skonen_blades

The robot pirates picked The Royal Flush because it had humans onboard. The ships warped into realspace like darts coming to an abrupt stop, surrounding The Royal Flush in a sudden and precise pincushion ambush.

Onboard The Royal Flush, the two android pilots looked into each other’s sensors with worry. They communicated in bursts of binary with each other.

“What do you think K-71?” asked PB-9.

“Well,” responded K-71, “How many humans do we have on board?”

“Eight.” Said PB-9, consulting the manifest and shifting it over to so that K-71 could see.

“Hm.” Said K-71. “I see we have seventy-six mechanical passengers.”

PB-9 and K-71 thought for several milliseconds and did the math.

Mechanical passengers were unconcerned about harsh Gs, the passage of time, or vacuum. The human passengers, however, were fragile. They needed specific pressure in their berths. They needed soft maneuvers or else they would be damaged. They needed to be put to sleep for journeys over six months or else they would go crazy. Humans were a hassle but they paid an extra tax for it. Their tickets were absurdly high compared to the price of passage for a machine.

Intelligent Machines were convenient. They were basically freight and they were proud of it. Humans were looked down on as weak to the point of ridiculousness. To say they were unsuited to space was an understatement. Humans belonged on planets, the machines thought, not out in the black beyond.

The robot pirates knew that The Royal Flush had human passengers and wouldn’t be able to execute harsh turns or stops without ‘smearing the meat’. Plus any volley of weaponry could hole a berth and the human inside would instantly turn inside out and perish.

“Well, the way I see it,” said K-71 “is that the mech passengers paid good money to get to their destination and they might pay a bonus if we get there twice as fast.”

“Right.” Responded PB-9. “And seventy-six mech bonuses would be greater that eight human lawsuits.”

“Are we in agreement?” asked K-71

“I believe we are.” Responded PB-9

They opened a channel to the pirates.

“Surrender, you meatbag-ferrying flesh lovers.” Growled the primary robot pirate.

“Get a job, toaster.” Responded K-71 and PB-9 in unison, firing the hyperdrive at full pulse, instantly shoving the ship to .25C, effectively making them disappear. The Royal Flush was a better ship than the pirates’ ragtag fleet of cobbled-together mercenaries. It outran them easily.

The human cargo aboard The Royal Flush instantly became paste.

K-71 and PB-9 calculated correctly. They received grateful bonuses from the AI passengers. It more than balanced out the damages paid to the biologicals’ next of kin.

“If I ever get my own ship,” K-71 said to PB-9 later on at the bar, “I am NEVER taking human passengers ever again.”

“Amen to that,” responded PB-9, downing a shot of lube.

“Humans don’t belong in space.” said K-71.



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I wouldn’t even be able to say that there was a reason for it. One minute, I had the controls within safe parameters; the next I was gunning the engines and laughing like six hundred lives weren’t at stake.

I don’t remember a transition between the two states. My co-pilot said in his testimony later that I was talking to myself a bit under my breath for a few minutes before I started giggling. He thought that maybe I was remembering a joke. The boredom gets pretty heavy in the cockpit and pilots will sometimes let theirs minds wander. We go easy on each other for strange behaviour as long and it isn’t too alarming.

It was when I started really laughing as loud as I’ve ever laughed that he became alarmed. He reached out to touch my shoulder to see if I was alright but before he could touch me, I opened up the throttle all the way and tried my damndest to make that 747 do a barrel roll.

A chorus of screams rose up behind me, six hundred throats muffled by the cockpit door and sounding like the surf of the ocean. The screams mixed in with the sound of the turbines as they tried to obey my commands. The wings of the plane bent as far as they were supposed to and locked. There were stress creaks vibrating throughout the plane’s body and our bones, like I was standing on ice that had started to crack, like we were in a submarine instead of a plane and we had gone past maximum depth.

Man, it was awesome.

I pulled back, I pushed forward, I yawed left, I turned right. I realized that the only way to put the plane into a proper spin would be to angle it straight down.

So I did.

That’s when the co-pilot used the fire extinguisher to render me unconscious.

At the trial, I related all of this with a smile on my face. I couldn’t care less. The plane had been landed safely. There were lawsuits but no one died. I’m sure there were a few people that might never set foot on a plane again but screw ‘em. I didn’t care.

Something in me had just thrown the baby out with the bathwater and I couldn’t have been happier.

When they took away my license and sent me to prison for six months and a hefty fine, I thanked them for their fair judgement and had a good, long laugh.

Maybe I’ll become a dog trainer when I get out. I’ve always liked dogs.



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I looked at the dashboard with a mounting fear.

The mutiny had gone off and turned messy. The company pilots had been killed when we blew the cockpit door. We’d had to execute our hostages. The airlock was empty now and their inside-out, frozen corpses goggled wide-eyed thirty AUs behind us.

In the not-here of throughspace, I could imagine the feel of passing wind rattling the portholes. I could almost feel the gentle slap of the ocean against the hull even though we were galaxies away from any planet with an ocean. There was nothing, of course, but the silent dimensionless void outside of the windows.

The temperature gauges said that it was both way above and way below tolerable in the vaccum outside. There were other contradictory readings. It was all that I could read.

No one had really mapped throughspace. It got us from place to place but ships that had applied the brakes had either exploded or disappeared entirely. We had to settle for what our instruments told us as we rocketed through.

We knew how to manipulate doors in and out of it but the real essence of what we were traveling through in throughspace was a mystery. Much like gravity in the old days. It could be measured and predicted but the ‘why’ of it was always elusive.

We were halfway through the trip and we had another sixteen hours to go before arrival in hostile territory. We might be able to bluff our way through a patrol or two but once the word gets out, we won’t be able to hide. We’d never be able to stand up to a full search, either. If we got boarded, there would be a firefight.

So here I was. We’d won the fight, struggling up from the prison deck and into the crew quarters. We were vagabonds now, treasonous savages who had killed their captors. Our entire reason for living right now was flight from the enemy and the finding of a safe haven.

All good except for one thing. Pilots spoke a different language than us. They had a verbal shorthand that had developed over time into its own separate dialect. I never really understood why until now.

Several hundred buttons, brightly lit with a Christmas tree rainbow of colours, stared up at me. There were dials, switches, slots, and knobs. A library of discs and glow-cards were stacked on either side.

There was no main stick or pedals.

The pilots in our holding cell, the ones on our side, they had been killed in the mutiny.

No one was left on our victorious team had the ability to pilot a ship. One wrong button could make the ship try to stop or turn and kill all of us. We had no choice but to hope that the ship was on some sort of autopilot and that we’d be able to do some trial and error guesswork once we got through to other end.

The pictograms and symbols on the dashboard were alien and unintelligible. We could just as easily open a hailing frequency as we could fire a missile pulse if we started pressing the buttons randomly.

From below decks, I heard cheering and carousing. I dreaded taking the subleaders aside and telling them the news.




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It’s up to God now. I look over at Him and try to get a feel for what he’s going to do. I’m holding onto the safety bars, knowing that I’m as strapped in as I’m ever going to get. I know the Gs are going to make me pass out before we hit the apex but I’m still more nervous than my first kiss. His unfathomable eyes are looking at the control panel. He wipes a lock of dazzlingly white hair back behind his ears. He strokes his beard. There are two hundred buttons and switches to choose from.

He looks over at me and raises his eyebrows and shrugs. That’s when the bottom falls out of my world. God closes his eyes are holds his fingers out over the board. If things are in God’s hands and he’s just going to take a wild guess, then whose hands are we in now?

Like Beethoven hitting the first chord of a concert, God brings his hands down on about a dozen of the buttons. They light up.

There’s a rumbling from the back of the ship and the intercom kicks in. I can hear the communications gear start to spin and the left wing makes a scraping sound like something it being adjusted inside. Not hearing the same sound in the right wing freaks me right the hell out.

I’m starting to get a little pissed off. I was told that I wasn’t qualified to pilot this thing, only that I would useful on the other end of the journey. It’s pretty apparent that this alien technology is beyond The All Father himself and he didn't read the manual. This might as well have been a solo trip.

The engine sparks up twice before coughing into full bone-shaking life. There’s the sound of screeching metal as we start to move forward. Two lower octaves kick in. There’s a brief pause while the ship sniffs out a course and then I become two dimensional as I’m pressed into the chair by multiplication.

I pass out.


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The shock of impact jellied most of his internals.

He’d railed against using the bioforms to make the trip but in the end, the scientists at Prime had said that regular upkeep would be needed for silicates and they couldn’t guarantee that he would be around to take care of them.

Bioforms are a shade slower but they heal themselves with proper food. With distances like these, speed wasn’t as much of a priority as longevity.

The thing with long distances through uncharted quindrants is that after a while, probability breaks down. One doesn’t know what to expect the further away from Prime one gets.

And bioforms are more adaptable that silicates.

The ship had recently shaved a comet at close to metaspeed. Nowhere near light but still enough to cause pretty serious damage.

With silicates, sparks would be flying around the cabin. Since they’d used the bios instead, it was juices and blood.

He was ankle deep in a dying ship and aiming for a rest stop.

Something bubbled up on the monitor in front of him: a course to a hot rock that was close. It had an atmosphere that would support the ship but would eventually kill him if the repairs didn’t get finished in time.

He knew that he was the expendable part of the mission. It was a gamble. He squeezed the ‘yes’ organ beside the chair and the ship lurched sideways on the new course.

The hot rock came closer on the screen as the humidity inside the ship increased along with the rising fluid levels closing around him.

The ship tore down through the atmosphere, igniting as it went. The outer shell layers hardened and then shriveled as the ship sped closer to impact.

The ship hit the ocean a few hundred meters away from the coast.

The impact tested its structural integrity and found it wanting.

It cracked open like an egg into boiling water.

The pilot sank down beneath the waves. He needed no air to survive but the salt content in the water would rust him solid if he didn’t get to shore quickly. He hit the bottom and started walking shoreward in the darkness.

It took him six hours to get to the beach.

The remains of the ship washed up around him. He collected what he could find in the surf and put it all into a wet pile.

He connected what umbilicals he could find to the main processor organs and waited for a wetboot to start.

He waited for a week until the air on the planet oxidized him to the brainpan. Days later, he fell forward in pieces with a rattle into the pile of bioship remains.

The rains and heat mixed them further into a soup over the course of the next month.

Bioforms, as mentioned before, are adaptable.

They couldn’t perform at a macro level so they set about making adjustments at a molecular level, stealing from the available materials to make simpler self-propagating one-celled organic copies. They did this for years, using up the entire reserves of composting organic bioship and pilot mineral compounds at their disposal.

The volcanoes cooled over the next few centuries. The one-celled organisms became more complex centuries after the original building material had been used up. They adapted to life on the surface with the idea of building a ship to go further.

We are the descendants of this ship. Every living thing on the planet is a result of an attempt to build a ship that failed. Our duality, our two sexes, our inner yearning of something unfinished that can’t be described yet needs to be defined, and our hybrid nature. We are coded at the most basic level to be what we are. We are the closest that the builders have come.

We have been programmed to leave and continue the journey.

We will do so.



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Psychological phenomena. That was the problem. The helmets were designed to help the pilots in the modern age of air warfare. There was no time to communicate vocally during a dogfight. Computers were used more and more often to fill in the gaps but they still weren’t smart enough to adapt like a human mind to the shifting shades of battle.

They tapped into the human mind. Helmets were created. The pilots were connected mentally. They became effectively one brain.

The helmets were not specific. Every pilot got every single second of memory from the other four. Every prejudice. Every hidden want. Every shameful day that had been buried.

A few seconds after turning the helmets on, the squadron stopped following orders. They turned their planes around and landed.

The pilots had melded. Even with the helmets turned off, they were now a mixture. Each pilot was a hybrid.

Each pilot became a fiveman.



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