Chain[01].Link[01]÷<α>

“I have a lot of questions about all of this” Sanna started, pausing as she tried to figure out how to say the next part.

“I have many answers,” he replied simply.

Sanna sighed, “I bet you do and you also need a name. But it’s late”, she said with a wave to the sky now with stars beginning to appear as the sun had gone beyond the horizon, “and my parents are expecting me for dinner soon.”

He simply nodded along with her.

“And,” she added under her breath, “I’m still not entirely sure I’m not hallucinating.”

After a moment she came to a decision.

“You can control the boat,” she started asking, gesturing to it staying perfectly placed despite the waves making it bob, “without any concerns of getting beached or loosing it?”

“Yes, it is my actual form,” he paused for a moment before pointing at himself, “this avatar is special and takes resources to replace, but it is not really me. If anything is my true body,” he continued as he pointed at the orb in the sailboat, “it is the core.”

Sanna nodded as she started trying to wrap her head around it. It was going to be an adjustment.

“My parents use a shared dock a couple miles down the beach, your,” she paused at the awkwardness of it, “form can stay there as I visit my parents.”

“Acceptable,” he—the avatar—said as he stepped on a bit of light before stepping on board… itself?

Sanna was already hating this terminology, the pronouns were going to get confusing.

“Should I just come aboard? Or is that weird?” she asked.

“You are my owner, and now captain, you may come aboard whenever you wish. It is not weird.” he replied as small hexagonal panels of light appeared floating over the water between her and the boat.

“Skipper,” she replied under her breath.

“Ah,” he said the reaction in the same monotone voice as everything else, “colloquial term for captain of small private vessels like sailboats.”

“You know”, she said as she gingerly stepped on the panels of light, not entirely trusting them to take her weight, “you have an impressive vocabulary for a 4 hour old, but the voice is a bit monotonous.”

“Each instance of the Lysi contributes to a shared understanding, so it’s closer to sixteen and a quarter days of experience. We are still learning, I will work on intonation.”

After placing her duffel bag against the core Sanna focused on the sailboat configuration. She found the main line, and the tiller, before she asked, “you’ve got the Jib?” as she sat at the back of springy deck that felt a lot more solid—and looked a lot more translucent—than most catamaran trampolines.

“Yes,” the avatar replied as it sat next to her more forward, “though,” he continued, “I can control any part of it at will,” and to demonstrate this the main sail extended of it’s own volition.

The boat didn’t move.

“You’re holding us in position aren’t you,” Sanna replied.

“I am, are we ready to go?”

“Yes!” she replied smiling.

The sailboat began picking up speed slightly away from the coast as Sanna controlled the direction.

“Tell tales?” she asked as she realized she couldn’t find any on the sail.

A hologram appeared in a circle around the deck of the boat. It had lots of interesting information, compass headings and maps (though she didn’t need them in these waters, she knew them by heart), speed, temperature, the status display he had shown her earlier—the computation allocation was 39 now. What she had requested was there in a three dimensional wind map that was being projected along the sides, as well as the tell tales she needed being projected along the sails themselves. But most interesting was the real time underwater map being projected in three dimensions under the wind one, marking not only the underwater surface, but various other things like sea life.

Sanna was enjoying herself, and she was looking forward to doing this more. Especially since she could tell he was nudging the entire boat around in strange ways to improve speed and keep them free from beach hazards. But the best part so far, in her opinion, of having alien sailboat super weapon was the ability to sail without any worries about her future.

She knew what she was doing with her future now: fighting aliens.

Sanna laughed to herself at the absurdity of it.

They would be arriving soon. And, she realized, it was getting actually dark.

“Lights,” she half-yelled over the wind.

And suddenly running lights appeared across the boat in the regulation appropriate locations. Meanwhile the wrap around projection became a false night vision, highlighting features so that she could see everything around her. It even zoomed into some distant boats she probably couldn’t have seen well on a bright and clear day. The computation allocation had jumped to 41 at that.

Sanna pointed at the dock as she loosened the sail for their approach. She would never have been this reckless with a normal sailboat but… well… alien super sailboat broke the rules.

She wasn’t going to get tired of this anytime soon.

Right, she should probably make sure the sailboat knew the plan here. Since it could think and all that.

“Dock us there before we run into it. You can do that right?” she asked moments before she would be committed.

“Yes,” he replied. She thought she heard something in the tone of his voice, but it was barely there.

The boat smoothly pulled up to the dock. The avatar simply stood up and stepped off with ease—with no apparent need to correct for his weight shifting the boat—as ropes materialized out of motes of light, that themselves appeared out of thin air, tying it to the dock.

Sanna decided to copy his form, finding the boat perfectly stable as she stood and stepped off. Once she did the boat began rocking exactly like a normal sailboat would. Apparently hiding in plain sight, even if the make would raise a few eyebrows—pearlescent navy blue was not a common color choice, to say nothing of the glass mast. Sanna shrugged, it was good enough and she had more immediately pressing issues to deal with on the ten minute walk up to her parents house.

“Ok, you really need a name,” she opened with, “especially if you are going to meet my parents. God this is going to be embarrassing.”

He didn’t reply.

“Okay, actually, let me do most of the talking. And if anyone asks you are 19 years old,” she emphasized the years. Her parents were going to be making assumptions, and she wanted it to be clear he was college aged—basically her age, if younger than her—despite his looks.

He nodded.

“I am going to explain your situation as being a friend needing a place to crash for a few days. And you can’t stay at my place cause I just finished moving out.”

She remembered how weird he had been on the beach.

“Yea, you know what, let me do all the talking. Just… don’t make eye contact and ignore their questions. And if I prompt you with a question in their presence while looking to your right the answer is no, and if it’s to your left it’s a yes. Got it?”

He nodded.

“Nodding is good too,” she added, “fuck this is so surreal.”

The more she thought about it, the more Sanna felt she was being silly. The world was apparently under threat and she was going to waste half a day eating with her family and sleeping in her old bed? Like nothing was happening?

She rationalized it by saying she would put her life in order. That tomorrow she would take on the duty to save the world or whatever. But she also had to admit that she lacked a sense of urgency, she hadn’t seen any aliens, and they had apparently gotten here two months ago. Was there really any rush?

She decided she might as well ask, “I have like 12 hours to spare to get everything in order before fighting the Phage or whatever we need to do right?”

“The Phage get more dangerous every moment, however, most sophont species require personal time, it is an acceptable trade off if you believe it to be.”

“Why not just go out there and fight right now with out me?” she asked.

“I would fail, we have owners because without them we always fail.”

“Didn’t you say you always fail anyway?”

“With owners we can stalemate the Phage, we have not failed on those worlds yet.”

“Okay,” Sanna said feeling cold at the reminder of the threat of the Phage, it just still didn’t feel real to her, so instead she asked about the other thing making her uncomfortable “also, the owner thing is weird, would you mind just saying captain, or something else, instead?”

“Captain is an acceptable and accurate term.”

“Good, and to be clear, I want you to tell me your thoughts. I don’t even necessarily agree with the implied chain of command here, but if it’s going to exist I want to be clear you should tell me things you think are important, even if they contradict me, okay?”

Sanna was concerned about leading a 4 hour– 16 day– whatever age being into battle. It wasn’t even the ethics of the whole thing, it was about the actual competency of the whole endevour. She was absolutely going to be establishing some common sense ground rules.

“Understood.”

Sanna saw her parents house coming into view over the rise, the light spilling onto the beach-grass covered sand dunes. Both the cars in the driveway, along with the artificial lighting, made it seem so out of place in what was otherwise a beautiful natural landscape with barely any other visible civilization. Even the road blended in.

“Does your avatar need food or water or anything?” she asked, going over her plans again.

“No.”

“Then I am going to have you chill in the guest bedroom, do you think you could make a smartphone and some headphones? And pretend to pay attention to that?”

He nodded as they materialized out of light on his person, she noted it went a lot slower than when he had made the ship or the rope. She had also barely registered before this moment that he had changed the colors and shape of his outfit to match his boat form, pearlescent blue cargo shorts with gold thread and hexagonal buttons, sky blue t-shirt with a triangle of hexagonal weave white across it reminiscent of a sail, and sandles without noticeable bands. Sanna didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about any of that right now.

Besides they had arrived at the door.

“Oh and a duffel bag,” she added, “it can be empty,” as it began materializing in his hand, again slower than she expected.

Sanna stood there for a good couple of minutes going over her plan in her head before ringing the door bell.

Her mother opened the door, still dressed in a dark blue pantsuit from work, flipped her neck length dark blonde hair, and gave Sanna a look.

“Sanna and…” she prompted.

“Chris,” Sanna replied, hoping to rip the bandaid off, “he’s a classmate from my econ class, he needs a place to crash since his parents are being assholes, is it okay if he uses the guest bedroom?”

“Will he be joining us for dinner?” she asked as she took a step back, and still with that look in Sanna’s direction, as they entered the house.

“No,” Sanna continued in a rush, “he already ate.”

Hoping to pre-empt her mother she turned to him and said, “up the stairs,” she pointed at them, “third door on the right.”

He nodded and walked away, with even a bit of a body language that looked something like an awkward teenager. Though it could still use improvement in Sanna’s opinion.

“Well, I guess that’s fine”, her mother continued, “always happy to help out a friend of yours.”

“Thanks Mom,” Sanna replied giving her a small hug and babbling on, “just with the end of the school year people are moving and it can be hard to find someone with an extra couch and stuff.”

“Mhm,” she hummed, “well your father is still working on dinner, why don’t we catch up.”

Sanna was thankful her mother didn’t comment further on it. They went to the living room and chatted over a cheese plate her mother got, Sanna talked about school and clubs she was in, while her mother discussed her latest frustrations with office politics, which considering her job, was just politics. Sanna usually appreciated the view into the political process, but today the whole conversation was feeling surreal to her, her thoughts kept drifting to the alien sailboat she had stashed at the dock, and also in the guest bedroom. At a certain point she just had to nod along to her mother’s rants about work, her mother got so frustrated about small things and the audacity of some elected officials. But it was better than a discussion about weird boys she had found on a beach.

She should have known it was a trap though.

It was after her father had brought out all the food, a local fish he had caught at the farmers market and a bunch of other local produce. They had gotten halfway through the meal before her mother struck.

“So, Randy, our daughter brought a boy home.”

“Oh, does he have good breeding hips?”

“Dad!”

“I’m pretty sure she’d break him.”

“Mom” Sanna groaned.

“Hmm, so not a strapping marine then,” her father replied.

“You realize sexualizing men doesn’t fix the systemic problem right?” Sanna asked leaning on her gender studies class last semester.

“Sure, but it’s fun to tease you,” her father replied.

“Bring home a young woman, and I’ll make the same comments” her mother replied.

“Mostly,” her father said in a more normal tone, “we just want to embarrass you enough so you don’t have sex where we can hear it.”

“He’s not even– we’re not– can we talk about something else?” Sanna, blushing, asked instead.

“Sure,” her mother said, and Sanna reflected later she really should have seen this trap coming, “it’s your junior year coming up, are you contracting with the Navy?”

“No,” Sanna replied, what had happened this afternoon had changed everything… but just in case, she hedged, “or, probably not.”

“Why not?” her mother asked calmly, Sanna knew her parents would support her with whatever she chose to do, that wasn’t the problem.

“I can’t really explain it right now,” she replied.

“Sanna,” her mother sighed before putting down her utensils.

The problem, Sanna reflected, was that her parents expected her to be an over achiever, it didn’t matter in what, just that she exceed expectations. Not being able to explain about the alien super weapon—because it would sound insane—made the conversation a rather one sided loop of her mother lecturing her while Sanna tried to explain the situation vaguely and deflected details. Yes it’s important, no she can’t explain why, yes she’s sure she wanted to do this, no she can’t give an example rolemodel, and on and on.

Voices were raised, tempers flared, and after an hour Sanna had had enough and simply retreated to her room exhausted and crashed on her bed.

Sanna woke with a start to the tap on her shoulder, there was a figure standing over her.

It took her a moment to realize it was the avatar of her ship.

“What’s up,” she asked at a whisper.

He replied in his quiet monotone voice, “Captain, there are Phage in the Sound.”