The normalcy of the last few months aboard Theseus had evaporated quickly into another complex and convoluted mess of plots that had decided that our lives weren’t complicated enough, and I was glad to hear that we would soon be leaving ‘civilized society’ behind again.

  Aisling and Shaw were busy at the helm discussing the other captain, rumors, and our future route, Lily had sequestered herself to her room instead of hanging out near me at my heart like she usually did because she was hiding something from me, the core that I’d been trying desperately to humanize for the last half year had just informed me that she’s sitting on a suicide button, I was still nursing a concussion that I kept swearing wasn’t a big deal anymore until it started acting up again, and I was housing an outsider who knew what I was and currently thought we were some vague corporate interrogation unit.

  Life as a space pirate in enemy territory wasn’t exactly easy or relaxing, but things had just gotten so personal again in the last few days. I really wanted to ask Lily if she had any insight on our current problem with Collins, see if she’d stumbled onto any incidental visions that might give us some guidance, but she was being reclusive and guarded. I wasn’t so socially inept that I couldn’t tell she didn’t want to talk to me right now.

  I needed a break. I opened my eyes and stared out into the void. My home. My own little but infinitely vast world where everything was so much simpler. My thoughts slowed down, and before I realized it, I’d slipped into torpor. The dreamless, sleep-like rest washed over me, and my mind slowed.

  It’s hard to describe exactly what torpor felt like in exactly the same way as it was hard to describe exactly what happens in sleep. You slipped out of consciousness, and the next thing you knew, you woke up and it was later. Only, torpor didn’t come with the pesky risk of interruption by disturbing dreams and occasional amnesic recall. Probably because it wasn’t actually sleep, just something analogous enough to it that I could get away with it for a week or two before my body forced me to do the real thing. Also, my eyes were open. There was just no sensory input to be had in the void, and since I experienced the digital world with my eyes closed, it was the only way to completely shut my own brain off.

  When next I was roused, it was to a ping from my heart, gently coaxing me from my slumber. I blinked a few times and stretched myself out, checking the time to see that it was mid-morning already. At least no more emergencies had arisen while I rested.

  The ping was Doc’s, and I groaned at it. Daily checkup. I whined silently into the fluid, rolling my eyes at the reminder. That meant extricating myself from the void. It meant separating myself from my starship shell back down to my lesser fleshy physical self once more.

  Doc had always insisted that unless we were in a dangerous scenario where I would need to spend a lengthy period in a dive for work or safety purposes, that I would come out at least once a day for him to ensure my health wasn’t deteriorating. I hated it. Most cores only needed maintenance around once a week, but Doc insisted that since I was also a person, I was a special case and needed more care.

  Part of me wished I could just forego my body entirely and just be Theseus, but that was apparently both not possible and would prevent me from experiencing some of the more interesting pleasures that my body did allow me.

  I shook my head as another ping hit me like the unsatisfying reminder of a snoozed alarm. I’d dozed off again thinking about it. Not for too long this time, thankfully. I sighed and flipped the switch to begin opening my enclosure, mentally preparing myself for at least twenty minutes of sensory hell.

  The human body can quickly abandon its senses to enter the calm that the core module offers, but it acclimates itself to a lack of sensation. And when that sensation returns, it is always terrifyingly magnified, making the return trip from the core module an ordeal, even if a dive has only lasted a couple hours. I closed my eyes as the void flickered off around me, the illusion of the infinite nothingness disappearing as the machinery’s lights turned off, and the slats that created it slid away into the side of the sphere. Vision was a sense that I could mercifully tune out while the rest of them began their assault.

  The digital world blurred and flickered as the remnants of light from the dying machine touched me from the other side of my eyelids and the flow of fluid draining above me attacked my ears. The gentle pull of gravity made my stomach turn as the engine that kept me centered in the sphere wound down.

  Then the worst of it hit. My bare feet gently touched the platform beneath me, and I winced. All of my senses already felt battered, but the worst was always touch. With experience, I’d learned to hold myself perfectly still so as not to activate more nerves in my feet than were strictly necessary, but I still felt my breathing quicken, involuntarily sucking in more core lubricant I knew I would soon need to expel in an effort to calm the electricity firing up through my body from my soles.

  Next came temperature. As the fluid drained and came down over the top of my forehead, exposing my skin to air, I felt that terrible chill of the ship move down my face. The others, and even my own sensors didn’t indicate any abnormality in the internal environment’s temperature, but I still felt unbearably cold every time I left the core module. Of course, that wouldn’t last long for the most brutal step in transferring between realities.

  I expelled as much of the core lubricant as I could manage from my lungs before the air reached my mouth, but that wouldn’t save me from the action my lungs weren’t technically built for. The air touched my lips, and I spent a moment shivering and breathless before I tried to inhale.

  I choked. I hadn’t been careful enough, and hadn’t emptied my lungs well enough this time, and I reeled, vomiting up a mass of clear fluid into the still-draining basin around me. My weight shifted, sending even more sparks up my spine from touch before I drew in a desperate gasp of air, my lungs finally deciding to behave themselves. I dribbled and coughed up a few more ounces of core lubricant before I was breathing steady again, and by then, the sphere around me had begun to split apart and reveal the heart of my shell.

  I focused on my breathing, shivering as I stood at the center of the basin, collecting myself. I reached up and grasped the clumped up glob of my hair, still soaked in lubricant. Sometimes I could manage to squeeze some of it out back into the module before I left it, but as my hands tried to close around the wet mass and sent spikes of tingling pins and needles up my arms, I had to concede that it wasn’t one of those days, and just let it be.

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  “Need any help?” I heard a whisper above me. I didn’t dare open my eyes, but Doc’s voice was clear, even distant as it was. He knew well not to use his full speaking volume when I was like this. I gave a shuddering breath as I slowly shook my head. “You know, you don’t always have to come up right out of torpor,” he sighed. “Could have given you a half hour to wake up. If you could keep yourself up, anyway.”

  It was true that being more awake would have made the transition a bit simpler, but I had just wanted to get it over with. It wasn’t like this wasn’t a normal occurrence by now. Spending some time thinking about it wasn’t going to make it that much less painful. Besides, I was handling it far better than I did at the beginning of my journey. I’d have probably spent a good five minutes gasping and choking on lubricant alone back then. But the sensory shock never seemed to go away, no matter how used to it I was. “J-Just help m...me up,” I whimpered, my stutter back on my lips now that I was no longer mostly machine.

  The process was slow. It needed to be, so I wouldn’t have a visceral, painful reaction to the pressure against my skin. Doc helped dab my hands dry on paper, since towels were a nightmare of tiny individual fibers, and I would grip the edge of the module so he could help pull me up out onto the catwalk, where I would be placed onto a larger paper sheet and then carried to the closest medical table, where I would slowly come to terms with the physical world again.

  I was lucky to be so small, at least. Doc never struck me as the strongest person, kind of a twink if we were exercising gay stereotypes, but he didn’t need much effort to lift me.

  I was placed onto the bed face-down, and I flinched as I felt him prod at the small of my back. Psychosomatic damage seemed to prefer presenting at the base of my spine, so it was always a priority for him to check. “Seems alright,” he whispered again, for my sake. “The bruising is finally all healed up.”

  “G-Good,” I managed to stammer out before coughing up another glob of clear, tacky fluid. I didn’t want any reminders left over of the catastrophic damage to my cargo bay I’d experienced near Luna. As he slowly turned me onto my back, I let the unfocused, blurry static of the digital world slip away as I took in a deep breath and ventured to squint my eyes open. The sharp contrast of light and darkness, the innate mental calculation of depth perception, and color recognition gave me a head rush. One would think that my eyes would be tired from staring into bright lights all night, but it was the mental effort of processing sight again that made my brain hurt.

  “I’ll give you a few minutes before I get to the rough stuff,” Doc teased in that low gentle voice he used to make sure my poor sensitive ears didn’t explode. By ‘rough stuff’, he meant manipulating my muscles and checking my reflexes to make sure I wasn’t experiencing muscular atrophy, things that a normal human toddler wouldn’t find challenging or even necessary. But I was far from a normal human.

  “Ais...ling give any n-news?” I spoke hoarsely after a few minutes of silent recovery, still shaking from the perceived cold.

  “Said she’d have some news for us at dinner. Why?” He let himself start speaking normally again. The rule was that if I could stand to hear my own voice, I could handle his. At least this process was getting faster each time I did it.

  “Think we’re go...going to be leaving Io s-soon,” I smiled at him. It would mean about a month in wild space, just flying. After six months trapped on or near this moon, I couldn’t wait.

  “Oh, really?” Doc gave an amused chuckle. “Suppose that means you’re ready to choke down a lot more emergency rations?”

  “G-Gross. We better have re...real food this time.” I gave a weak chuckle, then winced as Doc slowly lifted my leg up, forcing a shuddering whine from me as he squeezed at some section of muscle at the top of my calf he always did and bent my leg. “Fuck, w-warn me...”

  “Nah, more fun this way.” I could feel Doc smirking at me through my hazy vision. “Heat must finally be dying down. I bet we’re heading back to Luna?”

  “Pro...bably. F-finally settle into the nor...mal life of space p-pirates.”

  “No such thing, I’m afraid,” Doc gave an exhausted sigh. “I can’t say I have the longest experience as an outlaw, but it’s been nothing but one strange circumstance after another, so far. We’re never going to settle into a ‘normal’ like the people who play by the corps’ rules have. It’s going to be one bizarre experience after another until we all end up in a box.”

  I nodded slowly. It was a grim take, but he wasn’t wrong. We probably weren’t going to live to die old of natural causes, and it was probably going to be a frantic experience the whole way through. “D-Do you miss it? The... r-routine? S-Sense of safe...ty?”

  “A little.” He put my leg down and walked around to tug at the other one. “Though it’s easy to see the flaws of that ‘safety’ from the outside.”

  “At least we’re f-free,” I muttered.

  He nodded. “In a sense.” My eyes were acclimated by now, my brain switching modes back to physical reality at last while I felt Doc poking around at the sides of my sternum. “You’re still underweight.”

  “What do you w-want from me? There’s n...no gym in the void,” I rolled my eyes and regretted the immediate sense of vertigo.

  Doc flicked my arm, making me flinch before he went on to inspect whatever he was looking for there, too. “Eat more than once every couple days,” he demanded.

  “I eat w-when I’m hu...hungry,” I pouted. “You know I burn way few...fewer calories than a n-normal human when I’m in the core mod...ule.”

  “Well, you’re still burning too many.” He finally quit prodding me and stood back from the table. “I’ve let you get away with this for too long, Meryll. I can’t believe this is something I have to do for anyone, but I’m putting my foot down and as your doctor, I’m prescribing you to eat every time you come up.”

  I groaned, “Seriously? E-Every time? I’m not even hungry, rea...lly.”

  “Well, your body is. You’re not getting back in the module until I hear you’ve had an actual meal.”

  “I can enforce that.” I turned my head to see Aisling standing in the doorway, a smug smile on her face. Then I winced at the terrible sensation of my head rubbing against the bed.

  “Ser...iously?” I whined. “I’m j-just going to feel stuffed.”

  “Doctor’s orders.” She chuckled. “Glad I caught you. I want you to be there in the flesh for the big reveal on our ‘mark’. I know it’s harder for you to keep your mouth under control when you don’t need to run a bunch of functions to speak, so I wanted to go over a little bit of a script with you. Nothing major, just some points to keep in mind. A narrative that I want you to stick with.”

  “Oh? We’ve decided what to do with the other captain?” Doc asked.

  “And a few other things. We’ll get you up to speed at dinner, like I said. Nothing left of breakfast, so you’ll have to make something yourself or wait til’ then, Meryll.” She gave a small wave and departed from the doorway.

  “Better m-mood than yester...day at least,” I commented, slowly pushing myself up to sitting at the side of the bed. The world still felt a little disorienting, but the terrible feeling of pins and needles across every nerve was dulled enough that I could move on my own again, so long as I didn’t have to stand yet. “F-Fine, I guess I’ll just... occupy myself for t-today, then.”

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  The Nothing Child. It's an urban fantasy about three reluctant college students and a shapeshifting alien monster thrust into a campaign to defeat an all-consuming horror from another world that they accidentally unleashed upon their city.