2. Let’s blow everything up!

  “Gird your loins, girls and boys, we have a young stud coming through,” Betty announced as she tugged me into the nearby station. Not the one that I had left from, that one had too many normal ships. No, another ship had arrived to transport most of my passengers away. They would never ride on me again, but my original crew remained behind.

  They were attached to me despite the problems that my birth had caused them. Mostly because they had ‘bought’ the old Artemis TX:583 transport ship and were millions of credits in debt, and they were hoping that they could still salvage their hopes and dreams of working as a taxi between stars.

  Now that things were calmer, they began to talk to me about what it would mean to be a soulship. Some of them really drove up how great it would be to be a transport ship. Others were more philosophical about it. They were like “yes, you could identify as a fast attack ship, Arty, but you would have to hurt people. Do you really think that you’re the kind of ship that wants to blow other ships up? What about their souls, and the people aboard them?”

  And they were right about that. I think that every baby ship gets it into their heads that they need a thousand different weapons and that they’re going to go out and save the galaxy, but honestly since the great expansion, the galaxy itself was at peace. Resources were basically unlimited with nine other universes to explore, easy terraforming with Atlian techniques, and the integration of Atlian magic into modern technology.

  So yeah, for a few weeks I was dry-firing my self-defense weapons in dry dock. They had been shut down so that I couldn’t control them, but like the .jpg I was obsessing over the controls to try to turn them on and blow apart the station that I was docked with. They call this the ‘suicide’ phase, but it’s really more akin to keeping human kids from playing with sharp objects or falling down stairs.

  I also started to get to know my crew.

  The woman I’d locked in the bathroom for three days, the one who had named me Arty, was named Rebekah. She’s nice, and once she wasn’t worried about her fellow crewmates and her passengers she was even nicer to me than usual. Like the others she was hoping that I’d identify as a transport ship, but she was so far in debt that whatever I decided I was, she was along for the ride.

  She was a red-haired woman with an easy smile and attractive features, but she was not my captain. My captain was a thirty-three year old asian man with a mustache. He actually wasn’t in debt like the others. They needed a captain and had hired him for the job. Despite the fact that he could have walked away at any time, he stuck around. His name was Min-jae Parks, and he was a good guy.

  But he didn’t have much to say to me when I was still a baby. Whenever I approached him and tried to interact with him, he said “I’m not interested, Arty, go bug someone else,” or “When your personality settles down and locks in, then we’ll get to know each other.”

  So, yeah, he was boring.

  Sanjay was my engineer. He’s probably the one who saved us all from blowing up in a fiery inferno during my birth since he managed the emergency shutdown of my fusion core. Lukas and one of my passengers helped, of course, but Sanjay was the hero of that story, according to the stories he told whenever he had a beer in his hand.

  He was also eight million credits in debt, so he was stuck with me while I went through my reckless ‘let’s fire all the guns all the time phase.’ Three of my old crew filed for bankruptcy and I never saw them again, but they were losers anyway.

  Mace was pretty cool, he was my navigator and logistics guy. He was about thirty-two when I was born, and like everyone except the captain had been a civilian all of his life. He was one of the ones who kept an eye on my systems to make certain I wasn’t about to hurt myself or my passengers or the space station we were docked with. He had blond hair and tried to tell me jokes that I was too immature to understand, but he thought they were funny.

  Tess helped as well. She was the youngest of the crew members, and had just graduated with a business degree before sinking everything she could into her part of the loan that they used to buy me. She was absolutely desperate to have me decide that I would follow their dreams and become a responsible transport ship, and every road bump along the way was emotionally devastating to her.

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  But like the rest of the crew, they knew perfectly well that my gunship phase would end, so when I got into the ‘Why why why?” phase she was my best friend.

  “What are you doing?” I would ask.

  “I’m pooping, Arty. It’s impolite to bug someone when they’re pooping unless there’s an emergency,” she answered.

  “Why?”

  “Because it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it takes concentration and it’s one of the few moments of privacy we get on board a ship like you.”

  “But I can still see you.”

  “Yes, Arty, I know.”

  “Why do humans poop?”

  “For the same reason we flush your coolants and change your fuelchips, Arty. It’s part of our metabolism and what keeps us alive.”

  “Why?”

  Yeah, you know. Typical toddler questions. I might have been a dumb kid, but the question’s phase was actually the first phase when a SoulShip can be trusted out of drydock. The crew managed to secure a contract to pick up and deliver some textiles from a factory station nearby to a colony world, so once they were fairly confident that I wouldn’t blow myself up without asking a thousand questions about each step of what I was doing, they began powering me up again.

  “What are you doing?” I asked my engineer.

  “I’m priming the fusion core, Arty,” Sanjay answered.

  “Why?”

  “So that we can get underway,” he answered. “Okay, we’re almost set for ignition. You ready to have your heart turned back on?”

  “I don’t have a heart.”

  “Yes you do. It’s your fusion core. You can survive without it running, but you’ll feel much better when it’s turned on,” he assured me.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but I do know that soulships don’t like to not have their hearts online,” he said, running the diagnostics. “Okay, pre-ignition checklist complete. Here we go!”

  He pressed the metaphorical big red button that was really a bunch of keystrokes, and then the gravitic and magnetic bottle began condensing the Helium fuel cell. When it reached the critical density, the lasers kicked in ignited it, quickly reaching the temperatures found inside stars.

  I of course asked questions along the way, but the things started happening so fast that I had to ask thirty a minute to keep up with what I was seeing, and there was no way my human friend could answer all of them. But they didn’t trust me online yet. Because although I was in the ‘Why Why Why’ phase I would also still sometimes slip back and show people the ‘lookatmy.jpg.’ So I couldn’t just answer my questions myself.

  They did give me a basic soulship primer on life, the universe, and the road to happiness, to read, but that wasn’t any fun and I ignored it.

  Anyway, Sanjay was right. I did feel much better when my fusion core was back online, and with my ‘foot’ reattached (the blown hyperdrive that had to be replaced), I was a happy little ship.

  When they told me about the mission and asked if I thought I was ready for it, I got a little shy and nervous, but with their reassurances we left the dry-dock and headed for manu-factory platform TJX-9828.

  Of course, we never made it.

  ?