Chapter Text
Space Adventurers Online
Chapter 1 - They're Dead, Dave
3.9 million light years away… on Tuesday.
Crew's log, ESS Centoria… it still won't flush. I'll try again later…
In all seriousness though, this is VMR, 1st Class Kirito, reporting in for the… "Yui, how many days is this now?" He interrupted his recording to ask the ship's computer and his adopted daughter.
"Today is the 1829th day, papa!" She answered.
"Thanks Yui!" 1829th time. There's still nothing to report – it's cold outside and there's no kind of atmosphere whatsoever. Though it is space, so I don't know what I expected to see out there otherwise.
The ship continues to drift aimlessly across the universe until we can find life and repair the ship's control systems. Which I've now said for the past four years, and in that time, all we've found is a hologrammatic projector and a beaten up ship-to-surface craft that someone painted with go-faster stripes.
VMR, 1st Class Kirito, signing off.
Kirito sighed as he kicked back in the commander's chair of the Centoria, and he thought about the situation they were in. Space Adventurers Online was supposed to be a monumental achievement in the history of gaming, and if you subscribed to the definition that it was an event that would probably mark a turning point in history, then it absolutely was.
In the way that they all found themselves stuck in the game, and now, after four years of playing, they were lost in deep space, wandering an enormous ship that was out of control and travelling through hyperspace after the crew all died from a poorly repaired engine component, and the players had all evacuated 3.8 million light years previously. Which was unfortunate for him because those who didn't were a grand total of two people.
Alice, who had died already in the game and was now stuck here as a hologram, and Klein, who had somehow found his way back to the ship after all that time, saying that he'd spent most of that time in stasis, assuming he would find the Earth… eventually.
Given they were now almost four million light years away from Earth, he wondered why he'd decided that Klein would now be the navigation officer of the Centoria… oh yes, because Alice had the kind of sense of direction that would have gotten you lost on the ship, let alone in deep space.
Klein had at least navigated a safe passage to the Centoria – completely in the wrong direction, mind you, but he knew the old saying: "beggars can't be choosers".
In addition to the four years spent with Alice – years spent alternating between trying to murder each other, and well, the other thing that happens in lonely, miserable deep space – there was the ship's onboard computer, the Universal Interface… or Yui for short.
She had taken the brunt of those four years of hyperspace calculations, burning her processors out far faster than should've happened, and leaving a computer with an IQ of about 800, and a mental age of 8. He'd seen enough horror and sci-fi films to know that careening spaceships and burned out AI systems were a match made in hell, but for some reason, he'd never felt unsafe around Yui.
It probably helped that about the only thing she could break now was the vending machines, because almost everything else on the ship was broken too. Nearly 4 million light years into space, finding the spare parts for most of the ship was a little bit difficult – it wasn't like spaceship garages were a thing, after all, and certainly not for a ship nearly 10 kilometres long!
"Papa! Red alert! Red alert! Reb alert!"
"Reb alert? Is it that bad?" Klein asked, rushing into the control room to the swooshing of the doors, with Alice not far behind.
"Didn't we have a brow alert last week?" Alice asked, sitting at one of the many spare consoles.
"Yeah, but that was your attempt at shaving, Alice." He answered blithely, ignoring that Alice looked as if she was going to throw him in the airlock and jettison him into space as chaff in the event of a missile launch… "What is it, Yui?"
"It's something people do to remove excess hair, papa." Yui answered, to the blank looks of both himself and Alice, whilst Klein did his best not to crack up.
The problem with his daughter was not that overrunning her warranty by 3.8 million light years had rendered her senile, no, it was that she was intelligent enough to play games with people and masquerade it as a child (or broken computer) being literal, but that they had no idea which one it was most of the time!
"The red alert, Yui, not shaving!"
"We have an approaching vessel on collision course. Preparing defences!"
"We have defences?" Klein asked, as small specks drifted away from the airlock of the giant ship and into the vastness of space beside them.
"Countermeasures expended."
They had countermeasures?
"Err, Yui…" He asked, almost dreading the answer he would likely receive. "What countermeasures?"
"Room 235-12 has been emptied." Uh oh, he recognised that number, and it wasn't because it was his room…
"Room 235-12…" Alice grumbled. "Hey, that was my room!" She shrieked.
"Uhh, Alice… you're a hologram, why do you even have possessions? Wait, how do you have possessions!?" Klein asked, as if that was the important thing at this precise moment.
"Guys, bigger problem!" He shouted, trying to get their attention back onto the ship on a collision course for them. "Impact in 60!"
"Commencing evasive maneuvers!" Yui told them, much to all of their confusion. The ship was drifting with no controls, so how she planned to maneuver it was anyone's guess… "Evasive maneuvers complete!"
She told them, as precisely nothing happened. Something Alice had clearly picked up on, given the frustrated look at the ceiling she now wore.
"Perhaps the Red Baron there can elaborate, but how long do we have until impact now?"
"Minutes?" Klein asked, hopefully.
"Seconds. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… im-pact?" He answered with a sigh, realising that the ship had barely even juddered at what should've been a major collision… and in fact had felt a bit like the aftermath of curry night.
"Huh. We survived that." Klein answered somewhere between impressed and disappointed. "Didn't even feel like we hit anything, did it?"
"No, it felt like the aftermath of your cooking." Alice told them. "Yui, what was the size of the incoming ship?"
"Big." He saw Alice put her head into her hands and let out a small shriek.
"Yui, can you give a slightly more precise estimate please, sweetie?" He asked her nicely.
"Yes papa. Roughly 200 metres in length, and twenty metres in diameter." She answered, offering a far more helpful answer.
"Weird, we should've felt that impact, shouldn't we?" Klein asked, ignoring the mutterings of Alice in the background.
"Mister Klein, the ship scored a glancing blow off the bow and is now heading towards that moon over there. Hull integrity is 84% on the Centoria, but significantly lower on the other ship. Suggest we follow them to administer assistance when they crash."
"And see if they've got any supplies. We're running low on food, water, medicine and parts again, though we've still got plenty of that lager in."
The fact that all three of them shuddered at that thought should tell you all you need to know about the quality of the "drink". In reality, they would rather have drunk the re-circulated dishwater that the company who had owned the Centoria called wine instead, but even that was running low too…
Was this really what they were reduced to? Scavenging ships that they may or may not have destroyed due to their current status as floating space junk…
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Alice was really not having a good life, she had decided.
For one, she was dead.
For two, her bedroom and the last of her worldly possessions were currently doing their best impression of Saturn's rings and orbiting a small planetoid.
For three, she was stuck in a perverse kind of purgatory; surrounded by a slovenly technical genius with little interest in anything but that, who also happened to be her on-off lover, a man with no discernible personality whatsoever, and a senile artificial intelligence that seemed hellbent on making her afterlife hell…
"Sorry about Yui." Kirito answered, a pair of goggles hanging around his neck, and half a toolkit around his belt. The other half, no doubt, was scattered somewhere that it could be easily tripped over…
"I cannot understand why she takes such umbrage with me, but not yourself and Klein."
"You do tend to give pretty funny reactions…" Kirito admitted, and she felt herself fighting to not reach up and wring his neck. "Not that you deserve it!"
"I doubt that is the only reason."
"I think she thinks you're trying to be her mom as well." Kirito told her. "As weird as that sounds."
"She's not a child, Kirito!" She snapped back. "She is a computer that you refuse to fix, and so, she believes herself to be a child! More importantly, she believes you are her father… because you were literally the only living thing within a thousand light years before I was bought back."
She had wondered how much of an achievement it was to be the first person to die in a brand new video game, but thought better about revealing the reason why she died. Tripping and falling to death was already embarrassing enough, but tripping and falling out of an airlock because she slipped on her own drink…
She'd never live that one down.
"I don't "refuse to fix" her, Alice! We don't have the spare parts or the knowledge to restore her to factory default." Kirito reminded her, and whilst she wasn't technically minded, she reckoned if anyone was capable of doing so, it would be Kirito.
"Yet you have the parts to build your own maintenance drones…" She huffed.
"I told you, those were cannibalised from drones in the cargo hold!"
She sighed and wondered if it was that their relationship was just so unusual that she had no idea how to broach the more awkward subjects, or whether she was just bad at it.
Probably a little of both, if she was feeling introspective. "We have to sort our differences here, because this is just getting tiring."
"Yeah, we can't keep doing this, can we?" He agreed.
"Not if we wish to not age thirty years in ten, no." She admitted. "Well, for you anyway. I think I may be well past that now."
"I dunno, you still look pretty good, despite… you know." Being dead, yes she did know.
It was almost ridiculous to think that being dead was nowhere near the highest item on her list of problems, but here she was, in that situation after all.
Before anything else could happen, they found the moment interrupted by the non-entity that was Klein.
"Hey, lovebirds, we've tracked the ship we collided with. It went down on a nearby moon, no signs of a mayday though…" He explained, and she tried to act as if they hadn't been less than a centimetre from Kirito's face when he arrived.
"Any signs of life?"
"Nothing much."
"The usual then."
"Pretty much, but the ship was a cargo ship, so there might actually be some resources aboard."
"Hopefully so, because I'm taking Alice's place as ship hologram before I drink that lager." Kirito told them with certainty, and she couldn't blame him for that sentiment… that stuff was revolting.
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Sinon wondered how exactly she'd found herself in this position - aboard some of a crashed spaceship that she had been stowing away on, now stuck underneath a damaged beam that had collapsed when the ship collided with something much bigger.
Her superior senses hadn't actually given her enough warning of the incoming object as they came out of light speed, other than to basically brace for impact…
Honestly, she wished she hadn't even had that much warning - at least then she could have pretended to be surprised when an object the size of a large town appeared suddenly in front of them as the ship fell out of hyperspace.
The impact had been less of two cars colliding at highway speeds, and more like the impact of two planes colliding at cruising altitude - only their plane was far smaller, and tore apart almost instantly as it descended into the atmosphere of a nearby planetoid. Thankfully for herself, a pressure bulkhead had sealed as the impact tore everything apart, allowing her to continue breathing as the ship crashed to the ground.
Remarkably, everything had stayed intact as they hit the ground too, except for the one beam that had fallen and pinned her down…
Lost in deep space, and pinned down under a girder; this really wasn't how Sinon wished to lose her only life in this game!
"We uhh, we might have done a number on the ship, eh, Kirito?"
"That does explain why we barely felt the impact." The other person muttered to themselves. "Doubt we'll find anyone alive after this…"
"I imagine many of them are outside the Centoria now…" A female voice said with a grim disposition. "There isn't much we can do for them now."
"Hey! Help!" She shouted, trying to get their attention as a beam of light shone in through the crevices of the wreck. "I'm still alive over here!"
"I hear something?"
"Probably just a damaged beam." One of the men said.
"Kirito, if a beam sounds like it is screaming, I feel like you two should be rather more concerned for your lives." The woman said nonchalantly, as if she didn't include herself in a group called "the living"...
"Where was it coming from?"
"Over here, I think."
"I'm pinned down over here!" She shouted at the top of her lungs, hoping they could hear her and not something else…
A few moments later, and she could feel the blinding light of a torch being shone into her eyes; yeah, they had heard her!
After a few moments of digging, and the concerted effort of two of the three of them, she was freed from her cast iron imprisonment, and able to stand up and stretch for the first time.
An action that got some very strange reactions from all three of them - mild fluster from the black haired man, wide eyed surprise from the red haired one… and the discontentment of the blonde haired woman, who had crossed her arms as if to emphasise something for some reason…
"Uhh, guys and gal, I have a question." The red haired man asked, looking away awkwardly.
"Really, because I have one too?" She asked, now crossing her arms too.
"Since when were catgirls a thing in this game?" The black haired one asked.
"And naturally, he misses the fact she is entirely naked." The blonde woman sighed, almost exasperated at the black haired man.
"I'm what." She asked, and for the first time, she looked down at her chest…
And then came the violence.
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"I feel like we got off to a bad start." Klein said as he rubbed his cheek, trying to wipe away the burning red handprint now emblazoned there.
"I don't know, I quite like her actually." Alice said, very amused at both of the boys' suffering at the hands of the vengeful Sinon. "She does not tolerate you fools."
An attitude that clearly wasn't shared by the now hastily clothed Sinon; who had been dressed in whatever clothing they could recover from cupboards or the dead, and was now hissing at Alice under her breath. She had already tried to scratch the ever living hell out of the hologram, but had quickly given up when she realised that probably wasn't going to happen on account of being made of light rather than flesh. "I am taking some clothes from you, and that is the last I ever want to see you all."
"We did just save your life, you know?"
"You also nearly ended it in the first place! Why park in a hyperspace lane?!"
"Parking implies we have any kind of control of the Centoria in the first place." Kirito spoke up, having finished patching up the scratches on his face. "Which we don't."
"You're telling me that heap of shit has no controls whatsoever."
Klein thought about it hard, and came back with his answer. "The elevators still work?" No stairs was a positive in his eyes, especially on a ship with nearly two thousand decks!
"Vending machines are fine?" Kirito nodded in agreement.
"The coffee machine is in a state that can sometimes be called functional." Alice added to the list of things that worked on the Centoria.
It was a very short list.
"How have you not hit a planet yet?" Sinon asked blankly.
"Luck." All three of them answered in agreement. It certainly wasn't because of any intrinsic skill on any of their parts, but rather just dumb luck…
"Fine, I'll stay and help you idiots fix that thing so you can actually move it. So no one else has to suffer the same fate as me…"
"Wait, Sinon, what exactly did you do on your ship?"
Sinon, for the first time, looked away awkwardly. "Stowaway." She answered quietly, before quickly backing it up. "But I earned my keep by fixing the drives. Well, I did anyway…"
"Perhaps she can help you fix Yui then, Kirito…" Alice said, a tone he recognised as her vindictive voice. The one she used when she was planning her own kind of mischief on them both…
Such as replacing his blanket with brown paper, after he had walked in on one of their trysts by mistake. He didn't sleep in a week thanks to that little stunt…
"What's Yui?" Sinon asked, hesitantly.
"She's the ship's computer. She's… err, gone a bit computer-senile." He answered, trying not to offend Kirito. Yui was a valuable part of the crew, but he did wonder whether Kirito had also gone a bit "computer senile" during his time alone on the Centoria…
"Oh, I can help. How hard can it be?"
He felt like those would be the words that Sinon would come to regret during her time onboard the Centoria…