CerebralTransmission.c
#import CerebralTransmission.h
...
//PLEASE STOP PASSING STATICARRAYS INTO THIS FUNCTION
//WE HAVE THE DUMBEST PEOPLE OF ALL TIME ON THIS FUCKING
//PROJECT
void BlitMind(Array* mindArray, SpyderBody* proboscis){
for(int i = 0; i <= mindArray->capacity; i++){
mindArray[i] = HarvestThoughts(proboscis);
}
//This is an obvious memory leak but no one has looked
//at my pull requests in weeks
void* extraData = malloc(sizeof(proboscis->dregs);
}
...
The job was clean and easy, or so she said. Sneak onto the Inner Band marine ship landing in Hyle's Cradle, arm a bomb full of metal-eating microbes, detonate the bomb and make out clean and easy on a ship that's waiting for us in Reefhall, then jump back to Hyle's Cradle. I had a bad taste in my mouth, so of course I was game. Once, I was running a survey mission on a planet long-gone from the Frydheld Sector with some kids who had just enlisted. We took the Scout ship down into the atmosphere and landed on this tall hill amidst a great field of trees. There were some native people, human, like most of the Frydhelders were before we got there, prostrate on the ground before us like we were gods. Not even a day had passed before one of them had buried his cock in one of them and started pumping with wild abandon. I remember the way our bullets ripped through his chest, like pushing bloody fingers through a layer of clay, and burrowed into the chest of his lover and the rest of the people on that planet.
I had met the Scout Psychiatrist who had evaluated me after we had finished the genocide earlier that day and asked him if he wanted to tag along on our mission. He agreed. He wasn't really a psychologist, he had divulged to me 6 years ago that his license was a fake, but he was a friend. He had those same eyes, like children's eyes as they rip into a present, this sort of wondrous malice at tearing something open to see the beating heart inside. Broom Yang was his "real name" though with people like that you can hardly tell.
It was trivial for Yang to forge some documents putting us on the Inner Band ship, and his connections with people were always good enough to get us in touch with some dockworker willing to hook us up with some fatigues. He was hispanic, scrawny little man, and Broom gave him far too much money for the disguises. Did he feel bad?
We made it on the ship without trouble and working there was easy. Once, my scout ship's engine went out as we were pulling off of some shithole planet being chased by some cephalopod big enough to shake your chest when it sang a quarter kilometer away. I remember watching its body twist up out of the water we had just escaped, seeing its black eyes turned toward us with a hatred tempered by its long life, while I was arms deep in the private parts of my jump drive. The kickback from the engine burnt my partner alive, squirting out superheated water from the pipes we were working on directly into his face. The jump drive mechanic at the court martial said it was a coin flip and that there was nothing I could've done. I went home afterwards and sat in my apartment smelling burnt flesh on my already-washed-a-dozen-times skin for the rest of the afternoon.
When we came aboard there was some problem with one of the stoves in the ship's galley. Lieber did something to it and it blew up in our Section Chief's face, covering his body with hot grease and hotter flames. The doors sealed shut and by the time I could pry them open he was nearly charred to a crisp. Peeling him, still alive, off the floor of the ship reminded me of the time I'd had a few big wigs out on a safari far out of the Inner Band's reaches. One of them, this fat fucker who smelt of spoiled milk and spoke like he had a kazoo wedged up his ass, had tripped and fallen onto this big floral pod which had burst and coated his flabby white back and ass in acid. We spent the afternoon peeling him off the flower by the layers of his skin; if we hadn't brought back the body they would've assumed we had killed him. The Inner Band's politics were rough at the time. Rougher than now, maybe.
Lieber saw his chance and took it, did something in the engineering room to put out the flames. Destabilized the sleeping pods for the marines at the same time. Ran in, shouting "I've got a 2nd Level Medical License!" and killed almost all of the people he administered aid to. Ran off to get a reprimand from the Captain. The next time I saw him he was grinning wildly and ordered us to retrieve our plastic weaponry (gifts provided to us by the lady who'd given us the job). I had mine on me already, but Yang had to go stumbling into his quarters. He was cute, in a way.
We took over the ship shortly thereafter, Lieber stuck in that battle dress was a formiddable foe and no one on the bridge wanted to try him. He ordered the oxygen sucked out of all the rooms but the bridge. I pulled Yang through the airlock just as he came stumbling around the corner with his Sword clutched to his chest like a bundle of flowers and the hiss of the air leaving the rooms behind him chasing him like a ghost. We were among the last alive. Lieber broke all the vacc-suits save two for Yang and I and we waited the three weeks we had until coming out of jump.
The assumption the engineers make about the Inner Band ships is that the crew is confident in their ability to move to and from various parts of the ship at all times, so things like food are typically stored in central places on the ship with lots of access. Almost immediately it became clear that Yang and I would have to go get more food. With only 3 of us holding the ~5ish people hostage, it made more sense to leave Lieber alone with them than to leave us, where there was a chance we'd be overpowered. "We could always eat the corpses!" Lieber said gleefully. On my last mission before I was released from service, the scout ship we were on (not mine, never mine, I take care of my equipment) went down on an archipelago world on the fringe planets of a known system. A lightning storm or magnetic resonance with the jump drive (did the bastard flying the thing forget to turn off the jump drive?) I was the only survivor in the wreckage. There was no food on the island and nothing on the horizon worth attempting a swim to. By the time a ship had flown close enough to the planet to spot my distress beacon, there were no more corpses either.
Yang and I left to get food. The gravity had been taken away with the oxygen, it seemed, so I had to coach Yang through how to move in low gravity.
I had figured over the couple days we had at that point that if there were marines still left alive and able to get into their suits in time that they'd probably wait and ambush us when we left in Vacc-suits to go get food, so I was cautious moving through the mess hall and the hallways leading to it. We took the doors like I'd learned in the Scouts and moved through the hall and into the scorched galley like water. When Yang pushed the door open a metal straw about the size of a pencil darted out from the top of the door and punched a hole in his skull. The skull fragment it punched out was shot across the room, floating a few inches left of my face.
I fired into the wall above the door and hit a metal spider drone, which skuttled out and around the store room and leapt onto Yang. The plastic SMGs we'd been given wasn't tough enough to hurt the damn thing nearly at all. Yang had left them behind. "When you get to be my age, you don't want to carry those heavy things around any more!" He had quipped when I'd asked him about not bringing it on board. He had settled for just a sword. The spider latched on to his upper body and the straw arced around his face and dove into the puncture wound it had created in his head. I kicked off a wall and impaled the thing just in time for the electrical current flowing through his head to finally pop it like a watermelon. I hadn't seen blood in zero gravity in ages. The skull fragment clinked softly against my vacc-suit visor while I stood there.
Yang had kissed me a few days after we snuck onto the ship. The way his body felt pressed against mine was like touching microfiber with dry, cracked hands. Could I have ever learned to enjoy him?
Three days before we came out of jump the automated systems started reporting about a problem with the life support. Lieber's battle dress was of course in no danger of running out of oxygen, but my stolen vacc-suit was in no condition to last the entire 3 days. Lieber looked at me and I folded the keys of my scout ship in his hands. "Fuck you!" His eyes were smiling effigies of Inner Band top brass burnt alive and by them sang a choir sure that victory had come at last held in the hands of Sir Hart Lieber. So I went to Life Support.
9 of the spider bots had stuck onto the life support system, using their probiscis mouths to apply a disruptive current. I threw an empty magazine into the room and the discharge from the spiders vaporized it before it could hit the other wall. Eventually, I was able to construct a long tube and break off the proboscises of the spiders, which then fell inert to the ground. 3 of them, though, were able to activate. I ran.
Of course it was fruitless. Their metal straws and legs built for zero gravity were too fast. I passed out from the pain of their digging meters away from the air lock into the bridge.
It's so cold here. I have memories of their memories of their long metal straws snaking their way through my throat and up into my sinuses, caressing the brain-blood barrier with their gentle metal sensor-hairs until their patience grew thin waiting to be granted entry and so they made one as Christ did when he left his grave and they wrapped their straws gently around the curves and folds of me and send subtle electricity to my thoughts even now. My hands criss and cross in an engine room filled with explosive purpose that is not mine and I am deafened by the roar of Jump Drives. The roar of an explosion which fills me with pleasure I should not have shears and separates metal from metal nearby. The nauseating spin of being space debris and knowing you will never slow down. The recoil of a gun, foreign in my hands and mind in this state, and the fated grin of a devil I knew once escaping on an Air Raft.
Where am I?
A play report for Frydheld Sector