Chapter 2: Chapter 1.1

Have you ever wondered how big the galaxy really is? I can tell you, it is more than 2 soccer fields. The size of it is unimaginably large, so much that it becomes easier to measure space with time. The human federation spanned 102.369 light years at its peak. Surely, much of it was the vastness of nothing, but it still showed how much humans could progress.

We reached to the stars and found new planets to call our home. Sadly, we haven’t invented any way of instantaneous space flight yet which meant that travelling from one planet, or god forbid, even to another galaxy a tedious adventure. There was simply no other options but to seclude yourself in a tin can if one wanted to reach another planet.

And thus, I stood there in the middle of my little room in front of a smart mirror looking at myself, a blonde girl with green eyes and a cute stubby nose while we scooted away from the place I called home at breakneck speed.

“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the most intelligent of all?” My daily routine always started like this for several years now. After living on this spaceship for twelve years, one tends to get bored and starts to find ways to waste time, either through fooling around or by trying to improve yourself a bit.

“Judging by the average test scores, it is Marie Winchester. You, in comparison, rank 243 of all crewmates.” But not matter what I did, someone was always better in one area. I even had the feeling the AI liked to ridicule me a bit, but that was only my perception of her. She was still emotionless as ever. Angrily, I flicked the tables showing the academical ranking of around five hundred children away and looked into my green eyes for a few seconds.

Truly, there was no need to be upset about my marks. Nobody expected me to be the best at learning, or even lifting up heavy crates. But it still got on my nerves that I didn’t excel at anything. Sure, there weren’t many areas one could be the best in on this space ship, but I wasn’t satisfied with mediocrity. I wanted to be good at something. I wanted more. I just hoped that I could add value to this mission this way. But somehow, I highly doubted that as I was one of the older teenagers participating. Even the adults had no hope in the success of this adventure.

This mission, ironically names ‘New Hope’, was a desperate effort to preserve humanity as a species. This spaceship, faster and more durable than all others, was the result of extensive research and the whole economic output of earth for a year. It was the last effort of the United Federation to give a race, which lost a senseless war against creatures we still didn’t understand, a chance.

The result of this effort was the spaceship I was on along four hundred ninety nine other children. Our task to reach another galaxy where humanity could start anew was fairly simple as the AI did most of the work for us. Till this day, I didn’t know if I should be grateful for being selected as a participant, or to curse my fate of being held captive by the nothingness of the space between two galaxies.

On the one hand, I would have certainly died if I stayed on Earth, but on the other hand I wouldn’t have to bear jokes about blondes that way. I knew that I wasn’t the smartest, but some just had to crack jokes like these quite often. They weren’t even targeted at me specifically, but they still made me furious. Even then, I could feel my anger boiling up again, but quickly shook my head to clear my head of any dangerous thoughts. I had already destroyed three mugs because of my temperament this week alone after all.

“So, what´s on my schedule today?” My guess was on cleaning the hallways, or doing other mundane tasks the AI could do a hundred times more efficient that I ever could. Another option was to learn useless stuff like the history of mankind … as if that would help us in colonizing a new planet in any way. I knew the intention was to preserve knowledge and educate us about the mistakes humans did long ago, but it was still so tiring to repeat everything over and over again.

“You are assigned to the bridge. Specifically the external scanners.” As we started our journey, the bridge was a fascinating space to be in. Blinking buttons and screens bustling with information were truly quite interesting for a young child. But years later, it turned out to be the most uninteresting and pointless place on this ship. We were just there to monitor an AI that never failed once.

Like nearly all other tasks, everyone had to do it in rotation to educate everyone about all the aspects of this ship. There was the option to switch tasks though, which I fully intended to in this case. Looking at the scanners which picked up nothing for my whole shift was deadly for me. Sadly, it was too late for that, so I simply had no other choice but to slurp out of my room disgruntled.

Yawning loudly, I closed the door behind me and was promptly bumped into by a taller and slightly older girl as she ran along the corridor. Luckily, she managed to slow down enough so that I wasn’t hurt in the slightest. Usually, I would growl at the other person, but I managed to catch a glimpse of her before I did so.

“What´s up, Sofie?” The girl sadly didn’t have much time to chat and was already running again after she made sure I was unhurt. She was such a nice friend and honestly more than I could have ever asked for. What made it even better was that she had the room right next to me. The hours we spend before bed time were truly a blessing for me.

“Kitchen service! I´m late!” Sofie said, already running through the hallway as if her life depended on it once again. “Are you playing cards with us later?” Before turning around a corner, Sofie shouted in my direction, the second violation of the rules the AI would certainly take note of.

“Obviously!” I was pretty sure she heard me as I lost sight of her. My next words were way quieter and a more or less unhappy tone. “When I have finished staring on nothing more than a sensor console which hasn’t picked up a signal for ten years.”

Closing the door fully, I continued slurping towards the bridge while yawning in short time intervals. I really should have asked her what today´s menu was so that I could look forward to something. Or maybe it was better that I didn’t ask because there was also the possibility of food that didn’t taste good. I would never know for sure.

Humming quietly, I walked through the barely lit corridors once shining with vigour. But years after the ships maiden flight, it seemed to be more lifeless then ever. The time we travelled through space obviously took its toll on us, but also on the ship itself. The window I passed for example was quite dusty from the outside and only showed the darkness resulting of a warp bubble. It also didn’t help our psyche that repairs were often makeshift ones, that the paint was less vibrant and even the warp engine, our lifeline was malfunctioning more than ever before. Despite the effort of a whole planet, this ship was falling apart, and everyone knew that. And yet, nobody talked about it for obvious reasons.

The bridge on the other hand, with the exception of the malfunctioning door, was high on the maintenance list. It was always kept in good conditions because life saving systems like parts of the servers for the AI were installed there or various consoles that enabled manual operation. All these highly important pieces of technology stood in start contrast to the console I headed to. Currently, it was manned by a ten year old boy, but that soon changed as I greeted hum depressed. Tired, he stood up and slurped out of the room without even greeting me back. I caught a glimpse of his dead eyes though, which certainly was a sight I would reciprocate after I finished my boring shift, beginning as monotone as I expected it to.

There was just nothing on the sensors. I stared at this thing for over an hour already as I felt my concentration slip. I really tried to concentrate, I really tried to fulfil my duty, but it was insanely tiresome. I soon found myself closing my eyes more than necessary and slowly dozing off. I wasn’t exactly bothered by my actions either as the AI monitored ever bit of data anyway, which obviously included information from the external scanners. Truly, I was quite competitive in certain aspects, but I also wasn’t willing to put too much effort into a useless task.

It could have been such a nice shift, but I was quickly woken up again as the ship shook violently. The usual pitch black windows were still dark, but I could still make out a distant galaxy. We had fallen out of warp.

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“Warp parameters reached abnormal levels, inertia dampeners working at 99,999%.” Driven by a hint of eagerness to fulfil my duty, I glanced towards my console and observed nothing on the outside, just like I expected. As always, it would take a while to fix the ship again, but that was common these days. A few more days of sub-light speed wouldn’t make much of a dent in out travelling time and as such, everyone remained calm on the bridge.

Yawning loudly, I looked towards my console once more and directly shook of every bit of tiredness. Squinting my eyes, I got even closer to the screen to observe a red dot on it. I even snipped the screen a few times, assuming it was just a screen error but sadly it didn’t go away.

“Guys, we … ” Maybe the sensors broke or the screen was fixed because just at this moment, the red dot vanished. It did that right as I had the attention of everyone on the bridge which was quite awkward for a bit of time. Before I could continue and explain what happened though, the AI interrupted me.

“Atypical moving object detected for five seconds.” It wasn’t a screen failure. Instantly, the large monitor switched to a recording of said object which turned out a glibbery mess. Feeling more awake than ever before, I immediately turned to my console once again. If one of our enemies was there, others couldn’t be too far away.

Luckily, there were no others of these creatures seemingly made out of fluid, but with skin harder than steel around. Yet.

We still had time to escape.

Time, the current captain wasted with staring at the repeating scene.

As fast as I could, I stood up from my chair and scrambled towards the captain chair, only to shake the boy out of his daze. That was the problem in giving out tasks in rotation. One might get a less than suboptimal pick in a dangerous situation. Disregarding the temporary captain who still didn’t know how to react, I activated the alarm swiftly. Sirens started to rung through the whole ship as I grabbed the boy by his shoulders and pushed him towards my previous console.

“Communications, when is the warp engine ready again? Navigation, full thrust ahead, get us out of here.” Finally, several other crewmates snapped out of their shock and the thrusters directly pushed the ship forwards. I knew traditional thrusters wouldn´t save the day, as our enemies were capable of reaching light speed within seconds.

“It will take a few minutes to activate emergency operation. The mechanics are working on speeding up the process.” The girl operating the communication console finally got a reply from the machine room after several seconds.

Minutes? Was that enough? Judging by historical data, it could be. But it wasn’t a necessity.

Several minutes went by in silence, which each crewmate solely focusing on their given task. Everyone was highly concentrated, including me. My mind felt strangely clear as I gripped the armchair and surveyed every console attentively, hoping to find something that would help us survive this dire situation.

It wasn’t even necessary for the ex-captain to shout of as the enemy appeared right in front of us. First, it was just a small area that behaved suspiciously. A purple tear formed in space right in front of us, crackling with lightning and expanding rapidly. These were their gateways and for us and obvious sign that they came to eradicate every last one of us. We just had a few seconds left until they would come out of their portal and swarm us to death.

“Emergency warp!” I shouted through the room before the gateway could stabilize itself. It was honestly a gamble. Either the forces of the warp engine would rip the ship apart, or we could make it out of there alive. A mere second before the engine activated, another one of these creatures exited the portal. I wanted to deactivate the warp again because hitting this creature would be our death sentence, but sadly, I was a tad too late.

The warp drive activated, throwing us forwards with speed faster than light.

Luckily, we didn’t hit that creature. Sadly, we also didn’t manage to escape from that place. What I really didn’t take into account was that we would fly into their gateway, because nobody ever tried that before. It was always assumed it was just a visual phenomena as other ships passed right through them during sub light travel.

Using the warp engine though, we created a different reality around us. A reality that enabled us to use their gateways without any issue. We were led into a place unknown to mankind. A place filled with even more of these hostile creatures and a place where we crashed into one of these.

It was the place where every single one of us was disintegrated into atoms and where even these atoms ceased to exist in an instant. This place was just not meant to be for humans to survive. It was a place between universes, where the concept of reality itself was abstract and most importantly, where the usual circle of reincarnation failed.

… or so I was told.

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