“Yeah, I can do this. I’ve got the stuff, just need to use it. *nervous laughter* Oh god, please help me. Mom, Dad, sis, this is all for you. Oh… shit. I’m gonna die… but not before I take some of them down with me. Come on, stupid computer, hit me with it already. Oh, right the code – ‘Psycho’ *injection confirmation beep, liquid draining sound* Ooooh yeah, that’s the stuff. *pause* Move, move. When’s this fuckin’ pod gonna land. I can’t take it, my body’s heating up. Come on! Shitty harness, too fucking tight. I need some air. Fuck, fuck, when I land, I’m gonna tear them a new one. I’m gonna kill ‘em, tear out their goddamn spines. I’m gonna fucking kill each and every last one of those Lengti fuckers. I’ll grind them to paste! Come on, MOVE! *drop pod rumbling and landing in background* I’LL KILL ‘EM! FUCK! KILL, KILL! I’LL GONNA RIP YOUR FUCKING HEADS OFF! YOU’RE DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!” * door hissing, followed by shouting, screaming, gunfire, maniacal laughter* – Unknown, 2251. Inner cyber-implant recording demonstrating the effects of the combat stimulant ‘Barbarian’ at ten times standard dosage on an ex-Broken Fang clanwarrior.

  Elias wasn’t sure if most mice liked being petted by floating inorganic aliens with a gas cloud for a brain, but Algernon certainly appeared to enjoy it. The twilight days of Nucleus’ initial purpose were coming. It was inevitable, but all things had to come at an end – that was an unfortunate truth of all great works. Even with all the time given for the corporations to prepare, check-ins from the supervisors to examine progress, and delays from lab accidents and mysterious intruders, the Interspecies Galactic Symposium was on the horizon.

  With less than a week until the arrival of every major player in the CCH’s sphere, and for the scientists of Nucleus to show off their projects, Elias and Chel-Lin were making the most of the time they had left in the way they knew best. At least, Elias was pretending he was making good use of it.

  “Look, I’m just saying, it’s utter crap that to make good money you need to upgrade the player’s house, but to upgrade the skill needed to upgrade the house, you need to spend money,” Elias ranted. The instance he had of SigilPlane running on his computer made bleeps and bloops as his character ran about. As much as helping EXCAL out with his character had been a good act, the price had been heavy – Elias was also stuck in the skinner box too.

  “See Algernon, this is why you don’t play MMORPGs,” Chel-Lin said, stoking the white mouse all the while. “It’s just gambling with extra steps and flashier lights.”

  They were waiting for their computer to run the last simulations on increasing the efficacy of the Daksira-Savage-Drive before the IGS. Frankly, it was an unneeded upgrade; Elias and Chel-Lin had succeeded at achieving what they wanted from the project. There was no way in hell either of them would mention the invention to the IGS’s organisers, however, so actually producing and spreading the device would need to take place sometime after the event. However, Elias could not resist the desire to try and figure out the exact causes behind the strange precognition he had felt back during the fire of the fifth wing, and perhaps boosting the already overdriven machine further was the solution.

  But the idea of ‘afterwards’ made Elias pause the building his SigilPlane character was doing. What was going to happen once the IGS was completed? When he had first arrived, Elias wanted nothing more than to achieve some vague, intangible success, something that would further cement his name in the textbooks of physics. Now Elias knew the truth – he had simply wanted further recognition from the father who had sent him here as a tool to increase GaltCorp’s reputation. But something had changed – the science had become secondary to his own growth. Like it or not, Elias was still an irritating asshole, but he at least felt he saw more to life than pride and acceptance from one who would never give it.

  Chel-Lin was the sun that had parted the dark clouds. It was funny to think back on their early arguments, how childish and pointless their conflict had been. Born out of shared problems neither could see, he was now sitting side by side by the woman he never wanted to leave. Elias had made up his mind about what he would do following the IGS. All he had to do now was tell her.

  “Chel-Lin, I was thinking abou-“ Elias started.

  A slam of the door announced EXCAL’s arrival. Both the CAI and Kurt had spent most days either in the lab or close by following the ‘Isaac Incident’.

  “Uh guys, I think something’s up with Warnick,” EXCAL said, slightly frazzled.

  Elias got up from his seat, “What do you mean?”

  “I hear shouting from his lab. Not sure what’s going on.”

  Thinking the worst, that a certain bald-headed trespasser had made another appearance, Elias sprinted out of the lab and down the corridors of Nucleus Two. Though he had spent plenty of hours in the other team member’s rooms, dorms, shared recreation lounges, and kitchens, Elias could count the times he had been to Bernard’s lab on a single hand, and even then most of those had been in the first few months.

  Sliding past the lab from his rushed approach, Elias grabbed the handle and flung himself inside. The lab was not as it had been some months before, during Elias’ last friendly visit to pester and probe. Books, notepads and binders were flung all about the place, its relatively smaller size compared to Elias’ own lab giving a claustrophobic feel. Strewn amidst the usual equipment and workstations for reagent preparation and genetic analysis were a number of other devices Elias didn’t recognise. Most appeared to be Tylas in origin, based on the lack of human keyboards and the presence of four slitted cylinders for eyepieces.

  But the lab’s dire state was the least of his concerns. Sitting against one of the walls was Bernard, arms shaking violently with his hands curled into fists. His jaw was locked up, spittle dripping through gritted teeth. Based on the kicking of his legs, he was trying to push himself up the wall to steady himself, but couldn’t find purchase against the smooth tiles. Elias wasted no time in rushing over.

  “Bernard!” Elias said, checking over his body and placing a hand behind his head, afraid that if the seizing continued, he might crack his skull.

  Dr Warnick didn’t reply. He glared up at Elias, eyes filled with indignation. Just as he closed his eyes, the trembling reaching a crescendo, Bernard finally relaxed. White knuckled fists opened up as his arms steadied themselves. By the time the spasms had ceased, Chel-Lin and EXCAL had followed Elias in.

  “What’s going on?” Chel-Lin asked. “Is he alright?”

  “I’m fucking fine, just leave me for a bit,” Bernard rasped.

  “Ok, look, I know whatever this is looks a bit embarrassing, but we’re here to help,” Elias said, gesturing platitudes. “Just take a moment to relax, and then we ca-“

  “Get the fuck out!” Bernard yelled.

  Taken aback by the flash of anger, Elias stepped back. With shaky legs, Bernard pressed himself up the wall until he was able to stand. His eyes still burned with a sort of unjust scorn towards the younger man.

  “Bernard, please, we just want to help,” Chel-Lin dared drift a few paces closer.

  “Help? You want to help? Then leave me be. In fact, EXCAL, tell them I’m not to be disturbed, lock the door, and fuck off.”

  Elias, initially feeling guilty at his apparent intrusion into his coworker’s room, straightened up and crossed his arms. In the past, he might have been willing to let it go; Bernard could handle himself; he was his own man. But now, he wasn’t going to sit by. He had seen this strange affliction of Bernard’s repeatedly, little by little. It wasn’t getting better, and Elias couldn’t help but resist.

  “No,” Elias said.

  Bernard looked up, confused. “No? What do you mean no? I said I to get the fu-“

  “No. I’m not going to leave you like this. I refuse.”

  Bernard shook his head and gritted his teeth, “This isn’t like some little work project where you might have some old paper or info in the back of your mind, and you get to look like some sort of hero. This is my problem, and I have been working hard to fix it. I can’t give up, and I won’t let you make me give in. Let me do my job.”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Doesn’t look like it’s working.” Elias couldn’t help but let a bit of arrogance slip into his tone.

  “That’s not fair, Elias. You’re the kid genius, backed up by daddy’s piggy bank and whatever else GaltCorp wants to throw your way. I never took shortcuts, and this my problem.”

  “Well, you say that, but I couldn’t have done what I have so far on my own. Sometimes you need other people. You think I did all the work back there with just these two hands? No. I had Chel-Lin, I had Madison, I had EXCAL. And, despite what you said, I had you.”

  Bernard’s glare had simmered down as he hung his head, “Fuck. Fuck me.” He sighed. “Sorry, look, I just wanted this chance to do something on my own, ok? I’m not exactly used to being the moron in a group. I usually hang around drugged up celebrities and dumbass interviewers. You and Daksira have your special magical FTL stuff going on, Madison’s going to fuck up the value of syraline forever, but I’m just me. Just me and my stupid plants.”

  Bernard let out a weak laugh. “I just realized that makes me the only one following Lucian’s little advice, the stuff he said about keeping a low profile. Isn’t that funny? Me, the goddamn gloryhound, deciding to sit back and play nice. How pathetic. But then again, I didn’t come to the IGS for awards, or for peace, or any of that bullshit. I came here, to Nucleus, to fix this.”

  Bernard pointed to his hands. Though they were now stilled, the point was clear.

  “I see,” Elias said. “I’ve been noticing whatever you’ve got for a while. What is it? Maybe we can help.”

  “Elias…” Bernard warned.

  “I’m serious! It’s not like this is my field of study, far from it, but I want to help, Bernard. Not for pride, not for gratification or some other meaningless thing. I want to help you because you’re my friend, alright?”

  The older man’s eyes widened. He took a deep groan as he slumped in a chair next to a disaster of a workbench.

  “Fine. I guess this is also part of his plan, I guess.” Bernard held up his necklace, Echorist eye looking back. “Goddamn Great Observer. Where do we begin?”

  Chel-Lin, having waited patiently long enough, glided over to Bernard. “Perhaps we should look at the beginning. How long as this been going on? Any changes in routine or lifestyle?”

  “It started about two years ago, barely noticeable, but I guess the cause could be from much earlier. No changes to my usual poisons – I still drink a bit, smoke some weed, but believe me, I’m no fuzzhead.”

  EXCAL had been drumming finger on the table in thought. “Hmm, I guess you checked the normal stuff that might cause this? N-not that I doubt you or anything! Just that even the best of us miss things sometimes.”

  “Nothing actually seems to be the cause as far as I can tell. Overall, my body is fine, genetics are good, no poisons or toxins or even nerve damage. First thing I did was get my nervous system checked – nothing there.”

  “How about…” EXCAL seemed to be reminded of something. “Haemorrhagic hyper-stimulated neural encephalopathy?

  “Hickman’s?” Bernard said, deadpan. “No, but worth a guess. It would be ironic if the very disease I cured got me in the end. Where the hell did you think of that?”

  “From a friend,” EXCAL rubbed the back of his steel neck.

  Whilst the others chatted, Chel-Lin appeared to be thinking of something. She took a moment to move to the whiteboard and made some shorthand doddles with Tylasian characters next to them.

  “Bernard, just to check, there’s been no changes in your lifestyle in, say, the past five or six years?” Chel-Lin asked.

  “As I said, nothing big. Still a lot of traveling about, lots of interviews around the CCH’s space.”

  “I see. And how have you been getting around?”

  “Mostly just some cheap cruise-liners. I did a few round trips with the Cambiar, but their wormholes were a bit too slow for some arrangements I had. Switched back to Black Sun for most of my later tours on their smaller jump-ships.”

  “You have something in mind?” Elias asked, recognising a few of the formulas Chel-Lin was scrawling.

  “I am reminded of a story my father once told, a personal experience. It did not paint humanity in a particularly… positive light, so in my innocence I wrote it off as a lie. Shortly after the first contact between humanity, a rogue ship from Heaven’s Doctrine entered Tylas space. Though the current policy of the Scorching Dominant was the immediate disposal of all unpermitted crafts in Heraldian space, it was instead boarded and searched. A one-off affair, I believe.”

  She floated to the side, revealing a diagram of the human body next to a number of calculations regarding QIS reattachment processes for Bubble Fields. Bernard rested his head on a fist, eyes squinted in attention.

  “What they found,” Chel-Lin continued. “Was that most of the crew were completely brain-dead. QIS detachment, it was reported. The ship did not have a Keeper, as it was from a lower-class clan. However, one of the crewmembers was different. Though they were not brain dead, they were suffering a severe illness of sorts. Disease is something unknown to my kind, so he was only described in the vaguest of terms. Father said he was ‘possessed by the feverish agitations of those who fail to worship Barald’, as vague as that sounds. Though he couldn’t reliably control his body, he was clearly aware, unlike the rest of the crew. He later passed, so I can’t be certain, but I imagine the survivor was suffering from something not too dissimilar to you, Bernard. Though the severity was different, the symptom appears the same.”

  “Right, ok,” Bernard was slowly nodding. “I think I follow you. But how does this change anything?”

  “I believe, in the case of the person in my father’s story, that some issue with QIS attachment might been the cause of his plight.”

  “Right, yeah,” Elias said with a snap of his fingers. “If someone’s QIS Pattern is not fully detached, but not fully in sync, then it could lead to problems. The brain would still be firing neurons like usual – but the person’s consciousness isn’t properly registering them. It’s a stupidly rare possibility, but definitely possible.”

  “That is what I was considering. Bernard,” Chel-Lin said. “Combined with your nausea when S-Jumping when we tested the DS-Drive, I think this might be worth checking. Tell me, Bernard, over the past few years, since the Keepers were limited in usage around the CCH, how many of those jumps were with computer guidance systems?”

  “I guess about…” Bernard looked upwards in thought as he began to count off his fingers, only to let them fall limply. “Huh. Pretty much all of them. They felt fine. Although… the last jump I took to get here to Kral’Thul was with a Keeper, GaltCorp provided of course, and I felt like crap the first few days after landing.”

  “That would make sense,” Elias said. “The temporary computer-generated QIS patterns used to anchor your typical S-Jump effectively read your current QIS Pattern and maintain its connection during the jump. If you had some sort of mis-alignment, then each of those further jumps would maintain that wrong configuration. When the Keeper was used, it tried to fully reattach your QIS Pattern, but failed. Same with the testing we did with the DS-Drive.”

  Bernard’s eyes were wide. “Holy shit. Holy shit! That might be it! No wonder I never saw anything – my body was fine, but my QIS was out of whack. Wait, hold on then… What do we do? What do we need?” His voice was soaked with excitement, as a smile graced his face. He practically yanked Elias and Chel-Lin forward looking between the two for answers.

  “I can’t say we’ll have a solution, but there are things we can do to confirm. Would you be willing to undergo some testing of your QIS pattern to check?”

  “Fuck it,” Bernard shrugged. “I’ve been throwing everything at the wall. What’s one more thing?”

  Elias and Chel-Lin spent some time bringing over some of their lab equipment over to Bernard’s quarters with EXCAL helping clear some space. When it was all set up, Bernard handed over his lab coat to EXCAL, despite the CAI’s insistence that he was ‘not a coat hanger last time he checked’, and sat by the scanner. Brimming with energy, he bobbed a knee frantically.

  “Ready to rock?” Elias said.

  “Ready to roll, baby!” Bernard yelled. Elias hoped the soundproofing of the facility would be enough to keep Madison asleep from the excited scientist’s cheers.

  Almost silently, Chel-Lin passed a QIS Pattern analyser over his body, passing its flicking light across his body. As it moved about, the screen displayed a representation of his body – the nerves, bones, muscle and blood vessels all highlighted. After a few minutes the scan was done.

  “Well, at least we can see the problem,” Elias said, voice mixed with both joy at uncovering the issue, and gloom of confirming its presence.

  Bernard’s QIS Pattern was attached just fine for most cells of the body, but his nervous system was out of balance, with the motor control centre being the most strongly affected.

  “Bernard… I’m sorry but…” Chel-Lin whispered.

  Instead of the dejection Elias expected, Bernard began to chuckle, “Guys, come on! We know what it is!”

  The three others looked to one another, concerned that something else in Bernard’s brain might be affected.

  “Look, it sucks that there is something wrong, but you have to remember – I’ve spent years trying to figure what the hell this is. I went to doctors, top of their fields, and they just brushed it off. I’ve felt alone for so long, thinking that maybe this was all in my head. But now I’ve got a lead, and that’s something at least.”

  “That’s a good mindset to have,” Elias said. “But, if you need help, if there’s something we can d-“

  “Don’t stress, kid. You’ve done more than enough. All I ask is that I might grab some bits from your lab over the next few days. I’ll see if I can put something together; maybe fix this once and for all. Even if it takes me restitching myself together cell by cell, I’m gonna do this.”

  There was a new hope in his eyes, that was clear. After a requesting a few documents regarding QIS Patterns and some initial tools, Bernard was left to his own devices, an eager grin plastered on his face. EXCAL mentioned the possibility of retrieving a spare S-Drive, one of the many now using a CHALICE core following Madison’s acquisition of the new exotic material, and hiding it in his server room, should the biologist need it for his treatment. Chel-Lin agreed to make the preparations the following morning. As Elias followed the others to get a good night’s sleep, Bernard called out to him.

  “Elias, wait!” he said. “Thank you. For not giving up on me, I mean.”

  “Yeah, well, being persistently annoying is what I’m good at. Best I put my skills to some good use once in a while.”

  “I mean it, smartass. Honestly, I was pretty close to… giving up… on getting help. I felt so powerless. It’s a strange feeling, to think you have everything you could ask for, and still not be good enough to help yourself. But I realized I was missing something. Can you get what it was?”

  “Another interview with some bimbo reporter?”

  Bernard stifled a chuckle. “Nope. I was missing you guys. Thank you, Scratchy. Take care.”

  With that, he left a newly reinvigorated Bernard to his work. Elias hoped that even if Bernard wasn’t able to help himself in the short term, he would hold onto the hope he had seemed to have found.