Duty Calls

The bridge of the Nightstalker was quiet.

The bridge crew sat at their stations. Jolt sat in the command chair, following the event journals as they prepared to free themselves from the thin layer of radioactive cobalt coating the hull. Thresher's torso was duct-taped to a chair in front of the engineering station. Although he seemed to be grievously injured and unconscious, he had patched his robotic voluntary nervous system to his station's command interface. He was rerouting electrical power in the maze of conduits beneath the hull to align their magnetic fields precisely.

The Eye kept watch at the helm. The star-ship's short range sensors were almost useless due to the intensely radioactive film of metal that clung to the outside of the ship, but she was able to use the interrociter to get usable data to feed the fire control and tactical maneuver systems. This allowed the Nightstalker a zone of control covering 10,000 cubic kilometers of space. Since the Nightstalker was quite literally going nowhere anytime soon, this was enough to ensure that they didn't run into anything or anyone until the crisis was resolved.

The First Mate stood next to Jolt's command chair, and reviewed the project checklist on an overhead monitor.

Behind him, Thresher lifted his head and said, "Electrical conduits aligned."

The First Mate gave the cyborg a curt, telegenic nod, and checked the box on the touch-screen with grace and élan.

Executive Officer Benito Franco was the youngest officer ever commissioned by the Corporate Drama Academy. He and Jolt turned to each other, and Jolt gave the order.

"Energize." Powerful electrical currents created a powerful magnetic field that enveloped the entire hull. The cobalt was strongly magnetically permeable. Magnetic domains aligned, and the thin film was quickly magnetized.

Jolt turned around the other way to face Thresher. "How long will we need to magnetize the film?"

"Not very long at all. I think it will be ready in a few minutes." Despite missing the lower half of his cyborg body, Thresher seemed surprisingly lively. "Once it's magnetized, we can reverse the polarity and send pulses of current down the conduits in the opposite direction. The magnetic fields will repel, blasting the metal off the hull."

Jolt smiled at Thresher. "Great work! I'm proud of you guys."

The First Mate peered at the overhead monitor. "Captain, there's an incoming transmission, encrypted." He poked at the comms interface. "Key signature matches Arsenal."

Jolt turned towards the static-filled view-screen. "What? Didn't they find a body? Put this on the main screen."

Peter lay face-down on a bed, partially covered with a thin sheet. Jinx, dressed in a robe, sat down next to him and touched a spot on his back. Peter lifted his head, grinned and began to hum.

Jinx giggled and then gestured towards the end of the bed. "Hey, your encryption thingy finally finished handshaking. I think you have a connection to the Nightstalker."

Peter looked directly into the camera, and quickly leaped up. Thinking quickly, he just managed to cover himself a little with the sheet.

Jinx leaned back and waved at the camera. "Hiya, Sparky!"

Peter put himself together as best he could. He looked straight into the camera with an air of forced disinterest and saluted.

Jolt was not impressed. She sank into her captain's chair and rubbed her temples. The Eye and the First Mate gazed into the view-screen. The Eye's expression was a mixture of amusement and disgust. Thresher seemed consumed by vicarious embarrassment. The First Mate was simply dumbstruck.

"Arsenal here. Did you receive my message? We have a second image from a fighter simulator -- with a little luck, we should be able to reconstruct the attack plan by analyzing M-Seven's simulations."

Jolt looked at the view-screen through the corner of her eye. "What, that huge message that crashed my Inbox?"

"Yeah. That was an executable image of the simulators they used to train the fleet. I've lost my copy, but if you guys could sync with us, we might be able to re-construct the entire attack plan."

"We calculated where the fleet might re-materialize. Sedgewick Station is within the first standard deviation of the target distribution, so we're pretty sure they're going there." Jolt studiously avoided looking at the view-screen.

She turned to the slack-jawed First Mate. "Ben, open a data session."

"Yes, ma'am."

The sync operation quickly compared the images. Streams of data flowed to and from the Nightstalker and Jinx's ship. Jinx looked straight into the camera. "So, our ship has M-Seven livery. We can join up with the attackers--"

Jolt looked at Jinx with a withering glance, and interrupted her. "Did I ask you to speak? I don't remember asking you anything."

Peter spoke up. "It's a good idea. Once we know what they have planned, we might be able to disrupt their operations at a critical point. Attacking from surprise--"

"Yeah, that's not bad. We'll be there. You should try to land on the first wave and assist the defenders."

"Understood, Captain." Peter nodded. "We'll be in touch in a few hours once we've analyzed the composite image."

Jolt scowled at the screen. "Good. Put some clothes on next time. Close transmission."

The crew of the Nightstalker paused for a moment. Jolt then got out of the command chair and turned to her First Mate.

"Ben, you take over. I'm going to go soak my brain in warm soapy water."

Beyond Belief

Jinx looked down at her fists and laughed a little.

"Huh. You tagged out."

"Yep." Peter stood in front of her with his arms folded.

"It must be my charming personality." Jinx smiled at Peter in mock flirtation.

"I'm immune. Type 350 clones have extraordinarily low sex drives. Anyway, you ripped out my larynx with your -- uh -- sharp thing." Peter was a little taken aback, and rubbed his throat.

"It's a war spork. A weapon developed from a very old tool for skinning fresh kills." Jinx pulled the war spork from the inside of her jacket, and pointed to the parts of the weapon as she continued. "The spike penetrates the carcass, then you run it along the side to separate the skin and fat from the meat. You can then use the spoon part to scrape fat and muscle off the skin for curing."

"That was totally educational. Creepy, too."

"M-Seven, at your service. We're all about the old creepy stuff. There are some neat sword and spear-breaking techniques you can do with it." Jinx demonstrated a few quick strokes with the weapon. Peter kept his arms folded in front of him as Jinx stabbed the air.

Peter looked at Jinx. "Would you put that thing away?"

"Don't be scared -- it's just a tool. I put a whammy on it that attacked your nervous system. It's hard to defend yourself when you can't think or move -- not that that stopped you from trying."

"I did my best. It's hard to keep your balance when you can't feel anything."

"That's what I told the judge at my last drunk and disorderly trial." Jinx nodded towards the exit of the living area, and tucked her weapon back into her inside jacket pocket. "Let's take a look while we still have some time."

"Yeah, let's do that. I'm curious."

They walked into the courtyard, where a hole filled with ashes marked the location of a former fire pit. Peter looked into the hole filled with ashes as Jinx picked up a battered piece of colorful cardboard from the ground.

Jinx gestured to Peter. "Come here! They must be shutting down the training program -- this is one of the lottery cards they used to select new recruits."

Peter looked over Jinx's shoulder at the battered piece of cardboard marked with purple numbers. "A lottery?"

Classical lotteries, where prizes are simply given to those who had the dumb luck to have a certain number of matches to the randomly drawn numbers, were extremely uncommon. The most popular games were cumulative lotteries, where players collected matches from daily drawings and tried to place them in winning "hands" to claim prizes from the pot.

The lottery card was printed with a gaudy holographic pattern to discourage forgery and changing made bets. Based on a small section of the card, a lottery operator could uniquely identify it and its corresponding series of bets.

Jinx looked at Peter as he examined the matrix of numbers marked with stamps. She found that she could still read his face and imagine what was going on in his head simply by examining his expression. Discovering that she could, she did -- until she realized with a start that he was now looking at her with the same probing gaze.

They broke eye contact, and each took half-a-step away from the other in an attempt to re-assert their personal spaces. There was an awkward moment. Jinx's gaze sank to the dusty ground as she imagined for a moment what Peter must be thinking. Peter briefly seemed stunned, uncertain what to say or do next.

When he broke his silence, Jinx felt suddenly sad and ashamed. "Were you trying to do something to my mind?"

"No. Not anything paranormal, anyway." She stopped for a moment to push the shame from her mind. "I fed on your essence. I took into myself what makes you the person you are. This has some side effects. Right now, I feel a connection to you because we are looking at the same things, and responding to them in similar ways. This creates a context of shared feelings that--"

Jinx stopped, and was relieved when Peter continued her thought. "That enable us to connect emotionally? Have a relationship?"

The absurdity of what Peter said made her laugh a little inside. "Yeah. That's what normals feel when they fall in love. I told you that you shouldn't have come back."

"It's not voluntary, and that wasn't the first time." Peter seemed to relax a little. "I've been coming back from the dead pretty regularly since I discovered I had powers."

Jinx briefly considered the implications of what Peter said. "Does anyone know you're an immortal?"

"They must know. No one has ever asked me about it, though."

"Immortality really screws with people's heads. With a savings account and a couple of millennia you could end up owning the Corporation."

Peter looked at Jinx carefully. "What about you? You must be older than you look."

"It's complicated. This body was born about a century before the Last War on the Home-world."

"That's... three hundred years?"

"As long as I find souls to consume, I won't age or weaken." She felt ashamed. "It's not the same as immortality. Demons are parasites. As soon as the last sapient species goes extinct, our kind will perish."

Peter looked at Jinx's face and his mind wrestled with unaccustomed concepts. "Why do you look so sad?"

"This isn't how things are supposed to work. I hurt you and exploited you and--" Jinx discovered that talking about it made it worse.

Peter walked to her and took her hands. She looked into his eyes, and felt... something. She was having trouble giving it a name.

"They grew me in a vat, Jinx. I've been exploited since I was an embryo. It stopped hurting a long time ago."

His words comforted her, and she wondered why that was so. "We should go back to my ship, get drunk, and have meaningless sex. It's the only way to nip this in the bud. Discover the idol has feet of clay..."

"I have a better idea. Let's figure out where the fleet is going to attack, lay in a course, and then have drunken, meaningless sex."

She looked at him and they both smiled. "Gold star for robot boy..."

Silver Rocket

Jinx looked at the figure unexpectedly standing beside her. He was dressed in a nearly featureless slate grey unitard with a prominent insignia on his chest -- a stylized capital letter A in silver that vaguely resembled an old-style rocket with fins. His white furred face smiled at her, but his green eyes seemed to have trouble focussing.

"How the HELL did you just--"

"Woah. That was the edge of the freaking Universe! I fell off reality, and patched my state before I drifted into the void..." Arsenal paused for a moment, then gathered his wits and looked at Jinx. "...sorry if I'm rambling. I'm still adapting to time being all linear again."

"Listen, lady -- who is this dude?" A young man waved his plasma rifle in an unmistakable pantomine of taking aim.

Jinx stared the young man with the gun down. "It's a new ultra-realistic, semi-autonomous illusion spell I'm working on. This is supposed to be Arsenal --"

The young man looked at Arsenal. He let his rifle hang on its strap over his shoulder and rubbed his chin. "You messed up his costume. The real Arsenal doesn't have a chrome dick on his chest."

"That's not a penis! It's a silver rocket!" Arsenal was defensive, and pointed at his chest insignia.

"It totally looks like an erection, dude."

Jinx teleported inconspicuously beside the young man and squinted at Arsenal's chest. "That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?"

"Howcum it can talk?" The young man smiled.

"That's what I meant by semi-autonomous. I can use it to infiltrate Honor Guard." Peter seemed to understand what Jinx was playing at, and stood quietly in front of the other two.

"Cool." The soldier seemed impressed.

They both laughed, and Jinx's eyes locked for a fraction of a second with the young soldier's. This was enough for her mind to touch his with a numbing warmth. "You should lay off the paint fumes, son -- remember that one time you totally forgot you met me and I showed you this neat illusion?"

"Yeah, totally. I gotta get back on patrol."

"You do that." Jinx smiled sweetly at him, and closed the telepathic link. "Be seeing you!"

The soldier walked away. Jinx's face became hard as she swung back to face Peter.

"You can't do that! You SHOULDN'T do that --"

"Time comes all unravelled. I found an eigenstate before you beat me up and replicated it here."

"In a lame new costume with a stylized boner on your chest."

Peter rubbed the spot on the back of his neck where his communications implant used to be. "Stupid! I forgot my implants."

"Considering that you're deep in enemy territory, that's probably for the best. Let's get out of here!" Jinx turned to leave, peering back over her shoulder to see if Peter was following her.

He wasn't. His eyes narrowed as he looked at Jinx. "Wait a minute. I think I might want to beat you up and trash this terrorist base."

Jinx turned around and walked towards him. She held her fists in front of her.

"No, you won't. Tag me."

"What?"

"I want you to tag out. I can stop the operation in about a minute if I get in close enough to the fleet. Tag out -- this is my job."

"You're kidding me!"

"I'm serious. I promised you that before you died."

"But I came back!"

"I don't share your cavalier attitude towards death. Tag out."

Peter looked at Jinx's fists, hesitated for a moment, and tagged out.

Who Is Number Seven?

ONE is ALL, EACH and EVERY one
TWO has the DREAM that LEADS US ON
THREE is the BEAST that FIGHTS to SURVIVE
FOUR is the MACHINE that KEEPS US ALIVE
FIVE is the ANGEL that SEES US THROUGH
SIX is the DEVIL that GIVES HER DUE

WHO is NUMBER SEVEN?

Two minds shared one skull, looking at a garish, cheaply printed promotional poster for M-Seven. Jinx seized the moment when Peter weakened and began to feed on him. His thoughts and instinctual reactions began to flow into her. Pushing her psychic advantage, she dissolved the borders delimiting her inner world. His personality, stunned and dazed, could see what she saw, and feel what she felt.

The flow of energy never seemed to end. She felt intoxicated.

She walked into the common area of the refugee camp wearing a giddy smile. The residents ignored her, although a few of them gave her fearful looks and hurried away, carrying bundles full of their few personal possessions on their backs. One old-looking woman, mane streaked with grey, held her scrawny baby closer, and turned away to shield him from Jinx's gaze.

Jinx felt a surge of sentimental warmth as she realized that that woman and her child would likely have died were it not for the food and medicine secured by her recent raids on cargo ships. Her mind toyed with the unaccustomed emotion, and as she grasped it, she felt a certain sadness that the woman was afraid of her benefactor.

Everyone had left. She was -- or, more exactly, they were -- alone.

Peter's voice in her mental ear sounded drowsy, almost sedated. "Why are they scared of you?"

"They think I'm the devil."

"You aren't? I'm having trouble concentrating..." Peter's mental voice was weak.

"Don't be. I promised I'd prove you wrong, and I keep my promises." Jinx, on the other hand, seemed stronger than ever. She was animated -- she paced, pointed, and seemed enchanted by the world and the things in it.

"How's that coming?" Peter was tired, and seemed to be fading away.

"Poorly. Did you see how that poster just sort of jumped out at us when we walked into the living quarters? "

"Yeah. It was impossible to ignore."

"Well, look in the corners of the room." Jinx pointed to the tent poles holding up the walls to the sleeping area. Each had a polished circle carved into their shafts. "Little stylized eyes, watching everything you do. No dividing walls, no privacy." Jinx was agitated.

"I don't think I follow you."

"It's a conditioning chamber. The subject is either given a positive stimulus, or has a negative stimulus removed, and is placed in a controlled environment where they know they're being watched. In this case, by providing food and shelter, we lessen survival pressures. Then the subject is exposed to a stimulus -- like that poster. The result is a sensitization, an enhanced response."

"To what?"

"The poster asks, 'Who is Number Seven?'. The answer, implicitly, is 'You are'. Given a population that's already being selected by a hostile environment --"

"--you mean people who are used to starving on the street --"

"--you have a pretty good chance of finding people who can beat the odds, who have a little edge. Feed them, and tell them a story where they may be the hero, and you've got an organized mob, the nucleus of an army."

"So you agree with me? You agree that this operation is a real threat?" Peter was obviously weary, but seemed to recover a little strength as he saw his idea validated.

"I need to understand what you are thinking before I can tear it apart. There's some superficial evidence to support your point of view. In fact, I see evidence that Demonslayer is trying to sensitize people with unusual survival skills -- stuff like precognition and probability manipulation. Most people who have abilities like that never notice them, and they're common powers in the general population." Jinx twitched a little. An observer could be forgiven for thinking that she was high on cocaine or in the middle of a powerful manic episode.

"The idea that bad guys care about the truth is a new one on me."

"I do, and the buzz I'm getting from your life energy makes it easy and fun!"

"You suck." Peter paused for a little. "What about the consequences of your actions? Do you ever seek the truth about them?"

"Cognitive dissonance is a girls' best friend." Jinx was flippant.

"Cognitive dissonance isn't just for bad people. We're cops, and we're supposed to protect and help the innocent, right? Except actually doing the job means giving people a hard time -- even if they didn't do anything wrong." Peter's ebbing strength made him become reflective.

This carried over to Jinx, who paused her pacing for a moment of thought. "I don't think the problem is thinking social norms don't apply to you. I think the problem is thinking they don't apply to anyone."

"Anomie is a pretty word." Peter seemed to be falling asleep.

"Yes, but a terrible concept. I have to deal with people like that all the damned time, and it's tiring always having to watch your back." The thoughtful moment was persisting longer than Jinx had expected.

"It doesn't have to be that way."

"Oh really?"

"No. You can choose to deal with people who aren't like that."

This stopped Jinx cold. She suddenly felt very uncomfortable with herself.

"I'm a lion, seeking whom I may devour. How should someone like me survive in polite society?" Jinx's inner voice was sad.

"The same way the animal does -- by consuming the sick and the weak."

"You're not thinking clearly."

"No, I'm not. I'm just trying to understand what you are." They both paused for a long moment. "I can't hold on anymore. I think I'm ready to go."

"Just a minute. I'll help."

Inside Jinx's mindscape, the light had faded. Peter lay, emaciated and trembling, on the undefined ground. Jinx walked to him, and he struggled to lift his head to look at her.

Jinx's eyes glowed with a brilliant blue light. She knelt down to look at him. Peter was trembling. "I'm very weak. I'm not sure I can make it."

"You can. It's not that far." She felt sad, and did not know why.

Peter lay his head back on the ground. "I'm scared."

"It will be over soon."

"Promise me you'll stop Demonslayer's plan." Peter did not look at Jinx. He was trembling.

"I will. I swear it."

Peter rolled into a ball, and with great effort rolled over on all fours. He lifted his head and looked at the threshold into the eternal darkness.

"Thank you." His jaw set, and he dragged himself on his hands and knees over the threshold.

Jinx remained for a long moment, kneeling and looking into the abyss. She shook her head, rose to her feet, and re-entered the world of the living.

She opened her eyes, and saw a young man in ragged clothes point a plasma rifle at her. Jinx scowled at him. "Put that thing down."

"I heard voices." The young man was obviously nervous. "Who were you talking to?"

"Oh, that was just a magical excercise. It's like meditation, but out loud."

"Uh-huh. And who's that guy standing next to you?" The young man was suspicious.

Jinx looked to her left, and could not contain her shock.

"Please don't kill him." The man who shouldn't be there was whispering to her. Jinx recovered her composure.

"Oh, you SUCK!"

Delays and Revisions

Further episodes of the story are coming "Real Soon Now" (TM).

I hope this doesn't alienate the few people who are trying to follow the story, but I think it's necessary. Here's why:

I've gotten a fair number of words down, largely because I am essentially publishing first drafts. The point of this blog is to serve as a notebook for my development of this story. However, a story is an agglomeration of small points -- think of stacking grains of sand to build a sandcastle.

Right now, I've got my sandcastle about in the right shape, but the foundations need to be strengthened. There are stylistic problems with my first drafts that need to be fixed.

I welcome any suggestions.

In the meantime, I will make an effort to finish up the current story-line, and then turn to cleaning things up and making the earlier episodes more presentable.

Thanks!

Dead Reckoning

The cloud of fighters pulled away from the Nightstalker. Every second two or three would blink out of normal space-time.

"We only have a few minutes!" cried Jolt. "Thresher -- can we jump?"

"You don't want to follow them, do you?" The First Mate was alarmed.

Thresher checked his displays. "Hyperdrives are online, charge at 80 percent -- ready when you are."

Jolt turned to the First Mate. "No, following them would be suicide. We're going to acquire their hyper-vector!"

Turning back to look at The Eye, Jolt continued giving orders. "Eye -- take helm control. Pure evasive maneuvers, we're just taking pictures."

"I see." The First Mate paused and considered. "That's actually a good idea. We can narrow down the region of space they might re-appear. I'll paint them with our targeting computer -- then we can crunch the data." He took position on the weapons console.

The Nightstalker peeled away from normal space, and entered hyperspace.

It was surrounded by a bubble of Euclidian 3-space, and moving in a region with at least 7 macroscopic dimensions. The ship's interocciter scanned the convoluted manifolds of hyperdimensional regions of equilibrium of gravitiational potentials, where similar bubbles enclosing the fleeing fighters could exist.

"Now entering the first valence. I have a drive signature! Power at 77%." Thresher monitored the ship's systems on his console.

Two bubbles of Euclidian space met and merged. The fighter blinked into and out of existence in front of the Nightstalker as the starship briefly matched the fighter's frame of reference.

"We got a lock-on! Keep going, we don't know if they're all going the same place!" The First Mate was excited.

"That was a good one. I have a full interocciter scan of the vessel." Thresher watched the data pump along a schematic progress bar from the front sensor array to the main computers.

Up left counter-clockwise an elongated bubble untwirled over a local vortex, surrounding a pair of fighters flying on the buddy system.

Shocked to see Corporate corvette spin into their context, the rear pilot, Bob-Luke, radioed his companion, Dworkin.

"Whoa! Look at that!"

Dworkin turned a key in his cramped cockpit and fumbled to enter a four-digit code on a small key-pad taped to the dashboard of his fighter. A cyan light lit by a display labelled "WARHEADS ARMED."

"Got a shot -- I'm taking it!" Dworkin's trigger finger twitched on the fighter's yoke.

Two missles steamed from the racks beneath the fighter's stubby wings. The flight path to the Nightstalker was short and straight, and the warheads detonated just behind the corvette.

A tiny nuclear charge detonated, and the pulse of radiation and neutron flux struck a thick layer of cobalt alloy, vaporizing it and transmuting the metal into a souce of bio-toxic gamma radiation. The explosion of super-heated plasma was not as brisant as a proper warhead for space combat, but the expanding wave of irradiated cobalt held on for considerably longer before decaying.

The idea behind a bug bomb is not to create a huge crater, but to spread a powerful yet short-lived gamma emitter over as broad an area as possible in on a planet with an atmosphere. In space, the plasma cloud spread and cooled quickly, attenuating the effect of the nuclear charge.

The shock waves impacted the Nightstalker, shaking the hull. A frost-like layer of radioactive cobalt alloy cooled and condensed onto the hull of the corvette, flash-frozen by the ship's shields.

"Dworkin? Are you all right?" Bob-Luke radioed his companion.

Dworkin smiled as the NIghtstalker struggled to stay in hyperspace. "Got the bastards! You go, farm boy! Make your momma proud."

"I ain't Number Seven, ma'am. Not even close." The young man sounded scared.

"Yes, you are, boy. You're the one..." Dworkin dropped out of hyperspace, leaving her wingman to continue to the target.

On the bridge of the Nightstalker, panic reigned. Thresher checked his displays.

"The data feed made it to the main computer before the rads scrambled our sensors. What a mess!" Thresher was secretly dreading the clean-up action that would come next. While he was largely radiation-proof, the clean-up and disposal protocols were arduous; it was going to be a very long extra-vehicular activity before their ship could return to settled space.

Jolt scowled as she sunk into the captain's chair. "Dammit, we've been slimed."

On the surface of Suburbia Prime, a small figure entered the courtyard of a hurriedly abandoned tent city. She looked down at her jacket.

She was wearing her M-Seven badge. She was Number Six. If anyone were still keeping lookout here, in this desolate former place of temporary industry, they might hold her for a friend and ally.

Jinx Bubastis proceeded into the courtyard, and passed by a still-smoldering firepit. Clothing and papers were blowing in the wind. A thread-bare baby doll lay in the dusty debris. Jinx looked at it, and felt a swell of memory.

She had been feeling strange since her encounter with Peter. Her powers were vastly reduced -- most of her abilities were locked up in the crude parody of the material world he had constructed in her mind. She was having difficulty concentrating, and suspected that Peter was having similar problems.

Under ordinary circumstances, she would banish the thoughts from her mind, but now her mind was not entirely her own, and she did not have the strength to push her thoughts and feelings away.

She looked at the doll, and remembered another camp, a long way from here. Her father had left an hour ago, gone to find wood for the cooking fire. She was playing with her battered doll when she heard a young hunter rushing into the camp. She threw the doll down into the dust, much like the one she was looking at now.

She did not understand what he was yelling. Behind him, two men carried a slumping form in a blanket.

She remembered being hungry, and followed them into the central clearing, hoping to get a slice of tongue from the hunters' kill. As she wobbled towards them on her little girl legs, they unwrapped the blanket.

It was not a carcass, but a corpse. Her father's chest had been torn open by shrapnel. Her hunger turned suddenly to horror, as she contemplated eating his tongue.

From inside her mind, Peter's voice begged quietly, "Make it stop. Make it stop..."

She pushed the memory away, and with it the protests of her prisoner. "Suck it up, vat-meat." The rage and shame from the memory gave her a renewed sense of focus.

Now she felt a strange sort of curiousity, a nervous, jittery drive to know. She remembered feelings like this, when she was studying sorcery, but this was different -- a heartfelt yearning for things to make sense, a joy in understanding. It was a strangely intoxicating and pleasant feeling.

She triggered the elevator to the underground warehouse. The lights went on, illuminating containers in neat rows. She opened one of them, and she felt a wave of excitement. Her incuriousity about her colleagues' plans seemed strange to her now.

Approaching the cubical console, she reached for the back and flipped the latches with an unfamiliar movement that was suddenly second nature to her. Detaching the storage module from the internal bus, she held it in her hand and smiled.

Soon, they would know for sure.

What Exactly Does Regret Mean?

Her bunk was cramped, but Jinx Bubastis had been in space so long that she felt uncomfortable in an open bed. Her quarters were orderly, yet cramped -- she used what little free room there was to store the cases for her recording equipment.

She rolled out of bed at lights-on, pulled on a robe over her nightshirt, and sat down at a table with a mirror and double-headed sonic brush. Jinx stuck the small head into her mouth and started to clean her teeth.

She saw Peter in the mirror, sitting on the case of her psychogram. She retrieved the remote control for the psychogram and started recording. "Good morning. You learn irritatingly quickly."

"You have to let me out."

"The way out is easy, but you're not going to like it. Let me finish brushing my teeth." Jinx took a swig of water between her cheek and gum and stuck the brush into the accumulated water. She swallowed and entered a trance, joining Peter in her mindscape.

The changes were subtle, but Jinx noticed them instantly. Instead of a dimensionless white space, Peter's prison had a clearly defined floor.

She looked at him, obviously puzzled. Peter explained, "I tried to reconfigure the environment into something I could work with. I've blasted my way out of extradimensional prisons before."

Jinx was agitated.

"Unfortunately, you stopped breathing for about a minute after I put this environment together. I didn't want to take any chances--" Peter seemed hopeless.

"You had the chance to kill me in my sleep and you didn't? Why?" Jinx was angry.

"Because it would be wrong." Peter seemed strengthened by saying this.

"I beat you up, tore out your throat, ate your soul and damned you to hell. I think you have the right to take vengeance." Jinx sneered.

"Then two people die instead of one." Peter stood his ground.

Jinx became angry. "I'm not a person, I'm a monster! Are you such a self-righteous moron you can't even pretend you value life?"

"I do value life--"

"If you aren't willing or able to exercise your rights, you might as well not have any. It's an empty pretense if you don't follow through."

"You want me to kill you?"

"I'd like to see you try."

"No. No, you seriously wouldn't. Because I can." A touch of fear crept into Peter's voice.

Jinx paused for a moment and felt the air surrounding her. Peter had bound vast amounts of ectoplasm together into a crude parody of matter. A rapid state transition could blast both of them apart.

"Like I said, there's another way out."

"You said I wouldn't like it." Peter was calm.

"You won't. Somewhere here is a threshold. You'll find it when you can imagine a world without you, but I very much doubt you are mentally and spiritually equipped to concieve of a world without your petty moral certainties--"

"What, over there?" Peter pointed to a grey curtain that stretched away in both directions into the ghostly mists.

Caught in the middle of her stream of invective, Jinx rallied in an instant. "You suck."

"I can't cross. I tried that first." Peter seemed nervous.

Jinx's momentum, first slowed, now stopped. She paused for a moment, and contemplated the situation, recognizing the stand-off. "It takes most people a long time before they can. Something's keeping you here."

"I... I have some unfinished business." Peter looked at Jinx.

"What?" Jinx was curious.

"I'm worried about the attack on Sedgewick Station..." Peter seemed uncomfortable, and uncertain how to continue.

Jinx tried for a few seconds to keep a straight face, but eventually burst out into laughter.

"You've got to be kidding me! You seriously think Team Evil's ill-conceived plan is going to mean a damned thing in the grand scheme of things? I think you're taking show-biz a little too seriously, man..."

"That's the thing. The scale of the operation was too large. They must have had some kind of logistical support--"

"Uh, yeah. That was my job. Seriously, if Demonslayer had anything planned after the fighters launched, she sure didn't tell anybody about it."

"But... why bother, then? Are you sure she had no plan?"

"Peter, it's... it's just a game. They blow stuff up, get a subcontractor to rebuild it -- it keeps the wheels turning. It doesn't mean a damend thing in the end. This time, they got rid of a bunch of bums without paying for relocation and rehab. It's not real."

"How can you be so sure, Jinx? I think your cynicism blinds you--"

"Lucky for me you're a rational being. I think I can prove your concerns unfounded. Just one little piece of evidence that it's all a scam, and you can go."

Jinx shook her head dismissively and disappeared.

She sat down on her bunk, looked in the mirror, and saw no Peter. She smiled, and paused the psychogram.