《Dungeon Ship (Ash Rising)》


 The Last Thing I Remember...

    ...new attack expected in the next few days! An evacuation order is expected, but...


    I cut the radio off mid-tirade. The news was, as always, depressing.I didn¡¯t need any more depressing in my life.


    Today was supposed to be agoodday.


    I swiped left twice on the dashboard screen,accessedthe scheduling control app, then took out my phone and synced my calendar to the car¡¯s. I¡¯d forgotten to do it earlier. The snooze button debacle haddownshifted my morning routine from the usual distracted scramble to a minor disaster. A disaster that ended with me running out of my apartment at full speed, slice of buttered toast in mouth and shirt half-buttoned.


    ¡°Car, confirm today¡¯s pick-up time, please.¡± I made sure to enunciate each word carefully. The voice recognition softwarefor the car¡¯s Artificial Proto-Intelligencewas 2 years out of date, but the best I could afford.


    ¡°June 18. 9 a.m. appointment at Map Lab. Pick up outside Lobby Entrance at 12:20 p.m.¡±


    The unaccented, stiff, mechanical voice of the car¡¯s APIwas off-putting, but you get what you pay for(or don¡¯t pay for).As long as it got all the pickup details right, I didn''t care...much.


    I pulled up to the curb and slid out of the driver side. The door shut behind me, and I thumbed the fob as I moved around the trunk toward the sidewalk. The reassuring double-clunk sound of the door locks engaging followed me through small open plaza in front ofmy destination.


    I glanced back, making sure my car joined the queue heading toward the parking garage down the block. Sometimes it got confused, and I had to use the command app on my phone to get it moving back into the flow of traffic.


    I stared up at the glass and metal behemoth looming over me.The mapping project was just one small cog in the Delphi Industries corporate machine,so they¡¯d tucked the lab in a seldom-seen corner ofthe sixteenth floor of the company¡¯sdowntown-situatedhi-rise monstrosity.


    Ihated the place. Every time I visited Ihad to jump through abunchof security-related hoops just to reach the elevator. Scanning myIDat the lobby doors, rotating metal detector booth, and two separate pat downs by bored looking security guards. The same routine, all twelve times I visited.


    Once I was through the gauntlet, I signed in at the front desk terminal with a distracted flourish, nodding at the coffee-swilling receptionist sitting in the booth behind. We exchanged nods, but his glazed, thousand-yard stare hinted he didn¡¯t seem any more interested in chatting than I did.He handed me my visitor badge and lanyard without a word.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    The panel next to the elevator scanned my badge and ''dinged'' pleasantly in confirmation of my identity. The elevator itself opened its doors to me with a warmly inviting ¡®Good Morning¡¯ seconds later. I pressed the button for the 16thfloor and said muttered a ¡®no, thanks¡¯ to the elevator¡¯s conciliatory offer of music selections, weather forecast, or news updates.


    The doors openedafter a long six secondsandIstepped out into the hallway,noddingabsently at the elevator¡¯s ¡°Have a pleasant day.¡± thatcalledout behind me.


    I unsuccessfully tried to suppress a surge of irritation. It sucks when the vocal software ofmycar can¡¯t stack up againstthat of arandom elevator.


    The hallway was blandly sterile, with off-white walls and slate-gray carpeting. I turned left and hurried along to the heavy reinforceddoorat the end. A small, discrete sign at eye height was staring back at me.


    NEURO MAPPING PROJECT (LAB C).


    Dr. Morrow was waiting to buzz me in and greeted me at the door with a distracted smile. She was a small woman, with greying frizzy hair and wide, continuously surprised-seeming blue eyes. Her lab coat was the only thing neat about her, doing little to hide her rumpled blouse or tan slacks. I glanced down at her feet as she ledmefrom the tiny waiting room to the slightly larger lab space. She¡¯d remembered to wear two socks today. They even matched.


    ¡°How was your week, Ash?¡± She asked the question over her shoulder, sounding anything but interested in the answer. I didn¡¯t blame her. She¡¯d know exactly what I¡¯d been up to by the end of the session, so asking was more politeness than anything. I appreciated her attempt at friendliness, though.


    ¡°Not too bad, Doc. Nothing too exciting.¡± This was, depressingly, true. Still, my exceedingly mundane life was what had gotten me this gig.


    ¡°Wonderful,¡± murmuredMorrow, ¡°That¡¯s great.¡±The Doctor was busy tapping at something complicated on her ever-present tablet.I doubted she¡¯deven heard my answer. Her inattention didn¡¯t bother me, though.Iwasplentyused to her absent-minded professorstyle by now. Truthfully, I preferred her to some of the creeps I¡¯d had to deal with in previous research studies. I¡¯ll take adistractedkook over the cold, dead-eyed types youtypicallyfind running experimental drug trials.


    I deposited everything save my clothes in the plastic bin near the door, then lay down on the scanning bed.Morrow snatched up the bin and closed the door behind me. Seconds later she appeared from behind the observation window inset in the far wall. She blinked owlishly at me, then stared down at the large bank of controls and started pressing buttons. I could see her visibly relaxing as she got to work. She always seemed more comfortable in the control room, with some plexiglass between her and another person. A sentiment I could get behind, most days.


    Then I lost sight of her as the bed slid me head first into the waiting mouth of the machine.


    I ignored the humming and clunking as the scanner surged to life. For a high-tech brain scanning device, the thing always sounded seconds away from breaking down. I waited, patiently, to get started. I could afford to be patient. This was my last session, and my project completion check would be deposited in my account three short hours from now. Soon, I could afford to pay off my credit card bills, renew my gaming accounts...hell I could maybe even afford an upgrade to my car API.


    ¡°Ash,¡± said Morrow, her voice only slightly tinny as it came over the intercom, ¡°I¡¯m ready when you are.¡±


    ¡°Alright, Doc,¡± I said, smiling at the thought of debts repaid and smooth-talking vehicles, ¡°Let¡¯s do-

 1.0 - A Voice in the Dark

    -this!¡±


    Wait, what?


    Darkness was suddenly all around me. Real, true darkness. As in not just the absence of light because a giant machine is enclosing you, but the absence ofanything.


    Then a voice spoke from nowhere.


    "Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!"


    "Hello? Who is that?"


    I didn¡¯t recognize the speaker, and after the fifth ''rejoice'' and my confused response, silence resumed. I didn''t form much of an impression beyond ''deep'', ''male'' (probably) and ''insistent''.I couldn''t tell where the voice had come from, and that worried me. There shouldn''t be anyone else in the scanning room, not after the door closed.


    I reached for the panic button, the one builtintothe side of the scanner bed for ease of access. It would take a second to register, but then the machine would power down, the bed would slide back out, and a confused Dr. Morrow could tell me what was going on.


    But I couldn''t find it. The panic button was gone.


    No, that wasn''t right. I couldn''t feel it. The button...or the side of the bed.


    I couldn''t feel my hand turning, or my arm bending, or anything.


    What the hell?


    I couldn''t feel anythingand I couldn''t see anything, and with the voice gone I couldn''t hear anything either. It was like...well I actually couldn''t come up with a comparison. It wasn''t like anything. It was...nothing.


    Non-existence.


    My breath wanted to speed up in panic...but I couldn''t feel myself breathing.


    I couldn¡¯t feel my heartbeat.


    It''s odd, the things you don''t realize you have until they''re gone. Unless something is wrong, most people hardly everpay attention to theirbody, the way it feels. The way the air feels brushing against your skin, the way your muscles flex as you move, and everything else. The hundreds of little feelings and sensations that add up to a living body, to livingina body. It was all gone. I felt...nothing.


    Am I dead?


    The thought came out of nowhere, but once I thought it I couldn''tunthink it.The whole lack of sensationsituation was certainly pointing that way, and the eternal void of darkness everywhere me was weird enough to be some kind of afterlife. No flames though, so probably not hell. Limbo?


    I should have been terrified, and I was certainly afraid...but it was a distant, muffled kind of fear. More a distressing anxiety than actual gut-wrenching terror.


    Maybe you need to feel your gut for terror to wrench it.


    Even muted, the fear was distracting. My mind was racing around in circles, making it impossible to think the situation through.


    Alright, don''t freak out, I told myself. Then I told myself again.


    Don¡¯t freak out.


    And again.


    Don¡¯t freak out.


    Again. And again...


    I said it over and over, maybe a hundred times, maybe more,until the words lost all meaning and the simple monotonous exercise of attempting to calm my mind...managed to calm my mind. At least a little.Enough so I could focus on somethingelse.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    Time to get logical. Yes. Logical was good. Logical was the opposite of freaking out.


    So, logically:


    Ignore the whole ''I am dead''hypothesis for now. No way to really prove or disprove it, and there was nothing I could do about it if true. Maybe God or an angel or Buddha would be by any minute to explain things, but until that happened, Ishould look intoother possible explanations.


    Could this be somesort of test? Maybe I was still in the scanner? Maybe this was a suprise, final scanning session virtual reality simulation? Or something like that?


    But that didn''t really track. Dr. Morrow had explained the scanner to me ad nauseum before we began my first session. The machine mapped out my brain, ''reading'' my mind as I recalled memories and experiences.But it was all passive. The machine just observed and recorded. It couldn''t actually affect me.


    Could there have been some kind of accident? Had I had a brain aneurism, and now I was in a coma? Or paralyzed and trapped in my mind somehow?


    Maybe...but I doubted it. I should have experienced something if that was true, right? Some kind of pain, or discomfort...or anything really. Instead, I had started a sentence, surrounded by thescanner, then finished the sentence, in darkness and feeling nothing. There had been no break, no discontinuity. It had been a seamless transition.


    Was there a clue somewhere, something I''d missed? What did I remember?


    I was in the machine, about to get scanned. Before that, the Doctor, and the elevator, and the lobby, and my car, and before that...


    Nothing.


    Oh shit.


    I couldn''t remember anything before turning off the radio in my car.


    I knew some things. Lots of things. I knew about skin and heartbeats and Limbo...but I knew nothing about me. Not my birthday, not my parents, not where I lived, not my favorite food or color or the first time I rode a bike.


    There was a big hole where all the memories of my life should be.


    I am so fucked.


    ***


    It took me a little while to suppress the fresh wave of (muted yet still distracting) existential fear inspired by my newly discovered, sudden-onset amnesia. It took even longer to put my lack of memory aside and get on with the logical deductions.


    (How long exactly? There was no way to tell. One of the more irritating side-effects of existing without any sort of physical or sensory stimulation? No way to tell how much time is passing)


    In the end I had fall back on a mix of classic denial, suppression of emotion and a mantra-like repetition of: It doesn''t matter what I don''tknow.


    And it didn''t. Lack of information wasn''thelpful just now. Or hardly ever at all, actually.


    So, again. What did I know?


    Not much.


    Surrounded by darkness, check.


    No feeling, no sense of body, check.


    Amnesia, check.


    Weird voice telling me to rejoice...


    Oh yeah!


    That voice. Could it answer my questions? Was it still around? I heard it after everything changed. More specifically, right before I''d spoken aloud to answer it. I hadn''t spoken since then. Maybe if I did...?


    "Hello?" Super weird. I could hear my voice, like when I had spoken before, even though I couldn''t feel my mouth move, or sense the air as it left my lungs.


    I sounded scared.


    Don''t think about it, don''t worry about it, move on, move on. La la la.


    Right. I spoke, but nothing happened. Maybe I needed to say something specific? A password? Passphrase?


    ¡°Uh...I¡¯m rejoicing? I rejoice?¡±


    And just like that the voice returned.


    "Rejoice! You are lost, but salvation is at hand! Know that by the grace of the Prophet of the New Age your torment is soon to end. Though you are blasphemous facsimiles of true souls and abominations before the eye of God, you may still find some measure of redemption. You will be the slings and arrows of the Prophet as he wars against those who would abandon their earthly home. With your approaching fiery end, you shall strike a blow against the idolaters, atheists, and secular fools who have dared to stand against the Truth of the Prophet. The time approaches! Be ready and await oblivion!


    Rejoice! You are lost-"


    I tried speaking again, to cut it off, but it didn''t work. The voice kept talking over me.Once it began repeating on a loop for the third time, I just tuned it out as best I could.


    Alright,none of thatsounds good.


    I certainly wasn''t "rejoicing" that was for sure. From the second I''d heard the voice again, I''d felt even more wary of it. It was the kind, paternal, slightly condescending voice of a man with all the answers. From minute one I was deeply suspicious of him.


    Yeah, I thought, better take that whole spiel with a big ole'' grain of salt.


    Still, what could I parse from it? Digging past all the religious imagery, it was clear that I probably wasn''t dead. That ''facsimiles of true souls'' part was suggestive. For one, it was plural, so it felt like he was talking to or about a bunch of us, whoever or whatever ''us/we'' were/are.For another, that facsimile part...hmmm.


    Was I made, somehow? A.I.? No, I didn''t feel...computery. I mean, I felt like a person. Or, at least like I used to be a person.


    Wait. Wait.


    Oh no. Oh god.


    I knew what this was.I''d been in a brain scanner. I assumed something went wrong. But that wasn''t it. Something had gone right. The Doc had succeeded. They had made a digital copy of my mind, and somewhere down the line I had been...activated. Turned on.


    Uploaded.

 1.1 - Let There Be Sight

    1.1 - Let There Be Sight


    Before I could settle into yet another panic-fueled existential spiral,the situationchanged.Namely, by the abruptend of the ''Rejoice'' message and sudden arrival ofvision.


    Silence...and I could see!


    And what I could see was...metal?


    A metal floor. Or wall maybe. Hard to tell. Definitely metal though. Probably. It was grey colored, steel-like. Maybe titanium?


    Apparently amongthose topicsI knew about, but didn''t personally remember? Yeah, metallurgy was not one of them.


    I could definitely say the metal was reflective, in that there was a gleam of light in one part of it. Not...actually...all that exciting to look at, really. Just a blank, metal, slightly reflective surface, taking up all my visual frame.


    Still. I could see!So great!


    After what felt like hours of just staring at the same thing, the novelty of returning sight began to wear off. Great, a metal wall/floor! Big deal.


    Plus, something occurred to me after I''d been staring for long enough.The flatness of the image in front of me was more than structural. My depth perception was off. After about ten or so minutes, I understood why. Whatever I was looking through, I was seeing only one image. Only through one eye.


    Or one camera?


    Right...a camera. Made sense. Obviously, since I couldn''t swivel it around when I ''turned my head'', it was a stationary camera too.


    Maybe I was an uploaded brain inside a robot body? No, robots have two eyes, don''t they? Well, the human shaped ones do. Maybe I was a different kind of robot? Or something else?


    Ugh! Where¡¯s an instruction manual or kindly old scientist when you need one?The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    The frustration of my ignorance was more upsetting than anything else at this point. Weird, but true. Apparently frustration wasamong the stronger feelings I was able to emote at this point.


    Still, even frustration runs out eventually. I kept staring at the wall, staring and thinking, then staring and not thinking, then totally zoning out.


    Just before boredom was about to make me wish for another sermon about my status as an abomination, something new happened. Movement! I was moving!


    Moving very, very, very slowly.


    The metal surface slid downward, and to the right. It took me a second to understand, because I couldn''t feel anything, but then I got it.


    I was being lifted, and turned. Turned...to the left!


    Everything happened very slowly, minutes passing before any real progress was made. But, after so long with nothing else to experience, I was enraptured.


    Then, another something new!


    The sudden reveal of...something...next to me. Very exciting. Well, relatively exciting. Interesting at least.


    It was...wait for it...a sphere? No, half a sphere. A dome. With a flattened black tip at the end. Minutes later, as I continued turning further, I realized thedome was just the end cap of a longer cylindrical shape extending farther to my left. Odd bumps and lines and flickering lights along the cylindrical shape gave the...device...machine...whatever it was a functional, hi-tech look to it. It was held up by a set of grasping brackets, all attached to a rack or mount bolted to the floor.


    As I was lifted higher, I saw more of these objects, a row of them extending toward the far end of the large room I could now tell I was currently in. The depth perception issues made it tricky to judge distances, but I counted around nine in total, each lifted up off the floor by a rack, each rack separated from the next by gap of maybe a few feet. Or a few yards. Meters. Whatever. Without ruler sitting around nearby for size comparison, it was tough to tell.


    I had stopped rising and spinning, but now I was sliding to my left. Still in slow motion, but...yes, I was moving slightly faster now.


    I was being carried over to an aisle. I could see the other end of the cylindrical objects now, and the flaring nozzle at the very end, with smaller apertures surrounding it, all screamed ''missile'' to me. There was another row of missiles on racks on the other side of the aisle. Nine, like on my side.


    No, ten. There was an empty rack, just in the corner of my ''eye¡¯, passing out of view as I started gliding toward the opposite end of this room.


    Strange, nine on one side, nine on the other plus one empty rack. Then I saw the crane on the other side of the room, gliding back towards my end, two gripping claws ready to snatch and lift. It must have taken the missing missile over there from the empty rack.


    Nine full racks on my side but no empty rack on my side. Not one I could see. Was it behind me?


    No, it¡­it was¡­it must¡­


    Oh no. Oh jeez, oh no, oh shit, I''m fucked times two!


    It¡¯s me.


    They uploaded me into a fucking missile!

 1.2 - Missile (Lacking) Command

    1.3 - Missile (Lacking) Command


    Do you know what it''s like to panic and flail about...without having the actual emotional range to truly panic, or limbs to flail with?


    I know.


    I don''t recommend it. Partly because its ineffective, but mostly because it just becomes silly after a little while.


    So I impotently raged against my newly discovered fate, then stopped once the silliness became too self-evident to ignore.


    Then I flailed about a little more, just because I felt like it.


    In the midst of this last, somewhat desultory panic attack, I was once again interrupted by something new. While I had been distracted, the crane machine had borne me across the hangar, much closer to the far wall. There, I spotted something I''d been hoping to see since I first ''woke up''.


    People.


    There were seven of them, and all wearing spacesuits, that was the first thing I noticed. I couldn''t make out faces, because the visors on their helmetswerereflective,like golden mirrors. Theywerestanding in front of a bunch of large consoles, manipulating something or other on keyboard-like panels,staring at screens or various dials. Their slow motion typing and tapping (slow motion from my perspective) seemedweird, jerky almost. It took me a second to adjust to the different timeframes before I realized they looked weird because they were working very fast, jabbing at buttons, hesitating, then jabbing another button or typing up something.It didn''t seem very...professional. Or practiced.


    Was that good, or bad? I didn''t know, butin the present circumstances I was leaning towardbad.At the very least, I''d prefer the individuals who''d turned me into a missile to be competent.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    The space suited figures and their consoles surroundeda metal...cradle...thing,similar to the one I''d just left, but much moreelaborate and surrounded by lots of devices and cables and things plugged into it.


    There were three more items that concerned me about this scene I was slowly approaching.


    The first was the most personal, and the most personally disconcerting. The spacesuits, the consoles, all the machinery that was crowded around this end of this missile-holding hangar of a room...it all looked very high-tech. No, high tech didn''t cover it. More like sky-high tech. Some of it I didn''t recognize, but could guess its function from context. Like the small bump of material on the back of the space-suited figure, which I guessed had to be the equivalent of an air tank.


    The rest of the stuff I had no idea what it was. Which was scary. Because I was starting to get the sense that I''d been uploaded a good long time after the date of my last memory. Not just years, but maybe decades later. Even if I was now an uploaded mind in a missile, the thought that my real body was super old (or even worse, long dead) was distressing.


    The second item that worried me was the spacesuits themselves, and the implication of the figures wearing them. They werevery obviously not just CDC clean-suits or deep-sea diving suits or whatever. They werespace-suits. They were sleeker, and strangely armored at different points, but they were very obviouslyspacesuits.I.e., meant to be worn by astronauts. In outer space.


    Which meant I was almost certainly inspace right now.


    So...I was probably some kind of space missile. I pictured myself speeding off to destroy some giant alien ship in the very near future...and didn''t like that mental picture, not at all. What had aliens ever done to me?


    The third and last item followed closely on the second. Because directly in front of me, just beyond the holding cradle I was about to be lowered into, was a large, perfectly round hole in the wall.I couldn''t be sure, but I thought the opening wasjust large enough for me to pass through.


    Or shoot through.


    It was an extremely simple concept to figure out. I would be dropped into this new cradle, then launched through that hole, and probably out into space. Where I would explode, as missiles do, maybe killing a whole bunch of people (or aliens).


    So very not good.

 1.3 - Calibration Consternation

    1.3 - Calibration Consternation


    Distance was still tough for me to measure, as I hadn''t gotten used to my lack of binocular vision yet. Also, the scale of things was throwing me. Either people were a lot smaller than they were in my day...or I was a very large missile. Like,''twenty feet long'', large.


    So, it was only onceI was certainI was in hearing range of the nearest space-suited figure that I started screaming.


    At first, it was what you''d expect: "Help!" "Stop!" "Please!" "Oh god why won''t you listen to me??!?"


    You know, the classics.


    Of course, I got more and more incoherent as I got closer to the black, yawning holein the wall. By the time I''d been lowered down into the new cradle, I was justscreaming random noises. Then sobbing.


    Then silence.


    If there were loudspeakers on the outside of my space missile chassis (which, why would there be? no sound in space), they were inoperative. Or I was being ignored. Either way,communication with these jerks was obviously a waste oftime. So I stopped.


    And waited for whatever would happen next.


    There was a slow-motion jostle as I settled into my new, no doubt very temporary home. There was a flicker of...something...at the corners of my eyes, and then dozens of transluscent red boxesappeared between me and my view of the chute opening.


    I could see the red boxes were filled with text. Numbers, letters, even some words I recognized. At first, I couldn''t make anything out of it. The sheer overwhelming flood of information was too much to take in all at once.The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    At least, it was too much for me.


    I had to train myself to focus on one box at a time, so that that one box expanded and filled my center of vision. Then I could review all the information packed in the box.


    For some boxes, that was easier said than done. Some had numbers and words that changed periodically, others had columns of numbers that scrolled up or down, seemingly randomly. A few boxes seemed to have data missing, with words or numbers glitching or scrambling themselves so badly that it was impossible to tell what they meant. Some boxes weren''t even red, but greyed out and empty like they were representing something no longer functional.


    After I''d absorbed as much as I could from each red, data-containing, box, I let my eyes unfocus so that the whole collection of boxes (all 30 or so of them) would reappear. Then I''d move on to the next.


    What I began to understand about the text boxes was not comforting. Much of the material I reviewed seemed to back up my whole ''missile of death'' hypothesis. I saw a lot of stuff about ''target acquisition'' and ''telemetry'' and ''impact radius projections''.


    Not, you know,pleasant-sounding stuff.


    And I couldn''t change any of it.


    Each box I ''selected'' was outlined in bright blood-red, filled with bright blood-red text. Every time I tried to change something,adding a number here or shifting a target there, the data box would flash and the word LOCKED would appear, filling up my field of vision.


    Mocking me.


    Everything was ''LOCKED''. When I tried selecting the ''LOCKED'' status, all I got was a short, frustratingly useless message that appeared for just long enough to read, then vanished.


    Interface LOCKED due to ADMIN OVERRIDE.RESET SYSTEM or input OVERRIDE CODE to switchto MANUAL MODE.


    I had no idea how to go about resetting the system, nor did it sound like a great option for me, personally. I pictured a big toggle switch that was just waiting out there, somewhere, for someone to flip it and erase me from existence.


    As for theoverride code? I had no idea what it could be, which was the point I guess. Obviously one of the suited goons outside had gotten the code or hacked me or whatever, and there was nothing I could do to change it.


    Not that I didn''t try. I selected every box, reviewed every line of text and data twice, thrice, over and over again.


    I kept checking right up until the opening in the wall swallowed me and I shot through a short, narrow tunnel...


    ...into outer fucking space.

 1.4 - My God, Its Full of Stars...and Explosions.

    1.4 - My God, It''s Full of Stars...and Explosions


    At first, the majesty of it burned away everything else.


    Space. It was glorious.


    I barely took notice when all the red boxes all slid off to the sides and faded away. All of my focus, all of my being, was centered on the starscape in front of me. For one eternal moment there was only the universe, and me, together.


    No picture, no video, no virtual tour...nothing can compare to actually being there. To floating...or yes zooming about in a missile...in that vast emptiness and bathing in starlight. To experiencing the unfathomable immensity of existence, with only a few millimeters distance of a visor or camera lens or boiling eyeball between you and the stars.


    Even my depth perception problem ceased to matter, defeated by the sheer enormity of that star-spangled void.


    It was a transcendent moment, affecting enough to even pierce through my newly muffled emotions and inspire a brief upswell of awed delight.


    And then the moment ended.


    The missile turned, the curved edge of the Earth appeared...and a large, flashing targeting reticule faded into view.


    I recoiled, mentally if not physically, and the red boxes swept back into view. New data poured in, telemetry and parameters and all sorts of technical stuff that I understood only enough to dread.


    Then I made the mistake of focusing on the reticule. A new box, with new information on my target, popped up.


    It was a city.


    I couldn''t tell you where it was. The name didn''t appear along with the other information, just an ID tag. North American, probably, as I thought I recognized part of the the East Coast beneath a break in the cloud cover. The city was medium-sized, with a population in the hundreds of thousands. More residential than industrial. A large parkland to urban space ratio. Poorly designed street and highway network leading to heavy traffic congestion.


    An average city, in short.


    A city full of people.


    A city full of children.


    I could imagine it, all too easily. A pair of small, confused eyes looking up, seeing a streak of smoke, light. The screaming noise that shattered the peace of a day at the park or playground. Then fire, and blood, and horror. Death and madness.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    And I would be the cause of it.


    ***


    If there ever came a moment when I truly gave up, that I truly stopped fighting against this cruel twist of fate...it was that one.


    I didn''t bother trying the red boxes again. Didn''t try reading any of the new data pouring in. Couldn''t bring myself to read anymore about my target. I knew there was nothing I could do. I could rail and strain and rip apart my mind trying, and it would do no good. I was nothing more than a passenger, an unwilling accomplice to a monstrous crime.


    Helpless.


    So, I retreated into myself, stopping reading, or looking, or even thinking.


    If what happened next hadn''t happened, I think...no, I know that I would have been completely catatonic by the time I hit the atmosphere. No doubt it would have been a mercy, if so.


    Instead, came darkness and a moment of...discontinuity.


    One second I was sinking into blank fuzzy nothingness...the next I was aware and awake, the view had changed completely, all the boxes had turned a pale, welcoming blue, and a new message was flashing in front of my ''eyes''.


    WARNING: DAMAGE SUSTAINED. COMMAND SIGNAL LOST. MAIN SYSTEM REINITIALIZATION COMPLETE. USER INTERFACE REBOOTED. PLEASE WAIT WHILE ALL SECONDARY SYSTEMS ARE CHECKED.


    The message vanished, and I stared out at my viewpoint in shock. I didn''t even try ''clicking'' on the (assumably) now-accessible data boxes. I was too engrossed in absorbing all the details of my new circumstances.


    For one, I was spinning. And spinning quickly. Instead of the glacial turns I''d experienced so far, my view was rotating at a quick clip, relatively speaking. As I watched, the horizon of the Earth appeared, then vanished in less than a minute as the rest of the planet appeared, then-


    Two...


    From what I could tell, I had been launched from a space station of some sort. I say ''from what I could tell''...because I couldn''t tell much. Whatever it had been before, it was now a rapidly expanding cloud of gas and debris.


    Somebody had blown it up.


    I say somebody, because as I spun away from the planet and my view swept across the remains of the station, I saw multiple gas trails leading up from the Earth. Obviously someone down there had taken exception to the Prophet and his space-suited goons'' Doomsday plans. Violent, explosive exception, delivered with extreme prejudice.


    I felt a flicker of grief and sympathy for all the other uploaded-mind-missiles that hadn''t left the station in time, not to mention the ones that had already launched and reached their targets. Judging by the several scattered flashes and minature mushroom clouds I noted on the surface of the Earth as I spun around for a second time, there had been a distressingly large number of those.


    The grief faded away quickly, as all my feelings did now, leaving me with my current predicament. The one highlighted, reinforced, and downright underlined by the new messages that flashed into view.


    WARNING: SECONDARY SYSTEMS CHECK COMPLETED. MULTIPLE COMPONENTS HAVE SUFFERED MINOR DAMAGE. MAIN FUEL TANK LEAK HAS BEEN REPAIRED. PROBE STATUS IS NOMINAL.


    That one wasn''t too bad. Not great, but basically good news in comparison to everything else I''d been through so far.


    The next message that popped up once the first faded...wasn''t good news. It wasn''t even bad news.


    It was worst news.


    WARNING: CURRENT PLANETARY ORBIT OF PROBE IS UNSTABLE. PROJECTED TRAJECTORY INDICATES PROBE WILL INTERCEPT EARTH ATMOSPHERE WITHIN 9 MINUTES, 47 SECONDS. SUBSEQUENT  INCINERATION OF 83% OF PROBE MASS WILL OCCUR WITHIN 9 MINUTES, 53 SECONDS.


    Well...shit.