Press Start to Begin
Marley Quinn
Press Start to Begin
by Marley Quinn
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Trained Chimp
Amaris Eden
Spice Tube
Like a Dream
A Special Present
Hot Bayve
A New Surprise
Grappling
Louvre
External Anomaly
Final Gift
Also by Marley Quinn
Trained Chimp
Captain Waymire Ping-Jackson sighed with frustration and then resumed banging on the stim dispenser until, at long last, a thin stream of lukewarm tan liquid began to trickle into his battered polycarbonate mug.
Everything about being onboard the ship made it clear just how much SWE held its human employees in contempt, from the rust on the pellet dispenser to the endlessly flickering lights in three of the aft hallways.
Heck, even his bunk had popped a bolt and was only hanging onto the bulkhead by a wing and a prayer, which made getting a good night's rest an adventure unto itself, but Waymire was damned if he was going to sleep on the floor where the tidybots could get him.
Of course, in this modern day and age, it made perfect sense for the corporation to have everything important performed by AIs, and the cold room that functioned as the brains of the real masters of the ship had its own army of maintenance robots.
It was only the human areas that were an afterthought to the corporation as his presence was only to satisfy some minor clause in an insurance agreement, a flesh-and-blood backup in case the umpteen layers of AI somehow all managed to fail at once.
Yet there he was, saddled with the antiquated title of captain as if he even had the power to deactivate the engines or change course.
No, the only thing he was captaining was straddling the thin edge between boredom and despair as he hurtled through space on a nine-month journey to the Chiba asteroid belt.
His job, if one could even call it that, was a joke, one that could probably be performed equally well by a chimpanzee.
This reminded Waymire that there was a rumor that SWE had tried to train chimpanzees to make the ore run to Jupiter. But after a week of having nothing to do but verify that a panel of lights were still blinking in the right order, they'd rebelled and started smearing shit on the control panels.
And so, the corporation was still stuck with using humans to do the last remaining jobs too crappy for AIs to handle.
Literally, the only thing earning him a berth on the Nicolau 3dRK9 Heavy Transport and Ore Processor was the fact that he was invulnerable to electrical system malfunctions.
Nonetheless, in an effort to keep his sanity, Waymire faithfully went through his daily duties of inspecting the control panel, making a check mark, on the simpaper with a genuine old-fashioned graphite 'cil, walking the full length of corridors on the upper deck to inspect for any leaks, and then finishing by fixing himself a bowl of pellets to eat while he stared at the collision warning scanner until his eyes started to glaze over.
Thankfully, since it was a Strachan World Entertainment vessel, the d-bank had plenty of e'dramas to watch, some of them even fairly recently made.
The d-bank also had a few 'tutes as well, and based on a recommendation from one of the guys in his pod back at the Boronosov-Huang Colony, Waymire had started incorporating a workout into his daily routine, using the overhead hydraulics grate to do pull-ups and a spare mattpad he'd found in a maintenance closet to do some stretches.
Still, though, it was a daily challenge for Waymire to try and keep himself from going crazy.
With ninety-nine percent of the ship being off-limits, he felt simultaneously both claustrophobic and also terrified that somehow, he was going to be crushed under the weight of the colossal equipment that was able to process 90 gigatons of raw ore on the return trip.
That's why Waymire always scrolled through the menu until he found an e-drama that had a lot of outdoor scenes, so at least for a few moments, he could pretend that he wasn't a tiny insect trapped in a 22nd-century bottle zipping through the solar system at 50 kilometers per microsecond.
After being aboard the Heavy Nick for three weeks, Waymire had searched through the 'bank to see if he could find a tute to teach him how to read stillbet, but the truth was that he had breathed a sigh of relief when no results came up.
On the rare occasion when he'd seen stillbet letters engraved on certain signage in some of the older parts of the colony made his heart race, staring back at him with their icy demeanor and refusal to transform into intelligible images.
Anyway, Waymire knew that the rollscroll system was easier and better suited for a man of his limited intellect, and so he abandoned all desire to learn how to read and thus pass the time that way.
And so, time crawled by, one endless second at a time, and the journey to Chiba would've probably ended up with him able to quote every line from his favorite e'drama had he not accidentally stumbled onto a secret door one day during his daily rounds, and that had only occurred because one of the buttons from his front chest pocket of his coveralls had fallen off, and Waymire had bent over to pick it up.
It was out of the corner of his eye that he saw a glint of metal deep in a space where there should've been nothing but pipes carrying pressurized hydraulic fluid.
Yet his mind had grown so dull that he'd almost walked on, only the last dying spark of curiosity remaining in his brain prompting him to investigate further.
Waymire had to contort his body to squeeze past the two big pipes that ran down the length of that particular section of corridor, but when he managed to get through, he saw that there was a tall, narrow metal door set in the wall that shouldn't have been there.
At least, it hadn't been brought up on any of the training vids the company had made him watch. Yet it was there, and it was definitely a door with a handle and everything, clearly designed for human use and not a maintenance droid.
For a long time, Waymire stood in front of the door and stared at it. There wasn't any kind of code box or facescanner that he could see, making him wonder exactly how a person was supposed to open it.
Waymire checked all around the thin frame of the door, looking for a button to activate the rollscroll instructions, but there was nothing but flat metal.
Truly, it was a conundrum, a mysterious door located in a place where no person had any business being and without any obvious way to open it.
Waymire knew that some of the Heavy Nicks had been built back before everything had been completely automated by AIs, so maybe the door was a holdover from that ancient era when the human crews had actually been needed.
But surely, during the retrofit, such archaic features would've been removed, if only to prevent illiterate monkeys like himself from getting inside and screwing up something important.
It was only when he was about to give up and head back to his pod for his morning bowl of pellets that he decided to try one last thing, which was to reach out and touch the handle.
And to his immense surprise, it turned easily, allowing him to open the door, the dust-clotted hinges squealing in protest.
As shocked as Waymire was that he'd gotten the door open, it was what he saw inside that completely changed everything.
Amaris Eden
The hidden room that Waymire had discovered was far larger than he'd expected.
Along one side was a row of what looked like utility lockers, but it was the far end of the room that caught his attention.
A series of chairs were positioned in front of rows of instrument panels, all of them facing a huge screen that was now dark and lifeless but had clearly once been some kind of viewport of some kind.
Waymire slowly made his way toward that viewport, marveling at all the switches and dials, most of them inscribed with stillscript lettering.
There were more things to turn, flip, and adjust here in this one room than there were in the entire rest of the ship, and Waymore could only begin to guess what they might have once controlled.
It was only when he took a seat in the big chair in the center of the room that was slightly elevated than all the others that he realized that he was looking at had once been the ship's bridge, a term he'd picked up from an e'drama.
Had there really once been a whole crew of pilots and navigators and other people performing essential tasks to fly and control the ship? It hardly seemed possible, but it was the only explanation that made sense.
Even the armrest of the big chair he was sitting on had a few switches, but just when Waymire was working up the courage to try pressing one, he suddenly saw a burst of motion out of the corner of his eye.
Jumping to his feet, his mind racing, Waymire stood stock still for a moment, trying to locate the thing that had moved.
After a minute or so of his heart pounding, he saw it move again and realized it was just a ball of dust being pushed along by some invisible eddy of air current. Clearly, the tidybots never visited this room.
Once his breathing had returned to normal, Waymire began making his way across the room, his eye roving over all of the indecipherable stillscript that seemed to adorn every available surface.
Certainly, the crew that had once worked here had all been highly literate because just looking at those strange symbols made his head hurt.
Still afraid to touch any of the switches or dials, Waymore proceeded to the utility lockers, opening them in turn. The first held some kind of strange one-piece white coverall with long, loose legs attached to boots and floppy arms attached to thick gloves.
Even more bizarrely, there was some kind of big bowl resting on the top shelf, the front part of it made from some kind of thick translucent material that reflected his wan and haggard appearance, scaring him for a moment.
What was all this stuff? Waymire had no idea, but there were several more identical white coveralls in the other lockers, including some big metal tubes with straps that had large stillscript writing on them.
The writing, whatever it was, began with the letter "O", about the only stillscript Waymire could understand. The tubes, whatever they were, appeared to be empty and were surprisingly light when he picked one up.
In another locker, Waymire found stacks of little cubes made out of some kind of white substance that felt slightly waxy to the touch.
They weren't plastic but made out of something similarly lightweight, and when he took one out to examine it, it had a surprising heft to it.
There was more stillscript writing on the front along with a picture of what looked like ration pellets and some kind of bright green thing with a narrow stalk and a bushy top to it.
Was this some kind of pellet stockpile for the crew? If so, there was no dispenser that Waymire could find. It was just row after row of these boxes, some of them with different but equally mysterious colored items depicted on the front.
It was only the image of the ration pellets on some of them that he recognized, so he made a note to himself to investigate further later to find out if there was anything edible inside.
But it was what he discovered in the last locker that nearly wiped him out. Opening the door, he'd expected to find more abandoned supplies, but instead, he saw a beautiful woman dressed in some kind of modified coveralls that left the majority of her legs exposed.
Waymire jumped back from the locker, his heart beating a mile a minute, expecting at any moment for the woman to open her eyes and start talking to him.
But she just stood there completely motionless, her eyes closed, and he couldn't even detect the faint motion of her breathing. Was she dead? Some kind of preserved remains of a crew member? But there was no sign of decay. In fact, she looked eerily alive.
His heart still pounding in his chest, Waymire nervously took a step closer to examine her further. She was incredibly beautiful, perhaps the most attractive woman he'd ever seen in his life.
She had the sculpted cheekbones of an e'drama starlet, her narrow waist in stark contrast to her generous chest. And the odd coveralls that she was wearing showed off her long legs to great effect, all that exposed skin making his head swim.
Who was this woman? Or was it even a woman? Perhaps it was some kind of strange simulacrum of a person, used by the ancient crew for purposes that Waymire couldn't even begin to fathom.
His curiosity now getting the better of them, Waymire reached out and touched her upper arm. He immediately jumped back, fearing some kind of response from her, but she remained as still and motionless as ever.
Certainly, her skin felt like real skin, but if she was alive, then why wasn't she moving or breathing?
It was only after several long moments that Waymire noticed that there was a shiny red button in the middle of the waistband of her coveralls with a stillscript inscription on it, a fashion accessory unlike anything he'd ever seen before.
In fact, the button looked almost identical to some of the ones he'd seen on the instrument panels in this room.
Drawn to it like a moth to the flame, Waymire cautiously got closer to the woman to examine the button.
It was perfectly circular, with a shiny silver rim around the outside, and Waymire felt an overwhelming urge to press the button to see what would happen.
Yet despite this, he hesitated for a long time. So far, his discovery of the hidden room was his secret alone.
But if he pressed the button and it activated something, it might trigger something and alert the AIs to his presence, and then he would almost certainly be ordered to return to his designated zone of the ship.
On the other hand, if he didn't press it, he might never discover the mystery of the beautiful woman.
And so, after fiercely debating it for a good long while, he finally summoned up the courage to extend one finger and press the button.
The red material immediately responded by becoming illuminated, and then he heard something begin to whir and click from deep inside the woman. A moment later, her eyes opened, her neck adjusting so that she was staring straight at him.
"Um, hello?" said Waymire, every nerve ending in his body buzzing from the overload of nervous energy racing through him.
"Greetings," said the woman, giving him a reassuring smile. "I am Amaris Eden. What's your name?"
"W-W-Waymire," he barely managed to croak out in response.
"Waymire? That's such a lovely name," said Amaris, continuing to smile at him. "Are you my new master?"
"M-Master?" stuttered Waymire, the archaic word ringing some distant bell inside his overwhelmed and confused mind.
"Yes," said Amaris, tilting her head while still looking at him with her curiously intense blue eyes. "Are you my new master?"
"Um, I g-guess so," said Waymire, his nerves stretched to the breaking point.
"Excellent!" said Amaris, a big grin on her face. "Then I look forward to serving you, master."
And that is when Waymire's legs buckled, and he fell onto the floor with a thud, his frazzled consciousness fading to black.