The Starfighter Invitation

36 rp

"I spent a good ten minutes just outside the airlock, gaping. Fortunately the Challenge itself wasn’t too difficult, or I’d have failed it."

"What was it?" my mother asked. "Cleaning the outside of the windows?" She glanced up and around at said windows, and that drowning view of Valles Marineris.

"Using a thing like a butterfly net to collect space debris. The artificial gravity apparently causes a lot of flotsam to cluster outside as if lightly magnetised."

"So you’ve saved us from seeing crisp packets float by?" my father asked.

"It was a weird collection. Little white chips of the stuff that our Snugs are made of, as if they’d been colliding with each other. Space rock. Various metallic somethings. Mostly greyish splooge that Dio—that my Cycog says is escaped sealant."

"So they even gamify space splooge," my father said, putting a hand up to take off glasses he wasn’t wearing, and then smiling ruefully. "I keep forgetting I don’t need them."

My parents—my parents' Core Units—were familiar strangers. They had reverted to their early twenties. Dad was taller, my mother shorter, though she was still at least an inch taller than him. They both had a lot more hair than usual—in fact, they were wearing almost identical hairstyles: long, silky hair pulled up in a high tail. My father’s short-sightedness had obviously been corrected, and they had the clear-complexioned vitality that most of the Core Units shared, along with some tiny shifts to their features that I guess represented the same thing as my longer legs and less stocky look.

"How’s your guild managing?" I asked. "Sticking to your rules?" I’d never really been able to keep up the strict roleplaying between members that my parents' guild maintained, though it was often fun to try.

"Relishing the set-up. The concept makes it very easy to stay in character, since we can claim to be from a human-only Enclave that pretends to its citizens that it’s the original Earth. We haven’t decided whether to have a guild position on trying to bring down The Synergis, or let everyone go their own way, but we’re having a great time exploring."

"And have you decided whether you personally want to steal a ship or stay?"

"I don’t think that’s the decision that matters," my mother said thoughtfully. "The question is not whether The Synergis is a utopia, but whether the game itself comes with a catch."

My father reached for absent glasses again, and grimaced. "It’s tempting to believe in this idea of the Starfighter Invitation."

"Someone goes off to join heroic space battles, and the rest of us just get to play a cool game?" I said.

"I don’t object to joining an intergalactic defence force," my mother said. "But if either of you are recruited, leave a note."

"I’m not anywhere near the top of the leaderboards, but sure," I said.

"What if the important thing is to decide to steal the ship?" my father asked. "If Dream Speed is a recruitment tool, perhaps it’s looking for those who will strongly resist pampered servitude?"

"Surely they’d present The Synergis in a worse light?" I glanced around for Dio, but te wasn’t visible.

"We’ve only just started," my mother pointed out. "There is a galaxy to explore in this game, and much opportunity to find what has been swept under the carpet. At this stage, I am disinclined to take my ship and run, however. Tadori feels more like a friend than a…controller."

Did I regard Dio as a friend? Dio wasn’t a fledgling Cycog, but a Construct some of the time, and someone else at others. Claiming that someone else as a friend seemed outright foolish. Fun to talk to, sure, but not anything like trustworthy. Teasing, uncomfortably insightful, probably a very nice floating ball of light, but someone whose agenda felt more like finding out what made me tick rather than being a team.

"Did you see my Dream Speed design?" I said, rather than keep poking at the question. "It’s been selling enough that I think I’ll make this month’s rent."

"Not only seen it, but bought a shirt," my father said.

My mother looked pleased. "You are doing well? But it was only a matter of time."

"I’m trying to balance taking advantage of the momentum with wanting to bury myself in the game—I guess I’m lucky they have a lock-out rule."

I settled down to picking an EVA Challenge that would suit us, trying to juggle all the things I wanted to fit into my schedule. Eighty hours a day mightn’t be enough.