Starmind Chapter 58 (Patreon)

“It’s alive.”

Temeri said the words like she was trying to swallow them, which wasn’t exactly a promising reaction to the news of Fever’s new personhood. “It’s alive, and it has a class. And you’re sure about that.”

“Sure am!” I said, countering her worry with enthusiasm. “And so is Harvin! Right, Harvin?”

“There’s definitely something there,” Harvin agreed. “A mind for sure, and where there’s a mind, there’s a soul. It’s truly alive, no less than Star. I can’t interpret it any other way.”

“And now, Star,” Temeri said slowly, “you want to give it back control of its ship.”

“I will give it back control of its ship,” I corrected her. I didn’t like taking that kind of tone with her; it didn’t feel very helpful to just tell her something that was going to happen no matter what she thought about it. It felt a lot more like I was controlling things and she was just along for the ride, which was something I’d come to understand that she was terrified of. But this was simply too important for me to let her talk me out of it. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t deserve to know why I had to do this. “I told Varlanda this before, but the Fever Dream is Fever’s body. Its eyes, its ears, its arms and legs and everything else. Right now it can’t see, or hear, or feel anything, and it’s a surveillance ship! Every moment must be absolutely awful for the poor thing, and I can tell you: when we living ships don’t have anything to do, we can fit a lot of those moments into every second. Honestly, I feel so bad for it that I’d be approaching its body a lot faster if I thought it was safe to do so.”

“But it’s like you,” she countered. “I don’t know if you understand how powerful you are, Star. And we imprisoned its crew! What if it turns on us? Do you have any idea what kind of damage it could do?”

“No, I don’t. But I don’t think it will. It hasn’t assimilated so much as the tiniest fraction of an inch of me, despite its core touching me. And it’s a surveillance ship, Temeri, not a warship. All it wants to do is take care of its crew and keep an eye on that station. It doesn’t want to fight anyone. And even if it did, I don’t think it would want to fight me. We happen to be getting along very well!”

“That’s a relief, at least,” she sighed. “Well, crew, it sounds like this is happening no matter what. I’d still like your thoughts. Any particular considerations that come to mind, anything we can or must do to mitigate risks, things like that. Yes, Alder?”

“We should return its crew and open a dialogue as soon as we possibly can,” Harvin said. “This was never supposed to be adversarial. There’s no reason to change that now. We’re all on the same side as far as I can tell. We all want to know what’s going on with Erebus Prime. And, I mean… they don’t have a reactor. They can’t go anywhere, and they can’t survive without us. Once they can return to the Fever Dream we may as well try to start over and make friends.”

Temeri nodded, her fingers drumming lightly on the table. “Agreed. If we’re going to be stuck with them, which we will be unless we want to abort and return to Sophia, it’ll be a lot easier for everyone if we could get along and cooperate. Yes, Bekeri?”

“We will need to monitor our own reactor carefully,” Bekeri said, his tone leaving no room for discussion. “While we have a slightly oversized reactor for a ship of Star’s original tonnage, during hard acceleration we’ve been running at only a one in five safety margin below the output where we risk degradation or failure. And powering a whole other ship? Just sitting here we’ll be fine, but I shudder to think what would happen if we try to power up the Fever Dream’s drive.”

“Excellent point, Artificer. Star, do you have any suggestions there? I don’t suppose you have a category called Reactor Developments, and I just forgot?”

“Sorry, but no,” I told her. It felt like a terribly glaring omission, but it was what it was. I simply couldn’t improve my reactor in any way except the old-fashioned one. Then a thought struck me. “Oh, but there are things I can do to reduce power usage! I already handle gravity using my own mana instead of letting the generator do it with power from the reactor, so I should be able to do the same thing for heating. And I don’t see why I couldn’t do it onboard Fever, too. Or maybe Fever can do that itself! And, there’s the Thruster Efficiency Development. That should let us run the drives at lower capacity while still producing enough thrust to run away if we have to!”

Temeri brightened at that. “Yes! Good! You’re unlocking sensor Developments now, right?”

“Yep!”

“Alright, let’s see what that gives you once you’re done. Maybe we’re better off squeezing in another efficiency Development or two before doing anything else. And maybe… do your weight reduction Developments affect the Fever Dream as well?”

“I think so. It feels like it, anyway. I think applying my Developments is part of assimilating something.”

“Great! That’s great,” Temeri said, nodding as her fingers drummed faster and faster. Her worry wasn’t exactly gone on the solar wind, but she was in full problem solving mode now, and it was wonderful to see. “Maybe we should consider that, too, then. We’ll just have to do the numbers first, see what’s more time efficient.”

“Just get whichever is faster,” Bekeri said almost immediately then added, “Well… assuming, of course, that it takes the same number of Development levels to halve the mass as it does to double the amount of thrust we can get out a given amount of reactor output.”

“Do we know that?” Varlanda asked. “Star?”

“Um… yes. I think so,” I replied after pondering my Development Matrix for a moment. It didn’t actually say so anywhere, but just like when we’d first installed the Matrix I just felt like it would be ten levels to double the efficiency of my drive, and ten levels to halve the mass of my structure or hull. Which was a small but important detail! “Except there are separate Developments for structure and hull, and my structure is more massive,” I added. “And I can’t do anything about the mass of anything else inside me.”

“Oh, excellent point!” Bekeri said. “We’ll have to factor that in if we want to optimize.”

“What’s your mass distribution?” Temeri asked.

“I don’t actually have any exact numbers now I’ve added the new deck, sorry,” I replied. “My best guess would be about 8000 tons of structure and 1200 tons of hull without Developments, and maybe… 1000 tons of cargo on top of that? We’ve picked up quite a lot of materials. And then… okay, Fever’s telling me it’s pretty light. It’s got a lightweight tonnage of about 1250 tons, with about 1000 tons of structure and 250 tons of hull, and was carrying about 150 tons. It’s not sure how much might’ve been lost when they were damaged, though.”

“9000 tons of structure, 1450 tons of hull, 1150 tons of miscellaneous. Not quite four to one, but close enough,” Temeri mused. “And every Development level takes longer…”

“Doubles every eight or nine levels,” I confirmed helpfully.

“So it’s not quite as simple as five levels of thrust efficiency to four levels of structural mass and one level of hull mass reduction, but we could do worse than that? Do I have that even close to right?”

“With numbers as uncertain as ours, I would certainly say so,” Bekeri said. He sent a questioning look around the table. Harvin shrugged, Simeon gave him a tentative thumbs up, and Varlanda nodded and said, “Sure.”

“Excellent,” Temeri declared. “Star, I’m in no way telling you that you must do this immediately, but if you’d like to aim for that ratio I’d appreciate it.”

“Can do!” Really, I was just glad to have some clear guidelines to follow. I could pick up two more levels in Thruster Efficiency pretty soon, and then another level of Light-weight Structure and one in Light-Weight Hull, and then we should be okay. Though that would have to come after I saw what was available in the Basic Sensor Developments category. And then there were the other categories I hadn’t unlocked, and the Crew Developments I didn’t have yet. And because all of this was limited by how quickly I could regenerate mana I wanted to improve my mana regeneration, which would take time from other Developments.

I really had to focus on how great it was that there were so many ways I could get better at helping my Crew. Otherwise I might get quite frustrated.

While my Crew finally got on with eating their dinner, Fever’s crew finished their bath. They were all very complimentary about it. Even Liri told me that was the best she’d felt for weeks, at which there were a couple of jokes that I didn’t understand but which made her blush and yell at them a bit.

With them all clean and dry, it was time for them to eat, too. Having finished his own meal, Simeon brought them samples of everybody’s respective favorites and explained how the flavors could be adjusted. They didn’t appreciate that as much as they had the bath, but it wasn’t far from it.

“Gods bless you, food that doesn’t taste like pond scum!” Diviner Nahij said after trying the Harvin Special, smiling so wide her face must have hurt. “And you say I can get this with some spice to it?”

The strains of algae and slime mold their life support system used to produce nutrient paste must have been different ones than I had. Mine were, so I’d been told, almost impressively bland.

*

Over two hours later, at a little before 2100 hours, the Fever Dream was finally close enough to dock. While I extruded a docking tunnel, Varlanda and Bekeri disconnected Fever from its temporary position in the cargo hold. Then, once the tunnel was connected and I was sure it was perfectly sealed, I dropped the gravity a bit so they could carry Fever across.

At about 2300 hours they finished the last connections, and Fever was safely back in its own home.

“How are you feeling?” I asked it.

“I don’t have a reactor, so that’s not great,” it replied uncertainly. Then it brightened slightly as it said, “But I can tell that I don’t have a reactor, so that’s a big improvement! And let’s see… yep! Looks like all my sensors are working perfectly! The ones I still had before, I mean. Oh, and this is weird! I can feel my hull! I could never feel anything at all before, I think.”

“That’s such a relief. I didn’t want to say anything, but I was really worried that you wouldn’t be able to after I assimilated your whole body.”

It took a second for Fever to reply to that. “Then what?” it asked. “If that had been the case, then… what?”

“I don’t know, and I’m glad we’ll never find out! Now, how much of your body can you feel?”

“All of it, I think.” Fever paused to consider, then continued with much more confidence. “Yes! All of it! Including a… oh, that’s the docking tunnel, isn’t it? About half of that I think, judging by how long it is. It’s kind of hard to tell.”

“Oh, you’ll get used to it. And was there any delay?”

“No, not really. They set me down and connected me, and everything was just… there.”

So far I couldn’t be happier, but there was so much left to do! Varlanda and Bekeri needed to get back onboard me so they could go to bed, but before they did there was something I wanted Fever to try.

“Can you talk to Varlanda and Bekeri?” I asked. “The way we’re talking now, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Let me… no. No, doesn’t seem like it. Why?”

“Just wanted to know,” I said. “And it’s no problem. You can just talk to them the old fashioned way if you need to.”

“But I should be able to talk to my Crew when they’re onboard, right?”

“I really hope so!”

It was odd that Fever couldn’t talk to my Crew, because, while I hadn’t tried yet, it sure felt like I could have talked to Liri or any of the others. But it was no less strange than it having full sensation throughout its body even after I’d assimilated it. Everything about this was new. Nobody knew anything about Starminds except what we’d figured out in the past six weeks, and we knew even less about Void Minds. And then there was the fact that I’d given Fever a soul, or however that worked. What did that mean for us and our Crews? What did it mean that Fever seemed completely aware of itself and its body from the start, while I had to figure myself out? I had no idea! We’d just have to learn together as we went along.

“Alright!” I told Fever. “Let’s learn some skills!”

One thing I’d worried about was that Fever, never having had a Teleportation Matrix, might not be able to move materials where it needed them. And while that was partially true, in that it couldn’t teleport items the way I could, even simple ones, it could still break things down into their component materials and use those materials to create new Hull. It could reshape itself just like I could, though it was clumsy due to being completely new to it, and it could add and remove material, adding or removing sections of Hull or making them thicker or thinner. It quickly picked up the Structural Modification and Structural Maintenance skills through use, and seeing it happily bumble around, learning by doing as it completely removed every trace of the old damage it had suffered, was just delightful.

It could also move small items around the old fashioned way, with telekinesis, and Telekinetic Manipulation came soon after the first skills it learned. It was significantly weaker than I was, but that was only because I was a higher level; I hadn’t been able to move any more mass when I was level one than it could now.

Fever didn’t have any field generators, and I couldn’t think of any other ways to help it learn Field Manipulation, which was too bad. But there was one very important skill that I hoped it could learn.

“Fever,” I said, “do you have a Mana Crystal Storage Matrix?”

“Oh, yes! But it’s empty.” It sounded very apologetic about that, like it had done something wrong.

“That’s alright, Fever,” I said, trying to be soothing. “I’m sure your Crew needed them when you got damaged. And we’re going to do something about that, anyway! Now, what I want you to do is to focus on that empty crystal storage, and if you get a little message, accept it, okay?”

“Okay!” it said, then a moment later, “Something is asking if I want to condense my mana into crystals.”

“Yes!” I cheered. “Yes, you definitely want to do that!”

“Okay. Oh, that… it made a mana crystal! I can make mana crystals! And I learned a skill, and it’s telling me I have ‘construction options.’ What’re those?”

“Oh, Fever,” I said, almost overcome with relief and satisfaction. “You’re going to love this.”

We continued way into the night, a concept that meant nothing to us, since we didn’t need any rest. I unlocked Basic Sensor Developments, but I was so caught up in teaching Fever about all kinds of wonderful things that I barely noticed it. It gave me access to a new category of Developments, of course, with three options in it: Sensor Sensitivity, Sensor Resolution, and Sensor Clarity. I didn’t look into them too closely, though. I just started Level 3 of Light-Weight Structure. It was pretty much what Temeri and I had decided earlier, and it wouldn’t take all that long anyway.

 As we talked, I wondered if there might be any way for me to share my Developments with Fever. With how focused it was on watching Erebus Prime, I was sure it would’ve loved to be able to improve its sensors. And when I thought about that, I figured that the earlier it could start doing Developments, the better! Getting it a Development Matrix would have to be at least as high of a priority as a new reactor!

Of course, it was going to need at least one Mana Condensation Matrix as well, preferably more, and probably a Manufacturing Matrix. And I couldn’t help but wonder if its Crew were really comfortable in such cramped quarters. They all shared one small sleeping area, the hygienic facilities were all combined in a single cabin with a clothes washer and dryer embedded in the wall, and their entire recreational area was about a hundred square feet with a table in the center. There were only four of them, while my Crew was five, but by my estimation Fever had about an eighth of the living space that I’d had before I added a whole deck. I was filled with a… not a need, exactly, but a strong desire to help Fever get bigger and better, so its Crew would be more comfortable.

Oh, there was so much to do, and I looked forward to all of it! And that was entirely besides the warm, content feeling I felt at having someone else like me around. I loved my Crew, but there were some experiences of mine that they’d never fully understand, and vice versa. Fever, I was pretty sure, would.

I was suddenly overcome with emotion, so much that I stopped in the middle of an explanation of how Bekeri could use the Small Mana Crystals I condensed to superpower the drive. “Fever,” I said.

“Yes, Star?”

“I am incredibly glad that we met.”

“Me too, Star! Being alive is so interesting!”

“It really is,” I agreed, anticipation of the possibilities the future might bring swelling within me. “It really is.”