Chapter Eleven: Existential Crisis
Frag walks me through activating the manual release on the door, since he can’t interface with the ship without the network. The release allows the door to spring upwards into the wall itself Star Trek style, the door to this room only goes up a foot or so due to the damage in the wall itself, which hardly matters to me as I am still on my back. I push myself out into the corridor using my good arm and leg, trying not to cry with every movement, and failing. The hallway is bad, deformed walls looking like the crumple zone of a car after a bad accident, lights, pipes, and just pieces of the walls and ceiling everywhere. Oh well, nothing I haven’t seen before, I square my shoulders, metaphorically because I’ll be damned if I am going to move my ribs, and begin my quest.
Every single time I choose to move forward is the mental equivalent of climbing a mountain, so I talk to Fragment in order to distract myself, “Hey Frag,” Nyarg! “Can you tell me,” Ahhhhhuugh! “About this ship and where it was headed?” I stop to catch my breath, I have made it a whole ten feet from the door, definitely earning a rest.
Fragment pipes up cheerily as I continue to scrape along, “Leod, the S.S. Endymion is a garden colony ship which was commissioned by the United Coalition of Humanity to settle a planet which had been recently discovered in the furthest reaches of known space. The ship set out Thirty-Four years, five months, and one hundred and eighteen days ago using Earth Standard Time measurements. Every colonist aboard was brought into being through genetic engineering and the copying of a mental template provided by your progenitor. The pod you awoke in was in fact the womb that birthed you. Your personality is imprinted from the mind of the one who elected to send a version of himself on this journey, that and the dream stimulus that the ship provided you as you slept.”
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
That stops me in my slimey tracks, “Wait… I’m not me?” wait, wait, wait, no… No. That isn’t right. I’m Leod. I chose to enter an artificial world, I logged in and… and what? And was placed on a crashing spaceship… for fun? “Frag… that’s not… this all… this has to just be part of the story right? Part of the evolution server? I, I logged in to this world, I’m not… a clone.” I need him to tell me something I can hold on to.
Fragment hums, “Memory is more than fifty percent reconstruction Leod, the U.H.C. has done much research into garden ships and the psychology of humans in general. They found that the human mind can and will create totally fictional rationalizations for its own behaviors and this is especially true when one encounters gaps in memory. I’m afraid that whatever past you are recalling now is most likely just a story your mind is telling you so that you can cope with your current circumstances.”
Fuck. No. No… NO! I am Leod, I know who I am, I couldn’t have dreamed up a whole life! I have… oh god, I have thirty-four years and a few months worth of memories on Earth… I quickly do the math, and, no… The time the garden ship has been traveling… is the exact number of days I have been alive. No. Fuck! This is just Axiom messing with me… it has to be! It wouldn’t be a story if I didn’t believe it right? Axiom knows me inside and out, everything about me… it’s too much of a coincidence… right?
Noticing that I haven’t moved in a while, Fragment pings me, “Leod, does it matter where you came from? You are here now, and if you don’t get to the Auto-doc soon you will die. There is no guarantee the emergency power will continue to last, and it is likely you have internal damage as well as broken bones.”
I grit my teeth, he’s right of course, I can prove my existence later, because right now I have to give everything I have just to have a later. I use my building rage at not knowing the truth to fuel me, and push myself another foot down the corridor.
