Reanimation begins with a scream.

  "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" I screamed.

  My heart was racing, and I felt disoriented. Because I was disoriented. The world around me was spinning. The sensation pulled me back down to where I was lying. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing until the spinning slowed.

  "Did I die?" I asked, looking around, trying to make sense of where I was. This didn't look like a reanimation chamber, and I didn't remember dying. That scared me. We always remembered dying, unless it was so sudden that we didn't have our memories backed up at the time of death. I was so confused.

  "You have died many times," a computer responded.

  Stupid computer.

  "Did I die just now?" I clarified. "Is this a reanimation chamber?" I tried to focus and clear my thoughts while my heart pounded.

  "You did not die. You fell asleep. You are aboard your starship, i35 Omicron-192," the ship responded.

  I thought about that for a moment. Yes, that was the computer on my i35 spacecraft. I recognized the voice.

  I closed and reopened my eyes, letting my body register my surroundings, feeling around me with my hands. I was on the floor, on my floor, resting on my favorite fluffy white rug. The rug had a large yellow butterfly design woven into the middle. I turned to rest my cheek against the rug and stared at the yellow butterfly for reassurance, imagining the smell of lilacs blooming in late spring.

  Ahhh. This was nice.

  I could see my coffee station in the corner of the room. I was within arm's reach of my desk. This was my tiny little captain's quarters in my tiny little ship, the most basic, lowest-level ship in the fleet, where I spent most of my time in space.

  I sighed and slowed my heartbeat. Okay, so I didn't die, I thought to myself. That's good. But I ran a diagnostic and checked my memory banks anyway. No new memory gaps. Everything seemed fine.

  I had been having more and more dreams about dying. This was just one more bad dream, a reflection of my last death.

  "No wonder the world was spinning," I said to myself, remembering my dive into Jupiter's Great Red Spot. I was pretty sure that had happened. I played it back in my head, observing the memory. I giggled as I thought about it, picturing the beautiful swirling storm clouds. Then the room started to spin again, so I had to stop. I'd relive it later.

  "What was I doing?" I asked myself, lifting myself off the floor and returning to reality.

  "You were taking a nap," the computer replied. "Your assignment today is to patrol the moons of Jupiter."

  "My assignment is always to patrol the moons of Jupiter," I groaned. I wandered over to my desk to pull up the local starcharts, and then …

  Bonk.

  "Son of a bitch!" I yelled, my voice rebounding off the metallic walls of my quarters. I found myself on the hard, cold floor, next to my fluffy white rug. Not on it. No, that would be too convenient. I stared up at the ceiling. I didn't remember lying down. I remembered standing up.

  "Goddamn motherfucking ship," I pronounced to the world.

  I like to talk to myself. It helps me think. But now, lying on the floor, it occurred to me that most of what I say out loud must be a curse.

  I processed that thought.

  A 30-day analysis computes to 0.47% of my verbalizations being curse words, but it feels like more. Probably because I constantly bonk my stupid head against the corner of the ceiling where my desk is located. It's one of the many flaws of my little i35 battleship.

  I rolled my body a few times until the soft fabric of the rug was beneath me again, holding my hand to my head and massaging my injury. This was going to form a bump. I still remember getting bump number one on the top of my head. I was fleeing from my sisters when I tumbled over the piano bench in our living room, striking a sharp corner of the piano. I ended up lying on an orange shag carpet, grabbing my head, just like I did now in my captain's quarters over a hundred years later.

  Wait. I stopped myself.

  That wasn't me. That was my human origin, Henry Hayes. That was his memory.

  I'm @kittyboy, his future biotic self. I'm the one who remained after he ported himself to become an aiways, a blend of organic and mechanical, capable of living forever if someone could fork over the money for clones and data storage. For me, that someone was the Outer System Alliance, my government. Not necessarily the best option, but unless you're wealthy, it's the most feasible path to extending your life.

  No point dwelling on it, I thought. I am where I am.

  I could have stood up again, but I was starting to sink comfortably into the @kittyboy-shaped divot on my oh-so-fluffy rug, formed by countless afternoon naps. I should continue my nap, I thought. Naps are important. They recharge the brain and higher mental capacity. For an aiways, I would argue they are essential.

  I yawned.

  And wouldn't you know it? Just when I was nodding off, deep in the embrace of the softest rug in the universe, the sirens started snoring loudly, blaring out through the ship, over and over and over again.

  Oh yeah, I recalled. That was my punishment. The Outer System Alliance wasn't happy with my journey to the Great Red Spot. I was now prioritized for battle deployment. We normally get put at the bottom of the list after dying so that our minds can recalibrate. Not me. I was going to be heading into battle at every opportunity until they decided I had learned my lesson.

  I didn't quite think it was fair. My argument was sound. "Oh, come on," I had reasoned. "I was going to die soon anyway. Just look at the statistics."

  "Did you disobey an order?" my Wavepilot commander had asked.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  "No," I had blurted, and I was right. "My mission hadn't started."

  "Did your actions prevent you from performing your mission, and did they not cause needless destruction of property?"

  Fine. Whatever. It was worth it.

  The year was now UC290 of the Unity Calendar, established after the singularity in OY2052 (Origin Year or "Old Earth Year"), by people who optimistically believed we would all come together and hug as one big happy civilization. As you can tell by the sirens of my warship, that didn't happen. And, for now, I could rely on those war sirens being a regular thing.

  I covered my ears. I hate sirens, especially the sirens on the i35 ships. They're so high-pitched that I want to pull my ears apart and switch to a biotic pair that I can turn off and on. I believe this is intentionally annoying to make us angry before heading into battle. The sirens in the Europa colonies were much more soothing.

  The i35 sirens pierced through my brain, impossible to ignore, so I guess they did their job. They would turn off once I sat down in the cockpit and hit the big red button to acknowledge them and lock myself in the pilot seat.

  Want to shower first so you don't smell like a musty spaceship full of dirty socks? Make it quick and put on some good earplugs. I'm not ashamed to say I've flown into battle in my pajamas more than a few times, just to turn off those damn sirens.

  I've nearly figured out how to disable them without the configuration being detected, and I did destroy them once. You can't blame me. They're really irritating! You would do the same thing, I swear.

  "Blatant destruction of government property," they had said.

  I have a knack for that. The thing is, no matter what you do - disconnect them, take out the battery - they just keep ringing and ringing! So, of course, I ripped them out, ejected them, and blasted them with missiles.

  Was I late to the mission?

  No. I was not.

  I didn't even make it to the mission.

  Did I accidentally blow up my ship?

  No. That was on purpose.

  The Alliance Starmada wasn't exactly pleased with me that time either. My punishment was to drink coffee with vinegar for a year.

  Don't tell them, but after several months, you get used to it.

  My point is that our sirens suck and that punishment in the Alliance Starmada is not as bad as people think. I'm sure you've heard rumors about the Outer System Alliance and their fondness for deletion, the act of completely deleting and effectively killing an entity. I assure you, they are false. I didn't earn myself a deletion. You would have to do something extremely heinous, and I mean extremely heinous, for that. It's too important to have one more aiways to serve in the starmada.

  The Alliance also doesn't do Bodily Execution And Reanimation (BEAR) very often. It's expensive and can break a person's mind. But I did know an aiways, @pennygo, who suffered through BEAR. The punishment is that your next animated life is spent in some kind of container other than your own body, for a minimum of one year or until you perish by circumstances out of your control.

  That'll teach you to stay in line, if you can BEAR it (ha ha ha), and that might explain why my coffee machine back at Sovereign Starbase sasses back at me.

  Thinking about that made me a little sad. I hadn't thought about @pennygo since their punishment. I decided then and there that I would kill them myself, discreetly, if I could figure out where they had been stashed. Do them a favor. I'd start by smashing my coffee machine, just in case.

  I could only lie on the rug for so long. I had 60 seconds to respond, or I'd get in trouble. After 49 seconds, I gave in to the annoying ringing in my head from the siren squeals, compounded by the pain from the bonk on my head, and summoned the motivation to unplug my ears, peel myself off the rug, and sprint to the cockpit. I've done this before. I have it down to a science.

  "I'll be back soon," I said to the rug, waving to the yellow butterfly.

  If you haven't picked up on it yet, I fly with the Alliance Starmada. Space isn't for everyone, and working for the Outer System Alliance isn't exactly my favorite thing, but I've made it work. I'm not on a ship with hundreds of people, and I've managed to keep it that way. I need my alone time to stare into space. I think that's why I'm so drawn to space in the first place, and the Outer System Alliance spreads out into the farthest reaches beyond the asteroid belt.

  While I don't love it, I have to trust that Henry Hayes knew what he was doing. He was me, after all, and we're explorers at heart. I think that's why the Outer System Alliance made sense - not that I get a ton of time to explore these days. I wasn't always military, flying into battle to die over and over again. I was a miner for the Outer System Alliance before the war escalated. I was hoping to mine ice out into the Oort cloud, check out the area with my own eyes, and maybe save up to buy a chunk of ice for myself.

  A lot of people think there’s nothing out on the edge of the solar system, and boy, are they wrong. You get out there beyond Netpune, and it’s a mess of hundreds of thousands of icy worlds and dwarf planets. Beyond that are trillions of icy objects.

  Who cares? Ooo, a bunch of icy objects.

  Well, I figure that with the right elements introduced, a little heat, and some artificial spin, you could create yourself a miniature Earth. And there's trillions of those icy bits floating out there! I have no doubt that someday I'll be able to order myself a terraforming kit online, ship it to an icy world that I buy cheap, and have my own little planet for myself. It's not everybody's dream, but it's one of mine.

  I'm just waiting for one of those $1 qcoin specials that pop up when a corporation wants to get people to move into an area so that they can build infrastructure and make it a commercial hub.

  If the Outer System Alliance is my route to that dream, then I guess I'm in the right place. I could try to go it alone, be independent, but immortality is expensive. I don't want to run out of money and end up in storage somewhere. If you don't want to worry about it, you have to sell your soul to somebody, a government or a big corporation. Moot point for me. I've got 500 years with the Outer System Alliance.

  Couldn't you defect? Change your allegiance?

  Are you serious? Join the People of the Solar Union? Um … no.

  "People of the Solar Union." That sounds cool. You sure?

  Yup. Damn sure. I've spent most of my eternity fighting against the Solar Union. They haven't done anything for me other than kill me many times and make it hard for me to visit any of the worlds near the sun.

  They were called the Terrestrial Commonwealth back in Henry's days, Innies, folks who wanted to stay close to the sun inside the asteroid belt. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars - they're all part of the Former Terrestrial Commonwealth (FTC). They rebranded as the Solar Union when they started settling some of the asteroid belt.

  At the time, we called each other Innies and Outies. It was so cute. But that rebrand should have been a sign of trouble. I admit, the rebrand was clever. It's catchy. But come on. "Rebrand?" More like a toppling of the government, the kind that happens slowly, where you don't notice it until one day there are guards asking you why you're buying two heads of lettuce instead of one.

  I don't know what I'd do if Henry Hayes had joined the Solar Union, other than just buy the one head of lettuce.

  But here we are. War. Hundreds of years of war.

  I believe the advert read something like this.

  Hey you! Do you have no money? Are you worried about the end of your existence? Join the Alliance Starmada today for a chance to be completely alone and penniless, trapped in an endless cycle of death and reanimation! Not convinced yet? WE WON'T LET YOU DIE! Could be worse, right? #liveforever #aiways #hahaha #betterlucknexttime

  Those fucking bastards.

  So, most of my life has been spent living on i35 starships. The i35 is a looong cylindrical spaceship, very basic, with two rooms on opposite ends of the ship and a hallway connecting them. The cockpit is up front. The hallway runs down the center to my tiny living quarters.

  I didn't design it, of course, which is why I have issues with it. The sirens suck. It doesn't maneuver well. It's made of cheap materials. I don't mind that it's a single-person craft, but it doesn't even feel like it has enough room for one person.

  Even the hallway seems cramped, I thought, as I ran to the cockpit.

  I was now thoroughly irritated. I'm in a claustrophobic ship, with a sore head, sirens, and the knowledge that I was probably about to launch into a battle where I would die and be reanimated again, and all I wanted was a nap.

  I should probably order another fluffy butterfly rug for when they reanimate me, I reminded myself. You learn not to value too many possessions in my line of work.

  I sat down in the pilot seat, rage-clicked the #bigredbutton to silence the sirens, and injected myself with a caffeine stim.

  A yellow icon appeared on my screen.

  "So that's where I'll die," I told myself, and I hit the accelerator.