Nanowrimo 2012

nano2012.txt

Sovereignity of Mind

Katy was poring over the isosikerian charts, her headphones blasting music
of the worst kind in terms of quality. The repeating beat was not even
perceived anymore but did a good job in keeping the noises of the ship out.
There is nothing as important as silence when working on a new hyperspace
jump. The calculations are difficult enough that modern computers cannot
reach a satisfying result in acceptable time. The interaction of a
hyperspace navigator with the program in order to prioritize is often the
way to the best results. The hyperspace navigator has to have a set of
specialized skills and a lot of training, but most importantly a very
specific sort of pattern recognition which normally only few people excel
at and which often is only found in people who are faceblind. As such
hyperspace navigators have the reputation of being social outcasts,
something which Katy lives up to quite well. She set up a few additional
parameters for the computer when she saw that the captain tried to reach
her. She removed the headphones, and messaged him back: "Sorry for the
delay, captain."

Captain Ikaru established a voice connection almost immediately: "Katy,
what's new?"

"I'm up at," she checked a screen, "98, 99 right now." by that stating the
projected chance to leave hyperspace at all and reaching the vicinity of the
location (with the error of up to 3 days of regspace journey) if hyperspace
if left.

Ikaru nods. "That suffices fully."

"I am transferring the parameters to navigation then," she said with a bit
of insecurity in her voice.

"Yeah, do that, please."

Katy presses a few buttons on her console. "Transferring, finished."

"Good, start to work on the jump back as soon as we have the data for it."

"Sure will." Hyperspace is not static enough that one can use the
parameters of previous jumps for it without landing in unexpected places if
anywhere at all. This is why a lot of data is collected during each jump
which then can be extrapolated upon for the next one.

"Okay, till then, Okay to disestablish!" After a similar murmur, Katy
disconnects and gets her hand and feet into the rests which fixate her during
the jump and buckled up her seatbelts. During hyperspace jumps, there is
always movement and thus people make sure that they do not accidentally
injure themselves. Strangely enough this does not stem from the actual jump
part, that is the shift between regspace and hyperspace but from forces
within hyperspace (so-called Sanchez Variations).

Katy knew that so far, she has had a good series of jumps, but every series
has its end. Before every jump, she feared that this is the one which ends
it all, that this one will have an incorrect value somewhere and the ship
will not leave hyperspace and she will be blamed for this until the rest of
her short life as the Sanchez Variations slowly kill the ship. Again she
murmurred to herself: "This is the last time I do this. This is the last
time, I do anything like that ever again. I will find a job in a less
stressful sector, like gardening. Somehow, I will!" She knew all too well
how completely illusionary that hope was though: no one wants to hire a
person who has the sort of mental impairments which one needs to be a
hyperspace navigator for anything else than being a hyperspace navigator.
Most kind of employment these days requires so-called people skills, which
Katy knew she fails at that so completely that the job qualification system
rated her with a clear zero in that regard, a feat even most hyperspace
navigators do not manage given that the scale goes up to 100.

She always thought she felt the jump into hyperspace as a very specific
movement, but she rationally knew that this is just the initial Variation.
She knew that the ship would descend from hyperspace in 174 seconds and so
started to count as soon as she felt it: "One Yogyakarta, two Yogyakarta..."

Eventually she reached 180 and got nervous. Sure, navigation is never exact,
but this realization does not help when there is nothing you can do than
wait. Her heart raced and her back felt cold and sweaty. She bit her lower
lip as if that changed anything. She started to yowl as if in pain even
though it was not pain per se but mental anguish. She was no longer able to
count. She only could think of the fact that she failed the ship. Tears
obscurred her vision and started to fly into the weightlessness of the
room. After what seemed like an eternity, the moving and shaking stopped.
"You have reached regspace." said a computer voice.

Katy unbuckled and took a small vacuum cleaner like device to clean up her
tears, which still floated around the room. It was more a matter of own
comfort than a necessarity, the tears would soon be sucked into the climate
systems, but she hated to see them. To her these things were a sign of
defeat. Now that her pulse, stomach and mind steadied, it felt to her a one
of the reasons why she did not belong into this job. She was not meant to
have a job where so many people depend onto her. She hated all kinds of
responsibility to others as she felt often too much of a mess to justify
other's trust into her. To have a job where a ship, even if it is a small
freighter like the Sovereignity depends on her judgement, intuition and
pattern recognition was not something she enjoyed all that much.

In all her thoughts about how she would like to be in a different job,
Captain Ikaru established a voice connection. "Hey, Katy! Great jump! We're
about two hours from Yeni Istanbul."

Katy's voice sounded insecure as if she expected Ikaru to turn into a tiger
and jump onto her: "We... are?"

"Yeah, last jumps, we still had to go for an entire day until we got here,
Hyperspace in this area seems to be quite difficult to navigate."

"I guess..." she murmurred while checking that the destination is actually
called Yeni Istanbul in the canonical name, "I had time to prepare." when she
saw the name Yeni Istanbul appear, she breathed out audibly. "I will prepare
the return jump, I guess?"

"Yeah, please do, Katy!"

"I will! Okay to disestablish."

Katy knew that she behaved in a socially incorrect manner, but she was not
sure what to do instead and already was fully aware that she would be
replaying the same conversation in her head over and over again. It was not
even right that hyperspace in this area was difficult. It was one of the more
obvious destinations in terms of ease of navigation, few cepheids, few
quasars, pretty much none of the things which make hyperspace navigation a
real pain in certain parts of the anatomy. It is a bit tricky to extrapolate
some sikarian fluxes based on the isosikarians which can be determined
beforehand, but that is why they requested a navigator from her temp agency.
It is one of the reasons why humanity has settled on this far-off planet far
away from just about everything. Katy hummed to herself, then reminded
herself to turn on the music and started on the calculation of the next jump
back to Centralia.

Time flies when having fun, but it also flies when working with a lot of
concentration. Katy could not say how much time passed when she was rudely
dragged out of her state of flow by an incoming connection. "Katy! We need a
jump and we need it now, you get it!"

"We will not end in Centralia that way!"

"As long as we get over 50% exit chance, I do not particularly care about
where we land. Bugs have taken over!" The Bugs are an alien race, which
reminds of a swarm of locusts. They spread from one planet to another, mining
it, taking its resources and then moving on. And they always come in large
waves from hyperspace.

Katy cursed. "I am preparing a vector, gimme some time!"

"We don't have a lot of time!" Ikaru pleads.

Katy made a completely different approach now, instead of using a vector
which lands her near her location, she used a basic trajectory which would
most likely leave the hyperspace, checked back and immediately transmitted it
to navigation. "Use this one then!"

"Jalta, prepare the jump! Katy, where does it go to?" Ikaru commands a person
on the bridge.

"With a probability of 96% it leads us to regspace."

"And more exactly?" Ikaru asks while Katy prepares herself for the jump by
putting herself into the straps and belts.

"Well, I really don't know. You can start with a jump to your desired
location and make it safer or you can start with a safe jump and then adjust
the target destination. Guess what I did," her voice breaks. "You told me
to send the first possible jumpvectors with 50% exit probability."

There was screaming on the other end of the connection and almost a second
later, Katy felt the movement of the Sanchez Variations. She heard the
screaming of others on the bridge and tried very hard to retain her own
composure. She wasn't even sure how long the jump would take, but if Bugs
were the alternative, hyperspace suddenly seemed inviting. The Bugs can of
course also get into hyperspace, but their navigation is far less
sophisticated than human one. She heard that the Bugs always as a large wave
from all directions because they use the same hyperspace vector for every
single craft in a wave. While it in most cases seems to be a tactical concern,
they also do just that when fleeing and according to information from
isosikerian observation even when navigating within their own systems. They
would not be able to follow them. If they used the vectors of the
Sovereignity just as they used their own vectors, they would end up in a
different place given the fact that you cannot step into the same hyperspace
river twice.

The shaking became more and more violent and slowly Katy started to think of
the 10% chance to end up in hyperspace forever or rather for the rest of her
short life. Someone shouted "Oh my God!" through the connection in a piercing
voice, which gave the impression of having seen an entire colony of Bugs, not
just one ship. Or of having been severely injured. Or of a lot of other
unpleasant possibilities, which Katy's brain loved to imagine in full detail.
Katy was extremely relieved when suddenly the vibrations just stopped. The
computer voice which announced that they had entered regspace was the most
welcome sensation which Katy could imagine at this moment. If it was a real
person, she would have hugged her right now. Heck, she felt inclined to even
hug the server it was hosted on right now, just because it caused her such a
relief. She heard the voices on the other end of the line and remembered that
no one thought far enough to close the connection. "Ready to disestablish,"
she said.

"Before you do, can you cooperate with Yasmin to determine our current
location?" Ikaru asked.

"Depends. I am really not sure how much I can contribute in regspace." She
knew how important it was to react ready for teamwork and full of the urge
to cooperate even if her own inclination was to decline stating that this
idea was bizarre, that regspace navigation with parallaxes and cepheids and
redshifts uses mostly different techniques than hyperspace navigation which
works with isosikerians, isolaterals, ana-kata symmetry and a lot of pattern
recognition.

"I am sure you will be able to make yourself useful, cepheid periods are also
relevant in hyperspace navigation from what I have gathered. With correct
hyperspace evaluation you could find hundreds of usable cepheid periods in
just a short time. Far less than it would take to actually survey the sky."
Ikaru suggests.

Katy tilted her head. "This sounds like an interesting approach, but right
now, I have other priorities."

Ikaru's voice was icy: "What kind of other priorities?"

"Restroom. Urgent." Katy explained. She wasn't even lieing, she had to go
earlier already, but the emergence of the Bugs made that impossible.

"Oh, I did not mean right in this very second. Do what is required."

Katy disconnected and quickly propelled herself through the ship to the
restroom. Only when she did what urgently had to be done, she arrived in
Yasmin's realm, a somewhat secluded part of the bridge. Yasmin's entire
appearance made it seem as if she was not a person working on a freighter but
instead preparing for a beauty competition. She looked meticulously dressed,
was wearing makeup, a headscarf which fit the rest of her outfit and Katy
thought that she could smell the scent of a sweet perfume from her direction.
From what she heard, Yasmin was also quite a social butterfly.

"So, how are you expecting to tackle this issue?" Katy asked as soon as she
entered.

"Hi Katy. Great jump you did there!" Yasmin stated with a smile.

"It was a default option from such a position. You know, following a flux
pretty much." She hoped that no one noticed how uncomfortable she felt about
this conversation. She hoped even more that there was no hidden agenda in the
things which were said about her. She never was able to figure these out. "But
yeah, we need to determine our whereabouts."

"You are right. Do you have access to your systems here?"

"Yeah, they can stream to whereever required. It can be a bit tricky to set
up though. Don't expect it to work on the first attempt, can you?" Katy
realized how she manged her grammar, but resisted the urge to correct it
after she was told several times that doing this made her sound unnatural.

"Take your time." Yasmin was still smiling.

Katy put her mind to the task to get the central computer to stream her
content into a layer of the diplay. It was so loud here that Katy found
concentrating very hard. Whenever she felt that she was close to set it up,
someone else made enough noise for her to lose her train of thought. She knew
that people were loud, but did they really have to be so loud and so
annoying? Were they interested in the task at hand at all? Eventually, she
finished and something vaguely reminding of static from ancient analogue
multicasting devices, which she once saw in a museum filled the screen.
"Great! Now we should have both views."

Yasmin looked at her confusedly. "What the heck is that? It looks pretty
wild!"

"That is a realtime view on hyperspace ana of us. Except taht it is of course
not a view but a projection based on a nmber of physical properties as
detected from realspace. You can see the various structures of it pretty well,
but if you prefer I can make them visible for you."

"And here, you see the cepheids?" Yasmin asked.

"Of course you do not see them as they are regspace objects, what you see is
that the change in size can lead to distortions of the isosikerians. So what
we need is a regular distortion of the isosikerian lines around us."

"I will just pretend that everything you said made sense, okay?"

"Look, I can explain it to you: You know what a sikerian level is?" Katy
immediately became defensive.

"I don't. I know that it is something you work with a lot, but I don't know
anything else about it." Katy suddenly had one of the seldom flashes of
insights into another mind: Yasmin seemed to be proud of her own ignorance
since knowing these kind of things was deemed to be an area of interest for
sociophobic losers (a title which Katy by now had learned to accept for
herself).

"I can explain it to you if you care enough about it." Katy's voice was
pleading as if it was telling Yasmin to please be worth her time.

"I guess I have to if I want to get out of this mess."

"Okay, the sikerian levels are basically levels of specific particles which
reach regspace from either ana or kata."

"Who are ana and kata?" Yasmin enquired.

"They are directions. Basically, just as in regspace, there is left, right,
up, down, forward and back, there are two new coordinates once we go into
Hyperspace, ana and kata."

"But they are not real coordinates, are they?"

"They are real. If they weren't there'd be no way to go quicker than the
speed of light. There'd be no hyperspace. They cannot be perceived by
humans, but they are nonetheless real. Just as you can only see your brain
in a medical scan, you can only see stuff which is ana and kata of us if you
look at the output of a Inkeru-detector."

"But if the coordinates are in a right angle to each other, how can seeing
what happens in hyperspace help to provide data about regspace?"

"Because they do not look fully ana or kata, the look both forward and ana,
or kata. The ship has a few Inkerus to allow a full view." Katy explained.

"I see. And the sikerian level is the level of these particles form
hyperspace? From these weird directions?"

"Yes. Isosikerians are lines with the same amount of sikerian emmisions.
Sikerians are emitted by phenomena in hyperspace, Thus, isosikerians can
give a fairly good idea how hyperspace looks like around us without us
having to jump there."

"And how does that find things in regspace?" Yasmin asked.

"It finds things in regspace because not all sikerian particles come from
hyperspace, some jump into it from regspace and descend later. There are
quite a few things which cause that, including the reactors of our own
ships. We have to find in the haystack of hyperspace-originating
transmissions the few of cepheids and other things you can use for
orientation. Does that make any sense?"

"I guess," she still did not seem to be convinced, "but how do you find
these kind of signals?"

"And here comes the part into play where people with specific neural
oddities are taken from their parents after birth and raised specifically to
excel at this kind of pattern recognition." Katy explained laconically.

"They took you from your parents immediately after birth?" Yasmin seemed
shocked.

"The regime was falling apart and they were for that reason willing to
sooperate more than they would have normally. I actually spent 2 weeks with
my parents. There are still a few pictures of that supposedly though I never
saw any of them." Katy started to rock back and forth.

"But that's horrible!" Yasmin exclaimed.

"Not really. If I was born at an earlier age, I would have either been
abandonned, killed for being a witch, homeless or aborted. I don't know
about you but I prefer living over the alternative." Katy had heard too many
of these comments for her taste in her 25 years on this planet already. To
her, people who did that insulted her very existence.

Yasmin looked a bit embarrassed. "You come from a very different place than
I do. I guess sometimes, I do not even understand how different it is."

Katy nods: "You are from Earth, right? I am from Bue. So yeah, it is quite
different." Her home planet is named after a god of Earth who brought people
song and dance. "I think they are able to cure neurodifferent people on
Earth. Which is why they enjoy a normal lifestyle and why all hyperspace
navigators of earth are hired from abroad."

"It is kinda scary to think of that," Yasmin admitted, "That we can only go
to different worlds by exploiting people who would otherwise be cured of
their issues."

Katy does not reply immediately. After a longer pause, she answered: "The
scary thing is not really that but how unsuitable certain people are who
have been raised for this purpose for their entire lives. But this is
another issue."

Yasmin seemed to feel extremely awkward now. "I think we should make sure we
find those cepheids."

"Yes, they're not gonna find themselves." Katy agrees, swallowing an
additional relativation that this is mostly because of their lack of
sapience and that if intelligent start existed they would have a very clear
idea about their location. 

They worked hard in their own ways: Yasmin by continuously initiating
various comparisons about star brightness and spectroscopic analysis of
their light, Katy by looking for structures in the chaos. While soon the
first cepheids were found, this still did not help them immediately with
their location. Some of the Cepheids did not check out and via the sikerian
output, their periods coud be estimated far too roughly for Yasmin's needs,
but they had found a number of them together which they probably would have
been unable to find on their own. In the end, they agreed that the best
course of action would be to wait and to observe their actual periods until
they had any idea of where the Sovereignity could possibly be. Just when
Katy wanted to stop her data from being shown, shesaw something strange
however. "Yasmin, come take a look at that! What in the worlds is that?"

Yasmin looked at the direction of Katy's pointed finger. "It is something,
which looks like chaos to me."

"That is a lot of things but not chaotic! Can't you see it‽ What is in
regspace at this location!"

"This would require me to know where that is in regspace!" Yasmin became
defensive against the enthusiasm which Katy displayed. 

Katy told her the approximate location in coordinates she understood. Yasmin
then looked it up and tried to see anything from it. "You are right, there
is something very faint, a star probably."

Katy shook her head. "This cannot be a star. It is too close!"

Yasmin looked at her as if she was crazy: "I thought you cannot determine
the distance of things via your means."

"I can determine it with order-of-magnitude precision and only if something
is sufficiently near not to get lost in the static, which means that in most 
cases it is absolutely useless. Not here though! There was a short burst of
order from this place, which has been dormant for hours before. And this bit
of order maybe has a regspace origin. In most cases, that would be extremely
ungood." Katy explains.

"How so?" Yasmin asked.

Katy just said one word: "Bugs."

"What, you think Bugs are here‽" Yasmin exclaimed.

"Not necessarily, but it could be Bugs as stars do not create these kind of
reactions. The alternatives are equally interesting though. It could be that
faint star going nova or something like that. In which case we would only
see it in regspace much later. But it would be the first Hyperspace record
of a nova. Astronomers would surely love to see that."

"I will keep an eye on that as well." If Yasmin sounded a bit insecure about
Katy's enthusiasm, Katy failed to perceive it.

"Great! I stored it and I will watch the recording myself to see whether I
can see anything odd or even in it."

"Something 'odd or even'? That is an interesting way to put it." Yasmin
said.

"Oh, I guess that idiom is not used on earth. I am sorry." Katy immediately
became defensive as if fearing that people would beat her up if she
disappointed them.

When she left, she did exactly that: She went into the hyperspace navigation
room and watched the outbreak of structure at least 50 times (she lost count
afterwards). Then she went to bed in her small cabin. She dreamt of the
structure singing to her except that when Katy tried to concentrate on it,
it changed into another structure she encountered but before she could even
name that one, it turned into another and then again into another. Katy
panicked because she was unable to read these structures, she screamed and 
then realized that she was screaming in real life as well.

She checked the time on her communicator. She slept about 3 hours. She did
not feel as if she could go to sleep again and so she used the handrails to
move to the mess hall. She knew that emotional eating was a bad thing, but 
she had forgotten to do so last evening. The food didn't even taste good,
but it was pleasant to munch on. She got a helping of spagbol via a vending
machine and started to suck on the mouthpiece to suck in and eat the food 
inside the plastic enclosure. She remembered when the regime fell and her
home had to close down. She had to eat food of the same kind as other planet
dwellers eat which was not enclosed and you had to use weird implements to
consume it. It was so awkward to eat, but so very good. It was only a month
until the temp company signed her up and sent her on various ships, but the
food probably would be in her mind until the end of her time, making
everything else she could eat pale in comparison. She hated the regime for
falling and making her miserable like that. Even Spagbol no longer tasted as
good anymore and that was her favorite food as a child. Rationally, she knew
that the regime was bad to many people and had killed millions, but she felt
much safer while she still was at the Institution than ever after. She
realized that while she was strapped to the ground to eat, she again was
rocking back and forth.

"Hey, Katy, is there place next to you?" someone asked, breaking her out of
her varied thoughts.

"I guess," she murmurred, wondering why someone would insist on being near
her instead of virtually everywhere else, especially as there was no one
else in the mess hall.

"You think there are Bugs nearby?" he asked.

"Bugs, maybe, it does not look like them though," she murmurred. 

"Because it emerged suddenly?" he asked.

"Yeah, they use seclionics to power they ships, so they look just like us in
hyperspace and have a constant signature. On the other hand, I am not sure
what else can make a strong signature appear out of nowhere apart from
intelligence."

"So it could be a Bug ship which has issues getting their reactor to work?"

"Can, yeah, does not mean is though."

"So you don't know what it is either?"

"I slept, well tried to. Sure, I am recording that sector to check it when I
am actually sapient again but it will be a while."

"You know, I wanted to tell you something. There are people on this ship who
think that you are responsible for stranding us somewhere in the middle of
Bug territory. That you are actually an agent of the Bugs, ridiculous stuff
like that."

Katy looked at him, then broke down and started crying. Tears flew in all
directions because she was sobbing and rocking back and forth very much.

The person reached for her hand. "Is it okay if I hold you? I know that it
is probably complete BS what these people are saying, but I thought you need
to know that there are people who think so. You know, so that you can avoid
these people."

"I have always tried, I have always tried so hard." Katy repeats mostly to
herself.

The other person held her hand and just sat there, softly telling her that
she does not need to cry.

Eventually, Katy calmed down enough to look at this strange person who did
not see her a nuisance, people have to put up with, an idiot savante, but
worth his time. He had grey hair, grey eyes and his face seemed to show age
and lack of anti-ageing medicine. She could not recognize him, especially
not since he was not wearing uniform but instead an overall with the logo of
a band from Earth on the front: Sirius Rising. She decided to refer to him
just like that until she were to discover his name. She knew that if she
asked people who they are, they reacted often with annoyance and derision
even though they knew that a large part of the brain region which is used to
recognize faces in normal humans has been repurposed to recognize hyperspace
structures instead. 

Sirius spoke to her again with a calming voice, which reminded her of the
river next the the Institution she spent her childhood in. "There are bad
people everywhere. And sometimes, it is the only way to happiness to avoid
these bad people and spend time with people who treat you well. Humans are
stobors to others."

"Stobors? Are you from Bue?" she asked with surprise.

"Stobors are not a term only there, most settlers used the term stobor for a
dangerous form of local wildlife, as it is from a book written on earth. I
am from Nov Baku and our native wildlife also has stobors though they do not
look like yours."

"They are from a book?"

"The name stobor is from one, not the creatures themselves. Stobors on Nov
Baku are giant lizard-like creatures which can even bite through spacesuits
and whose armor requires special ammunition to even harm. I heard that the
Stobors on Bue are insects which destabilize the ground, right?"

"Yeah, I have heard that they even destroyed entire cities like that."

"Human stobors can be a bit like either: they can either directly attack you
like they do on my homeplanet or they can work covertly to destroy
everything which ever had a value for you like they do on your homeland."

"I never thought of it like that." Katy admitted.

"You are a child of the most restrictive upbringing of the human sphere of
influence. Of course you don't. I don't want to be rude or anything but I
read about the New Mind Institutes of Bue and I was scared. The people who
thought this up were brilliant but completely amoral. For example I read
that they actually enforce the already latent tendency of faceblindness by
having everyone whom a child would interact with wear a mask and not allow
any mirrors."

"A mirror as in a device to see yourself?" Katy asked, "Yeah, we didn't have
them. I am unsure about the masks though. If they did, I never noticed." 

The person seems to stiffle an utterance. "And the schools which you went
through seemed to consist of nothing but allegiance and learning about
Hyperspace."

"We also learned to read, write and do maths, you know. And disaster
prepareness as well as marksmanship." Katy beamed.

"But you never learned about literature, music, history, computer science,
chemistry or any of the other fields of knowledge in school, and I thought
this is kinda scary."

"What is literature?" Katy asked.

"You do not know it? Seriously? Do you know what a book is?" the man
enquired.

"I know that, I read a lot when I was a child."

"You know that there are books that tell stories?"

"I know, we had many of these in allegiance classes. Stories are supposed to
teach people how to behave."

"Stories are also written for many other reasons, to make people think about
certain topics, to persuade for a point of view, to allow people to flee
reality for a while. Literature is basically a canon of the most remarkable
books which do tell stories."

"I prefer books which do not. I they do not make me feel as badly about my
own actions."

"Not all books are like the ones from your allegiance classes, you know."

"I do, but the ones which are not just make me feel inadequate about my
entire self and that is even worse. I prefer books which describe things
which either exist or are possible. They have no moral component to it and
want nothing of you but your interest."

"What do you mean?"

"I have read Romeo and Juliet and felt the entire talk about love to be
severely annoying. I either felt annoyed by their actions and thought they
should take some emotion-suppressors or annoyed that I had been through such
a trip that I probably will never experience it myself. I forced myself to
read it and was confused by the times, the emotions and the behaviour. When
I finished, I had the urge to shower."

"Wow, I never saw it in that way."

"There is one writer who I like because he does not write in this confusing
manner. His name is Inshadil and he writes the closest thing to stories that
I have not disliked. Maybe that is because he is a retired hyperspace 
navigator who talks about his experiences."

"I am definitely looking up his works when we will return into the civilized
world again," the person assured her.

"You don't need to. I can transfer it to you. He does not mind. His works
are free of charge anyways."

"Great!" he seemed to be actually happy and not trying to get out of an
unpleasant situation. "I set my communicator to accept incoming transfers."

Katy moved her fingers over hers. "Here you go!"

The text transferred within seconds and she saw his communicator ID, which
fortunately had his name: Aurelio. She did not remember meeting anyone with
that name before.

"If you have seen my ID, yeah, I am actually called Aurelio. That is what
growing up in the favelas does to you," the person, Aurelio, said.

"I never heard it before. Is it a bad name?" she asked.

"Just a very strange one. For some odd reasons, the poorer the area, the
more fucked up the names of the children. If people cannot do a lot for
their children, they tend to give extravagant names which embody their
wishes for them. In my case, the name was made famous by an emperor on
earth."

"Is Katy a fucked up name?" Katy asked.

"No, it is a name which is as bland as they can be. I guess you were
committee-named like I saw in some documentations."

"Yes. I was. My parents wanted me to be called Katherine, the name was too
imperial for the authorities, but they did agree on a version which
apparently was less offensive to them." Katy explained.

"I was not aware that the parents had any influence on it."

"Most of the time, they did not but as the coprosperity collapsed, they were
more accomodating. So, I guess I was lucky." Suddenly she thought back to
something else and spat the words out, "but then, parents are overrated
anyways. They didn't even care for me when the Institution closed and there
was no place to go for me. They never came for me even though they were
informed that they should take me in as I had no place to go. Like fuck did
they! I feel as if these big things are lies: love, parenthood, democracy,
solidarity, religion. They are just invoked if people want something of you:
Money, time, effort, support. If you want something of them and invoke any
of them, they will laugh into your fucking face."

"It is not that easy. If things were that clear, life would be far easier
than it actually is. The fact that you experienced some of the bad sides of
humanity does not mean all is bad. And you at least once did get through by
invoking solidarity. How else than by implicitely relying on solidarity and
other humanitarian values did you get the free books of Inshadil?"

Katy looked at him pensively. "You keep making sense. That is seldom in a 
person."

"You have had some bad experiences with people, Katy."

"Is that surprising? I live and work with them." Katy stated without a trace
of irony.

"Yes, it is. Humanity is not all bad. There are many decent humans out
there. There are many people who don't want to hurt people like people hurt
you. There are many decent people out there. It pains me to hear what you
say about people because it implies that you experienced quite a few
unsavory things out there."

"Let's not talk about these. Let's just say that the Coprosperity should
have never collapsed and leave it at that."

Aurelio did not disagree, but instead changed the topic. "My shift starts
soon, so I need to hurry. Let's stay in contact, can we?"

Katy audibly sucked in air, seemingly fighting with herself. "Yes, we can,"
she eventually agreed.

When Katy went to bed, she fell asleep soon and if she dreamt, she did not
remember any of it. The next morning, she woke up groggy and tired, just as
usual. She went to mess hall and got a standard breakfast and ate it, then
she went to the hyperspace navigation room, forgetting even to do the basic
tasks of hygiene, which she generally remembered. Even before she fixated
herself to one of the wallsin order not to float away during work, she
checked the relevant region of space. She was not disappointed. There were
spikes in order and they were regular. And when examining it, it did not
remind of the Bugs at all. Sure it was a spike in order, but not a spike
reminding of a seclionic reactor, even a malfunctioning one. It did not
remind her of anything at all she encountered previously and it was too 
regular to be random. Katy decided to request a connection to Captain Ikaru,
but received a message that he was off-shift, as such, she tried to find
Yasmin in the network of the ship and she was surprisingly enough available.
Katy initiated a connection, which Yasmin only answered after almost 30
seconds. 

"Hey Katy," Yasmin answered, "It's a bad time right now, can you ping me
later?"

Katy expected such a behavior and rationalized to herself that she must be
busy. "It is important. That structure, it cannot be Bugmade. The signature
seems to be something completely new. It has a far too high hekira value to
be Bugmade or random. And even if that was an error seclionics cannot
produce so short spikes. I have no idea what it is but it is something
previously unknown to me. If you found anything out while I was asleep,
please tell me." She breathed in.

"Seriously? You mean it is not something buggy out there?" Yasmin sounded
dubious.

"Yeah, it spikes regularly every 3 hours and 5 seconds and it spikes for 3
seconds. The reaction which a seclionic process causes in hyperspace can be
observed for 10 seconds though, so it cannot be a seclionic process. Now, for
all their failures in navigation, the Bugs do still use pretty sophisticated
seclionics. Thus we should not be able to see a 3 second signature, even if
they were trying to get their reactors to work. We should see a 10 second
signature."

"What we saw yesterday was longer than 3 seconds," Yasmin thought that she
made a good argument.

"Because yesterday, we saw cumulative changes over a 15 minute range, not
actual behavior in hyperspace. This makes it easier to detect certain kinds
of cepheids by their signature changes. There are several views and you have
to select the one best for the task. Isn't it like that as well for you?"

"Well, yes, but I don't really have these weird ones."

"I know, different spectra and different ways to see them, while I have
mostly the sikarian information. It is still similar in spirit, if not in
implementation. I also did not have such a resource-intensive view on it, so
it onlt updated evert 15 seconds while I now looked at it with sub-second
precision." 

"So, what do we face there? According to you, that is." Yasmin's voice made
Katy think that she made a big mistake.

"A structure about 2.343 unit distances away. Of unknown purpose, by unknown
origin most likely made with unknown technology."

"It's more like 2.342 unit distances. Good catch though from someone who
cannot supposedly determine distances in anything closer than order of
magnitude."

"I learned a bit or two about regspace navigation in my education and cna
access your data." Katy stated plainly, not trying to answer to her tone of
voice, but only to her content of speech.

"So, you have no idea what it is, only what it isn't?" Yasmin asked.

"Pretty much, yeah." Katy admitted.

"I will talk to the captain when he gets up. This is interesting. Ready to 
disestablish." 

"Disestablishing." Katy agreed and quit the connection.

She continued to work on the issue until she realized that she was getting 
hungry. She again went to mess hall and realized that 8 hours had passed 
without anyone contacting her about the issue. She was getting worried. 
As Ikaru was on-shift right now, she decided to contact him.

His voice seemed to indicate that he was busy, however not busy enough not to 
take the call: "What news do you have?"

"Basically, I wondered whether Yasmin has explained the issue to you 
already and what can be done about the thing."

Ikaru seemed surprised: "What issue?"

"There is a signature, 2.342 unit distances away. We knew that it was 
something, probably bugmade which caused it. It is regular in a 3 hour 
scale, but too short to be seclionically caused. So unless this is where the
Bugs do their betatesting, this cannot be anything they thought up." Katy 
stated the, to her by now well-known, facts. She started to talk about the 
10 second rule, which goverened seclionics, that is quark-based power-sources 
which humans and Bugs used to power their vehicles, and did so in great 
detail, by that blatantly defying all stereotypes about the Bue navigs who 
only know how to find their way through hyperspace and to praise their leader.
She hated this stereotype because it was too true, and thus tried to read up 
a lot about other things around her. Given that she realized how enjoyable 
non-fiction was, it was not difficult to read a lot. 

"I get it, this structure does not behave in the manner you have just 
described," Captain Ikaru was rather annoyed about her long-winded 
description, "but what does it do?"

"It sends a signal which is seen ana and kata of us and reflected back to 
regspace, basically. We are not sure whether this is an intentional signal, a 
byproduct of something else or a completely new thing, but to me, it is 
important that this is being checked out."

"We have other priorities." Ikaru stated clearly. "It is our job to deliver
goods to Yeni Istanbul, not to discover strange physical phenomena, no matter
how interesting, strange, awkward or unexplainable they are."

"I understand this, but I think that unless we understand something strange, 
we cannot assess its danger to the Sovereignity. It could be Buggy, but 
non-seclionic, it could be seclionic but of a completely different style than
anything we have encountered so far, it could be non-buggy and non-seclionic 
and that would be huge. That would be the hugest thing ever happen to us all. 
Nothing we could ever do would compare to that. It'd be,... something all 
children would learn in Allegiance. This is the most amazing thing to come 
our way, like, ever."

"We are not paid based on how cool we are, Katy. This thing might be harmless 
or it might be a threat to us and, believe me, humanity does not need another 
enemy. The Bugs are scary enough. Do you have anything else to say? If no, 
please disestablish the connection." Ikaru sounded cruel, even to Katy.

Suddenly, Katy felt reminded of something which Aurelio said to her about 
invoking the big words: "Can I appeal to you patriotism not to let this 
moment pass? Whatever this is provides new technology, and we need to make 
sure that this will not fall into the mandibles of the Bugs. The only reason 
why we are not steamrolled by the Bugs even more is because we have a far 
more sophisticated tech, especially in terms of seclionics and hyperspace 
navigation. If we let this moment pass, the tides might turn, and whatever 
this is will tell its secrets to the Bugs, not to us. And if that will be the 
case, we can only pray for mercy of the leader."

"You raise a good point, Katy. I will think about this." Ikaru admitted.

"Thanks, please do not betray the interests of humanity in following the 
interests of the company. Ready to disestablish." Katy felt as if she had to 
vomit. It was the most scheming thing she did in her entire life. It made her 
feel bad to say it and it made her feel even worse that it actually worked. 
As she could not do a lot about this, she went to her room to think about 
what just happened, on earth, she'd have paced back an forth, here, she moved 
from one wall to the opposite one with quick movements. It was just as 
effective at clearing her mind and would not leave as bad traces on the 
ground (there were several carpets in the Institution, which were slowly 
destroyed by her relentless walking back and forth). She eventually decided 
that maybe the big questions are called big questions because they cannot be
solved by a woman in a cabin of a spaceship with nothing but her mind and her 
pattern recognition. While these big words did not very much help her to find 
a meaning in the randomness that is life, the universe and all the rest, they 
suddenly seemed to be actually relevant to people. Ideals have no physical 
form, as such, they only exist in the minds of people who are governed by 
them. Katy knew that, but she always thought that the ideals she was raised 
with were not actually believed by the people who forced them upon her. The 
fact that a person did so in a situation where it might actually be 
disadvantageous for him to do, as such threatened more of her view of the 
world than she liked to admit. If she kept believing that everthing was black 
and white, it made life easier but it was far from the truth. She reminded 
herself to talk to Aurelio about this.

While she was still unraveling the personal consequences of the unsolvable 
big questions, a connection request reached her from Ikaru. She answered it. 
"What has been decided?"

If Ikaru was taken aback by her lack of sense for subtleness and small talk, 
he did not let it show: "We are going to examine the structure. I have 
decided to allow that to protect human interests over the ones of the Bugs.
Please make sure we have a way out in case all goes to hell here. Preferably 
at least in the vague direction from which we came. I don't want to risk an 
even longer jump through hyperspace."

"Great! I will instantaneously begin to do so," Katy exclaimed as she made  
her way back to hyperspace navigation. 

"Tell me when we have a 99% exit rate jump as a possibility."

"Of course, captain!" 

Long after the call was finished and she was listening to music and working 
on the way out, she was still wondering about what just happened. Humans can 
be harsh, strange and difficult, se said to herself repeatedly, only the 
hyperspace refuses to play strange mindgames, only the hyperspace abides to 
some rules, which can be figured out. No one who bashed her upbringing and 
education understood ever how much comfort can be found in it. Even in times 
before hyperspace travel, the neurodifferent had big issues understanding the 
neurotypical around them. If murder, suicide or inability to care for 
themselves did not take them out of the game, they either worked in thankless 
jobs in settings where their skills with other humans were important or they 
were homeless, jobless and hopeless. What hyperspace navigation did was to 
provide them with a framework on which they were able to thrive and be 
useful, where what they were able to provide was something which actually was 
desired and where the most difficult issue was having too much 
responsibility and the occasional collapse of a regime which was employing or 
raising you. 

Eventually, she had an answer to at least one of the questions: whether it 
would be possible to jump into the direction where Yeni Istanbul had to be 
and get out with a more than 99% chance. As it turned out, there was a way 
for this. After she provided this information to Regspace navigation, she 
followed the data feeds of the ship as it approched the weird object. It 
turned out to be not one object but a large area of them: Small objects in 
various shapes in the form of a cloud around one center. Closer inspection 
made it quite sure that it was a wreck: The parts were shattered, fragmented 
and torn apart as if a giant monster had been very angry or, more 
realistically, as if something was in hyperspace until the Sanchez variations 
killed it before releasing its shell down to regspace. Or an explosion
caught the poor ship and destroyed it. Katy had to avoid her eyes from the
regspace images. It was a large structure which was destroyed here, either a
hyperspace-capable ship or, even more amazingly, a ship designed to travel
between solar systems at sublight speeds, taking probably centuries to reach
its destination. Katy thought this was an immensely sad view. Ships were a
symbol of hope, a beacon of a better world to her. As such, it was not the
potential loss of lives, but the loss of the ship which saddened her. 
Hyperspace showed a jumble of structures. This thing, whatever it was,
seemed to affect things both ana and kata of it slightly leading to affected
structures from the objects behind it. A bit as if they were providing the
hyperspace-equivalent of a kaleidoscope, which was only there for people
able to understand hyperspace and read its structures. Maybe these things
even stretched out ana and kata of their actual place. There were so many
fragments, some smaller than a speck of dust and some larger than her room,
and most of them seemed to cause the distortions. The approach had been
extremely slow and thus it would only be a matter of time until they would
see the next pulse of whatever it was that was sent and it could be observed
from a viewing distance which hopefully still was safe. Katy felt anxiety
and excitement when she realized that it was about to begin. The last
minutes before it, she found herself rocking in the weird mixture of
emotions she felt, to make the racing heart slow down, to dry the cold sweat
on her body, most importantly the back, to calm her racing thoughts. Then,
the clock told it was only one minute to go, 50 seconds, constantly getting
less and less no matter how much Katy wanted it either to already be over or
never to happen at all. 30 seconds and she saw in front of her imagination
the safety distance being not enough, the wreckage of the Sovereignty mixing
with the wreckage of that other structure, a statue of defeat. She blinked
rapidly in order not to let tears obscure her vision. 20 seconds in and she
imagined this to be a milestone for humanity, something important enough
that it would seperate history into a time before and after it. She started
to stare intently at the wreckage, waiting for any sign of structure to
emerge from anywhere. She made sure everything was set up to record with the
highest possible temporal precision possible with her equipment. Then, it
happened. A spark causing a fire burning for three seconds and then going
off again. There was one definite center to it from which it originated only
to be broken and distored into an extremely swift but most beautiful
symphony of shapes, colors, structures. It was amazing. She wished that she
could just be there waiting for the next spark to light up, never resting,
never sleeping, never eating, being just a pair of eyes to observe the
instantaneous beauty and immense sadness of it.

She broke down sobbing uncontrollably, replaying the images in her head. At
least for her, there would always be a before and other. She did not notice
the time passing or the expectations which were implicitely on her. She was
just stimming, reverring in the scenery, her mind painted into itself while
her eyes were closed to the world. Tears flew like rain.

She did not notice Aurelio to enter the room, but suddenly he was there.
"Are you okay, Katy?"

Katy looked down where he was following a handrail to her vague position. "I
am not sure whether I ever was, or ever will be. I never saw anything like
this."

"Do you mean the pulse?" Aurelio asked.

"Yes, I feel as if I spent my entire life just as an excercise to see it, as
a kind of preperation for the fearsome beauty of it," Katy rubber her eyes.

"It was that beautiful?" Aurelio asked.

"There are no words for it, there was a pulse, then suddenly everything 
lighting up, interacting with itself, and then dissipating as it was just a
very vivid dream. I wasn't even aware that things can be like this! There is
nothing which compares to it. It is... so out of this world!"

"Can you show me?" Aurelio asked. As if sensing Katy's discomfort with it,
he added: "I will probably not understand it, but I do want to experience
it."

Katy seemed to shake out of a trance: "Yeah, let me show you!"

The series of lights flickered over the screen for 5 seconds. Katy murmurred
to herself and then showed the slowest possible version of it, every frame
taking a few seconds. Katy soaked in every bit of the view, clinged to its
visuals like a drowning person to a lifeline. Every new frame brought her a
new world to get lost in. Only when it ended, she remembered the presence of
Aurelio again. "Do you understand?" she asked.

"I don't think I do, but I enjoyed the view. It was like a flower, like
these orchids, which only bloom for a few minutes and then fade." Aurelio
seemed to struggle for words.

"I have never seen an orchid," Katy admitted.

"They are extremely seldom flowers on earth, reverred for their beauty.
Since the age of biological manipulation, there are countless variants,
which could not survive a day in the wild but are stunningly beautiful.
Enough to make a grown man cry. Many rich people have gardeners who raise
these kind of flowers for them." 

"Oh. I need to see these orchids when this all is over, I think. To see
whether they can compare." Katy smiled.

"Maybe we can go together." Aurelio suggested, "but we do need to get out of
this and that means among other things to understand the pulse. Do you feel
that you are capable of it? Or do you require anything?"

"Hot chocolate would be a great start!" Katy smiled. 

Aurelio seemed to be amused by the immediateness of her desire. "That can be
arranged, Katy. How about we go to mess hall and then back here?"

Katy nods: "Sounds like a plan."

They went to the mess hall and Katy could get her hot chocolate from one of
the many vending machines. She drank it with her eyes closed and her mind
chasing things which have no name. Suddenly, she turned to Aurelio: "Were
you asked to come to me?"

Aurelio shifted his position a bit: "I was, indeed. The ship's interaction
logs showed that I was the only one who interacted with you on a personal
level. This is why Ikaru wanted me to contact you when you did not react to
his requests."

"He requested me?" Katy seemed surprised.

"He indeed did, but given the state you were in, I am not surprised that you
did not react."

"I guess. The Do Not Disturb mode was not the right choice in that
situation, was it?" Katy smiled, apparently steadying herself.

"Yeah. People worried about your health and sanity."

"I don't think they had anything to fear in regards to the latter. I never
had any sanity to lose in the first place. People have to be insane to do
this kind of job. We are genetically screened to be insane enough for it."
Katy sounded a bit bitter.

"You are within your own standards of sanity and those which are expected
from navigators."

"Good point, though that would mean that standard behavior which everyone
else accepts might be a sign of insanity for a hyperspace navigator. I am
not sure whether it makes sense." Katy stated.

"It might be a sign of a bad mental state, of emulation in spite of mental
anguish," Aurelio remarked, "It was seen quite a few times that people who
were seemingly well adjusted to life in the neurotypical world suddenly
broke down, suddenly became mute or fled into other kinds of
reality-denial. As such, mental health probably should be defined in a
divergent manner, which includes personal happiness."

"I understand your point. I never thought of it so much, while I knew that
people differ, I never thought of whether they have a different ideal state.
It would be quite scary if the answer is yes, though, wouldn't it? I mean,
society expects a basic compatibility, which is why non-compatible instances
are only allowed to interact in a layer of emulation, for example a temp
company."

"Yeah, most people are quite afraid of the neurodivergent, but I think
society as a whole has found ways to accomodate them. Why else were such
complex structures for future hyperspace navigators created?"

"You think that society is accepting even though its individuals do not have
to be necessarily? A kind of emergent acceptance? Of different but
equivalent?" Katy seemed to grasp for terms.

"Maybe, I am not sure either, but will we ever get great answers if we won't
keep on asking the really hard questions?" Aurelio smiled.

"I wanted to talk to you earlier about another hard question, about the
existance and validity of patriotism."

"Oh? Is it another hard question?" Aurelio seemed to be amused.

"In a way. I told you yesterday that patriotism might not exist, but today,
I have seen evidence that it does as it had affected the behavior of someone
else when more generic appeals to emotion did not. My question is when it is
invoked and when it should be invoked. Oh and if someone who does not feel
it should invoke it at all." Katy looked a bit embarrassed.

"That is a good question. In general, I think it should be invoked for group
cohesion and setting priorities for yourself which involve the welfare of
the nation of origin. It often is invoked for compliance and group
cohereance. That is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, it depends on
the eventual goal. And I personally do not think that it is an acceptable
thing to do to pretend that you are very concerned with an idea if you
disagree with it. It is a form of lieing, don't you think?" Aurelio asked.

"Maybe, but then, it is still something this person cares about. Even if I
might disagree. It is more emulation than lieing, I'd say." Katy was not
sure whether this made a lot of sense, but it seemed like a valid point to
her.

"You mean not to pretend you yourself are a patriot, but to phrase an
argument in patriotic terms to make others agree to it as they would not see
your actual reasons?" Aurelio asked.

"Yeah, it often seems that people do not understand my reasons to do, feel
or want anything. It is the other way around as well, sure. We called it
emulation, behavior which others can understand even if it betrays our own
thoughts."

"I don't think emulation in itself is wrong, but implying that you are
something else in order to get something is wrong. We all have to use a
milder form of emulation sometimes, I think. Every single one of us has to,
though of course I cannot really compare it to anything you do."

There was a long silence, not an uncomfortable one, at least for Katy, but
one where something had been said which was relevant enough to stand on its
own. Only after a few minutes, she put the container for the hot chocolate
into the cleaner and then addressed Aurelio: "I have to work on analysing
the pulse. Thank you for your time and patience."

"No problem."

Later, Katy worked on not only marvel at but on analysing the pulse. Music
was again pumping out of the headphones loud enough to obscure the noises a
ship invariably makes. She remembered that at an earlier assignment, the
captain refused to believe her that she was working when he could hear the
music from her station and only started to believe her when she made the
tightest approach to the location which she could. That Captain still was
not someone who liked hyperspace navigation and in the end, Katy asked her
placement company to find her another ship to work on. Fortunately Ikaru
understood how important music was to her and saw over some of her other
quirks.

When the next pulse occured, she had a pretty good idea as to how it would
occur and why it would do just that. If you accept that the materials of the
wreckage had this weird way of reacting with hyperspace, that is. However,
while the amazing phenomenon lit up her holographic projection again, she
suddenly had a scary idea: What if this is not the material but the signal,
which was strange. She immediately checked how things looked behind the
ship, away from the strangeness and saw the same weird pattern of structure
being broken on a regspace object as the wreckage showed. Whatever it was,
it was both a regspace and a hyperspace phenomenon. And it was far sorter
than one second, just appearing longer because of the kaleidoscope in front
of them. The other strange thing was how slow the reaction was. She never
thought of it before, because to human eyes, this was still very fast, but
compared to other physical phenomena like sound and light, it occused
painstakenly slow. 

When she reported back to Captain Ikaru, her hands were sweaty, her back was
freezing in her uniform and her urge was to just run away. Her voice was
shaking and trembling the entire time. Eventually, she finished her
presentation with the words: "Well, that's it." Only now she realized that
other people also entered the room she was presenting in. She did not
notice, because she only looked at her material. She was rather surprised by
the reaction of the people: They started to ask her questions which she
never thought about before. Sure, she had thought of the point of origin,
the interference with its own signal, but she never thought about the
assumed regspace component of it and its danger to ship and crew for
example. Or what kinds of energy were needed to cause such a strange
phenomenon. The way she reacted to the questions made her feel as if she was
disappointing them even though they did not express it. To her, it felt as
if she did a bad job at it, else the many questions were not necessary. If
she could just disappear without a trace, as if doing a 0, 0 jump into
hyperspace, she would.

After what seemed like an eternity, no further questions were asked anymore.
One of the people in the room, probably Ikaru, said something which confused 
her greatly: "Good work, we will inform you of how we are going to proceed
from here. Please keep your escape jumps updated in the meanwhile."

"I will," she agreed. In front of her mental eyes, the first things these
people would do once they arrived back in Centralia would be to file a
complaint against their hyperspace navigator. Even before actually docking
to the station, they would send a complaint via the network of the station
to the company's offices in Bue or whereever its headquarters are this week
to escape higher taxes. Katy would be reprimanded again and there would be
serious consequences which she did not want to picture. She prefered to
think that she would remove herself from existance before these consequences
could hit, even though she knew that she was too much of a coward to do it.
If she was not, she probably would no longer exist after the New Mind
Institute closed its doors forever. She started to murmur the lyrics of a
song to make the thoughts of that time go away.

Moving through the ship made Katy realize how much she liked being in zero
gravity. Planets always seemed so very oppressive with their high gravity
(even though the implants she just as just about all spacers had were to
combat decrease of muscle mass). She made an effortless summersault just
because she could (and probably because it was better than constantly
thinking about the last meeting in an infinite loop). She immediately went
on correcting the jump vectors when she noticed something peculiar.
Hyperspace was not its normal self in that area. The structure was not
something she ever saw life, but she had heard of it: A turbulence of fluxes
which would vastly increase the Sanchez variations as well as the travel
time through it. It was not something easily seen as it was not a strong
turbulence, and these things are very seldom (and she admitted to herself
that she lacked experience with this structure), but it sounded like there
was a good reason why this ship broke down eventually. This of course meant
something else as well: The position was very easily reachable since several
fluxes lead there to combine. So if Bugs attempted to get somewhere and
instead followed one of these invisible streams, there was a chance that
they would appear just here. This was not a pleasant thought even though it
meant that the end probably would be swift. It was strange that she did not
discover this earlier, but she was just glad that she did now, plotting a
vector preventing being taken by the fluxes and lead into the equivalent of
an extremely slow windhose and still leading to the right direction. It made
the task more difficult, of course, but also more rewarding when she
eventually figured it out and sent it to navigation. Then, Katy went to her
room, strapped herself to her bed and read Inshadil's words again. 

Eventually, she realized that she could not concentrate anymore and idly
checked the ship's intranet pages. As even these did not lead to
entertainment, she decided to attempt falling asleep. It was only then when
she saw that someone attempted to contact her. It was Aurelio. She checked
his status and he was off-shift and in the loud hell that is the recreation
area of the ship, a place which Katy only visited twice and both times the
noise made her break down. She decided to via text ask him whether anything
relevant had happened in order not having to suffer the background noises.
Apparently, he did not get this and voice-called her instead.

"Katy, come here!" he seemed to more whisper than speak, "Something
important is happening: we are examining the alien fragments!"

Katy ignored her anxiety and hate of the recreation area and as fast as she
humanly could flew threw the ship to it. She saw that one wall was used to
project a threedimensional picture to it. A countless number of people was
sitting in front of it and curiously looking at what it showed. Katy
immediately saw the place where the pulse originated from, but from a much
closer distance than the ship's telescopes could show it. Someone approached
her and asked her to come to a good place to observe on the opposite wall.
Only when he noticed her short pause, he introduced herself as Aurelio
again.

Aurelio seemed to be as excited as she was. And probably as truobled by the
amount of noise around her. While it was true that people did not do any
intentionally loud things, she could not help but be extemely aware of every
sound these people made, mostly whispering to themselves. She felt her heart
racing, probably just about as much as if a jump which was scheduled for 20
seconds was still ongoing after 200 seconds. 

Aurelio whispered to her: "You can take my hand if this overwhelms you."
Katy took him up on the offer immerdiately, trying to concentrate onto the
screen and ignoring all the pesky humans around them on the walls. There
were three humans in spacesuits visible, looking all alike to her. She would
later find out that it was the same for Aurelio. They were connected via
ropes to the shuttle. Each of them was carrying various scientific 
instruments. The thing they were approaching looked like these weird
geometric shapes with difficult greek names, except that part of it was
ripped apart, probably by the vortex. Sharp edges, reminding her of a woven
mat being ripped apart by an angry guardian made it difficult to enter the
structure. The material on the outside was metallic and seemed to have a 
rough surface. A zoom to it showed countless, seemingly random scratches and
lines on it. It was not clear whether they were there originally or whether
a long time out in regspace weathered the material. Upon entering the
structure, the people in the recreation area gasped: It looked bigger on the
inside and whatever it was which filled the structure glittered in the
light of the torchlights. It was as if the entire thing was filled with
jewelry. When the admiration passed, more exact things could be seen of it
but the extreme glittering of it: A strange net covered most of the wall,
carefully avoiding the broken parts of it. Maybe it was painted onto the
textured walls whose material reflected light like a crystal, maybe it was
something which was part of the material or maybe it clinged extremely
closely to the material. The network-thingy was not in any meaningful way
ordered it looked as random as it could be. It reminded Katy of something
but she was not sure. There seemed to be nothing inside this which could
have caused the pulses. Katy anxiously waited for the next pulse, while
looking at the astronauts doing things which she could not place, maybe
attempting to take samples of the material in question and analysing its
reflected light. Katy checked the time, it was only a few minutes until the
next pulse would happen. When it did, nothing visible seemed to have
changed. Then, Katy realized it: The weird reflective structure had changed,
apparently instantaneously. Katy realized that something about this structure 
was odd, but she could not place it. It was on the tip of her tongue but she
was unable to find the term for it. 

Eventually, it was time for her to get something edible and go to sleep.
Aurelio was still next to her, but when she looked around she saw that only
5 other people of the previous dozens were there as well. Aurelio still
wanted to watch some more, so Katy left the room on her own and slouched to
her room, her mind playing the structures of this alien thing back over and
over again, the network lighting up brightly in front of her inner eye as if
it was an isosikerian diagram. She shouted loudly something incoherent
because suddenly she had a very good idea what it was showing.

She had no idea whom to tell it but she knew that she had to tell it to
someone. She paced right there in the hallway, then made her way to the
recreation area. "Aurelio!" she shouted breathlessly, "I understand now! I
know what this is supposed to mean!"

"Katy?" Aurelio looked confused, "What happened? Why this ruckus?" 

"This is a diagram! Of Hyperspace around us. They seem to use height instead
of color for the different regions. This is why it updates itself with the
use of this pulse."

"Are you serious?" asked Aurelio with incredulity in his voice. 

"Yes, you can see specific structures. The issue is that it only updates
every three hours, otherwise, it would be quite usable as it has a high
resolution." Katy requested some pictures and then showed him how they
correlate to colors in her displays and how the structure showed more
details. 

A few hours later, Katy wished that she had just kept her mouth shut:
Aurelio told these things to people and suddenly they asked her get into a
spacesuit and assist the team in some way, because if this was a hyperspace
representation, it'd take a hyperspace expert to understand it. Of course,
she had to do spacewalks already, but these were well-supervised and the
instructor put a small drop of an etheric oil onto the nasal area to
distract her from the weird smell which a spacesuit invariably will develop,
especially one shared by many people. Now Katy felt as if she was about to
throw up and the inner material was just irritating on her skin. It felt as
if everything was itching and being slimy and horrible. And worst of all,
Katy couldn't even bite herself as a means of coping (parts of her hands
were quite calloused during her childhood though at that time, she learned
to conceal it better). Then she stepped outside and it was breathtaking. She
was used to no gravity, but having sheer nothing around her from all sides
was enough to make her heart race. And space itself... there was a reason
why most spaceships have no weasily accessible windows for the crew. Space
is awe-inspiring in its vastness, its wideness and its ability to shatter
all human intuitions about distance. The short trip was just a few hundred
meters, but to her, it felt like the better part of an eternity. The sound
of the feet of the spacesuit touching the walls of the structure were a
desperately yearned-for relief. She breathed in, even ignoring (but still
actively perceiving) the smell of the spacesuit of sweat of other people. It
looked even more impressive than in the video transmissions. The glittering
and glimmering was not random as the camera made it appear. There were
distinct differences in it which she could not explain but could definitely
see. The network was made of a black material however which looked as if it
would eat all the light. When two lines met, there was an about 10 millimeter
long circle, a kind of node in a network. Katy felt the slight elevation of
these nodes. The lines were perfectly flat but the nodes are just very
slightly perceivable.Katy thought that maybe the aliens were blind and
operated on touch, but the different ways to glimmer seemed to discredit
that idea. She nevertheless murmurred her perceptions into the comlink to
the Sovereignity. She did not have a definite mission apart from finding
things out and as such, she communicated everything which was odd to her.
She shifted her interest to all the nodes, not just one of them. It looked
like an isosikerian diagram to her, except that certain things were
conflated which really should not be. She murmured to herself while marking
first the ana-sikarian, then the kata-sikarian parts of the nodes, tracing
the relevant (and maybe a bit reflective, though she was not sure whether
her mind played tricks onto her) lines as she was doing so. Suddenly. the
nodes seemed to have disappeared, then she heard an ear-piercing scream
through the comlink. She looked down on herself. The network-thing had
wrapped itself around her spacesuit. The last thing Katy saw was another
astronaut approach her. Then, she passed out.

She was still in the spacesuit around which this network-thing snaked itself
when she woke up. Someone tried to take a sample of the material and failed.
There were loud voices in the comlink. Too much noise, too many people, she
tried to breathe evenly, but it was not easy at all to do. Not with all the
noises around her. They were doing random things to her spacesuit, not all
of them she could define, but their talk on the comlinks made her realize
that they had not found out anything yet. The material resisted their
attempts to remove it or determine its composition, let alone purpose. For
space reasons, they moved her outside into the space in front of the
structure. When she faintly voiced her discomfort with that, they just
mentioned that they too felt it there and that it was important to get over
it. Katy knew how important it was to comply so she stopped her objections.
She knew that this was an extraordinary situation. It required her to be
calm while those better equipped to handle the situation would be left to
handle it. She recited mantras from her allegiance classes to herself. There
was no way for her to influence the situation at all, she had to accept it.
Except that one issue became more and more urgent: her oxygen supply was
getting low. When she signalled that to the others, they realized that they
completely forgotten to take this into account. Hectic voices flew through
the comlink. Ideas were proposed and rejected, Katy felt that her heart
started racing again and her breath got shallow. Even though her data said
sshe still had sufficient levels of oxygen for the next minutes, she felt
as if she was suffocating. Or drowning, she realized as tears started to
flow all through the spacesuit until they were gotten by the environment
stabilizers (which probably were designed for a bit of saliva, not someone
crying a river). Eventually, the suggestion was made that an oxygen tube was
to be pierced and connected to another supply of it, buying her a bit of
time in the process. She felt a warm embrace of hope for a short while, but
then feared that maybe, just maybe they would not make it in time. It was
not as if she would leave behind a lot: A few sheets of music she had
written in the Institution behind the backs of the guards, She never was
able to compose a lot later when she no longer had access to the same
programs she used to squirrel onto computers of the institution. A plush
animal, which is supposed to be a dreameater even though she never saw one
in real life, a bit of money and some unpaid taxes. There would be a state
funeral (that is a funeral organized by the state as there was no surviving
member of the family organizing one, something which the culture of Bue
views extremely badly) where one person would conduct the rites and then put
her body into the cremation oven (other planets without stobor put their
dead into the ground, which sounded strange to her). She knew that no one
here would come to her funeral and no one would want to keep her ashes
(meaning these would just be distributed in the sea), except, suddenly she
imagined Aurelio in his work clothes sitting in the ceremony room and loking
out of place there. That saddened her and she started to cry again.
Suddenly, she saw the vague outlines of a large structure approaching her.
They were able to bring oxygen in time. She made a note to herself to make a
will if she ever made it back into the ship. Morbid as it was, starting to
mentally draft a will calmed her down and gave her mind something productive
to do. Suddenly, she heard a noise of some kind of drill. It surprised her
since most of the other processes were silent. Only then she realized that
this drill was heard through the vibrations of her spacesuit.

There was a loud screaming as soon as the drill stopped. She had no idea as
to what happened and the people on the other end of the comlink were too
busy with themselves to answer questions. She started again to busy her mind
with thinking whether Sayskeriva deserved anything of her property. Sure, he
did shelter her for a while, but his shelter was an excuse for things which
she could not even name and she refused to think about. She realized that
she did not want him to have any part in her will, but that Iuliana probably
does even though her care for Katy was nothing but part of her job. There
was one time when Katy did something bad and Iuliana helped her understand
why it was bad instead of telling it to the police which could have executed
her right then and there. Eventually, the incoherent screaming gave way to a
more coherent explanation of the situation: "The thing, it disappeared! As
soon as we removed the drill, it suddenly was gone. Just like this white
material was when the next pulse was supposed to take place. It moved so
fast!" 

"Wait, the white things disappeared?" It seemed weird that in such a
situation this seemed to be important, but these white things were
representing hyperspace. Whoever used them was in the same position she was.
Whatever this structure was, it was related to hyperspace. It was something
which too was related to the structures, which were there, however she was
not sure in what exact way it was related to it. The thing had some kind of
stabilizing function, apparently. 

A light was shone into her face. Katy squinted and the next scream made her
reflexively close her eyes and move her hands to ear level where they did
absolutely nothing. "Katy!" a voice screamed loudly, "This thing is on your
face!"

Katy was stunned. "But, how‽"

"It somehow got through that hole in the tube, fucker!" the same person
shouted.

"What a bastard!" someone else joined in. 

"What can we do now?" another person asked.

"Report to Ikaru. This is becoming an issue high above our paygrade!"
a person suggested. The comlink was terrible at providing voice quality at a
level where she'd be easily able to distinguish the speakers and they all
looked alike in their spacesuits.

"What about the navig?" They did not even refer to her by name anymore.

"Just leave her here with the oxygen. The vacuum of space is probably the
best quarantine mechanism we can create anyways." They had a point, even
though Katy didn't like it and couldn't help but thinking of an elaborate
scheme of a predator to catch its prey: Like a spider on a net, it was able
to lure in prey and then it wrapped its pray in and would eventually devour
it. This thing had quite a knowledge of hyperspace so she wasn't even sure
whether the bonds also held her from ana and kata, which was a terrible
thought to her, though it also invited the distraction into her mind as to
how this would affect the jump vectors of a ship on which she was. She of
course lacked a lot of data, but with the current assumptions it would have
had a negligible effect. As she still was alone and far too close to losing
her mind anyways, she wondered whether this thing if it was able to extend
itself ana and kata was able to adjust hyperspace jump destinations if it
set its mind to it. Scarily enough, she saw ways how it was clearly able to.
Diagrams and structures appeared in her mind, ana and kata marked in blue
and yellow. 

She remembered that everything and everyone were made out of the common
building blocks of matter, that the higher elements were forged in
supernovas. Both her, the alien and all the rest, including the Bugs. There
was the thought that everything was connected by this history and this
history had an imperative and thread of karma connecting everything. She was
reminded of old songs from allegiance classes which expressed the kinship of
citizens and started to sing in the regional dialect of Bue. Someone asked
her via the comlink whether she was okay, and she said she was just singing
as there was nothing else she could do right now, was there? She felt
somewhat strange here around the stars. It was no longer the dread which she
felt earlier, this was an exhilaration which came out of nowhere. It was a
magnificent time to live in when space was open to humanity, when ships like
the sovereignity existed, when hyperspace had become navigable. And in this
moment, it looked to her as if the progress of humanity would only
accelerate. It would be a great time. She changed into a song which was
written in the time after the collapse of the Coprosperity: A still more
glorious dawn. A song about how eventually humanity would conquer the galaxy
and spread even further. 

The time until she was admitted into the shuttle again did not seem that
long to her, but apparently it was several hours. She made a disapproving
sound when she heard that. She had been completely lost in thoughts and 
music again, after what seemed like decades. She was put into a makeshift
quarantine champer in the medical station. And there, she was told to get
out of her spacesuit. It was the first time she saw it herself: the pattern
of the network along with the weird somewhat elevated nodes covered her
entire body. Both below the solves of her feet and on her shaven head, the
dark lines were seen. If there was gravity on the ship, she'd additionally
feel a node under the sole of her right foot at every step, but fortunately,
here she would not have this issue. She knew that all she had to do right
now was to cause as little trouble as possible. That now people would watch
at her every movement and that made her feel even more naked than she was
already. She quickly donned a hospital gown in order to seem at least
somewhat decent. She knew that surveillance was generally a good thing: It
allowed people to see and correct deviations from the generally adhered to
standard. But here the purpose was not as innocent, here, the purpose was
not feedback but seeing a potentially destructive organism do its work. It
was not to later provide a feedback session, and to explain which statistics
had been unsatisfactory, this was to chart a decline. She could see the rest
of the station behind a transparent shield of some kind of hard material.
People tried not to react to her behind the wall when coming into the
station with the kind of issues which generally bring people into the
medical station.

Katy was floating in the fetal position and pretty much waiting for the
inevitable when she heard a voice which she recognized: Aurelio. She turned
to him with difficulty. It seemed her body was not reacting with the
expected precision. She felt like that time when she drank some kind of
alcoholic beverage and then tried to make it home. "Hi Aurelio," her voice
was slurred. 

"Hi Katy. How are you feeling?" Aurelio enquired.

"Drunk. Despite not having drunk anything. Am feeling latencious." Katy
slurred.

"I imagine that this did affect you badly. I guess you need some rest,"
Aurelio suggested, "but I came here to show you something else. Can you
project your hyperspace data here? You do have a terminal there, haven't
you?"

"Can try!" Katy selected some things on the terminal and after a few painful
minutes, the strange static-like images haunted the room. "Can't get to the
live feed right now as this location is not authorized. This is the newest I 
get."

"Now please go in the logs to 14:35, can you?" Aurelio asked her.

"Today?" She enquired.

"Yes, please."

"Failure, it's become late swiftly." She paused for a moment. "Yeah, am
here, what's to..." her voice failed her as she saw something extremely
similar to the pulse with one exception: the ship was in the center. Again,
she broke down, repeating the seconds over and over again, not even reacting
to Aurelio's questions. She started rocking and then shouted "idjariim"
whenever a specific part was happening. In the local minority language of
Bue, this meant "it is happening". Katy never before used Takai Bue on the
ship. She knew the rules that Central was the main language and she was
brought up in Buese colored but prefectly understandable Central.

Aurelio checked something on his communicator and then an artificial voice
said: "Takai Bue dja-alaisin?" (Do you speak Takai Bue?)

"What?" Katy came to her senses again. "What I was saying, oh it is a cheer, 
I heard that during some of the sports matches I was able to see."

"You seemed to like it." Aurelio stated.

"I probably am going down, but I will go down in a series of flashes of
beauty. Isn't that more than you can normally ask for?" Katy seemed a bit
off. The idea seemed to be more pleasing to her than it should be by all
means.

"Beauty is indeed a very important thing in life. Life is pursuit of beauty
as a philosopher said," Aurelio stated.

"I don't know about all life, but when I saw the pulse, it was amazing, I
can't even say what was so amazing about it. It was just as if there was
this moment where things had been laid bare to what actually counts. There
was a moment, and then it was like insight, but it lacked a component of
that as well. It was a clarity but there was something else in the
structures, the interference. It was all interfering. And I think it was
reacting to its future state as well. I cannot say future state so easily,
but that the pulse changed when there was an obstacle, but it changed before
this obstacle was reached. This is what I mean by reacting to a future
state. This is not necessarily clairvoyancy, I think there might be
components in different speeds. They might have different levels of
correlation with regspace, you see? This solves the issue elegantly, the
swift component reacts with the slow one."

Aurelio seemed to be taken aback by her explanation. "You mean it interferes
with itself in a different stage? Due to components of different speed? That
seems to be quite elaborate. Do you think this might be an alien lifeform?"

Katy sunk together. "Well, of course, it is. It is a thing which traps those
who are aware of hyperspace. It's the fucking Ljorelai!"

"Who?" Aurelio asked.

"Ljorelai was the daughter of a fisherman in Ntavaskali, when her love was
drafted into the military and killed by the tsenga, basically a clan of 
pirates, she supposedly sang on a rock on the sea where he died and her
singing lured the tsenga mindlessly into the rocks. It's what early settlers
tell, a story about the Ljorelai rocks. They are in the sea of Sorrows, in
southern Bue." Katy's speech had gotten less easy to understand.

"This sounds like a story which we have as well. Of course some details are
different, but the general feeling is quite similar. It might be based on an
original story from earth."

Katy looked at him as if she wanted to jump at him but was thankfully
prevented by the glass: "Are you implying that the Buese are too stupid to
come up with their own legends and stories? Do you really think that we are
all just incoherent coprosperitians? We are not and Bue has a long and
honorable culture. The existence of the coprosperity is nothing to deny
this."

Aurelio was taken aback by the sudden shift in tone: "I didn't say anything
like that. What I meant was that the settlers brought their own legends to
the planet and that long before the coprosperity even existed, many of the
half-remembered old stories had become re-purposed to the new world. This is
why the story we have and the one you have are alike."

She looked at him confused: "But if it is like that, then how does your
story have tsenga?"

Aurelio looked at her, as if she was losing her mind: "There are no tsenga,
she is actually a demon in human shape in our myths. But she does sing to
make ships hit rocks."

Someone whom Katy failed to recognize entered the medical station. She heard
what Aurelio was saying to it: "Rae, can you tell me what the state of Katy
is?"

Rae was the doctor, except that this person looked nothing like him: "We
cannot determine a whole lot from behind the shield. Has she been difficult,
I mean, more difficult than a hyperspace navigator generally would be?"

"Yes, very slurred speech, continuously worsening, very shifting mood. I
fear that whatever it is that she picked up is impairing her brain."

Katy angrily shouted: "I did not pick it up, it wrapped itself around me like
some kind of sleeping bag. Do you really think that if I had any choice in
the matter, I would have chosen this?"

Aurelio turned to her: "Katy, I was making a joke here."

"Make one which I get next time!" she pouted.

"Let me see what I can determine." There was a loud curse. "Yes, this thing
is doing things to her brain which should not be done. At all. It does
connect to her brain and does something to it. But I have no idea what in
the great hills of Tansha, it is doing to her."

Aurelio used choice words. As the ship's class was indirectly derived from a
word for sailing, the term cursing like a sailor might be very apt. "Can we
do anything whatsoever?"

"I doubt it. I would say we need to use her abilities to get us to Centralia
before her mental faculties decline even further." Rae urged.

"Do we have any idea where we are by now?" Aurelio asked.

"We do. By now, Yasmin has found the location apparently well enough to do a
hyperspace jump. If she would be able to calculate it." Rae stated.

Aurelio turned to Katy who was doing what looked like summersaults through
the compartment. "Katy?"

"Yes?" She turned around and Aurelio saw that the network seemed to have
moved to the head more than it used to be.

"We need you to calculate a jump to get us home and to help you. We need you
to do this swiftly. Can you please try?" Aurelio pleaded. By now he had
asked for an authorisation for the live feed so that she could actually work
on it.

"I can try, but I cannot guarantee a thing. I feel drunker than a skunk
right now." Katy's speech has gotten even worse to understand (a fact which
the narrator obscurs because the language has changed quite a bit and so
realistically writing the impairment would seem alien to the readers).

Katy had issues even getting the things displayed correctly, but eventually,
they were as she seemed to like. Suddenly, another pulse was visible and
Katy again was visibly shaken by it. Aurelio checked the time: "This pulse
was out of sync. It was 54 minutes and 34 seconds too early. I fear that
there is a relation to her looking at this and the pulse."

A while later, Ikaru arrived, Katy was not paying attention to his presence.
She was jugging hyperspace views in a constantly interating series. There
were a lot of shifting graphics more like disco than the way hyperspace
navigation was supposed to be. Ikaru looked at her for at least half a
minute. "I think I see what the issue is." 

"The issue is worse than what you see." Aurelio explained. "The issue is
that there has been a new pulse as soon as she started viewing the
hyperspace data. We were able to see it here. It was out of schedule for
this thing. about an hour too early. I think whatever it is doing is not
random."

"How did you know that there was a pulse?" Ikaru asked.

"I saw it." Aurelio explained laconically.

"From my experience, you don't have any training in hyperspace navigation.
How then can you detect such a pulse?" Ikaru enquired.

"You have no training in electrical engineering, how can you see whether a
light is on or off?" Aurelio was again laconic, "This thing is not
something which can only be detected by specially trained pattern 
recognition, this lights up her entire display. I have seen her looking at
the pulses before. And yes, I have hyperspace navigation training even
though not enough to get certified as hyperspace navigator."

Ikaru looked at Aurelio sternly: "What makes you say that?"

Aurelio did not blink even now: "We can stop the charade now. I am not just
a maintenance technician. I am a special operative from the Centralia police
who was tasked to go after rumours of systematic physical and sexual abuse
of hyperspace navigators. This meant that I have received a bit hyperspace
navigation training to be able to get the trust of the navigators. No, I
don't know enough to provide a jump back home."

"So, Centralia thinks that people randomly rape hyperspace navigators now?"
Ikaru seemed personally offended. 

"Your ship did not have that issue, maybe because your hyperspace navigators
were verbal. You cannot believe what things happen to people who have no
voice. This is not my first job and believe me that I still have to fight
the images sometimes. I thought pretty much in the same way you did about
it, but my faith in humanity disintegrated thoroughly." Aurelio explained,
you hear a sharp tone of anger in his speech. There was no longer a grave,
well-thought response, there was a layer of pure emotion, which shone
through.

Ikaru audibly breathed in. "I was not aware of things like that."

"Of course not, You are a decent human being. These people never are capable
of imagining what the truely deprived are capable of." Aurelio seemed to
intend a compliment here, even though Ikaru was not fully sure.

"So, you mean that you saw the pulse losing its period but instead reacting
to Katy being exposed to hyperspace images. Is that right?"

"Not any images. It seemed not to have any effect when they were older.
These ones were live though and that triggered something." Aurelio bit his
lip. "I have no idea what exactly this means. I am not a xenobiologist and
neither do I play one on TV, but the thing had awareness of hyperspace and
access to Katy's brain. So it might have read it from there."

"That sounds scary." Ikaru admitted, "but remember that she is still dealing
with maths. While it is difficult to determine a solution to this specific
math problem, it does not mean that it is equally difficult to determine
whether a solution is correct. It could be tested on a clean system, even.
So if she is still in any way able to function, we can verify that."

Aurelio and Rae looked at Katy who seemed still to do hectic switches
between grphics more likely to trigger hallucinations than result in a jump
vector. "If she ever even gets to that point, you mean."

"Is her state that bad?" Ikaru asked.

"Barring a miracle, I'd say yes," Rae chimed in.

Ikaru unleashed a string of curses only occasionally interjected by
conjunctions. For a while nothing was being said, even though Rae nodded
sagely to each and every of these expressions (and memorized some of the
more remarkable ones for his own personal use in the future).

They were all surprised when suddenly Yasmin stormed into the medical
station, looking furious enough to kick a small poodle out of an airlock.
"Katy, what the fuck is this supposed to mean‽" 

Katy did not react but instead murmurred something to herself. 

Captain Ikaru looked at Yasmin sternly and then asked: "Yasmin, can you tell
me what is the matter here?"

"She sent me this!" Yasmin showed her communicator. It looked like a series
of numbers to the rest of them.

"What is that?" Ikaru asked.

Aurelio replied: "This looks like a hyperspace jump to me. Well, the vectors
of one at least. Not the most elegant thing I have ever seen and I cannot
say whether it would lead us to Centralia or into human space at all, but it
does look as if it was at least valid."

"It is bullshit!" Yasmin shouted. "It looks far from anything I have
implemented, and Katy has not come back to me yet on my questions,
apparently because she is busy." She angrily glanced at the hyperspace
navigator who still changed in iteration between different views. The last
word had irony dripping from it and forming a large puddle in front of her.

Katy slowly turned back, then positioned herself so she was upside down from
Yasmin. "It is, it might,... I cannot say, it all is going away, it is all
latencious and you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same
place."

Yasmin made a gesture clearly indicating that Katy lost it. 

Aurelio turned to the regspace navigator. "Have you tested the vectors on
your system and can you confirm its unsuitability?"

Yasmin looked at the maintenance technician angrily: "It looks far too wrong
to be even valid, so I have not. But I doubt someone who cleans toilets for
a living understands that."

Ikaru looked sternly at her: "She probably is not able to do a jump in her
normal quality, thus I want you to take what you can get before she can no
longer run as fast as she can just to remain in the same place. As such, I
would appreciate if you gave her the benefit of the doubt, unless you want
Sirgen to execute the jump for you." Sirgen was Yasmin's replacement for the
other shift.

"I insist on that. Even if this would defy everything I so far learned about
hyperspace jumps by executing them and works, I refuse to be associated with
this." Yasmin stamped her feet but ignored the fact that she was in zero
gravity and hurt her head on the opposite wall.

Ikaru actually called Sirgen right then and there and when he arrived, he
was still wearing his nightgown. Sirgen yawned before he was greeting
Captain Ikaru.

Ikaru first brought him up to speed before he asked the navigator of the
opposite shift whether he would feel capable of testing the validity of that
jump and if there was any chance that is actually worked to execute it. 

Sirgen sucked in air when he saw the vectors. "I can see why Yasmin bailed,
definitely can. I will do so, but I want to have it on the record that I do
not want to have anything to do with it."

Ikaru looked at him: "I will log your objection, Sirgs, but this is maybe
the last time our hyperspace navigator Katy can calculate a vector for us.
Her brain is steadily being compromised."

Sirgen nods: "That is the reason why I still do this, but I think if we ever
go this route, the Sanchez variations will kill us. This is a very steep
approach."

So they agreed on at least trying it. Yasmin would probably get a writeup if
they made it back home, but it seemed to her this had a too low chance of
happening to concern herself with it. 

Sirgen went to the bridge, still in his nightgown, which clearly was not
designed for zero gravity and occasionally left just about nothing to the
imagination. Ikaru followed him. Aurelio had to leave to prepare the ship
for the jump. Eventually only Rae and Katy remained in the medical station.

Katy switched off all her simulations, but she realized that she still saw
their outlines. Like a residue on an improperly calibrated holoprojector,
she still saw structures slowly undulating. She blinked repeatedly. They did
not disappear. Katy called out to Doctor Rae. "Doctor Rae, I think I am
losing it, I think I cannot... continue. I am losing... my mind. Am...
hallucinating. Tell Aurelio, and the... former instructors and guardians of 
the New Mind Institute... on... Bue... that I... didn't... forget." She
covered her head in her hands.

Rae wrote it down: "Maintenance technician Aurelio and the instructors and
guardians of the former New Mind Institute in Bue. I will get into contact
with them and tell them that you didn't forget."

Katy looked to Rae who was upside down from her perspective and uttered a
barely intelligble: "Thanks..."

There was a sudden noise and then the Sanchez variations started with much
more force than anyone expected. Rae was thrown through the room as he was
not prepared for it. Katy had her eyes closed. Rae saw that the "nodes" of
the thing which wrapped around Katy started to glow in an eery red light
while Katy herself was humming notes which only faintly reminded of a
melody. It seemed as if the ship jumped into hyperspace so quickly that they
didn't even have time to warn the crew. Katy suddenly realized what the had
in mind and started singing it, the song was something she grew up with:
"There's a girl in Silja Town, Mama Laja, who will bring the system down,
Mama Laja, She will grin and she will fart, Mama Laja, while the whole thing
will restart, Mama Laja." She was not in a fixed position but could not help
but do various daring acrobatic maneuvers in the small space she was confined
in. After the first stanza, she started singing other ones, which her
guardians probably disapproved of if they knew the content. Some were only
aluding to drug use, while others involved variants of sexual acts and 
criminal bahavior, all of which would have meant jail time back in the 
coprosperity. The most harmless of all was stealing the hat of a policeman
and crapping into it.

She paid no mind to Rae who blushed during some of the lyrics (his
communicator helpfully translated most of the Bue slang). The time in
hyperspace was almost ten minutes, but Katy did not in any form fall back to
the behavior of guilt which she normally had when the hyperspace jumps took
longer than expected. Instead she seemed to be happy and after she
eventually ran out of stanzas for the Silja Town song, she used other rhymes
which were on the same level of immaturity. Eventually, Rae tried to get 
Katy's attention: "Katy! Priority! Do you have any clue whether this jump
will ever leave hyperspace?" He disliked using the command priority, which
children of the Institute were taught to obey whatever the circumstance, but
she seemed completely oblivious to the first time calling her. 

Katy slowly turned around, still grinning widely. "Yes?"

"Did you hear me?" Rae asked.

Katy looked a bit confused: "Maybe?"

"What was the probability of this ship leaving hyperspace?" Rae asked.

Katy grinned: "What would you like it to be?"

Rae was getting annoyed with the game she seemed to be playing: "I would
like it to be 100 percept chance to leave hyperspace, 100 percept to
actually arrive at the expected location, but I know that it is not
feasible."

Katy still seemed to have a lot of fun: "100% you say? Nothing it certain
except for birth, death and taxes. Are 99% okay?"

Rae breathed out audibly: "Yes, that is grand."

Katy laughed: "Well, then let's adjust the odds a bit!" 

Rae gasped when he saw the nodes rapidly change colors for about a second.
Only a few seconds later, the ship left hyperspace.

Ikaru's voice was transmitted through the ship: "This is Captain Ikaru
speaking. The Sovereignity has left hyperspace and our current location is
being de... seriously? our current location is in close distance to the
Centralia station."

Rae looked at Katy confused: "Have you adjusted the jump?"

Katy seemed to be sullen all of a sudden. "I have not, not really, at least.
There was an error. Things were too latencious, cannot accept. Was latency,
lots of it." She tried to move to Rae and crashed against the transparent
wall. Katy touched it confused: "Why cannot advance? What is?"

"Katy, the wall is there for your protection. Please do not attempt to get
through it."

"Want leave!" Katy stated.

"No, Katy." Rae stated.

"Must leave." Katy insisted. "Must lalakaka." Rae's communicator fortunately
suggested that the last term means to use the restroom in Bue childspeech.
As such, Rae started explaining to her how to use the toilet on her side of
the barrier. She seemed to be completely oblivious to it until Rae made her
open the toilet. Suddenly, her expression seemed to shift, she seemed to
recognize was she was faced with and used it normally. However she refused
to close it later. As she stated: "Not easy find. Not want search." Rae let
it be. He did not again want to help her find it as the process had been
slow and tedious (he made a mental note to be extremely nice to anyone who
would have to guide him through a step-by-step process like that). 

While the ship was doing the general landing procedures, Rae tested the
mental functions of Katy as much as the situation allowed. While it was not
fully scientifically correct, her IQ must have decreased extremely. She
never had a high IQ according to her files (her mental difference being the
reason for that), but now the IQ was in the severely mentally impaired range.
Rae was mostly confused about the speed of the decline. It went from the 90
range to the low 70s in less than a day incrementally. Whatever the thing
was doing, it was doing it fast. Aurelio appeared in the station again.
Normally, he would not have liked a cop sneaking around his station, but
right now it was completely okay. He knew that Aurelio cared about Katy. He
asked Aurelio to step outside with him for a second and told him about the
mental decline. When Aurelio came in again, his eyes showed worry. "Hey
Katy, how are you doing?"

Katy gave an unsteady nod: "I get confused easily. It was much better when
we were still... there. Much better there. Didn't want leave."

"What do you mean, where?" Aurelio asked.

"Where come from. What is name?"

"The place where the wreck was found has no name, though I think it should
get one, many archeologists are interested in it, I guess."

"Not there, later."

"Hyperspace?"

Katy nods slowly: "Mind is fail. Not remember."

Aurelio seemed angry all of a sudden though he tried to keep it under
control: "This alien thing is a serious menace to your sanity and mental
health. I wish there was a way to get rid of it."

"Bue's coprosperity would be proud of her," Rae said sarcastically, "Her IQ
is extremely low, but she still seemed perfectly able to calculate
hyperspace jumps."

"She was, I am not sure whether she is now."

"It seemed as if she or whatever is linked to her neural system was
re-adjusting the jump when I mentioned that I wanted better stats." Rae
mentioned seemingly casually.

"Now that would be quite spectacular. We already know that whatever it is
had an affinity to hyperspace, but this would be more than just an affinity.
This would mean that it had capabilities far beyond ours." Aurelio mused.

"I think we have already established that when it moved almost
instantaneously." Rae agreed.

"If we could reverse-engineer that tech and keep our sanity, we'd trounce
the Bugs. They'd not have any clue what would be happening to them." Aurelio
seemed to be unphased by the borderline-sarcasm of the doctor.

"If, that is a very important word here." Rae agreed.

"Even if we could not reverse-engineer it, if Katy's state was stable enough
to do hyperspace jumps as she did now, we would have a clear advantage over
them."

Katy seemed to have heard this: "Have already. Bugs no good in navigation.
Use same vector all. Not adjust, not config. Are bad, very."

"I mean, you can imagine it? We'd flee and they'd copy our initial vector as
they sometimes do. So what happens? They'd end in some form of deep doodoo,
like very close to a sun or so, we'd adjust the jump, in hyperspace when
they cannot adjust the vectors anymore." Aurelio grinned.

"No copy vector." Katy objected.

"It was just an idea." Aurelio immediately admitted defeat.

When the Sovereignity was near the station, its fate was discussed by the
Centralese authorities. It was immediately clear that a ship that was
contaminated by an alien biological entity was not allowed to board the 
station. The question was whether it was required to specially control Katy
and have a longer quarantine time than the 40 days which actually were the
etymological origin of the word quarantine. Also the exact way how to make
sure that the Sovereignity could get its supplies was squabbled about. Of
course, the company, which owned the Sovereignity also wanted to have a say
in that and strongly objected to the ship being out of commission at least
for 40 days. And various scientists would have loved to be there in person
to determine what exactly happened there. It took a few days until an
agreement was reached and in that time, Katy's state constantly worsened.
While she still seemed to be capable of understanding normal speech when the
freighter arrived, she was completely unable to do so by now. She didn't
even react to her name anymore even though she still perceived sounds, as
was proven when she reacted to loud noises and even quiet music. She was
quite uncoordinated and more than once even failed to use the toilet. She
didn't speak, only communicated by pointing and sometimes by high-pitched
squealing. A biologist from Centralia who came onto the Sovereignity logged
and charted her decline in the most exquisite detail. Most of the rest of
the crew were either annoyed about it, or happy about the
makeshift-vacation (depending on their jobs on the ship of course). Some
blamed Katy for being stupid, others blamed "these fucking bugs". The
uncertainty was dragging on everyone, whether they admitted it or not.
Aurelio reported a lack of any sort of spurious behavior to the hyperspace
navigator to his employer on Centralia and still did his normal maintenance
duties. Often, when he had free time, he went to the medical station, where
both Rae and the Centralian Ilyas already had gotten used to his presence.
Ilyas still seemed to be afraid of him somehow interfering with scientific
rigidity, but he just stated that the human rights of Katy had priority over
the preferences of a scientist. Yasmon came down to the medical station
once, looked at Katy, who was in that moment sleeping and then left without
a word. Sleeping had become something, which Katy did most of the time. It
was one of the few things, she seemed not to have problems with: Even eating
was something she could only do at a snail's pace. Ilyas and Rae
occasionally did use medical imagine techniques to visualize the decline of
her brain, but on these images, it did not look like a typical decline. It
seemed to be more a completely new rewiring of the brain, which took place.
There were new structures, which were emerging, apparently controlled by the
parasite, even the separation in hemispheres no longer existed. Once, when
Katy was sleeping, Aurelio admitted that he sometimes wished that she would
just die instead of ending up like this. Rae nodded with understanding. He
could not do anything either and most likely, even if Katy would recover,
she would be someone completely different.

"It must be a sophisticated to adjust to a different biology and hijack it
for its purpose," Rae said, "very well designed by an extremely meticulous
designer. Probably not our own one."

Aurelio agreed: "Such adaptability seems unlikely to evolve, indeed. It is
probably an extremely advanced parasitic organism which tried a very
innovative way to spread. And it took Katy first." 

"Ot could be something else. We don't even know whether it is a parasitic
entity. It could be something which is fully self-sufficient but has been
created to establish changes in intelligent beings for specific purposes and
is not intelligent enough to determine when the situation to spring to
action is acceptable and when it is not."

"But intelligent enough to adopt to a completely new biology, seriously?"
Aurelio asked.

"Okay, the idea was not that a good one, but we must not fall into
groupthink thinking only one idea is acceptable." Rae tried to save his
position.

"Sure, we need to," Aurelio agreed, "as such, if you have another idea, feel
free to talk to me about it."

"I will get back to you on that, Aurelio. Ilyas is taxing my patience. He
thinks just because he is a scientist who studied here in Centralia and I am 
a physicist who studied at a community university in Amikejo he can
discredit everything I say. Even if it is not about biology or medicine. I
had an argument with him just yesterday about the political systems of the
colonies. He insisted that he knew better than me what goes on in Amikejo,
despite me being from there and regularly reading various news from there. I
don't say that he is not good at what he does, but his personality is an
argument for post-natal abortion."

"You know that you are talking to a cop here and if something happened to
him, I would probably be put onto the case?" Aurelio asked with a smirk.

"Don't worry, it's not as if I would go through with it, if only because I
heard that healthcare in Centralian prisons is not exactly up to
international standards."

"Good to hear."

"I am just ranting because this 'person' and I am using this term in the
very liberally here, has a way to pretend that he is in charge here and we
all have to do what he says. Nope! He's a guest on this ship, despite the
importance of this mission and sure as taxes he needs to act that way." 

"That sucks."

"Ilyas recently planned to take her on a new trip so that he can see himself
that I and the cameras and the other records I made didn't lie."

"He didn't trust that it was done with sufficient scientific rigidity?"
Aurelio enquired.

"Apparently. Of course, this has the potential for so many things going
wrong, especially as Katy seemed to distrust Ilyas when she was still able
to react to people. He thinks this does not matter, but I would like to see
it not matter if she has one of her few lucid moments."

"It'd be better if someone was there, who knows her and whom she knows."
Aurelio mused.

"Looks like you just volunteered." Rae grinned.

"What?" Aurelio was confused.

"Well, she is a navig, which means that there is probably no one else who 
meets the criteriayou have jsut outlined. Remember that navigs have issues
with social skills and often have very stunted relations with other people.
Especially if they grew up in an environment where there was almost no
emphasis on the development of social skills. It is generally a hassle from
what I have heard to deal with the inheritence of hyperspace navigators. Not
only are there only a few people who are sufficiently close to inherit
anything, they also often live on faraway planets. My brother is a lawyer
who specialises in various kind of family related lawsuits and according to
him, there is always one asshole in the extended family who decides to sue
for some reason or another."

"Well, it is not as if your brother gets to see the ones without the suing
asshole." Aurelio grinned.

"Okay, good point. Without the suing assholes, he'd be out of work."

Quarantine was a slow and tedious time. This gave Ilyas more time to
advocate for his causes. Eventually, both Captain Ikaru and the powers that
be in the Centralian central administration agreed to let Ilyas do a
hyperspace jump to and back to examine how the parasite reacts to being
outside of regspace. Logistically, it was of course a nightmare: As they
could not easily transfer Katy, they had to do it in the Sovereignity. 
There were no ways to allow another hyperspace navigator to enter the ship. 
One of these extremely limited human resources was already lost to the
alien, losing another one even temporarily was completely unacceptable. 
Thus, it was agreed that another hyperspace navigator, named Eris was to 
calculate the jump to and back from Centralia and provide the vectors to the 
Sovereignity. Eris was also educated on Bue and wished no interaction with 
the crew apart from calculating the information required, which made working 
with a ship in quarantine very easy. Ilyas had become rather angry during 
this time, especially when it turned out that doctor Rae insisted on
presence on the medical station during the entire time or when his issues
with feasibility of certain arrangements forced Ilyas back to the drawing
screen. Katy's state did not decrease any further. It seemed to be a stable
state even though it was not a good one. Aurelio still was with her often
even though she failed to recognize him anymore. It took a toll on him, but
he still hoped that she would return to lucidity. Also, there was only very
little to do anyways. Even the information transaction was limited in speed
and censored in case any kind of malware attempted to escape so most kinds
of entertainment were the files in the Sovereignity's servers and to Aurelio
it often felt as if he watched all of that repeatedly already. 

When it was eventually time to get into hyperspace, of course with strict
rules not to land on any planet or to to board any foreign vessel,everyone
was well-propared. No one was not in a static position as well as belted
(well, apart from one person who had to go very urgently and was doing his
business when the Sovereignity entered hyperspace, but that is another
story). 
 
As soon as the Sovereignity entered hyperspace, Katy's behhavior changed.
She woke up, smiled wildly and seemed to look at something only she was
seeing. Again, the nodes glowed faintly red and even the lines (or edges in
network terminology) glowed faintly. Katy seemed to be extremely happy about
being awake and in hyperspace. She started humming to herself something more
of less melodical. There was no sign that she was impaired by any effects of
it whatsoever, she unbelted and started doing pirouettes and other things in
the air. Ilyas murmured to himself "Remarkable" while he was making notes.
The jump was supposed to take only a few seconds, but it still took longer
and longer. The nodes of the alien thing were flashing in an extremely quick
and irregular manner. The Sanchez variations started to worsen more and
more. Rae was quite worried about the integrity of the medical station if
this continued any further. Eventually, the blinking ended and the glow
remained constant. Katy seemed to wake up from a trance, she shook her head
and looked quite confused. She murmured: "Maybe this works," apparently to
herself; then the Sovereignity returned to regspace.

She sank together when the ship fell to regspace. She looked around
surprised. "We are not near Centralia? How did that happen?" she asked.

Aurelio regained his composure quickest: "We came from there, Katy. Don't
you remember?"

Katy looked at him in confusion. "No, I don't. We came from the vortex, from
the ruins of the Seklia and then we were about to jump, I tried to get a
working jump despite the latency of the systems and now we are... here.
Well, whereever that is." 

"You really have no idea what happened during the last month?" Rae asked.

Katy looked at him: "It's been a month?"

"It has been 32 days, Katy." Rae explained.

"What in the name of the green hills of New Funafuti? It seemed
instantaneous to me."

"Very interesting," mentioned Ilyas, while again noting things down.

"Who is that? I don't recall you having an assistant." Katy pointed to the
Centralite scientist.

"I am Professor Ilyas, I am a professor of xenobiology in Centralia. I came
onto the ship while it was quarantined near the station. I came here to
study the alien lifeform which apparently has attached itself to you amd its
effects on your health and sanity."

Katy laughed embarrasedly: "Sorry for using the wrong title then. I really
didn't know. I don't think that I ever saw you before."

"No problem," Ilyas accepted her apology. "Do you mind if we run a few tests
with you? We do need to determine what this thing did to you."

"I guess we need to, yeah," she hesitantly agreed.

Her brain was tested again, and while they saw high resolution images of
what she was doing, they asked her to complete a few tasks: sing a song
(this time she fortunately chose something which did not violate all rules
of decency), read a text, catch a ball, recall a childhood memory (in her
case a story about a difficult class where she excelled in one difficult
project), list 10 animals and 10 plants, describe how to cook something (she
embarrasedly admitted that she'd have to look it up since her cooking skills
were nonexistant and cooking in 0 gravity was also a very difficult
endeavor) and talk about plans for the future (she mentioned writing a will
as she realized she neglected to do so before). Ilyas also asked for
different things like to touch both ears with the opposite hands, to
describe a picture and many, many more seemingly easy tasks. In the end, Rae
asked tp also give her a task to do: he showed her a series of isosikerian 
graph and then asked her to calculate a jump to a specific location. While
she did the previous tasks in her normal speed, this last task seemed to
click with her: She calculated the jump in a matter of seconds. 

If Ilyas felt anything at these demonstrations, he didn't let it show,
however, Rae always commented encouragingly whenever she finished a test.
After the last one, he shouted "wow!" before Ilyas threw a glace at him
which could metaphorically speaking melt steel.

Aurelio appeared a while later and when he heard Katy speak perfectly
clearly (albeit with slightly changed qualities of vowels), he shouted:
"Katy!" and ran to her. 

Katy noticed him and moved to his as far as the glass permitted. "How are
you doing?" she asked.

"I am just so happy that you are healthy again. Your state scared me."
Aurelio said, then turned to Rae: "How long has she been like this now?"

Katy answered instead: "Apparently since the Sovereignity came out of
hyperspace, but I am not sure. Rae told me that this was the second time I
have been in hyperspace since we left the ruins of that alien ship, but if
that is true, I do not remember anything between the first and second time.
Strange, isn't it?" 

"It's indeed strange, I am just happy that you are back to your old self
now." Aurelio was relieved.

"I am not sure whether I am yet, I guess we have to determine what Rae and
this Centralian, Ilyas found out. And even if I was, I cannot be sure that
this alien thing will not latch itself onto the next living being who dares
to come next to me, or will follow alien instruction to overthrow the
Centralite parliament." Kate commented.

"Yeah, we can only determine where the behavior differs, we cannot say that
you are without any doubt are the same person as you were before," Rae
admitted, "And from a biologocal perspective, your brain differs quite a bit
from how a human brain is supposed to work."

"Seriously?" Katy and Aurelio exclaimed simultaneously.

"The structure is quite different and it seems some procesing takes place in
that parasite or symbionte, instead of your biological brain." Rae said,
oblivious to yet another stare of death, "when you calculated the hyperspace
jump, your biological brain did not show any specialized activity, apart
from typing a series of numbers. We think that the interface showed a higher
than usual activity, but we are not sure. We don't even know whether what we
are meassuring is activity or something else like maintenance processes."

"Let me guess, I will never get clearance to work for any government ever
again?" Katy asked.

Aurelio laughed, while Rae explained that this was indeed very unlikely.

Ilyas approached Rae and asked him to step outside for a short while. Rae
excused himself from Aurelio and Katy, then left the station. The
maintenance technician and the Hyperspace navigator were left alone. Aurelio
murmurred that he expected this to happen. 

Katy asked why he did so.

Aurelio made a vague gesture: "They have been annoyed with each other for a
very long time now. Rae feels that Ilyas intrudes into his sphere while
Ilyas thinks that Rae is provincial and unintelligent. It's hilarious if
you are standing by, not so much if you are involved. They are
metaphorically speaking on each other's throat all the time. It has been
very unpleasant there, Izmir Yeni blockade level unpleasant, if you get my
drift." He referred to a long, albeit bloodless conflict between two nations
on Izmir Yeni, bad enough that all trade with the planet was ceased.

"Ouch, so they are fighting about who has the competence to find out what is
happening to me?" Katy asked.

"Pretty much, indeed."

"I hate these sort of petty conflicts. I con't even understand them most of
the time. It makes me wish not to belong to the human race anymore." Katy 
sounded genuinely unhappy.

"Well, I would say that you have gotten your wish to a much higher degree
than anyone else could."

Katy looked confused, then started to laughing. "I guess you're right," she
said when she was able to speak again, "though it sounds strange to think
about it in that way."

"It must be very strange for you." Aurelio said empathetically.

"I had not thought about it so far. I guess right now I have more difficulty
understanding what happened. You know, I never believed in amnesia. I always
thought people who have retrograde amnesia were just trying to get away from
some kind of unpleasant past. I understood that maybe the brain was
incapable of forming new memories, but not that it could lose what it had
stored all of a sudden. And now I lost an entire month. It's ironic, isn't
it?"

"Yeah, definitely. What made you think that there was no retrograde amnesia?"
Aurelio asked.

"Well, I can't even say it. But to me it seemed that people used this as an
excuse to get around things that would put them into jail, like chairman
Jonathan. I think that I always declared things which I did not understand
as impossible. If I failed to understand something, I always implied that it
failed to make sense to just about anyone and everyone else was just playing
along, you see? Pretty close-minded of me, I guess." Katy made a vague
gesture and looked down, that is into the direction of her own feet.

"It was your way of coping with a world which became more and more complex
with everything you discovered. As such, it was a natural strategy. You are
not the only one who fell into this kind of behavior. It's quite common in
hyperspace navigators." Aurelio explained.

"That is at least somewhat comforting." Katy seemed to bit a bit relieved:
"Sometimes, I feel that my little corner of the world is strange and I don't
belong anywhere. I guess it will be worse now: I'd probably not be able to
do anything anymore. I'd probably be studied by scientists for the rest of
my life."

"You do still have human rights, I would at least assume so. You know of
course that courts will be the ones who decide here, but generally, you seem
not to be in that alien. It seems that whatever affected you still either
has not affected you or has emulated you in another structure."

"Emulated? That does not sound like it would be compatible with human
rights, does it? I mean, if a system decided to emulate one thing now, it
could emulate something else. Or stopped emulation and showed its true
shape."

"That does not sound good, indeed. We yet don't know what this thing is
doing though. If we had any clue about that, we could made a better guess as
to how courts decide. I mean, you don't stop being human if you lose part of
your brain matter, or your brain is injured in an accident. Sometimes, it is
possible to restore lost function with implants though, and even these
people are still considered human. Same with the transhumanists who use
techniques like that to improve their mental functions. If it would fall
into just this category, you'd be out of legal trouble."

"In hyperspace and in front of a court, you are in destiny's hand." Katy
remembered an old saying.

"Well, yeah, courts can decide unexpectedly, but it generally is quite
seldom that someone who is accused of shitting onto the sidewalk gets the
death penalty, so they are somewhat predictable."

"But wouldn't it just float... oh, you mean on a planet, sorry. I have not
been on one in a while, at least form what I remember." Katy was right of
course. Hyperspace navigators had very little time on planets. She herself
had only been for a few times there especially as she was not that fond of
gravity.

"Yeah. I was talking about that."

There was a short pause, then Katy talked again: "It is kinda annoying that
now that we are kinda reliant on finding out what my status is, all the
smart people are doing by infighting. That helps no one but their own egos
and has no consequence than wasting time."

"I guess we can only hope that they are not just infighting but working on a
strategy to start tacking the issue."

"Yeah, but that requires faith in humanity and I have to admit that I don't
always have the biggest supply of that." Katy smiled.

"Goes with the profession. My faith in humanity is also limited, given taht
I deal with human waste most of the time in my job. In both meanings of the
term."

"You mean that you deal with the recycling systems of the ship?" Katy asked.

"Not only that, I actually infiltrated this ship under orders of the
Centralite police. We were trying to find evidence of sexual and physical
abuse of hyperspace navigators on ships. There were some leads to this
company, so I was to applied there and befriend the navigators here. But
fortunately, there was nothing here. Ikaru seems to be a person with a very
high integrity."

"Yeah, I didn't experienced anything spurious here. Sounds scary to imagine
that it would happen." Katy stated, "I guess mute navigs have most issues,
right?"

"Yeah, but not always. Some navigs have been gaslighted into not trusting
their own perceptions and not trusting to express it without being declared
crazy. It's doubleplusungood for your faith in humanity, believe me."

"Ouch, I guess." Again, there was a longer pause. Then Katy asked Aurelio:
"Can you please determine whether Rae and Ilyas are up to anything good and
if they are still squabbling tell them to hurry the lah up?"

"Yeah, sure," the cop said. Katy still had issues to see him as such. It
seemed so different from what he appeared to her. But then, he was far more
educated than you would assume maintenance technicians were.

When Aurelio even opened the door, you could hear a heated discussion
ongoing. Both voices were quiet when the door opened though. Aurelio spoke:
"I come here on behalf of Katy. She told me to scrap your infighting and get
back to work, not to let her live in the agony of not knowing her form and
fate. Can you? That'd be stellar, thanks in advance!" he then closed the
door again and turned to Katy: "They should behave now. They generally think
that hyperspace navigators are some kind of trained monkeys. So if an
embarrassing truth comes from there, it should sting deeply." 

"Thanks for explaining these kind of tricks to me. I am clueless about human
behavior at times. As you probably already experienced a lot."

"I have encountered a person who is scared, who believes deep in her soul
that humans are stobors to other humans and denies the things that make
human life and society worthwhile, but not out of denial but out of a
genuine lack of experience with them. I see someone into whose soul the
words 'be very afraid' were carved. Fear is a very potent motivation aid,
and it was used deliberately in your education, wasn't it?"

Katy nodded: "It was, though I never experienced actual fear for my life
there. The Coprosperity had to collapse for that."

"Sure, I do not doubt that the time afterwards was horrible, I guess you had
nothing."

"The clothes on my back, my ID card and the address of my parents, who then
decided not to let me live with them."

"This also wrote even more fear into your soul. It makes me sad when I see
your body language always screaming the fear in your soul. I just wish that
one day you can be fearless."

"You know, I sometimes wished the same, but then, I am not sure. Wouldn't
someone who was fearless ignore all rules of propriety?"

"Morality is not necessarily based on fear. Morality is also based on
empathy, on feeling of others feelings, the firing of mirror neurons."
Aurelio explained.

"I see what you mean. Sometimes, I would like to be able to live in the mind
of another person so that I can feel what a normal, neurotypical person
would feel." 

"We all do, Katy, we all can only guess what another mind feels like and in
the end, every mind is an island."

"I know what you mean, but the neurotpical minds are at least on the same
planet aren't they?" Katy said.

"At least before the change, you also were, just a bit further off, nothing
like the Bugs. And like the rules of plate tectonics and climatology are
valid for us all, most of the rules of psychology are for you. It could be
that the change will cause a legitimate and wide-ranging difference here,
but I am not sure. I am not a doctor."

"Change is a good term for what happened to me, you know, it does not sound
judgemental or anything, it is very neutral. I like it." Katy quite
obviously changed the topic. "It is a change which apparently is wider than
I would have thought, I mean, if I really accessed information from these
structures, it no longer is a me vs it situation, I have to start seeing
myself as partly alien. And that is a weird thing to think about."

"I cannot assist you here all that much apart explaining to you that
neurologically, the self is an illusion and that a philosopher from ancient
earth said that you cannot step into the same river twice, because the river
has changed and so have you."

"That is a nice thing to consider indeed. Thanks for that." She paused a
bit, "Does that survive contact with the statut philosophers though?" 

"You know more of philosophy than I expected you to do. I personally do not
like the statutists all that much. I think they are mostly hyped to boost
the ego of some of the colonies who created them. Let's look at what they
say: You are as a human always in one state of existance, right? Now either
internal or most of the time external events can move the mind into another
of the predetermined states. These states have been defined by our biology
and are the same no matter the place and no matter the person. If the
statutists were right, you would still be the same person as long as your
mental state has not changed despite secondary changes which are undeniable
like remembering stepping into that river for no reason whatsover except to
make a philosophical point. You're with me so far?"

"I am, yes." Katy said.

"Now statutists have a few issues which are still unaddressed. First of all,
do you think that an amoeba has the same menal states as a human being?"

"Not really."

"Indeed, this means that mental states have evolved. Now for some of the
more theistic or at least dualistic ones of them, that is not an issue. The
states came from either a higher being or the mind instead of the brain. If
we are philosophically on the side of materialism though, these states must
have evolved, which throws the idea of their generality out of the window.
While it is likely that the progression charts are similar to humans, it
could be that a human, in the course of human evolution or technical
progression, is born with another progression chart. These hypothetical
beings in statutist philosophy are deviantes. Now, statutists say that
society requires a set of progression charts and that deviantes do not
survive or raise offspring becuse they are not capable to. I call BS on that
given that many neurodifferences already exist. Maybe the Savannah had ways
to weed out those who are too deviante to live, but modern life can allow
many people to live who without intervention would have been dead. The other
issue, which many people forget is that not all mental states are accessed
often. Some might only be changed to a few times in the human life. If there
was any irregularity in behavior, there would be no way to filter it out.
Take a person who hears that he has an incurable illness and who is a theist
and a dualist. Most theists and dualists still fear death after all, it is
actually one of the observations which gave rise to the ideas, but this one 
is a deviante, so when he hears that he will only live for a short while, he
is happy that he is going to see the higher being of his dedication. He
might have already raised children, but only now it turns out that he is a
deviante. No way to filter it out anymore, is there? That is why I am not a
statutist."

"That was a very elaborate explanation. Thank you for that." Katy seemed
genuinely happy about it.

"I cannot help it, sorry. Statutism seems to be created out of a reactionary
response to humanity reaching for the star, terraforming other planets,
enhancing themselves in various ways and so on. I think what bugs me most
about it is that it prescribes humanity complete and utter stasis without
even the theoretical possibility of a beneficial positive enhancement of
humanity."

"I kinda wonder how state philosophers would react to my situation." Katy
mused idly.

"If we come back from this jump, we can maybe ask Centralia for some
reactions. It should be funny."

"It should definitely be hilarious." Aurelio agreed.

They thought a bit about the reactions the state would get, but then
eventually, Rae and Ilyas entered again. They had apparently come to an
agreement and even managed to do so without major bodily harm (whether any
egos had been bruised was impossible to say). Ilyas explained that he wanted
to see how she interacted with depictions of hyperspace and a few tasks were
set, which Katy solved in a higher speed than she felt was previously
possible. She also realized that she felt the need to be in hyperspace. She
had no idea why she felt that way, but if she had the choice she would have
immediately devised a jump back to Centralia for no other reason than to be
in hyperspace temporarily. She realized that this had been a difference to
how she used to feel. Hyperspace had been something she always feared, but
now she felt fearless towards it. The same kind of fearless which people
generally feel when moving to another room in the ship. After a long while
of being tested, she was able to mention that to Rae, who diligently wrote
it down and murmured something to Ilyas. Ilyas murmured back and then both
left the room again to discuss something. She wondered what that was
supposed to mean but supposed they had decided to settle their arguments and
disagreements out of earshot, which she supposed was also a way to
circumvent being seen as argumentative. Eventually, they entered again and
made a few more tests which related to her mind (or maybe minds, she was not
sure whether the idea of one mind, even in a philosophically materialist
sense would describe her state adequately right now) and her emotional
state. She realized something though: The idea of state progression charts
might make no sense in a philosophical sense, but it was useful for
research into the mind and it seemed to be used here to lead to tangible
results. It reminded her of a story of celestial navigation on ancient
earth. The geocentric models were incorrect, but the navigation worked, as 
such an incorrect model sometimes can be a good tool.

Eventually, they had come to results of some kind because they were
suggesting that they would do the jump back to the space station at the
nearest possible time. Katy looked forward to it more than she could
imagine. For her, hyperspace jumps sounded extremely appealing for a reason
which she could not determine. She should be concerned about this change,
but she did not really muster the courage to examine the change as she did
not want the previous state to return. She liked her fearless approach to
hyperspace more than she would like to admit to herself. She actually looked
forward to with ease generating 99, 99 jumps every time and not being afraid
that something happened which she did not expect. She felt for the first
time not afraid that she could not handle the various metrics they measured
her in or made the kind of mistakes which would end up stranding a ship in
hyperspace. She realized that most people probably did feel that way towards
their jobs and it was a striking realization. Only now she started to even
understand what fearlessness as Aurelio mentioned could entail and it was an
exhilerating realization. She was not allowed to check the jump vector, or
rather, it "was not possible" without anyone having explicitely forbidden
her to do so. She knew that it actually was possible but knew that
bureaucracy was the closest humanity had ever come to an unmovable object
and as such did not complain or argue, but got into her restraints and
waited for the jump.

She was completely unprepared for what happened next. There were so many
things she perceived as soon as the ship had left regspace that she was not
even sure how to express it. It was as if she had been in a dark metal box
for all her life and now was allowed to sleep on a bed in all colors of the
rainbow and of many more textures than there are names for to her. She saw
(which is a misleading term as it felt nothing like seeing whatsoever) the 
amount of deviation to ana, which they had from regspace, she felt the
Sanchez variations not only in her body but also in another way, she was not
so far aware of. It seemed as if she was for the first time ever she was
fully alive and it thrilled her. She felt that at this moment she only fully
accepted what it did to her, even if it changed her in this quite extreme
manner. She felt that never before there had been a chance to feel anything
like this. As if she found a previously undiscovered path on the state
progression chart leading into previously uncharted territory. There was
something else, which became clear to her, the more she thought about it:
The jump was too deep into hyperspace. She felt as if she previously did not
use one large jump to her goal but several smaller ones with only short
distance to regspace, but she had no idea what made her feel like that. She
knew that this was a completely different way of using hyperspace than any
human so far attempted. It was just not feasible with the limits in
precision of hyperspace jumps. It was not that she felt in any way uncapable
to reach far away targets in the conventional manner, so she would be able
to manage. Only when she had gotten somewhat used to her new state she heard
that Rae called her. She replied and apologized for the delay in noticing
him.

"Katy, can you lower us into regspace again? It has been quite a while
already and more than ten times the projected time."

Katy looked at him confusedly: "What do you mean?"

"I know that you don't remember what you did last time, but you behaved in a
way that made us appear that the hyperspace jumps only ended because you
decided to end them. Can you please do that again?" Rae pleaded.

Katy waved her elbows in a vague gesture. "I am not sure what you mean, I
will see what if anything I can do here." She was not sure that she could do
anything here. She tried to move herself in various ways but it did not
work. She wondered whether she did anything to maintain the state she was
currently in. She tried to imagine how she felt in regspace in comparison
than how she felt now. It was a strange endeavour, but she did not feel as
if she did anything different this time. She tried to think about her state
ana of regspace. But there was not really something she could do affect the
jump, could she? Suddenly the ship descended back into regspace. She did not
do anything different, it was just that the ship decreased in ana until it
reached the small layer to regspace, which it then breached. Immediately she
felt back to her normal self and it sucked badly. The amazing sights (for a
lack of a better word) which were in hyperspace were gone and everything
felt bland and grey to her. There was no structure in the same way and while
she previously hated the Sanchez variations, now she missed their incoherent
blathering which she perceived while she was in hyperspace. She assumed that
the Sanchez variations' effect could be minimized but right now she could
not think of that.

Katy turned to Rae: "Do you know where Aurelio is?"

Rae shook his head: "Probably working or doing stuff. Why do you ask?"

Katy made a vague gesture: "I want someone to argue philosophy with. Mostly
Statutist concerns and the definition of a human. I had some concerns which
I need to discuss with someone who will not be laughung about it."

"Philosophical concerns?" Ilyas asked with incredulity.

"I feel that while a scientist can best explain what happened to me, a
philosopher can best understand what it all means to me as a person, or at
least instance." Katy explained.

Rae seemed to be quite amused by this while Ilyas made an annoyed gesture:
"How can philosophy help you here?"

"What does it mean to be human? Is a human a human because it forgets and
denies, enthuses and believes, leans on another and trusts? That is what an o
ld song from Bue says, or is there something more to it. I feel that I would
still be capable of these feats, does that make me human? Or has what was
done to me changed me fundamentally to the point that I would be in a
different class of beings? It bugs me that there is no definite answer."
Katy said.

Rae smiled broadly about that: "I know that song. We use it to mourn the
dead. It does have indeed a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of what a
human is. But I think it is in its core a statutist one: A human is not what
behaves like a human but what moves between internal states like a human.
Believing and trusting does inform actions but at first is a mental state,
isn't it?"

"I see that you have been thinking about it already?" Katy asked.

Rae nodded: "I like philosophy, especially the statutists and their views.
Before, humans were reduced to animals already with the discovery of
evolution, but statutism reduces humanity even further down to a state
machine. In all times before such an extremely mechanistic understanding of
the mind would have ended extremely badly. I think the statutists where the
first ones who stated a truth which was evident but denied for a long time
already."

"That is interesting, as Aurelio had a lot ot criticize about their views,"
Katy explained.

"There are critical points to make, sure, but the big picture is the
reversed view on humanity. You need to see it in a different view, before
the statutists, there was a big fad of dualistic views of the mind, people
seemed to have problems to imagine how the mind as a biological machine
worked. Then, statutists came there with their mixture of biology and
philosophy, with their maths and all that and suddenly the argument from
incredulity that is philosophical dualism had no leg to stand on anymore.
That is what I like about them, they overthrew everything."

"I never saw it from that perspective." Katy admitted.

"Sometimes that is the best way to access a work: by its context and its
history." Rae stated.

Katy was not sure whether she could agree or disagree here and thus just
murmured something which could be interpreted as either. After a while
passed in which Ilyas and Rae were doing something with their instruments,
Katy wondered something out loud: "Do you think a human is a creature which
adheres to a human state progression chart?"

Rae nods: "In general, I do think so. Though there are cases which are
difficult, like people who are mentally impaired and thus have a somewhat
different progression chart for example, but are nonetheless human. In your
case at least, that is the most useful definition, if the question was about
homo florensis, I guess we would have to use a genetic definition as we
cannot extrapolate how their state progression chart would have looked like
at all. We sometimes need suitable definitions for their purpose and must
allow a term to have several definitions to be able to work with it. But in
the end, we can have whatever opinion on that matter and the courts will
have the last word, so speculating too much on that matter will not get us
anywhere whatsoever." 

"Yeah, I guess you're right. I guess it is true that there is no definite
case here and in the end all definitions have some arbitrary component to
them. Thanks for listening and thinking about it with me." Katy was
genuinely graceful.

"No problem," Rae said, "if you ever want my probably somewhat divergent
opinion, feel free to ask."

After a while, she saw that someone requested a communication, it was Ikaru.
She realized that she probably should turn on synchronous communications
given that right now there was nothing she needed to be in high
concentration and flow for, then she accepted the request. "Katy, is it true
that you are more or less well again?"

Katy hummed in agreement: "I guess so, yeah. Why do you ask?"

"The jump left hyperspace but we have landed somewhere spurious, quite a
distance from Centralia."

"Oh, so we make another jump to there? Can I set it up right now?" Katy
immediately got excited. 

"As soon as we have any idea where we are, yes."

"So I take it that I should help finding cepheids again?" Katy asked. 

"We are already isolating it, the question is whether you can do something
very quickly as it seems that we are deep in Bug territory." Ikaru asked,
"Even if you could just move us away from there, that'd be stellar. Can you
give me a timeframe until when you can do so?"

Katy had the feeling that she could not really express what she wanted to
say. Eventually, she settled on a weak "I guess it would be rather fast.
Ilyas and Rae tested me in that respect, so they might know best."

"Thanks, ready to disestablish."

She could hear Rae talking to someone, probably Ikaru later. There was a
noise reminding of surpressed laughter, then Rae disestablished the
connection. "You seem to think very little of yourself, Katy. Other people
would have talked much more freely about their accomplishments."

Katy made a vague gesture and kept quiet. It was not as easy for her to talk
about accomplishments, that was all. She wasn't even sure why this was but
unless her memories were seriously compromised, she had been like that for a
long time already.

"I have told the captain about your results though, so he will come back to
you whenever they have enough info to get out of here."

"When the position has been fully determined?" Katy asked.

"Pretty much, yeah." Rae scratched his head, "maybe he will tell you though
that we need to zork instantaneously."

The expression zork sounded strange to her, but the context made it
sufficiently clear what he meant. "Is there a way to make things less...
latencious?"

"You got a latency issue with the system?" he asked.

"Not a latency problem per se, it's more that the latency seems to be
slightly different for different systems. It's a bit disconcerting. Like
seeing that my lips move now but hearing my voice a few seconds later, I'd
say. The test data you showed didn't have that issue."

"Sorry, but you will have to make do with what we have. I am a doctor, not a
programmer."

"I wonder whether it would be possible to set a custom latency for specific
inputs though."

Ilyas interjected with an angry voice and a suggestion, which actually
worked. Katy thanked him for his assistance and then implemented it on her
systems. Immediately things looked so much better, to the point that she
could easily see the structures, which normally would have been difficult to
gleam. She knew that the data had not actually changed at all, all what
changed was that her pattern recognition had beed taken over by an alien
construct. It was the only reason why the slight latency phased her at all,
she used to be able to work with the almost unperceivable, sub-second range
latency. She again felt reminded of the fact that there were two pasts she
had, the past of Katy and that of the alien thing. One of course was the
obvious past, which she could easily recall, but the other one was far more
hidden and so far, she felt it as a difference between is and ought, where
all her life, she only experienced the is state. It was not even a real
memory, at least not in the same way as remembering worked for her normally,
if she could have rememberred being that alien and working there with the
series of small, shallow, almost completely Sanchez-variation-unimpaired
jumps, it would at least be something she knew what to do with. The subtle
difference was far more insidious.

When she was called the next time (and by then she had set herself to be
synchronously available) Ikaru sounded stressed. "Katy are you here? I need
you to help right now!"

"I am, yes, what seems to be the issue?" Katy asked.

"Bugs! Lots of them! I think there must be a nest around here!" Ikaru
shouted.

"Crap!" Katy shouted. suddenly however, she had an idea: "Did they come out
of hyperspace?"

"No, out of regspace. I think they come from the planet in this system."

"I will develop a way out right now!" Katy started to work out a route back
to human territory, when suddenly, she felt something for which she had no
name, but which reminded her immediately of the feelings she had in
hyperspace. Suddenly she realized what happened: A bug ship had just entered
hyperspace. Again she felt an ought versus is disparity and immediately, she
knew what to do, she changed the parameters to something completely
different, and sent it to navigation without even testing whether these
would work. Only when she had done that, she realized what she had done,
still, for some reason, she was not scared, she knew that she had done the
right thing even though she was not sure what exactly she had done. The ship
jerked kata. And then immediately fell back ana again. She had no idea what
this was supposed to have changed and immediately sent back her original
idea for a jump.

Ikaru called only a few seconds later. "What was that supposed to be, Katy?"

"To be honest, I felt that this was the right thing to do when I felt
something enter hyperspace. I felt as if there was a difference between what
I was doing and what I was supposed to be doing and I did what I was
supposed to be doing."

"What you did was apparently to get rid of all these bugs in a series of
quite spectacular explosions." Ikaru explained.

"Wow," Katy was unable to form a coherent sentence. She had not expected
that to happen.

"The explosions seemed to come from the right side of the ships, though we
are not sure what exactly happened."

Katy thought out loud: "It must have had something to do with the sikerian
effects of our jump which were extremely nonstandard. There were hyperspace
and regspace components which in this jump had extremely high spikes. I
generally do not think that this should affect something unless there had
been erratic setups. If a hyperspace engine is defective or just shoddily
designed, a spike can break it down. Given that the bugs understand
hyperspace like a pig understands quantumsecliodynamics, I would not be
surprised that their drives are shoddily designed. It could be that the
signature reminded me of a vulnerability of some kind. For a sufficiently
advanced definition of 'me' that is."

"You mean that this 'spike' caused their hyperspace drives to overheat in
some way?" asked the captain.

"Not overheat, no. More lose a specific balance and destabilize. When that
happens without being reigned in, like you would expect it normally, it can
spread a destabilization, I don't know the right term for it. And that
causes the issue." Suddenly she had a realization, "Gudmund Freyadottir had
the same issue. The first hyperspace testjump also fried the backup system.
I think people who know more of the physics behind it know better, but this
is very similar. Except of course that she didn't know what she was doing.
Actually, I think they were exactly alike." 

"But since that jump, all hyperspace engines are prepared for it, aren't
they?" Ikaru asked.

"The hyperspace engines of humans are prepared for this. If the Bugs had
developped hyperspace engines in a different manner, it might make sense
that they have always protection against spikes. Other reasons could of
course be that their knowledge atrophied and they forgot the reason why they
had the protection in this." Katy mused, "I don't know why it works, I just
know that it works."

Ikaru changed the topic: "So, yeah, is it possible to get us back to human
territory?"

"You should have the data for it already." Katy stated.

"Wow, you are quite fast indeed." Ikaru complimented.

"After the thing changed me, hyperspace navigation is extremely easy to me.
I am not sure why that happened or how, but, well." Katy explained.

"I see, ready to disestablish."

"Disestablishing." 

A short while later, the ship entered hyperspace. Katy realized that the way
she designed this jump was somewhat different from how it generally was
supposed to look like. It was somewhat difficult to explain how the
difference looked, it was a different pattern, not a completely different
method. She doubted that anyone else was able to notice a difference,
however if they did, she was not sure whether it would be necesarily seen as
a bad thing, apart from the entire state progression issue. A small glitch,
but not a huge issue. She felt the various sensations which only hyperspace
could provide, her eyes were closed and she savoured every moment there. She
knew that this was something which she was supposed to consider strange as
this came form somewhere outside her normal self, but to her, it felt just
as natural as hearing or seeing. There was no difference, it was the most
natural thing to her. She felt the Sanchez variations, she felt how the
sikerian gradiants were crossed, and how the movement of the ship stopped
going ana and and then slowly turned kata. She felt the small resistance
before the ship dropped into regspace. Then everything went silent and dark 
again. Actually, she could still see and hear, there was still light and
sounds, but these were not like the symphony of hyperspace, which she
previously heard. It was like hearing someone attempting to play a song on a
xylophone, one handed after hearing the full orchestral version of it. It
just did not compare.

"Good work!" Rae said while unbelting.

"What do you mean?" Katy asked, immediately feeling defensive.

"That's the nearest I ever saw someone get to a target from hyperspace!" Rae
seemed to be genuine.

"The nearest?" Katy repeated as if she lost full compehension of standard
language.

"I can connect to its network from here. It's quite uncommon not to have a
few hours of travel in regspace until the destination is finally reached.
Heck, sometimes it's days of travel. It really sucks how different the
quality of hyperspace jumps is."

"It does depend a lot on the company and the individual. This company is
known for its low-tier navigs directly from third-tier worlds," Ilyas
complained, "It's pretty much a miracle to end up somewhere near the
location when you take this company! I guess that is the reason you ended up
hektolightyears away from the intended location earlier."

"You are not going to call Bue a third-tier world!" Katy's voice was
ice-cold.

"What are you going to do if I do?" Ilyas asked.

Rae answered before Katy could, which was good because her answer would have
contained graphic descriptions of violence: "Complain in Centralia about
inappropriate behavior for once. I know how fond you are of the navig
traditions from earth and think that most colonies are third-tier, but that
does not mean that you can liberally insult Katy's patriotism."

Katy laughed: "Earth navig culture? That's stellar. It involves getting
navigators from places like Bue and getting them to change citizenship
because earth's laws prevent an actually effective navigator education
program. Bue gives people a good education from birth so that they become
the best hyperspace navigators."

Ilyas argued back: "Oh, of course you say that. What would they do to you if
you did not? Caning? I heard it is a punishment which is still very common
on Bue, for even small crimes. Cut your rations? Imprison your family? Force
you into hard labor?"

Katy's voice was angry: "What you might or might not know is that patriotism
is not only a result of fear. It can be a result of belonging to what one
thinks is the best nation on the best planet in human territory. Patriotism
can be the result of nothing more sinister than loving your homeland. And if
you think that Bue was cruel, you clearly never have been there. I think
that caning is a more humane punishment than throwing someone into a house
with other criminals and not release you until years later. And when you are
released not giving this person any chance to get back into his previous
life. Sure, caning hurts, but do you really think the long and arduous
torture of losing your basic dignity for years on end is humane?"

Ilyas laughed: "You know that people from the various third-tier worlds
always say these kind of things to justify their patriotism? And that it is
never original? If you were born not on Bue but say Novagrad, you'd say the
exactly same thing about a different planet."

"Well, there are flowers which grow in many different places, many different
terraformed worlds if the soil is just right, think of the Sidha flower. And
at least on Bue, I could grow up myself without countless operations and
drug regimes before I could even speak just because your society cannot
handle people being a bit different. Your society expects that everyone
ought to look the same, act the sma and think the same. Guess why it is the
planet with the highest net migration. People know how bad it is to hear
countless disagreeing messages about their own inadequacy and thus decide to
get the fuck out. Sure, Bue's government also has messages, but at least it
is not a place where everyone and their little dog is allowed to send
messages via public media telling just about everyone that they are too fat,
too slim, too tall, too small, too nurturing, too negligent of their
children and so on, and so on."

"In Bue, only the government has that right, big difference!" sarcasm
dripped from Ilyas' voice.

"It is one message which people hear, not a shrill cacophony of hundreds of
unrelated messages capitalizing on your deepest and darkest fears. I'd
rather have allegiance classes in school than constant jingles and messages
embedding even into your dreams all under the pretense of a freedom that
means nothing else than that the people who have a lot of money can control
your entire world, including your subconscious. Bue might have many
disadvantages, I am not going to deny that, but people from earth generally
are surprised about the peaceful athmosphere and the pleaseant lack of
advertising. I know that many earthians think that a constant barrage of ads
is a sign of a prosperous and free nation, but I tell you something, I'd
rather be poor than not to have one uninterrupted thought and be as
superficial as many earthians are. I rather have ideals which might appear
childish to you than to chase the ever shifting ideal called beauty."

Ilyas demeanor changed all of a sudden: "Sorry that I said some things which
were inappropriate, I wanted to know how well you react to frustration, how
high your tolerance to these kind of things is. Given that you were
described as a very patriotic person, insulting your homeland seemed to be
the obvious way to go. I apologize for the things I said."

Katy seemed to be more than just a bit confused: "This was just a test to
see how well I react to being frustrated?"

"Yeah, indeed. We need to know that you are not too unstable to be released
into human society after quarantine. I think the thing we all can agree on
is that living in a community with other people can be extremely frustrating
at times. It can lead to people running amok or going postal. This would
have been the worst outcome, which was why I measured your frustration
tolerance by teasing you like that and recording your reaction: both in the
world and in your head. As much as the latter was not in the artificial
system."

"I hope that I passed?" Katy asked.

"You indeed did, this is one of the reasons why I told this to you." Ilyas
seemed to be happy about this given the tone of his voice. "Most
neurodifferent people have very idiodyncratic ways to deal with frustration,
which would seem very alienating to others."

Katy at that moment was very happy that her socially unacceptable behavior
was not related to frustration. She used to bite herself when being
frustrated, but the Institution helped her to get over that. She thanked her
teachers in absentia who forced her to get rid of this behavior. There were
strange moments when this decided to pay off and this one definitely was one
of them.

When the reached Centralia, everyone left and let her do her own thing. In
her case, that meant reading and occasionally listening to ships entering of
leaving hyperspace far away. The book she was reading was about the history
of various forms of quantumphysics: From Planck via Heisenberg and Feymann
to the discover of Seclionics (and the strange story as to why seclionics
was given that name despite its lack of any evident Greek, Latin or Hindi
roots). It was interesting though in her opinion it had too much emphasis on
the human aspect, the rivalries, the intriges, and the oddities and too
little on the content of the discoveries and maybe a layman accessible
version of the physics behind it. She balked at the more difficult physics
and was hopeless at math, but she seriously wished to know more. While she
was reading, someone called her. She looked up and saw a person, whom she
could not recognize, who was wearing a uniform, which did not look like the
one from the company. "Yes?" she asked.

"Are you Katy?" the person asked with a harsh voice, more used to shouting
than to soothing.

"I am, yes. Who are you?" she asked.

"I am the one asking the questions here. You are the one to answer them,"
the person rudely said. "I am going to ask you a few questions about what
happened when you were in Bug territory. Did you affect the jump which led
the Sovereignity there in any way?"

Katy looked at him in a manner which showed her disapproval, then returned
her eyes back to the book. 

Of course the person could not have that happen. "I asked you a question.
Answer it."

She again looked at him but kept her mouth closed. She had learned not to
bother with bullies.

"I order you to answer this question and all following ones in a fully
truthful manner!" the person boomed.

Katy made a vague gesture before turning around.

"I think you don't understand the gravity of the situation, dear ma'am. I am
Hasran of the Joint Human Intelligence Division. You are accused of sabotage
and cooperation with the enemy, and if you do not answer any questions, you
will be courtmartialed in no time."

Katy's heart began to race, but she still forced herself to appear calm: "If
that was the case, you would be able to show your credentials. If you cannot
do that, there were enough people who tried to use my faceblindness to get
me to believe something ridiculous. You would not be the first person to try
it, rather the twohundredfirst one."

Hasran was taken aback and showed his identification, which she checked with
her own communicator and the ship's systems and then the systems of
Centralia. It checked out. Katy broke down. She knew that she now was in
serious trouble. With shaky voice, she started to apologize profusely. Tears
welled up in her eyes.

Hasran was quite uncomfortable with that change in attitude: "Hyperspace 
Navigator Katy, did you affect the hyperspace jump which led the
Sovereignity out of human territory in any way?"

Katy shook her head and between sobs denied even being capable of doing so.

"Why have you submitted the hyperspace jump which you had submitted first?"

"I don't know... I... set up the... other jump first... but then a... ship
left... regspace... and... and I saw a... how can you say it... a signature.
I... just knew... that what... I planned was... spurious. And... so I
changed the vectors... to what we used... because... it seemed... it just
seemed... right." She was sobbing like crazy now. She just knew that this
all would lead into deep doo-doo for her. This person already sounded as if
he was a lot of trouble and if a person like that had the intention to make
life hell for someone, he could very simply and tenaciously do so. She knew
that someone did do just that to one of the few people she spent time with
as a child.

"You say that you did it because it just seemed right? Because you saw
something?" He clearly was not even understanding it.

As such, she started to tell the story. While tears drifted through the room,
she told him that she saw the ship leaving regspace and that this was a
specific perception, which for some odd reason was associated with a
specific kind of hyperspace jump to her. She had no idea wh this was
something she had to do, but she felt a sharp sensation that she was doing
something she probably shouldn't be doing when she set the original jump
vecotr and thus adjusted it. Hasran asked many questions about details of
what she saw, but Katy could not even express it to her well. And when he
realized that she was not using any hyperspace display from the ship for it
but only her own senses, he seemed shocked. He seemed to have been
blissfully unaware of her condition and the changes which happened to her.
He insisted on asking many questions regarding the time she did not remember
and all she could do here was to refer to Rae, Aurelio and maybe Ilyas. She 
could relay a few things she was told, but her amnesia was inpenetrable on 
these issues. She just did not know what she did during the jumps before
even though it seemed to others that she could influence things then. When 
Hasran asked about later events, she at least could give information. It was 
still a rather disjointed account of what happened, but that was okay. At 
least Hasran seemed to understand her mental state now and stopped making
assumptions about it. It seemed like an eternity later when Hasran
eventually said that this was enough and left. Katy immediately called
Aurelio and told him what happened. He seemed to be quite surprised about
the events. He had known that quarantine had been lifted for the rest of the
ship, but was unaware that Centralia had been interested in her. "Well, it
is great to know that I am the only one who did not know about quarantine
being lifted. Who was going to inform me?" she spat out.

Aurelio seemed embarrassed: "I was after my boss received my report on this
ship. She used the priority card on me hard. Daughter of a stobor, she is!"

Katy smiled without intending to do so as she heard similar insults on Bue
despite stobors being completely different animals there. "Well, does anyone
now have any plan as to what happens to me now? Are they going to let me rot
in there indefinitely?"

Aurelio cleared his throat. "They are not going to let that happen. I think
they will want your assistance somewhere else. They would like to study you,
but are really afraid to let you onto Centralia. They think your mad
hyperspace skills are some form of menace to them."

"What do they think I will do? Alert people to miscalculations in their
hyperspace jumps? Notice when ships leave or arrive from hyperspace? It's
crazy!"

"People always fear the unknown. And to be fair, we have no guarantee that
the thing is peaceful as it has shown that it was well able to kill. And
well, you did do exactly that when you did the first jump people could not
check back due to time constraints." Aurelio explained.

"These were Bugs, they deserved it." Katy spat out. "Did they ask Istanbul
Yeni whether they wanted or deserved to be killed? And do you think that
when it comes down to it, they will ask Bue or Nov Baku about this? Or will
they just do what they are genetically programmed to do, that is to spread
without regard to human life?"

"Sure, they did," Aurelio replied, "and no one is going to deny that dead
bugs are good bugs, the question which the people in charge have is just
whether you are patriotic to humanity given your part-alien nature. And
there is a rumor going on that this structure which you picked up is
bugmade."

"Stupid people, can no one read a hyperspace signature anymore? I have seen
almost immediately that this could not have been something which they
cobbled together. That is like seeing a seclionic reactor and thinking that
it was made by stobors, Nov Baku or Bue."

"Yes, reading hyperspace signatures is a specialized skill. You are right
and apparently no navigator was talked with looking at the initial
signatures. Partly due to the quarantine which also prevented most kinds of
data transfer."

"I am not going to say anything about that, okay? Otherwise I would have to
resort to the lowest registers of my language."

"We do not want that to happen, that is for sure."

"I am going to have an ear on the ground as to why people started to see you
not as the person who dealt with a large swarm of Bugs but with the one who
sent a ship into bug territory for what seems like no reason whatsoever." Katy
must have looked confused, which was why Aurelio explained to her what he
meant: "I won't literally have an ear on the ground of course, I will just
attempt to keep up with what people say about this and determine whether it
is possible to understand why Centralia acted the way it did."

"That's good. I don't really understand what happened earlier. Sometimes,
humans make absolutely no sense to me. None of them."

Aurelio smiled sympathetically: "I can let you in on a secret: it happens to
all of us. None of us understands his fellow humans fully. Especially if the
other gender is concerned."

"Seriously? Other people to me always seem as if they had it all figured
out. As if there was no issue to interact with others."

"Yeah, it is just that this happens far more often to the neurodifferent. By
orders of magnitude. Do not forget that someone will probably not share
relationship issues or similar problems with someone who has very little
experience with them. That is one of the reasons why everyone else looks far
more harmonic to you than they really are."

"That actually makes a whole lot of sense." Katy admitted.

Aurelio smiled. "By the way, I read your book during the quarantine. I have
never read something more disturbing than that."

"What do you mean?" Katy was seriously confused.

"This book deals with people who live in a very strange parallel world to
mine. The things they talk about seem strange and often do not fully make
sense to me. But what shocked me most was the way these people were raised.
How does anyone expect these people to grow up sanely when they are raised
in bizarre systems of seemingly random punishments? How are people expected
to make informed decisions on matters of politics when they have no idea
what is outside their homes?"

"What do you mean? The author was raised in a very liberal institution. I
sometimes think that his childhood stories could not have happened on Bue."

"Did Bue's New Mind Institute too have these tiny cells to sleep in? Like
tiny enough that you cannot even sit up, let alone stand up in them?" 

"Yeah, they are great. It is completely silent in them. The entire world can
stay outside. It was the safest place in my childhood. It is the thing which
I miss most on ships: The room is large, so you cannot touch the walls and
there are always sounds. Even white noise does not help against the all the
sounds from seemingly everywhere."

"Seriously? Is that how you see the rooms on the Sovereignity?" Aurelio
asked in honest confusion.

"Yeah, it is. I sometimes feel like banging on the walls screaming at the
ship to shut the fuck up. Especially since I am here in quarantine. I don't
even have 6 opaque walls around me. Everyone can watch me sleep. I can hear
everyone in the medical station. At one point, I am just going to break down
and cry and scream. Yes, it is that bad and I cannot see it become better
anytime soon now. It drives me even madder than I already am." Katy sighed
loudly.

"I can see how this situation is not the best one. In your position, I'd
mention this when there is a plan about what will be done. Maybe you will
get a quarter of your own in a quiet location."

"Maybe, though I do not believe in it. I am good for them as long as I
function for their purposes, my own requirements always come last. I think
that was what made the new mind institute so good in retrospect: they knew
what we wanted, feared, yearned for and to a point catered to it. They
understood our needs for solitude, quietness and safety. After I was on my
own, I had that feeling almost never anymore. I had no feeling of actually
belonging somewhere, only being tolerated around as long as I was useful. I
guess the fact that the only friend I gained was someone who had to gain the
trust of the hyperspace navigator for work purposes does belong here as
well. I mean, nothing against you, but well, before you, no one bothered
with me."

"Katy," Aurelio's voice was very sincere, "I might have befriended you as a
part of my job, but I do want to stay friends with you despite our
differences, you are a very nice person."

Katy looked confused: "Nobody ever has said that to me."

A while later, Katy was pacing again. No one has said to her what was going
to happen. No one explained to her what they planned, they all assumed that
she would just consent. Right now, she wondered whether she was a prisoner
to them. Then, all of a sudden, a new group of people entered the room, they
were wearing uniforms which looked different from work clothes of the
company and had a somewhat similar gait to Ilyas. They reminded her of
planet dwellers who did not spend a lot of time in space yet and still
struggled against the lack of gravity. Katy looked at the 5 people. One of
them started to speak to her, in a very nasal, whiny voice: "Hyperspace
navigator Katy?"

"In person. What is your request?" She asked. 

"We are scientists from different universities of earth, xenobiologists
mostly. We ask for your support with the ruins, which you discovered."

"What do you mean? And what kind of assistance do you talk about?" Katy
equired.

"We will rent a ship to go to the pulse ruins and examine the ruins of the
alien craft which is located there. We need your assistance not only for
hyperspace navigation, but also on whatever information your current
predicament can give you." Someone else with the highest male voice she ever
encountered talked: "People have talked about your feeling that there was a
difference between an ought and an is which reminded you of a previous
state. Information like that would be very helpful." 

"So, you want me to help you with xenobiology despite me not being a
xenobiologist?" Katy asked with suspicion in her voice.

"You are a xenohuman, that is qualification if there ever was one."

"Xenohuman?" Katy raised her eyebrows.

"Neither fully human nor fully alien." the nasal voice explained. 

Another one, a woman with a very monotone prosody started talking: "Creating
a new term, which does not set the expecatation that you are either fully
human or fully alien seemed to be the best precedent we ould set in our
papers."

"I have already been mentioned in papers?" Katy asked, her suspicion not
exactly alleviated.

"Well, of course, I have provided the data to my colleagues and we have
worked on a few papers together. Your specific predicament is of definite
interest to the scientific community," a voice, Ilyas, explained.

"Ilyas?" Katy asked.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot to introduce us: I am Ilyas, the person who talked to
you first is Chang, Next to him is Isa, then Telit," he pointed to the high
voiced man, "and that is Asiya."

Katy nodded: "It's a pleasure to meet you? Could you please identify so my
communicator can help me to recognize you?"

"Yeah sure," Ilyas went ahead and the others followed suit sending the
biometrical features via their communicators to Katy. For a second Katy
imagines the horrible world before communicators could tell faceblind people
whom they were talking to. She knew that this existed in the past, but it
seemed unthinkable and life must have been so much harder back then. She
also conveniently was able to verify their stories by confirming their
identities with Centralia's database. They checked out.

Katy realized that she would probably not be able to help them at all, but
this did not matter. It seemed for her the fastest way into hyperspace and
the sheer thought of getting there made her feel giddy with excitement. She
felt as if she made her reasons sufficiently clear why she could not be of
help all that much. "So, you basically ask me to go into hyperspace with
you, tell you that I have no idea about a lot of things you are going to ask
me if it is the truth and get into hyperspace to get back? Sounds good. I'm
in."

"You do realize that you are required to tell the whole truth about things
you know and perceive when being asked?" Someone, Chang, said.

"I am aware of this, I just do not feel as if I can be of too much use
despite my predicament and wanted to make that perfectly clear. Nothing
else," Katy explained. "Will you let me out for the trip or will I remain in
some form of quarantine?"

"We will let you out of this room when the Sovereignity will leave
Centralia. There had been some fears of Centralia regarding your state and
they protested all means of transporting you through their territory, so we
planned to rent the Sovereignity for our work." Asiya explained.

"Makes some form of sense," Katy agreed to, "especially as Centralia seems
to think that I am buggy or something like that which makes me a persona non
grata to them."

"It was quite a hassle to organize that with the company of the ship and
your temp agency, but if you want to, we can leave tomorrow." Chang
explained. 

Ilyas agreed: "Very much so. We started moving papers when we heard of your
predicament first. Even when you were not quite aware of things, we thought
that you might be able to recognize things."

Katy suddenly felt relieved. If they thought a barely conscious person could
do things for them, then whatever these people wanted seemed rather doable.
"Sounds as if you couldn't wait to get your hands onto that, but that's good
because I cannot wait to get into hyperspace either."

It actually took three days in which the Sovereignity was packed with
various equipment and in which Katy could do little more than pacing and
talking to Aurelio, who would remain on Centralia. And of course reading as
if books were being outlawed tomorrow (and what was even more important was
to use the already established connection to Centralia's servers download
more reading material). She checked the vectors for the jump again and
again, even though it was not a difficult joke by any means. The vortex
meant that a lot of ways led to the ruins. The only issue was not to get
into the vortex but to leave hyperspace early enough. Given that it was a
jump she did within seconds even before the alien structure helped her, it
was expected. The ship was too loud to concentrate well, but at least no one
objected to her putting on music, even though many people thought that her
musical tastes were simple and without virtue as she loved to listen to the
kind of music which was scientifically designed to be most catchy and had
enough bass to down out anything else around her. Most people no longer
cared for this kind of music and preferred more artistic music, which was
written by actual people instead of programs and spoke to them to their
souls.

Eventually, the Sovereignity moved away from Centralia and the door was
opened for Katy to leave the closed section of the medical station. Katy
could not propel herself out fast enough. She moved through the hallways and
then entered the hyperspace navigation room. As her work was only done with
information and their representation, in theory she could work anywhere on
the ship, she just needed the shipcomputer to display her layers of
hyperspace information in that location. She worked like that in her
quarantine on the medical station, but the hyperspace navigation room had
better projectors which showed a higher resolution. It also had the ability
to dim the lights to whatever brightness she needed and even change its
color in case she needed extra help in finding these pesky structures. She
had set the light to be dim, and reddish with a slight dash of blue to
prevent her eyes to get too used to the darkness. She again checked her jump
there and then confirmed it to navigation to implement it. Of course it was
correct, but to her it felt soothing to check it in her normal environment
again. After she transmited to vector, she prepared herself for the jump.
There was the feeling of leaving regspace and all the various sensations of
hyperspace almost taking her breath away. This times, she checked the
sensors of the ship to better get a feeling for how to interpret the
perceptions she had there and hopefully to learn to use her pattern
recognition for these kind of perceptions just as well as for visual
information. It was the best feeling she could imagine. Even better than sex
(but then, the sex she had was mediocre at best; even a good night's sleep
was better). It was over far too quick, there was a moment before the entry
into regspace, which feels like a high note played on a rubber band, which
vibrates between the fingers, then it was over and she was alone again.

The ship was just a few kilometers from the wreckage when they descended
from hyperspace. She felt utterly without fear, at no point did she fear
that she would not leave hyperspace or not reach her destination. She felt
for once as if she was fully able to fulfill her tasks and that she did not
have to fear to be inadequate anymore, she never imagined that a moment like
this was even possible before she made this jump away from the Bugs. She
decided to replay the recordings during the time the ship was in hyperspace
and to use her memory to her to get a better feeling for its patterns. Her
services were not needed at that moment anyways and to work in the right
place for it sounded like fun.

When she was asked to come into a central room, she knew that something was
up and they apparently expected her to know things which she had no idea of.
She was asked to sit down as if the ship was about to accelerate or
deccelerate randomly. It seemed like an odd thing to do when there was no
expectation of movement into any direction, but these people were from earth
and thus were constantly accelerated downwards by gravity where they live.
Of course, she did sit down, as difficult as it was under this lack of
gravity and heard what they had to say. They projected pictures and asked
her for her ideas and told her that they also read her brain activity just
to see whether she or "it" reacted to it. It was not even described as an
issue of distrust, but she felt as if it had something to do with it. 

The first picture showed a metallic surface with a few etched lines in it.
She was not sure whether this was supposed to be writing or some kind of
accidental scratching. She looked at it a while and them explained that it
showed a Tela constellation albeit an atypical one. She started loudly to
speculate on decreasing sikerianity in certain quadrants to lead to the
atypical form. The scientists made notes of what was said without any
feedback or comments. Eventually, they showed her a new picture. This one
showed text, apparently from a novel. She read parts of it to them, but when
there was a scene where bad words were written, she fell silent. After this,
they showed her the picture of a metallic edge of a part of the wreckage.
She described it as a jagged edge in the vague form of a Sahn configuration.
She likened a picture of a a crease on the wall of the alien vessel with
another constellation in hyperspace. More pictures were shown to her and she
said something about each of them, very often a comparison to a hyperspace
structure was made. At one point, Ilyas slammed his fist onto a chair in
anger. Katy immediately was defensive and scared, she didn't notice that he
became angry before and so the sudden reaction made her think that she did
something horribly wrong. Katy jumped up and in the same motion turned to 
Ilyas and then crouched on the opposite wall, which these people clearly 
intended to be the ceiling. Ilyas looked confused, then he looked onto his
charts and seemed to blush. "I would appreciate it if you came down to us
again," he said coldly.

Katy moved slowly back to the seat and apologized for being scared by the
sound. There was no reaction from the scientists in any way. There were more
pictures and she easily associated things to them. Eventually, she was told
that it was okay to leave. She knew that they did not want her to stay
around, but she still stayed around behind the door and listened.

The voices were muffled and she felt as if her heart was beating so loudly
that it was heard over there, but she could not move away. Ilyas voiced his 
unhappiness loudly: "This must have been the worst waste of time, which I
ever sat through."

Someone else agrees: "Yeah, we got zero usable data from it. I don't know
how her mind works, but I do not want to inhabit it, like ever!"

Chang agreed: "How can she even function outside of a laboritory? I mean, I
knew that we would find some aberrant pattern recognition, some false
positives, but not all of them. I m surprised that she has not delved into
the deepest layers of conspiracy theory or schizophrenia."

"Bue's finest export," Ilyas spat out, "you know that the New Mind Institute
did everything to encourage pattern recognition in their kids. Including
some more illicit means like drugging the children regularly while their
brain develops. Of course, the resulting individuum will not have any
meaningful social skills and will be full of distrust and fear, but she will
be able to do the task of hyperspace navigation like no one else. Also, it
is just the fact that her experience is quite different from mainstream and
that she does not ascribe to any political positions that she is not deeply
invested in conspiracy theories, she has told things about her perception of
human behavior which do meet the requirement of conspiracy theories, but
which she normally knows better than to voice openly. Better don't ask her
about her views on faith and love if you don't want to be introduced to
them."

"I am not sure whether I understand," Telit explained.

"Read the casenotes then," Isa replied, "you had the same time everyone else
had."

Asiya interfered: "Stop fighting here. I know that it is not a good moment
right now, that a test which we planned failed, but remember that she was
primed to look for patterns there. Not just by her upbringing but by us.
Remember that the task was to find associations and to find patterns, this
does presume the existence of said patterns to normal people. I think we
should just get over this initial failure and remember to take priming more
seriously around someone who was taught to look for signals and signs all
the time."

Mumbled agreement was had. Katy had heard enough and moved to her quarters,
while stiffling the urge to cry. She had again pissed off people on whom she
depended. The unthinkable thing had just happened again. It was becoming a
bad streak in her life, which probably would only end when she died. She
knew that her self-confidence from being able to navigate hyperspace so
easily was ill-gained. She was still a failure and a screw-up and would
never amount to anything whatsoever. At best all she would be was a trained
animal doing the same and same things over and over again until it was time
for her to apply for death with dignity because no matter how she coerced it
with medicine, her body was unable to make it. Then she would disappear
without any delusions of a life beyond this. Then this would be all there
was: The constant threats of society, the short bliss of hyperspace and
eventually hopefully a painless end. If she would be on Bue at that time, it
definitely be possible, unless of course the planet would have another
government at that time again. However it seemed that the previous and also
the current government had no culture of glorification of suffering. Katy 
started crying again. She turned on music in her room and when the haunting
singing was heard, she stood there and let the words and notes wash over
her. No human being was involved in the creation of this music, it was all
created by algorhythms, still or maybe for that exact reason, she loved it
very much. 

When Isa found her, she was still listening to the sounds by the program and
rocking backwards and forwards. Isa watched her for a while but apparently,
she was not aware of her or willing to interact. In the hope that it was the
former, she spoke: "Katy?"

She jumped up and turned around, smashed her head on the ceiling and while
rubbing her head asked: "How did you get in here?"

Isa explained: "The door was not fully closed, so I just walked in."

Katy's paranoia was immediately triggered, but she tried not to make it
show: "So, what brings you here?"

"You know, new tests we need to do with you," Isa explained, "this time, the
tests will be a bit more appropriate for the situation you are in."

This did nothing to alleviate her suspicions to the human: "What do you mean 
by this?" 

"That we had some assumptions in our first series of tests which were not
really true for you. We have lived on a planet most of our time for example
while from what I understand, you were quite uncomfortable in the situation
you had to do the previous tests. This skewed the results." Isa explained.

"Okay, I will come with you." Katy agreed. Not that she had a lot of choice
on that matter.

When she came into the room, they had removed the in her opinion useless
chairs and were instead floating at the walls in the way how it was supposed
to be in Katy's opinion. 

Telit, not Ilyas seemed to be the leader this time as he started to ask
questions: "Katy, are you literate?"

Katy tilted her head: "What do you mean?"

Telit had to explain it: "Are you able to read and write?"

"Depends on what you mean by reading and writing. If you gave me a feather
quill and a bottle of ink, I would not be, if you asked me to derive the
hidden meaning from a poem, I too would fail, but I can interpret the
symbols of the Standard alphabet and turn them into words."

"That is the ability which we need. It is not something that we can assume
in these days anymore, there are people who have lost the ability and get by
with reading software, or those who never had it." Isa explains, "Do you
know any other alphabets or systems of communication?"

Katy hesitated a bit before answering: "I know, I don't even know whether it
has an actual name, but we called it Symbols. It was a way how we
communicated among ourselves in the institute. I have no idea who created
it, but it already existed when I was young. I think it started with very
simple signs standing for an idea but became more sophisticated over the
generations."

Isa was interested: "Can you show me how this is written?"

Katy blushed a bit: "Only if you don't make that or the sheer existence of
it known to the Bue institutes. I would hate it if the next generation would
be deprived of it."

"Oh, sure that can be arranged. It will not leave this room," Isa said.

"Promise it!" Katy insisted.

"I promise it," Isa said.

"By the sight of your eyes and the breath in your chest." Katy insisted,
"and by all the streams of hyperspace." 

Isa repeated the promise with these additional clauses, then Katy made
everyone else in the room swear to secrecy as well. She then started to
write a few almost completely alike symbols and drew some squiggly lines 
between them. After she filled a page with these symbols, she finished and
showed it to the scientists who were quite confused about this. "What is
that supposed to mean?" 

Katy started reading it, showing the direction in which it went: "A few
generations before us, there was a student in this place who always wanted
to see a waterfall. Whenever trips were suggested, he would tell that he
wanted to see one. He never could. After he graduated, he was drafted by the
Bue government. He worked there for a year and his requests of vacation time
were denied every time, it was always said that he would not be able to
interact with the world anyways. So at some point, he calculated a vector
not to the destination, but to Ntia'an and managed not to have this noticed
until they arrived there. He refused to bring them to their destination
unless he was allowed to see that waterfall, the planet is known for. They
tried to reason with him, but eventually relented. When they returned to
Bue, he was courtmartialed and put to death. He died smiling. Since then
hyperspace navigators can apply for three vacation days a year."

Isa looked confused about this: "What kind of story is this?" 

"It is one which floated around in the institution," Katy admitted, "it is
not very good though." She sounded defensively.

"That is an interesting one," Isa said, "Don't feel afraid about it. It just
means that I have to change the shape of the characters in the tests a bit.
It is happening in the background right now. What I will ask you is to
determine whether something looks like a character or like random lines. Do
you think that you can do that?"

"Sure, I think that I can do that," Katy said.

"Great, please put on this cap to measure your brain activity, then we can
go ahead," Telit explained.

The test was rather difficult to her because she was never sure whether a
distorted line as supposed to look like a letter or just supposed to be
random. She knew that she probably already said more with her brain than she
did with her mouth. But if they could read her mind, they would mostly read
her fear to disappoint them again. She was very happy when the test ended.
The scientists thanked her for her participation and then she had some time
for herself again. Again she lingered, but now the response was more
subdued, while she heard them talking about the results, it was not angry,
however they seemed to ignore the rule of taking turns when speaking which
made it hard to understand them this time. She went into the mess hall and
grabbed a new helping of Spagbol out of a vending machine and then hungrily
wolfed it down. She remembered that she met Aurelio right there and realized
that she missed talking with him about various topics. She decided to send
him a message and as such she paced thinking about what to write. One of the
few human-created songs which she loved had the title "Don't let me be
misunderstood" in an ancient earth language, because she really liked the
sentiment. She always was almost afraid to write as she had the fear that
people would misunderstand what she said and turn it into something she
never intended. To make things worse, she was not very eloquent in writing.
Eventually, she finished the letter in which she mostly explained what
happened to her and wondered whether human-composed songs could be confused
for those which were created purely by programs and if not in which areas
the algorhythms would have to improve. In the end, it was very long-winded
and only acceptable with the length guidelines because she had no formatting
in it whatsoever, it was just a plain Universecode text. Eventually she
queued it to be sent. It would only be sent as soon as the ship would enter
hyperspace or be in vicinity to the station.

When she returned to her room, she immediately decided to contact Ilyas.
"Ilyas, I have a question, which you can maybe help me with!" she almost
shouted as soon as the connection was established.

Ilyas sounded confused: "Katy? What's up? You sound as if you are out of
your breath!"

"Has there been hyperspace communication?" Katy asked.

"Not yet, but we probably have to go into hyperspace soon to send a few
messages."

"Not from us, from it!" Katy got annoyed by what she perceived Ilyas'
failure to understand her.

"What do you mean? The alien structure?" Ilyas was confused.

"Yes, indeed," Katy sounded rather angry right now that she had to explain
something so incredibly obvious: "I know that my changes in state seemed to
correlate to hyperspace jumps. This could be related to transmissions to an
external location of some kind. I don't think the sensors would overlook a
broadcast in these situations, but a narrowcast might be something which was
overlooked." 

Ilyas was silent for a few seconds. "You mean that we should search the
sensor logs for any anomalies during the jumps as this can be an indication
of communication?"

"Pretty much, yeah. If there was anything spurious, we will be able to find
it and depending on the length of the anomaly, it will lead us to the
location of the transmission."

"That sounds like an interesting proposition. I know that in Centralia,
hyperspace experts are looking at the logs as well, but maybe you can find
something interesting as well. It is always good if many eyes look over
data, it makes it less obvious to overlook something obvious. can you look
at this yourself or do you need resources for it?" Ilyas asked.

"Apart from silence, no and I know that this is unfeasable here." Katy knew
that she had to make do with supposedly noise-cancelling headphones and
music.

"Yeah, you have a very good hearing from our tests, it would be
prohibitively expensive to filter out all sounds," Ilyas referred to some
tests which they did.

"I'll try to work on it. Ready to disestablish!" Katy said.

Ilyas said goodbye and disestablished the connection. She then went to the
hyperspace navigation room, called up the sensor logs and tried to find
anything in there which would look like a transmission of anything. She
started by looking how existing transmissions looked like on the sensor
logs, she assumed that an alien transmission would look rather similar
because if you just look at the physics, there are only so many ways to
transfer data through the hyperspace to circumvent the extreme slowness of
light. She saw a rather characteristic series of spikes in the last dozens
of transmissions as well as a small movement to compensate for the movement
of the ship through hyperspace. Depending on the sitance it would probably
be able to use this for purposes of triangulation, even though it would
depend on the difference between the angles. If they were too similar, there
would be a higher chance of an error of rounding than a correct location. 

It was not really going anywhere though for Katy. If she had an ability to
see hyperspace structures, that ability completely failed her at that stage
with the spikes she observed earlier. There seemed to be no such forms
there, none of the series of spikes which she easily found on the previous
logs. Maybe the spikes were of artefacts of something else, for example the
hyperspace transmission hardware. Maybe the message was somewhere else in
the logs and the spikes were just an error. But the logs did not show
something like that to her. They showed these solitary spikes which spiked
up occasionally. When she was asked to come to a new test, she gladly
accepted, if only because it meant that she were allowed to get away from
the tedious grasp for straws which might not really exist. 

The next tests were again related to seeing letters or other structures.
Katy looked at the images and did the tests as she was required, but later
asked whether some pictures were recycled from the last test. To her, it
seemed as if she was able to recognize certain structures from the last
tests. Ilyas again seemed shocked by this but this time managed to keep his
temper in check. Isa merely seemed amused about it. Chang explained that
this was indeed the case. Chang then showed her the pictures again and asked
her which of them she recognized from the last test. Katy mentioned many of
them with certainty and without hesitation. Eventually, the scientists left
her on her own devices and she was back to trying to find any indication of
the possibility of a transmission. Of course, it seemed to lead nowhere
whatsoever, but it was an interesting distraction.

When there was no clear shift and no shift of ambient light, she had the bad 
tendency to lose track of time. She would often lack any idea whether she
spent one hour or one day at a task, would go to bed when tired, wake up
when her body decided it was time for that, eat when hungry and wash herself
when remembering to. The bad thing about this was that after even a short
while of that, she would completely lose sync with the rest of the ship. The
good thing was that in these periods of time, she felt most like herself.

She was not sure how long she was in that state when Chang asked her for
help. He explained that they had found things which seemed to be text and
their own text analysis algorhythms failed them. The mostly wanted to see
whether Katy was able to give any insights. For her, the various symbols
looked like certain constellations, there seemed to be several dozen of
characters. She was not sure about the exact number of them though, as
certain differences were almost random. Then Katy realized something: the
aliens were far more advanced than humans, why would they lack a so normal
thing like standardized fonts? Maybe there were cultural reasons related to
art and other, similar ridiculous notions, but it made no sense to Katy. Why
would super advanced aliens be confined to the same strange human condition
as humans were? She expected more of them. There was another idea, but that
was rather strange as well and involved a completely different view on their
language than she assumed before. Of course, it was stupid to have an idea
of their language in the first place despite knowing nothing about them. It
made no sense when she thought it to herself, but it still bugged her. She
listed the various characters which seemed to be distinct and the ones,
which had gradual differences in their most extreme forms. Language tends to
be discrete, words are entities, but a small variation of the pronunciation
and writing does either get filtered out via the error correction in the
brain or mapped to another word. There is no continuum of meanings between
good and bad depending on the pronounciation. But exactly that was what the
writing seemed to imply. No human language did that, but Katy still felt the
need to tell the scientists her suspicions. Isa again listened to her and
mentioned that they thought in a very similar direction right now, but were
quite amazed about the quick way in which she came to the same conclusion.
Katy was asked to come to their room to think with them together about
something.

She did so, but immediately realized that she had no way to penetrate the
jargon despite the valiant efforts of her communicator. She asked for
permission to leave as soon as she realized that and was granted to. She
went to the mess hall again for a new helping of spagbol. She realized that
since she was in space, she only ate spagbol, and had the idea that it might
be better to test something else this time. She thought about other things
and for a while decided not to bother with the immediate questions, she did
no longer feel the same drive to get this sorted out after she associated
the issue with many people talking loudly and without letting the others
finish talking (why did they give that rule to navigs when seemingly no one
in the real world adhered to it?) spewing long terms at each other. It was
the exact opposite of appealing to her. Instead, she looked back at the last
trips and wondered whether communication might be visible here. Rught now,
the answer very much seemed to be no, but Katy did not want to give up so
easily. Days turned to nights and again to days when Katy realized
something: The thing had a very different inclination to use hyperspace. Who
would have thought that the signals it would send woud be sent in the same
manner, by jumping deep into hyperspace and then dropping out there. The
inclination to use hyperspace was very different even if it understood and
supported the human way just as well. She would have to search at the points
when it would be at its preferred depth.

It was not as easy to find as she expected, but only a few hours later, she
found something which could be a signal. It had only extremely short spikes
but a very elevated average. It could be that this thing communicated in
such a high speed that it was not possible to fully identify its spikes and
lows. It meant that she was not able to eavesdrop on the connection, like
she at least in theory could on human connections if it was not for the
encryption. Katy would have loved to check this with someone else, but she
knew that this was not easily possible. Instead she checked for the same
low-kata or low-ana signals and found them in every single hyperspace jump
since she was on the ship. She reminded herself that she was fooling herself
probably and set the computer up to show her these moments in various jumps
either before or after the change and only later reveal them. She knew how
susceptible a mind educated to recognise patterns was to recognize patterns
no matter whether they were there or not. Thus she made a list where she
wrote down whether she saw what she thought was the communication signal.
Later she evaluated which of these she got right and which she did not. Of
course, she had seen a link where it did not exist but it still seemed like
a good job, strongly implying that the pattern was real. When she contacted
Ilyas with the results, he seemed confused. She remembered that Aurelio
stated that Ilyas thought that she was not very clever. As such it could
have been that he was confused to be confronted with an experiment in a
manner he himself would have used. Or he was just wondering what kind of
mind altering substance she was on.

"So let me just re-interate what you just told me for the benefit of my
colleagues: You have thought that you had discovered a signature of the
communication of the interface and then made a blinded experiment to 
determine whether you were fooling yourself and apparently were not?"

"Yeah, pretty much. I thought that I should probably start to calculate
possible destination from these communications, but I thought I better ask
you whether I made some kind of methodological error in it. You know,
because I am not a scientist and so I thought you might know a few things,
which I forgot."

He asked about a few facts like the method of randomisation and how she
protocoled the assumptions. She heard the voices of the other ones who
apparently were streamed into the conversation. They suggested some
alternative methods of evaluation, but her interest in science books,
including interest in the scientific method had paid off. 

"I think you should determine where this thing sends to. If it is reachable
with thie craft, we probably should look into this. I am sure we can
determine mire from that than from a millenia old wreck."

Immediate disagreement followed from the fellow scientists. Isa thought this
was completely unresponsible while Asiya said this wreck required more
research. Katy listened to the loud, heated discussion, but eventually
decided to disestablish and go ahead determing where the thing sent data to.

It was a creepy thought to think that this thing communicated during each
jump with a system somewhere. It made her afraid of going into hyperspace
because she was not afraid what it would say about her. Suddenly she
imagined this thing being disappointed by her and she felt panicked. What if
it was these transmissions which made the alien race deem humanity unworthy?
What if her addled, confused and sometimes just plainly crazy brain doomed
humanity to be seen as enemies of this other race? 

It was an idle speculation, but it put her into a very unhappy mood. She
wished that she could talk to anyone, but as this was right now impossible,
she wrote another letter for Aurelio in which she detailled all the issues
she had right now. She asked him in a very long-winded defensive manner,
which tried to clarify every ambiguity as swiftly as possible whether he
believed that being human did involve self-reliance. Of course humans
communicated with the rest of the world, often even unvoluntarily. But was
that also an unvoluntarily communication? Was the sending of data in
hyperspace without noticing it similar to the accidental insult to another
person by body language? Or did the sheer fact that she communicated
involuntarily via hyperspace meant that she was something else even if she
otherwise adhered to the state progression charts of humans? Was there a
benign reason why this happened or were the reasons sure as taxes evil?

Before she sent the message, she realized that this alien thing might just
overwrite her current personality with something alien. She decided to write
down a last will and then attached that to the message as well. She had made
a few plans for that already when this alien thing attacked her and now she
only had to write down what she remembered. Eventually, she finished writing
and queued a very long message. She was not sure how long it would take to
send this, but if all else failed, there was always the idea to send it via
the local network of Centralia.

If statutism was the criteria for being human, then she was by most means no
longer human. Whenever she would get into hyperspace she seemed not to fully
adhere to the state progression charts anymore. Pure statutism would not
allow for that, if there were stochastic modifications allowed, then maybe
it made sense to see her as human. Maybe Rae and Aurelio were right by
deciding that in the end the question whether she was or was not not human 
depended on nothing but the opinions of the courts.

Katy paced back and forth when she thought about these things. She disliked
most humans, but still it striked her as odd that she would not be part of
the group. The worst thing probably was that the fact that she always would
be studied and if she no longer fell into the category as human there was no
guarantee that her human rights would be adhered to. They would be able to
basically do what they wanted without any regard for her feelings, desires
and requirements. She would not have privacy and silence because they were
for humans, there was no way for her to have different ideas of what to do
with her life than what was prescribed to her. And most likely, she would
not be allowed into hyperspace anymore and for some odd reason that last
thing stung most. Since the change, she loved being in hyperspace more than
she dared to admit to others. She knew that if people would only realize how
much she loved it now, they would attempt to take it away from her. That was
generally how it went. 

She had another thought: there were implants which did communicate with the
networks to provide services, mostly medical implants which communicate with
doctors about the correct course of action to defeat a disease. Maybe the
thing could be seen as a medical necessity of some kind. Eventually, she
returned back to trying to determine the location of the receipient of the
messages.

"Yasmin, are you here?" Katy started to leave a message for the navigator
who should be on-shift right now but apparently had better things to do,
"This is hyperspace navigator Katy, I request your assistance. Please
contact me when you are available. It is maybe strange, but I need someone
to talk to, because I think that I am losing it here."

Only a few minutes later, Katy was contacted by the regspace navigator:
"Katy? You of all people contact me? What happened?"

"I am making a calculation, basically a parallax of some kind, and I think
that I am having some errors in it because the result is so far off what I
expected that I don't think it can be justified. I must be something wrong
and I doubt that I can find it on my own. Can you come here to give me a
hand?" Katy asked.

"Is it safe to come?" Yasmin asked.

Katy paused a bit, honestly unaware what Yasmin could refer to, only then
she realized that Yasmin was talking about her state: "Ask Ilyas, Isa, Telit 
or any of the other scientists who spent quite a bit of time with me without 
any walls inbetween. They did not fear that they would be infected by the
system."

"So, it did not attack others?" Yasmin asked.

"Attack others? What do you mean?" Katy was honestly confused.

"There have been stories that it has attacked people, other than you, that
is. That it either tried to use them to turn into weird creatures like you
or to eat them." Yasmin said, "I don't really know where they came from, but
that is what is told around here."

"You can see the logs, if you don't believe me that nothing happened. Sure
the rooms are not surveyed, but you can see that I was the only one who
entered there," Katy explained.

"I probably will do that. I mean, you are not really confidable, given that
you are... that! I will contact you later. Ready to disestablish." Yasmin
stated.

"Disestablishing." Katy confirmed and closed the connection. Then she
proceeded to think of whether she could have formulated things differently.
Constantly thinking that it was probably something she said which put her
off. In retrospect, everything sounds bad and there are always better ways
for just about everything. She hated the way how she often seemed to be
misunderstood. She suspected that Yasmin would now talk to friends about
just how bad she needed an excuse not to be near that Katy. Katy's only
consolation was that Sirgen in the second shift could maybe assist. He
seemed more cooperative than her (which was not exactly a difficult feat to
accomplish). But what if both Katy and Sirgen refused to cooperate with her?
In that case, she would have no way to get a second opinion on her
calculations and in the worst case, would be blamed for a disastrous or
simply costly trip outside of this galaxy. The only good thing about it was
that it would net the team a mention in the Ginish Book of World Records,
but what good does that do if the ship was unable to return.

While she was having strange, depressive and useless thoughts, a knock was
heard. Katy opened the door with an unexplained, but nontheless real
tredidation. When she opened the door, Yasmin floated there. Katy happily
invited her in. Yasmin's movements were cautious and her intonation was
defensive: "So, what is the reason you want me to be around? You sounded
very mysteriously."

"Well, Yasmin," Katy realized that she had not really an idea how to say
what she wanted to say, but tried nonetheless: "The reason I need you to be
here is because I want to determine where a certain narrowband transmission
went to, which we were able to locate, but not understand. It seems to
transmit only under certain circumstances. Only in a certain kanth, it can
be determined. So it is not as if I have a lot of data. What I have are a
few fragments and their approximate direction. Now, I have learned about
paralaxen and similar things in school, but it's been a long time since I
have used it. As such, it'd be advantageous if you could point out where I
glitched."

"So, you ask me do the basics of my job?" Yasmin asked.

"Pretty much, yeah. I know that it is not quite the same because of the
different kanth, but this could be worked out." Katy explained.

"You talk about kanth, what does that mean?" Yasmin asked, "I have heard it
a lot in regards to your trade but never heard a good explanation."

"Let me attempt to explain it in a way that makes sense: height, width and
depth are terms for extend in a specific dimension, kanth is the 4th term
here. Kanth is like depth in hyperspace, if that makes sense."

"I think that does. So you want me not to do normal parallaxen but those
which are in hyperspace, which is not at all my job." Yasmin summarized.

Katy agreed: "It is not the kind of job which you habitually would do, I
understand that. I was asking whether you were able and willing to help me
despite this. I do not require this of you, but I think it would help both
the Sovereignity, and me. It is not a demand, it is a request." She tried
again to invoke a higher purpose and felt like a phony for it.

"How does it help the Sovereignity?" Yasmin asked and moved her long hair
out of her face and into her hairclips again.

"Oh, quite simple: the Sovereignity gets to experience the destination of
the transmissions first and given their alien origins, writes history. So
that means your name will probably make it into the history books. And even
if not, it would be the highest distance from both Centralia and Earth so
that it would mean the Ginish book of world records might care." Katy
explained.

"If we survive, that is." Yasmin seemed unimpressed.

"It depends, actually. We would make history in failing and in succeeding.
Think of Gudmund Freyadottir. Yes, she did make the first hyperspace jump,
but did not return." Katy reminded Yasmin with a bit of a smile.

"Not the kind of popularity, I am aiming at. I have friends and family back
home. I want to be with them, my presence can help them more than the
insurance money." Yasmin said.

"So, you are afraid of a new discovery?" Katy asked with curiosity.

"Better once a coward than always dead." Yasmin semi-joked.

"Well, no one says that it will be done, but it can be done if you
cooperate. If you don't cooperate, I think that Sirgen can still be able to
help me. Sirgen was quite cooperative the last time when you thought that it
was too dangerous." Katy mentioned, "The other alternative if both bail
would be to ask Centralia for help with data. I am sure that Centralia would
be very interest in the question as to why I request assistance. Including
your employer."

"Do you try to threaten me?" Yasmin asked.

Katy did not expect this response: "I don't try to threaten anyone. I don't 
think that I am doing things for any benefit than the gaining of knowledge
and don't want to cause anyone trouble here."

"I doubt that this is your actual reason for doing these kind of things. I
know how difficult it is to motivate people who are like you by abstract
things. You are not the first hyperspace navigator, I had the misfortune to
deal with." Yasmin pretty much spat these words out, "So tell me why you
need this info, not the reason you pretend there is but the one, which
actually exists. The one which you admit to yourself."

Katy breathed in and out before answering: "Okay, there is a kind of
transmission which happens whenever I am at a certain kanth, both ana and
kata, it goes to a specific destination, which I don't know. I feel that I
need to know what this does because that helps me to know whether I can
trust my own mind. If I don't find out what this thing does, it could very
well cripple me again during a hyperspace jump like it did once already.
This is why I feel a craving to know what is located there. The other reason
is related to my status. If the information is nothing than a transmission
of medical data, it would not affect my status of a human in front of the
law. If it is turns out that a lot of the things which make me tick are
hosted there, well, then I guess my status would be in a lot of peril. I
know that legal experts on Centralia are attempting to tackle this issue
already, but to be honest, I am scared what would happen if they decide that
I no longer qualify as human being. You know? You say that I don't care
about abstract things, and you are normally not wrong with that, but there
are things which human rights affect. I no longer want to be nothing but a
test subject without the expectaiton of privacy and own desires. I want to
be able to decide on more than how I comply with scientists demands.And I
want to cover myself when I am sleeping in something that is not
transparent. I was too afraid to do anything I wanted to during the nights.
This is why human rights matter to me."

Yasmin looked at her quite stunned, she expected many things but apparently
not the truth, or at least this truth. "So, you want me to calculate the
course so you can prove that you are still human or at least still deserving
of human rights? Is that the reason?"

Katy nodded: "Yeah. I know that it probably seems strange to you, but to me,
this is very important."

"You know what, I am going to help you with this calculation. I never
thought about what it meant if I was no longer deemed human and the thought
scares me." Yasmin surprised Katy with this announcement.

"That's great!" Katy and Yasmin started to work on the task which was not as
easy as it appeared to the uninitiated observers. The same things which make
hyperspace good to shorten travel time made it bad to navigate through. Thus
there were many factors to takeinto account. It was good that Yasmin could
check the parallaxes along with her as Katy was unaware how far her first
guesses were off. In the end, it turned out that the location must have been
quite a distance away from pretty much everything else. When they sawthis,
both were silent in shock for a while.

"So, this is where the answers lie?" Yasmin asked, unintentionally quoting a
song.

"Looks like it. It is quite far away from our current location. Whatever
sends these messages must have quite a clue about hyperspace and more
sending power than I would like to admit and feel comfortable around."

"Yeah... you don't notice it when it, you know, does these kind of things,
do you?" Yasmin asked.

"What I feel is a sense of euphoria as soon as I get onto hyperspace. As
long as I am there, I feel as if there was nothing which worried me. I feel
as if everything was right and can only stay like that. I never felt
something like that before." Katy explained.

"So, you think that the symbiont floods your brain with the right chemicals
or stimulating impulses when you do something, which it approves of like go
into hyperspace?" Yasmin asked, "Kinda scary how it can use that to
condition you to do things it wants. I mean, meaking hyperspace jumps is
benign, but what makes you think that the next step might not be killing
people of becoming a traitor to humanity?"

"I don't feel that it does that. It feels not related to anything like that.
It has an affinity to hyperspace. Everything it did was related to that.
Even before it attached it, it mimicked isosikerian lines. And attached to
me when I pointed these out by touching them in order of the level. I think
others touched the nodes earlier and nothing happened. It does even allow me
to have perception of certain things going on in hyperspace." Katy
explained.

"It could be a stage. And it wants you in hyperspace so it can communicate
back with the mainframe to get further information." Yasmin suggested.

"We cannot determine this by speculating. I am very sure that this is not
the case but have nothing to go on but my own feelings, you have nothing to
go on but your feelings, from what I gather." Katy said, "what we need would
be confirmation of any kind and we can only get that by getting there."

Yasmin looked at Katy's determination with hesitation and only after a pause
spoke: "I know that you think like that, but I am scared, actually scared
about what would happen in case we get there. I don't want to be stranded in
hyperspace or a place in some distance of our galaxy without any means to
get back."

"I understand what you mean, Yasmin," Katy remembered that using the name of
the person she was talking to was supposed to help in cases of emotional
uproar, "I am scared myself. I am scared of going and I am scared of
staying. I am scared of what might happen in either case. My feelings tell
me that the structure is trustworthy, but they told me the same about
seemingly everyone who disappointed me in life. They are not a metric I can
go by. I am admittedly terrible when assessing how trustworthy people are."

Yasmin nodded: "I really wish you are right this time."

"Me too," after a pause, she changed the topic: "can you go with me to tell
the scientists about our discovery? I am sure that the might be interested."

Yasmin nodded, "do you want to go there or to use the comlink?"

"If you don't mind, I would like to go there in person. It might be easier
to show the calculations to them." Katy explained.

"I thought you hate things like eye contact and having your body language
interpreted in many ways, most of them incorrect." Yasmin seemed confused.

"I actually do, but I think this is important enough for me to get there."
Katy explained. "Given the limited bandwidth in this ship, showing them via
comlink would be too latencious."

"Yeah, the connections are crappy as heck here, you're right! I can't wait
to get back home. It only takes seven seconds to download a complete holo
video there. Here they don't even have many holo videos and the ones they do
have are pretty lame." Yasmin complained.

When Katy and Yasmin went to the scientists, they were surprised by the
revelation. Ilyas' first reaciton was to dispute just about everything about
what had been done: the method, the values, the vectors. Like a stobor onto
a baby, he jumped onto every perceived (and existing) flaw that there was.
The other scientists stood back (actually standing due to magnets in their
soles, as many people do who have issues with zero gravity) when he did so.
Only after what seeemed to Katy to be the better part of an eternity, he let
go and asked others what they thought about it. Isa mentioned that it was
solid work. Telit nodded. Chang shook his head to him, the vectors might not
even be there and another hyperspace navigator might have to confirm their
existing. Despite the fact that the various vectors all led to the same
result before Katy even had an idea where they could lead to. Chang was not
sure about this and even though she did steps to reign in her own pattern
recognition, he was not even sure that they were even there. Asiya seemed to
have no opinion either way. He thought more data was what was required.

As such, Katy was tasked to describe the phenomenon she was seeing so that
other hyperspace navigators would be able to establish the existance and
direction of these vectors. She attempted to make it as clear as possible
and indicated exact sensors, coordinates in space/time and the strength or
lack of it. Eventually, the ship sent the messages to Centralia. While it
uses hyperspace, it is not the same as a real jump. Still there was a
feeling that the movement to ana triggered her hyperspace perception and she
could see some kind of blindingly fast communication taking place. She knew
that the communication was visible via the equipment of the sovereignity,
but that something like this was possible for her interface surprised her.
It by all means should have but on the other hand, she never noticed its
attempts to communicate, even though by all means, she should have. It was
strange and seemed to relate the theory of Yasmin that this thing was up to
no good. Why else would it need to hide its traces? Maybe it was just
related to the different angle from which they were sent or the way it sent
was less prone to cause traces which could be observed.

A while later, the scientists asked her to go into a holographic
representation of the ruins. It was interesting to her, she only remembered
it with the interface covering every wall in the white structure. The now
metallic, smooth and grey walls contained a number of weird implements. Some 
reminded her of computers or control interfaces, but others seemed to have
no function whatsoever, or looked like hooks and bolts. Another structure 
reminded her of gears, but what function these gears had on a spaceship was
anyone's guess. They did not rotate, but that could just have been the
implementation in the hologram. Near these gears, there were the kind of 
symbols, which she immediately remembered. They were symbols from the last 
tests. They seemed to be slightly elevated from the surface, as if they were
to be felt, not seen. There was something about them which she did not fully
understand. She touched their forms and felt their pattern under her
fingers. Something of this was strange but she could not place it. At other
places where this reliefed writing was seen, she did not get the same vibe
that something was off. It were just characters of an unknown alphabet. She
could look at it with the same ignorance as she could view Devanagari
characters. She asked the scientists about the oddity here. Asiya laughed:
"We have indeed done something to them: we have shuffled the various
characters."

"What?" Katy was too confused for a full sentence.

"We have taken what we deemed to be different characters and changed their
order. You immediately seemed to realize that something was off." Asiya
explained.

"Whatever this structure is, it apparently has been around these symbols
quite often. At least often enough to not only parse them with native
language proficiency but also with a feeling for the order in which they are
supposed to be. Apparently, it was fluent in this language before it became
part of you. The places where your parsing is processed would at least make
this very possible. It seems as if this structure had taken over most of
your visual and auditory pattern recognition. Which was by the way also seen
in the previous tests. In the last test, you did not only recognize the
symbols from previously, but also those from the alien structures, which we
had not shown before."

"That is... creepy." Katy stated.

"I would agree. It seems to be that this thing has at least partly taken
over your subconscious processes, at least in this specific area." Asiya
mentioned with empathy.

"This probably means that I can bury the chances of ever living a normal
life, doesn't it?"

Isa agreed: "It is a strong indicator for you not being considered fully
human, as well as being considered one individual and not two seperate ones
in legal terms."

"But I don't feel like that. I feel like me and it being a separate thing.
If it would affect me so deeply, wouldn't I feel different?" Katy asked.

"If we took your brain and emulated it on a computer so that it ran in
exactly the same manner as your physical brain would, you would not feel
different as long as your sensory inputs would still seem the same and would
affect the world around you in the same manner. To you, you would not feel a
difference. Now, this thing is not a computer, but we can maybe see it as
some kind of similar thing."

"You mean, part of my brain functions are running on it right now without me
even noticing it?" Katy asked in a confused manner.

"Pretty much, yes. We can determine its activity in an imprecise manner. It
never seems to sleep but always show signs of activity," Ilyas explained,
"It never seems to slow down from its normal level but in hyperspace, it is 
going into a completely new level of activity. We can only guess the amount
of MIPS, but it is not low. Kinda amazing that this thing linked up so
fluidly with you."

"I am not really sure about whether I can believe this. I mean, before, I
did not notice whether activity was on the brain's right or the left side,
you think this is similar?" Katy asked.

"Pretty much, yes." Ilyas agreed.

"Yikes, that is a really bad mess I am in." Katy admitted.

Yasmin piped in: "So, how high is the threat?"

"Threat?" Asiya enquired.

"Well, the threat originating from her. You know, how high is the chance
that she is plotting how to deliver our hearts to her alien overlords?"

"You have a bad taste in viewing material!" Telit said with a grin, "but
seriously, it seems her moral behavior has not been impaired, just certain
subconcious processes."

"So, her moral decisions are still contained in her physical brain? Now
that's a relief." Yasmin exclaimed.

"Well, at least it seems that way, however it still can be affected. You
have mentioned that in certain situations, her emotional reaction is
different." Ilyas contradicted.

"So while her morals are not fully contradicted by it, she can be influenced
by it?" Yasmin asked.

"Pretty much. Maybe drugs are a good example for it. She is affected by
something that can cause her high happiness and from what I can imagine, it
does affect her actions, albeit it will depend on her self control just how
much. It is basically something which from the previous hyperspace jumps
extrapolated seems extremely enjoyable as opposed to her previous
experiences in Hyperspace."

Suddenly, Katy shuddered and closed her eyes. She started rocking back and
forth, but not in the way she generally did but instead in a somewhat
irregular rhythm. "We are going into hyperspace. I feel it!"

"You are wrong, Katy, we are not going into hyperspace, how could we without
a vector?" Someone asked.

Katy did not notice them: "There is something being sent! It is something
from the Sovereignity, it reminds me of previous transmissions." She waited
for a while, while the silence was quite thick: "It finished. We are back in
regspace. Well, we never really left regspace, but we have tilted kata a bit
for a transmission."

"There has not been a transmission." Ilyas explained in a matter of fact
voice. "We would have been informed about this. Maybe you were hallucinating
it."

Katy shook her head: "This was not a hallucination. Let me show you!"

She opened the weird TV static layer right then and there and started to
influence it in some way. "What in the name of the green hills of fair Bue!"
she exclaimed. "There is a gap in the records. Just in this very seconds
when it happened. I try to access it and, names of the almighty, it is not
there! What is going on here?"

"It might just be a glitch." Ilyas tried to calm her down.

"I doubt it. I might have 99 problems but a glitch ain't one of them! I am
going to check the logs for further 'glitches' however." Katy stated.

"You are free to do that, Katy," Ilyas stated this with what seemed complete
and utter calmness. Asiya tried to say something but Ilyas turned to him and
with an icy voice stated: "I don't think your input is needed here, Asiya.
Please leave interaction with the subject to me." This shut Asiya up 
immediately. "Now, if you want to find these glitches in our system, you are
of course free to, but don't you think there are more productive ways to
spend your time? You could attempt to create jump vectors to that place you
calculated and keep them up to date? My colleagues stated that it was
impossible to reach it with our modern technology, but maybe you can find a
way."

She understood that this was not a suggestion, but a command. "I obey," she
stated as she learned in Bue.

"That is a good thing to do. If the system really was glitchy, checking too
much of the logs might impair its stability. You don't want the system to
crash on you, do you?" Ilyas asked with an icy voice.

"I don't!" Katy cowered from his commanding voice, "I am going to work on
the jump vectors now."

"Good!"

Back in the hyperspace navigation room, Katy felt in a dilemma: She knew
that something communicated, and she was almost completely certain that the
logs were purged from this attempt to communicate, but she was told not to
do anything against it. Of course she had to obey, but she did not like this
one bit. She had somewhet looked forward to calculating the jumps, but now
the process seemed almost tedious to her. Her concentration was not on it
and even the best music she had in her collection didn't help. When the ship
again leaned ana to receive messages, it was a very welcome surprise,
especially as now, there was no lack of documentation in the logs. And even
more as now, there was a message for her from Aurelio. 

She stopped what she was doing and read the message. Aurelio's writing was
concise and it had very few bits of information on it: It told that the
Centralia Constitutional court were to consider her status as a human being
after a human rights organisation from Nov Baku complained about her
circumstances of imprisonment. It would have to be decided in absentia of
her apparently as Centralia's government still steadfastly insisted not to
let her onto the station, even in the form of telepresence, as she posed a
threat to the integrity of the station. Below that he posted a picture, that
apparently were corrupted in transit. Katy did not believe that for one
second anymore. He also showed a picture of himself after he shaved his head
and apparently also his skin color to a darker tone. Katy thought that this
was unneeded, given that she didn't even remember hor he looked before, but
appreciated the gesture. Then she saw it: The picture was not in the best
attainable quality: when you zoomed in, there was some kind of static in the
picture. For some odd reason, this annoyed her more than it should have: He
sent this short, almost thoughtless message and didn't even make a picture
in high quality but instead taxed her pattern recognition to see it, even
though the taxing was just minimal.

Katy had to pause and distract herself with some music and reading before
she was able to continue creating the jumps again. She had been working on
it for hours, when she felt the need to go to a specific place. It was on
the way there, that a realization hit her like a ton of bricks at high
velocity. Of course Aurelio had to tax her pattern recognition, this was the
only thing, in which she excelled so if he wanted to send a message to her,
which nobody could intercept, it would go via this means. She did what she
had to do and then returned to her room, locked the door and looked at the
picture. It was difficult, even for her, but suddenly the picture shifted
and she could recognize a series of numbers in the static. She wrote them 
down despite not being fully sure whether the system was confidable enough
for them. It was not as if she had another choice. The numbers seemed to be
random to her. There was always one low number and one high one and
combination of numbers appeared more than once. It did not equal anything
via the mathematical tricks she had learned to encrypt messages and the fact
that the numbers seemed all to be unique made a frequency analysis
impossible. If she took the numbers modulu other numbers, they could be
mapped onto the alphabet, but there was no meaning behind the letters. She
bit her lips and started to rock back and forth, but only got more and more
frustrated with the situation, frustrated enough to try to do work again.

Maybe it was the fact that she had given her mind a break from that task by
giving it another one that she had an idea: Why should the destination be
reached with one jump? It was completely possible to make a series of jumps
which could reach the location. It would also task the jump engines far less
as it would have to use far less kanth than the usual manner. The
disadvantage of course was that it was much more tenative, depending on the
exact locations of the destinations of her jumps. A small variation could
lead to a somewhat different destination and if you used that one and the
previously calculated jump vectors, you could as well join the Bugs as your
hyperspace navigation skills were about equal, that is nonexistant. Still, a
vague projection could be done, had to be to determine the energy
requirements of the individual jumps to determine whether such a strategy
was feasible.

It was taxing in another way than normal jumps were, it did not only talk
her pattern recognition, but also her imagination to give good estinates for
the conditions she would encounter there. However, after a while, she felt a
higher certainty in her estimates, as well as the feeling that this was
nothing new, that the only new thing about this was that she did it with
such a long journey instead of just a short one as usual. Now, she knew that
she didn't ever make such an interval jump before, but it probably
habitually did apparently. She was no longer even surprised by this. After a
while, she had a good estimate as to how this could work, even though it was
not something which she could state with the same certainty as her normal
estimates. She calculated the estimates of leaving hyperspace and reaching
the destination. There was not a good value in the latter field, but it was
higher than some other jumps which she already used even before this entire
trouble began. 

She transmitted the series of jumps to Ilyas, mostly for his benefit and
then looked at the series of numbers again. Maybe she had to see it
differently: Aurelio was not able to talk freely, thus he relied on pattern
recognition and steganography in the first place to make these data
available, he would have to make sure that even when this was discovered,
only Katy was able to restore it. As such, it would have to refer something
they had in common. Katy started to enumerate the things to herself: liking
philosophy, interest in Bue, stobors, Inshadil's books... She stopped.
Inshadil might actually be a clue: The first number never rose above 6 and
Inshadil wrote 6 books. The second number would rise higher than 50000 and
as such could be a reference to a word in a book. Of course, there were
several ways to order the books: based on release date, alphabetically,
based on the chronological order of events, based on the order in which they
were transferred and even more. She tried some of the permutations and
eventually realized that he did order the beeks indeed in the chronological
order of events. It made sense as it was not something which could be
assessed by simple means but would have required to inform oneself about the
books. She was able to determine the following message in the text:

Dear Ketele,
thanks for reading this. I cannot speak freely anymore. What I thought I
could confide in has become frail and lost its structure. There is no hope
for me to change their views, the gov-govs see you as a threat and as such,
have rigged to independent one to cease to exist unless a signal from
Centralia is received every eight hours. The fact that I used my influence
in the courts to attempt to alleviate your situation and solidify your
status has led having been threatened here in Centralia and from home, but I 
try to prevail. As such, I strongly urge you not to do anything unexpected, 
violent or thoughtless. If the newly arrived ones think that you pose a 
danger to Centralia, humankind, earth or their plans, they can ask not to 
send the signal. The communication happens every 8 hours, so in case 
something happens please be mindful of the time limit which you have. I do
not want something to happen to you because things were interpreted
incorrectly. Take care and please come home to me, I miss you as a friend. 

But do not expect to read the other image, it contained a picture of a
kangaroo in a robe of a judge and was just included to give the powers that
exist the reason to filter something.

Your friend with the strange name

With that the message concluded. Katy breathed in audibly. This was not what 
she expected to read. This was very different from what she expected and
extremely worrying, though for some odd reason the first thought she had was
that even that was a horrible excuse to falsify the ship logs and either
delete data or just make it unaccessible to her. It all made sense now and
this also made it possible for her to prove her suspicion and go back eight
hours from the first glitch, which she noticed. Her heart started racing as
she contradicted a direct order and checked back. Her fingers felt twitchy
and her breath was shallow. The system again explained that the lookup
failed. Katy breathed out and then breathed in again. She seriously had
hoped to be mistaken, but apparently, she was not. Just for her own safety,
she went back 8 additional hours and checked it again. Another error popped
up. She really hoped that it would not have come to this and started cursing
under her breath out of habit and then when she realized on one was
listening also openly in a lot of variations her instructors would have
greatly disapproved of. She did not need a third test anymore. This was the
worst thing which possibly could occur. This meant that she had nothing to
believe anymore and no system could be relied upon anymore. Out of the blue,
it hit her like a bag of bricks at high velocity: What if they also modified
the system to log access? What if the system noticed that she accessed these
bits of data? She would be all kinds of screwed. She should have thought
before rushing forwards without any thought whatsoever. Jusst as she was in
thought again, she realized that the ship jolted ana a small amount (in this
location in the ship, the movement was barely noticable unless you expected
it) and she felt the message being transmitted. It was the same message form 
last time, at least it reminded her of it. The patterns which this message 
made looked alike. This to her was a good sign, it meant that this was not 
the message that would make it all blow up. Great, this meant that she had
at least additional eight hours. She decided to eat some spagbol and then at
least attempt to sleep as often the best ideas she had came to her at the
edge of sleep an she had been tired for a while already but seemingly unable
to calm down enough to fall asleep. She still had not, but at least she
would fall into the kind of sleep which reminds of just randomly losing
consciousness and waking up three or four nightmares later, feeling as if an
iron bar had repeatedly impacted her head.

She was in the state before falling asleep, when the borders between sleep
and reality blurred more than she liked, when she started to have an idea
regarding her current state. It was vague and suficicently uclear for this
stage, but she remembered it the next day and despite its vagueness was able
to remember it. It all was related to the fact that when she woke up in her
current state in hyperspace, people expected her to be able to influence the
jump. If these things actually were capable of doing things like that, she
could probably prevent the ship from communicating with this station. If
they were seriously believing that the communication to Centralia was
impaired, they would have been more able to cooperate. These humans did not
come onto the ship because they wanted to be there but instead to write
scientific papers, have them published and then become famous for it. If
they were contrained to lightspeed for their discoveries, no one would
profit from it. Hundreds of lightyear away from their hime planets, it would
mean that by the time the transmissions reached human territory, humanity
would have changed so much that the ideas in these papers were most likely
redundant. She was quite sure that this woud have be something which they
were motivated by, which them even allowed to potentially lose their lifes.
They did not do that for nothing, they did that for knowledge and and
reputation.

Now what she needed to do was just to regain this knowledge which she
apparently had when the structure was completely in control of her.And even
when she might have attained that knowledge, it would mean that she had to
have a plan as to how to further proceed. As tempting as it might appear in
the short term, the scientists would deem her a danger as soon as she would
even approach Centralia. As such she needed a long-term goal as well as a
short term one, which in her case would be continued survival. It was a
weird idea, it was an impossible one, maybe, but if there was no chance for
any realistic plans, it was her best bet. Only after a few hours, she
realized what she could maybe do to help herself. It was not really
something which she would have considered in normal situations, and it
seemed scary enough for her to make her reconsider and re-reconsider the
plan, but at least it was something which she could do. If she asked them to
go to this faraway place, in the best case, she would be able to find the
kind of definite information to settle her status without any further
questions or in the worst case, she might be alien enough to be accepted
there. She did not like that this all basically said that no real plan could
be done because for that the fist step of it would already have been
undertaken and without any evaluation of the possible risks and benefits,
going there sounded extremely foolish. It basically was a deadlock. She felt
that this idea was not ready for anything and felt better the night before
than now. Katy hummed to herself and tried to work on the new calculation of
the route when she realized something else: normally, message transfer could
be recognized by her with a completely different intensity than the normal
transmissions, they were using a different communication device and they
would probably place it in a different place so that normally, she would not
feel it if it attempted communication with Centralia. A way to cover up
their tracks in addition to faking the sensor logs. This meant that she
would have a way to determine the location of the thing with higher
precision and then probably deactivate it. She remembered the last
transmissions form the second station but was unable to recall it with
sufficient precision to lead her to an exact location on the ship. She
decided to do something else however, she knew that it would not be openly
accessible and thus she needed access to it. She decided to write a long
latter to Aurelio. It was a letter which described the strange things which
were discovered about herself and also explained the last tests and the
alphabet to him. To feed the censors, it contained an example in that
writing system. If they were to attempt tp read it, even with the help of
the New Mind Graduates, they would only discover that it contains a
description of the bathroom near the hyperspace navigation room and as such
was perfectly innocent information (though it did mention a duck grafitti
that had been impossible to remove which Aurelio probably never saw). If the
censors were to corrupt that one, nothing would be lost. She did also
describe hypersoace in the most stereotypically obsessed way possible to
Aurelio. It sounded obsessive in the worst possible manner, but it helped
her to mention a few numbers in it in exactly the same encryption as before.
The message it said was: "Need maintenance permissions, do you have your
access codes?" She hoped that this would help her to see all of the ship
when she at a later state had to and maybe would help her to defuse the
bomb. She sent the message and knew that it would take quite a while to
deliver it. She was not sure whether censorship would be applied on the ship
or on Centralia, but it should not matter. The message was innocent enough
or by all means should be. Unless of course Centralia would block all
messages, but in that case, she was screwed whatever she did. 

Only after she did that, she pretended to work until it almost was time for
the next transmission. She went to a location in the front of the ship and
listened, or well, did that the equivalent of that with her senses tuned to
hyperspace. She felt the movement extremely strong in her vicinity and
attempted despite the almost instantaneous transmission to feel its origin.
It was even further forward in the ship and not in any area she had access
to. As such, she hoped really strongly that her message went through. She
could not imagine havint to social engineer her way into that part of the
ship.

Suddenly, someone opened a door nearby and floted out with the grace of an
elephant on ice. "Hey, Katy, what are you doing here?" the person asked.

Katy checked her communicator and saw that this person was Asiya, the
scientist with the very high male voice. "Hi Asiya. What I am doing? Nothing
at all. I wanted to keep on moving to give my mind a bit of a rest. Ever
since the reading experiment of earlier, it is running at highest possible
speed." Katy lied badly, then decided to reflect the question: "And what
brings you into this area of the ship?"

"I wanted to check something," Asiya answered, "some instruments, you know."

Katy decided to see this answer devoid of any information content as a
challenge: "I didn't know you play any."

Asiya looked confused until the milliunit dropped. "Not these kind of
instruments, scientific ones."

Katy raised her eyebrows: "What kind of instruments are that?"

Asiya seemed to blush: "They are for some... spectroscopy. We had to analyze
what the wreck was made of."

Katy replied before she thought: "I never knew that spectroscopy could
interfere with hyperspace, but from what I just felt, something strange was
going on there."

Asiya turned deep red: "I am not sure what could have caused this."

Katy nodded: "It is still rather strange that, don't you think? It happened
before and it is happening now again. There is information, but apparently
all your lips are sealed. And apparently Ilyas knows everything but refuses
to speak to me. It is quite confusing for me, don't you think?"

Asiya looked at Katy: "You are quite insistant."

Katy nodded: "Insistant, scary and confused. I feel that I need information
urgently. I need to form a new concept of myself and I cannot form an
acurate imagine of myself without the information I need."

Asiya looked at her with open eyes: "I know that it is hard to do that. I
was unable to form an accurate mental image of myself, it had been impairing
me quite a bit in life."

Katy tilted her head: "What do you mean?"

Asiya made a sound of embarrasment: "I am transsexual, I feel as if I was a
female mind in a male body."

Katy's eye opened: "So this is why your voice is so high? Because you are
actually female?"

Asiya shook her head: "My voice is so high because I am transitioning. I am
using medicine and later surgery to make my body female. It has already
impacted my voice a bit as you noticed. My name is also a female one already
because I decided to change it already."

Katy admitted that she did not know that before and explained that her
knowledge of names on earth was rather bad.

"It does not matter. I don't expect anyone to know these kind of things.
Especially not if they are from a place which is backwards enough not to
openly acknowledge transsexuality."

"I guess it has most to do with me having grown up extremely sheltered and
not really as part of any gender at all. Before I left the New Mind
Institute, I wasn't even ware that blind and deaf people existed. It is
quite shameful how little I knew. I try to learn, but it goes slowly."

"The island of knowledge is surrounded by the shore of desperation." Asiya
replied cryptically.

"What do you mean by that?" Katy asked.

"The more you know, the more you realize what you don't know and get
desparate. I try to learn and discover as much as I can, but I always
reminded just how much there is to discover. I know that I am never going to
experience getting sufficient knowledge of the things around me." Asiya
explained. 

"This sounds sad." Katy acknowledged.

"It is not. Life is a struggle, but this way, you can at least help
humanity and make a lasting constribution. Ignorance is not a choice to me."
the scientist explained.

"I see." Katy had no idea what to say and so abruptly changed the topic:
"You know, you and me are similar in some way: We both life in a body, in
which we don't belong, except that in your case it is the gender which does
not match, in mine, it's the species. And while you have the means to, you
called it transition, I don't."

"You feel wrong about the structure on your skin? Or are these perceptions
freaking you out? What exactly feels so strange about you?" Asiya asked
empathetically.

Katy was hit by something strange, the realization that her body felt as if
it belonged to her, imagining herself without the structure made her
suddenly feel amputated, especially as she started to see the perception
onto hyperspace very much as a part of herself, not something weird and
intruding. She realized what was really most confusing was that since then,
she was not allowed to have privacy and was constantly seen as a potential
threat or an object of research. "I thought about it and suddenly am amazed
as to how much I did get used to myself already. I think my main issue is
how I am treated. So yeah, I have to take the comparison back. Our state is
actually somewhat different."

Asiya nodded: "It is different, yeah. Though I am amazed as to how much your
image of yourself was changed to accompany these changes. It makes me wonder
what something like it could do in my case, if anything." Asiya looked at
Katy, then her expression changed to one of fear, "Katy, forget that I ever
said something like that!"

Katy nodded: "I am sorry for having brought this discussion onto that topic.
I apologize for my failure."

Asiya nodded distractedly: "No problem. I am going to rush now. Keep on
working on these vectors, eventually, you might have success."

Katy looked at Asiya, who was about to leave with confusion: "But, I did
already."

Asiya turned around and looked at him with wide eyes: "But... Ilyas told me
you were still struggling."

Katy smiled widely: "Come with me and I'll show you!"

"Oh, sure, though I don't know a lot about your trade." Asiya mentioned.

"I will try to explain it as well as I can, okay?" Katy used the rails to
move at a high speed and only stopped when she realized that Asiya could not
follow in the same way. She consciously had to adjust her speed to that of
the planet dweller. Eventually, after what seemed like the better part of an
eternity to Katy, they reached the hyperspace navigation chamber. "That's my
realm." Katy introduced it as she opened the door.

"It's quite spacious!" Asiya complimented.

"It needs to be for the job I am doing, or maybe I should talk in the past
tense about it as I feel that the requirements of the job might change if
my state is better understood. If this state is understood, I am quite sure
that there won't be navigs in the current sense of it. Maybe the job will be
merged with that of a regspace navigator, or another role, or if they fear
the presence of people who merged, maybe they would still have a dedicated
role, but in a different location in the ship." Katy had not worried about
this before, but now, the thoughts all came together.

"You assume that it could be spread to others and more importantly: you
think that it should happen?" Asiya asked.

"I am not speaking about should, I am talking about will. You know how what
happened at the New Mind Institute shocked you. Well, Bue is not the only
somewhat rural, somewhat backward planet with a Great Administrative Board
of Planning willing to both put their planet on the map for something and 
have a limited concern for the rules of morality habitual in Centralian 
parliaments." Katy stated with utmost certainty, enough to surprise herself
with.

"I see your point. I am not sure whether I like what I am hearing, but I do
see it: Every New Soviet, Enlightened Leader and Chief Executive Officer of
a planet will want the edge over all the other places like it." she agreed,
"This will not end in that job, these people will want a place in society,
they will want to marry, raise children, get horribly drunk on weekends and
watch whatever sport their area is known for, probably something involving
lifestock and eventually retire and die amidst their families. Society is
not ready for that. I am not sure whether they will be ever ready for this.
Whatever is going to happen then is going to be hillarious." Asiya said
darkly.

"It is only becoming even more unpleasant when they realize that the changed
ones have ways to use hyperspace as a weapon. I did accidentally, out of a
sense of threat once. Human engines are not so buggy, but they do have their
weaknesses and I am sure that an attack could be devised if someone set her
mind to it." Katy said it with a neutral expression, not so much stating a
fear or a wish but just a certainty about the future as if she was reading a
weather forecast.

Asiya cursed with much coarser language than Katy expected her to know.
"This is not looking good at all. But we didn't come here to talk about the
downfall of society, you wanted to tell me the jump vectors and show me that
they work."

"Sure, sorry that I got into this with you. Let me show you something here."
Katy showed something which looked like static, then changed the settings
until it looked like a diffrent kind of static. She murmured a few things to
herself in the entire time. When she turned back to Asiya, a red line
appeared on the screen, except that it was not full but dashed instead and
sometimes, there seemed to be a slight shift between the different dashes.
"Yes, this is what I wanted. This is the jump. Or rather, the jumps, which
seem right now the most likely ones. Especially the later ones depend to a
point on the conditions of hyperspace around them, but they all seem
feasible in general."

"What do you mean by that? It is not one jump but a series of them?" Asiya
wanted to make sure.

"Yeah, it does not have such blatant energy requirements as one jump would
have and I'd probably have the next vector as soon as we reach regspace
again. It used to take longer, but I think you know what I mean, it all gets
faster now, especially as it, I apparently did these kind of things at an
earlier stage." Katy looked intensely at Asiya as if attempting to see
something in her expression.

"You have transmitted that to Ilyas?" Asiya asked.

"I have and I have received a confirmation that it had been received, I have
not received and human aknowledgement from him though. I have occasionally
updated the parameters for the shifting of hyperspace around us, but apart
from that, there was nothing." Katy looked towards her feet now, as if she
had been guilty of any form of wrongdoing. 

"That is interesting news. I am going to ask Ilyas about this. Can you bring
me back to the room please? I still get confused by these corridors here.
they all look the same." Asiya asked.

"Sure. It's not that I can do anything else which will have a lasting
result." Katy said with a hint of sarcasm.

When they left the room, Katy was again impeded by Asiya's slowness and
thus, if only to limit her own annoyance, explained to her how to move a bit
more efficient in zero gravity. Afterwards, the Earthian was also not fast,
but the speed as at least not so nonexistant that it caused her a headache.
When they reached a room near the one, in which she was testedm Asiya told
her to return and do whatever it was she was supposed to do. Katy did indeed
move out of sight, but as soon as the door had closed, a weird suspicion
caused her to float nearby and eavesdrop.

Asiya's voice was heard loudly: "Ilyas, when did you plan to inform us on
the way to the source of communication which Katy discovered?"

Ilyas reply was unaudible.

"No, it cannot be that as she contacted me directly and informed me about
the incorrect information I had with regards to a possibility of a jump
there. Let's just say that she was not thrilled with the lack of followup,
which she received and indeed, to me this borders on Sirius Corporation
level. Before you ask, Katy has illustrated the feasibility of said jump to
me and while I know that we were not talking about one jump, but that said
solution is a structure of jumps, it fulfills the parameters you have given
her."

There was a louder, angry reply, which was muffled by the walls enough to be
unintelligible.

Telit's voice was heard: "You seriously ask why we are getting angry about
such a little detail? Maybe it is because you are not President for life of
this expeditionm we all are equal members of this group and to be quite
brutally honest: your habit of monopolizing information sucks."

Another murmured reply by Ilyas.

Telit again retorted loudly and angrily: "Tell that to your dead
great-grandmother, she might believe this bs maybe, I however don't. This is
one of the most important discoveries in our mission. Are you aware of that
at all? Or are you just doing as you are told? Did you really let something
like that get removed by the junkmail filter?"

Ilyas replied something in a defensive tone, but again Katy could not
understand what he was saying.

Isa was heard even though Katy could not understand all of it: "...blatant
breach of trust! You are aware that keeping this under wraps led to
providing incorrect information to... You should roll up in a ball of shame
and only ever unroll to pee and poo!" Katy smiled upon hearing this insult
and tried to remember it for later.

This time, Ilyas was heard, either because he came near or because he was
almost screaming: "You don't know what is at stake, do you! What do you
think will happen if we go there? These things are dead-set on corrupting
humanity! There is no other reason for their existance."

Chang was heard for the first time in this discussion: "Ilyas, we will tell
the academy how you disinformed your colleagues. You can be sure that every
bit of data will be checked twice to make sure that you did not falsify
anything. And I vote we are going there now!"

Ilyas screamed now in panic: "You are going to poison the purity of the
human race! Your history books will see you as the biggest traitor to the
human race ever! What do you think these things will do, they will become
symbionts to you, probably bribing you with amazing knowledge and abilities,
but they will take all your humanity and turn you into something else!"

Chang spoke again: "That's four in favour, one against. No abstaining. I am
also for replacing the leader of this mission, anyone in favour?"

Ilyas screamed in panic: "You cannot do that! Without me you are nothing! I
am going to use every bit of my influence I have to make your life hell! You
won't get anywhere in the scientific community anymore! You should be more
than just sure as to whether you want to burn that bridge."

Chang repeated again: "That's four in favor, one against, no abstaining.
That passes. Nominations for new leader of the mission?"

Katy slinked away and made sure to update the vector so it would out of pure
coincidence be the most up to date one. She knew that if she was asked
whether she listened, she probably would not uphold a successful lie, but
maybe she was not asked. A while later, Asiya indeed asked her to provide
the vectors of the first jump.

The journey was difficult and stressful: Her perception had to re-adjust
every few seconds to either regspace or hyperspace and in the time between
the changes determine the next jump. Eventually, she provided the last
vector and felt as if she was to break down. She told the scientists that
she needed some break and went to her room. On the way there, she suddenly
felt that the ship jerked into hyperspace. It was almost enough to leave
regspace. Something tried to send a message and this message was not the
previous one. She checked the 8 hour schedule and realized that it was still
5 hours until that would fire again. It should not be related to this, but
what if it was? Centralia does have a schedule for various transmissions,
but it does have some parts of it contantly in hyperspace to send and
receive messages. She returned to the navigation room and tried to play back
the last minutes in the sensor logs. Tiredness crept into her mind to the
point that even keeping her eyes open seemed difficult. She checked again,
then cursed loudly. Her first reaction made her ashamed in retrospect: it
was the thought that the reply would come in only 5 hours if at all. That
would give her enough time for a long nap. Only then she realized how
egoistic and insane that opinion was and contacted Asiya.

"Asiya here, what is going on, Katy?" Asiya seemed angry.

"Asiya, I know that you want to discover what it is what we have approached,
but this is urgent! You are aware of the transmission, which Ilyas said did
not happen? The one which actually happens every eight hours and is removed
from the sensor logs? It happened again, and it happened out of schedule. To
make things worse, it did not send the kind of message which it normally
sends. Something is going on here, which I dont understand."

"What do you mean? But Ilyas told us that this was a glitch not something
regular." Asiya seemed utterly confused.

"It happened every eight hours. Aurelio had an idea what this relates to,
but I am not sure about that." Katy explained trying her best to reign
herself in.

"Ilyas!" Asiya screamed in a volume that made Katy cover her ears. "Your
game is up, now tell me everything, or else!"

"Else what?" she heard quietly from Ilyas.

"Else, I might just as well smack the head of a traitor in with a table!" 
Asiya screamed, "and hang you by the balls!" Katy knew that it probably was
jsut a generic insult, but she imagined this particular feat very difficult
in zero gravity.

"I am not going to say anything to a traitor of the human race! You all are
traitors!" there was a noise.

"Katy, must, end call, Ilyas ran away!" Asiya shouted and the connection
broke down.

Even while she was saying that, Katy already made her way through the ship
to the corridor. She had a very good idea where Ilyas was running to and
propelled herself so quickly towards the nose of the ship as her tired body
permitted her to do. She then had to wait, or maybe had already been too
late, she did not know. She started mentally chiding herself for being too
slow, too tired. While doing so, she felt her eyes close and saw the
colorful swirls of a mind too tired to function in a coordinated manner.
Just when she thought that she would fall asleep right then and there, she
heard something, or someone. She open here eyes widely and before being able
to do anything, felt an impact which slammed her at the wall behind her.
Only then did her mind process Ilyas' presence. 

"Out of the way, tainted one!" He was trying to open the door which Asiya
came out of earlier. Katy slammed herself against his body and in an
incoherent, uncoordinated manner threw her hands at his head in an attempt
of a slap. 

"Not with me, Ilyas!" She shouted. And started to beat him while he was
confused: "This is for lieing to me, this is for faking the sensor logs,
this is for your arrogant manner, this is for your horrible, despicable
views on me. And this is for not having allowed me a bit of privacy even for
things like shitting when I was in isolation." Blood was floating from the
back of his head, but she did not care. Suddenly, Katy heard screaming and 
realized that Asiya had caught up with the Centralian scientist.

"So, Ilyas, will you tell them about the bomb or should I?" Katy asked.

Before, Ilyas just failed to react out of shock, now he seemed to be in a
state of panic, struggling frantically to break free. 

Asiya slapped him as well: "Tell me about the bomb or I'll eat your ass for
breakfast!"

"In case this mission needs to be aborted, there is a way! It is filtered
from the ship's logs. In case it is considered to be a threat, there will be
an explosion to prevent contamination. It has to be done to ensure the
safety of humanity against the Bugs." Ilyas voice sounded hysterical and
shrill. 

"Bugs? This is a completely different race of aliens and you have all the
proof you need fthat clearly shows it! Including the fact that Katy
destroyed a number of Bug ships! But enough with this idle chat! You will
disarm the bomb now or you are going to die in the slowest and most painful
manner Rae and I can devise."

"You might die in 5 hours anyway, but believe me, I know some of the best
punishment techniques from books of the Coprosperity and most of them do
work in zero gravity!" Katy chimes in.

"And given that we have already transmitted to Centralia about your
falsified data, there is no way in hell that your reputation gets out of
this alive!" Asiya too started to jump onto the things which she assumed
that he held dear.

Ilyas moaned in pain: "Okay, I will help you! Don't hurt me!"

They both stopped despite the temptation to make violence an end in itself.
Asiya shouted at him: "Anything unexpected from your end will lead to
endless realms of pain!"

Katy agreed: "I am going to shit into your mouth and I am not talking about
metaphors here! I am talking about shit! And then I will force you to clean
the parts that missed up!"

Ilyas and Asiya reacted with disgust. Ilyas extremely quickly agreed to help
now. He opened the door and there was a small room with bad lighting and
many instruments in it, which to Katy appeared just as cryptic as the ones
on the alien wreck. Ilyas ignored all of them and instead started to do
something to a part of one of the walls. Suddenly, a hidden panel opened.
Inside, there was a blinking thing, apparently a communication engine. He
typed something into the buttons and murmured that he tried to disarm it.
The ship tried to jerk ana, but before Katy even knew what was happening, it
was fully in regspace again. "This is not going to happen!" Katy explained,
to an Ilyas who was turning pale in fear. Katy tried not to sound as if she
had no idea what was going on, but exactly that was how she felt. She did
not feel as if she was responsible for whatever it was that brought the
Sovereignity back to regspace. In earnesty, she had no idea what it was, but
hoped that these gremlins which made it fail were on her side. "You are
not going to leave regspace here, Ilyas, so stop trying to phone home and
defuse that bomb!" Long after the end of phones as devices, phone home had
lost its neutral connotation and had devolved into the communicating of
threats did with its basis away from your own sphere of influence.

"Okay, okay!" Ilyas said, but Asiya had already accelerated onto him and
smashed him again the wall again. She then mover her legs, still strong from
moving in high gravity with full speed between his legs into his procreation
area. Ilyas let out a scream of sheer pain.

"Are you willing to cooperate now? Or do you need another dose of that?" 
asked Asiya with a determination in her voice, seemed strong enough to cut 
glass.

"Yes, yes, don't hurt me!" Ilyas pleaded.

"Will you deactivate the bomb now?" Katy asked, "Or do you want me to go
through with my threat?"

"I will, I will!" Ilyas said and opened another part of the wall below them.

He typed in some numbers. For a while, nothing seemed to happen, then he
spoke into the hole: "Authorisation Code Ngendin, Seruvan, Chennay,
Makemake, Funafuti! Authorizing as Ilyas."

There was a faint beeping from it. Then everything turned black.

Katy had no idea what happened. She felt as if she fell asleep for a long
time and only now woke up in a state as if all the sleeping made her tired
and disoriented. She forced her eyes open, then immediately closed them
again to curtail the onslaught of light onto them. There was no gravity and
no sounds. She murmured something unintelligible. She tried to remember what
happened but his a blank: The last thing she remembered was that Ilyas tried
to deactivate the bomb. Then, there was a clear cut. Where was she now? It
was too quiet to be the Sovereignity, unless of course whatever happened to
her had damaged her hearing. She felt over her ears and realized that she
did not feel any kind of pain. Again she tried to open her eyes, but saw
nothing but white, there was a complete lack of any pattern whatsoever and
so her brain started to impose them upon her vision. She looked down onto
herself. He body seemed the same as it always was with no kind of any injury
on it. Only then she realized that she was naked. "Hello?" she asked more
than actually greeting an entity.

"Welcome, dear stranger!"