prompt the ship to reach out to me.

  I thought this was really fucking clever, but the virus would be detected. I wasn't a biodatascientist like @shadowhacker. I wasn't that good.

  But I had an idea. I could set the virus to upload, bit by bit, every time Oblivion activated its DEAD drive. The power flux would present a window of opportunity where ship functions calibrated for warp. I just needed to make it resemble one of those calibrations. It would take time and many DEAD warps for it to load and activate, but I couldn't see another way.

  I could try sending a signal from within the ship, but it would be detected immediately, and I didn't want to risk giving away Alliance Starmada encryption to the enemy. The catnip virus would have to be my solution.

  Satisfied, I continued parsing and decrypting files, crawling through the system. It took about 77 seconds for me to find what I was looking for, a set of logs related to Chief Master Bigwig Asshole Sergeant @bronzelion's visit.

  I blipped through the logs until I found it, the primary reason for his summons to the starlab.

  transmission_id: Ik1NJy2xTgd1g3ZOihZcXip

  subject: zos612 overtaken experiment success

  @bronzelion, your presence is requested at Starlab 41665.1.

  We have successfully encoded sample zos612 of the zombie_os virus, creating viable prototypes for distribution.

  Unlike prior strains, zos612 has the ability to modify the host's genetic code programmatically. Using this technique, the virus personalizes itself for each host, with a latency of up to seven years. More importantly, we have the ability to block specific genetic markers for greater control of infection, creating a genetic safe list.

  Upon activation, the host becomes overtaken, overriding the aiways' mindspark, executing zos612 programming.

  This strain also contains the zos572 enhancement that allows for physical and digital proximity replication and DDoS defense.

  That's right, @bronzelion.

  We are finally ready to unleash the overtaken.

  @moonqueen, Chief Biodata Services Officer

  I found even more information after that. There were hundreds of messages. The Solar Union scientists had been working on this for years. We had seen some attempts at this before, trying to hack and take over an aiways' mind. In some cases, it even succeeded on small scales. But if a zombie virus could do what they were describing, that could win the war.

  I kept scanning and rapidly summarizing logs. There was a video.

  I cringed. The video showed one of the infected aiways, what they were calling an overtaken, a round man with a blank expression, holding a qwire cord that extended out from his body. He was chasing a woman around a room. She was locked in there. Screaming.

  She had probably never screamed so much in her life.

  I paused the video and checked my timer. I needed to wrap up. I had a pretty good idea of what was about to happen, but I needed to know what this overtaken could do. I needed to understand what we were dealing with. I pressed play again.

  She dodged. She ran. But the overtaken man wouldn't stop. She knew he wouldn't stop, and she was smart. She tried to stay out of the corners to avoid being trapped. She had figured out that if she ducked at the right times, she could get around him.

  So she did. She ducked and moved gracefully, if you can say that about someone screaming frantically. Short red hair, too short for the man to grab onto. Lean and agile. She had the advantage there.

  But it was hard to watch. I knew what was going to happen. He was tiring her out, without even trying to tire her out, and it was working. Every duck and dodge got slower. The distance between her moves to avoid him and his sweeping arms got smaller and smaller.

  Finally, he got enough of a grip on her arm. She was exhausted. She might have been able to give it one more go, one more attempt to free herself, but she just didn't. She didn't move. She knew she had lost. We had both known there was no getting away.

  I UNPLUGGED.

  My upload and download were finished.

  I was sweaty. My heart was racing.

  I had to blink several times and wipe my face to bring myself back to the engine room of Oblivion. My legs were shaking. I sat, counting my breaths, telling myself that what was happening in Starlab 41665.1 needed to be stopped at all costs.

  "It's okay," I said, calming myself. "I'm done. I did it."

  All I could do now was hope that we, the Alliance Starmada, were clever enough, or lucky enough, to find my memoryshard or the bits of it I stashed in the computer system. If that failed, I had to rely on my catnip virus to do its job and reach out to me.

  There was nothing more to do now, really, except to die.

  "Time to die." I perked myself up, shaking out my arms, motivating myself. "Let's do this."

  I could have self-destructed, but this ship was too beautiful for that, and it's not really my style. I die a lot, but you've got to make it count if you want to remember your deaths, and it's the memories that matter.

  "I am the end of the world!" I shouted instead. I sprang from my chair, took off down the hall, and went for what I figured was the command center.

  "The end of the world is me!" I hissed. "Bow down or face my fury! I shall destroy you all!"

  It honestly took longer than I thought to get myself killed. I must have done three loops around a corridor where the lounge, command center, and armory converged. Maybe it was because I was screaming, and they found that fascinating. So I shook one of them.

  "You are made of ice! And I am the heat lamp!" I screamed. I shook him again. "I am the heat lamp!!!"

  I finally noticed @stardvark come into the area, with two glasses of tea. When he saw me, he nearly dropped them.

  I gave him a pleading look, then charged.

  "Obliteration mode is my mode!" I yelled at him.

  He calmly set down the tea, pulled out a shotgun, and blasted a hole through my chest.