Consistency

Quinn’s alarm goes off. His eyes open as it does. Consistency breeds more consistency in a self-contained cycle. Getting out of bed, he heads outside his makeshift shelter, picks a direction, and begins to run. The specifics don’t matter significantly. They aren’t important. Only the run matters. Start the day with a thirty minute jog. He always starts every day with a thirty minute jog.

The run takes Quinn all the way around his small comet, several times over. It burned, inside and out, and he could feel the system inside him fighting to keep him alive. It had no atmosphere to speak of, so his NPC was stuck in survival mode. Couldn’t branch out, do as many problematic things when it is always focused on keeping him alive. As the run ends, Quinn walks over to his lander. Or what’s left of it. Most of the systems have been stripped over the last ten years, less for parts and more to avoid excessive contact. No electronics left inside, save the background functions. And, of course, the shower.

Stepping into the side compartment, he presses the button and holds, turning on the shower as hot as it will go. He strips off his skin tight jumpsuit, placing it carefully in a small unit with several other jumpsuits stacked up. The twentieth “day” period was coming up, but wasn’t here yet. So no altering of the routine. Left alone, waiting for the shower to beep, he runs his fingertips across the scars. He can practically feel the excited electricity from his worse half as he touches the deep markings. Because while to him they are an ever present reminder of who he might have become, to it they are an unpleasant but ultimately happy memory of a symbiotic relationship being birthed into the universe.

The shower beeps, informing him that the water is heated to the set temperature. Quinn heads into the scalding water. It felt good as it ran down his muscles and across his scars. Almost relaxing. But the routine doesn’t leave that much time for relaxing. He begins to scrub himself down. Then, after exactly nine and a half minutes in the scalding water, he presses the button to activate his ‘finish shower’ subroutine. Rapidly, the water cooled down to cold cellar temperature. For thirty seconds it rushes across his body, closing all his pores, then automatically the shower shuts off. Quinn steps out of the shower and stops for only a moment to look at himself. One could almost mistake him for human, he muses before he steps into the main area of the lander and flips the switch to activate the dehydrator unit. It takes a minute to dry the air in the lander after a shower, and another ten seconds to dry his mostly hairless body. He waits, regulating his breathing and counting in his head. Then he turns the unit off and heads out of the lander.

Walking across the comet’s surface, he heads to his meditative point. One must always remain mindful. He sits down on the small, flattened section of ice on this arbitrary place and begins to go through his breathing exercises. He felt the air flowing out of his skin, generated by the computer inside of him burning through his own ever-regenerating body. And he kept pulling it in, trying to get to breathing in the emptiness around him. It would never reach that point, but the destination was only a goal, not the point. The point was the awareness of what he was doing. Being in his own body. Then he breathed out. Pushing more air than he’d taken into his lungs out of them. Feeling the system burn through him in the other direction. Showing the system that the fight for survival through violence would only hurt them. And in, and out. He continued for precisely two hours.

A lesson in self control, one he repeated daily. Once his meditations are concluded, he stands up. He walks to the exact opposite side of the rogue comet, to a blank canvas sitting on an easel. He begins to paint, his two hour daily painting. A story of his journey, both slowly through the stars and as a painter, even more slowly. The paintings became different, arguably more interesting, starting a year and a half ago. The comet had entered one of the uninhabited systems, meaning there were more variables. More moving parts in his paintings from day to day. And a much larger star. He paints what he sees. Then, a few months ago, his paintings began to occasionally have a different flare in them as well. A small collection of massive ships, hanging around the asteroid belt. One had swung by, and his system hadn’t destroyed it. Hadn’t been able to, or it didn’t try hard enough. If it was the former, I would be somewhat frightened. The system thinks it’s the former. Informed him of such. Quinn likes to think it’s a combination of a strong digital security and his lessons to his other half starting to take route. Fortunately, it is very good at keeping hidden and keeping him hidden, so he is confident he was not spotted. But those ships remain. They jumped out of this system twice over the course of these months, and grown in number by one. Just a new, small flair to his paintings. A small collection of ships, barely visible in the vastness of his painting. Standing here painting for him, it isn’t a matter of creating his story, but rather passively observing the beauty of the galaxy when it is not being destroyed.

As the two hours finish, he puts down his art supplies and takes the canvas off of the easel. He takes it over to his makeshift shelter. In the back room, he carefully places it down on the seventh pile of a thousand paintings. Not worrying about the paintings, he closes the doors to the back room and walks around to the workroom. He grabs a jumpsuit off of the wall and pulls it on. Once again, he feels the electricity. Then, sitting down at his makeshift terminal created by placing a tablet inside a holder with an arm, he turns the tablet on. He opens the file he has opened so many times, and he begins the three hour process of critiquing the worst thirty minutes of his life. Step by step, he watches in slow motion as the security footage from the Hadrian Facility he slaughtered, pausing whenever the system that was in control at the time made a critical mistake, whether it be tactically, morally, or logically. He remarks upon it, then presses play once more to continue to make his way through the footage. The lesson to himself, and to the system, of why destroying without consideration is not viable or right. And, if what happened when they were scanned earlier is any indication, then it is perhaps starting to work. The routine, the rigidity of his rules seems to be slowly turning the system to his side.

Once the video finally finishes, Quinn turns off the tablet and leaves the workroom into the main area of the shelter. It’s almost fully furnished. And lately, he’s been working on an attic for his shelter, because his back room was running low on storage space. Doesn’t have room for another stack of a thousand paintings, and so he needs a place to put his older stacks. He heads out from his shelter and, having his NPC activate and turn to high power the muscle and bone reinforcement, he moves the bricks of stone and ice he cut yesterday up the side of the shelter, setting it around the edges. He does so with ease, lifting the bricks by the ton and leaping up to the roof. The shelter begins to creak, the stress of the additional weight affecting the place’s structural integrity. So, the attic will be delayed while he determines how to reinforce the support beams of the main shelter. He stops adding new weight, and goes to his plans and he begins to, with the aid of the system, determine calculations for the weight of the addition and how to distribute it safely across the shelter’s skeleton. By the end of his two hour and fifteen minute construction period, he’s worked out the answer of how to distribute the weight but not actually done any work on it yet. But that didn’t matter. The act of creation in this period of the day is a lesson as well. That all those bits and tools that the system had been designed to enact violence effectively are also useful for creation. And so he does not feel bad about spending nearly two hours working with the system to design a structure. Because it is learning and growing emotionally.

He leaves the shelter behind temporarily to head back over to the lander. Outside the lander sits the database access unit. It has not been connected to anything since well before he deserted the Service, but it still has all the now slightly out of date information it had accessed back nearly twenty years ago. Every day, Quinn spends three hours at the terminal, reading about some topic, teaching himself everything from philosophy, to science, to art, to economics. For the last few months, he’s been spending every day’s reading time learning about spaceships. Partly out of curiosity, and partly because it is a topic currently on his mind. And will be for roughly the next eight years, or at least as long as those ships stay based in this system. This week, he decides to focus on gravdrive calculations. What is actually required, what goes into it.

Reading through the limitations on the calculus involved in determinations, Quinn notices an inconsistency with observed events. Because these ships activated sheathes and whirred up their gravdrives while in the asteroid belt, which according to the dissertation he’s reading should be impossible. So either there is something that has changed since his self imposed exile began, or there is something for him to research tomorrow. He’ll check come tomorrow’s database time. Until then, he needs to buckle down and figure out this math. Figure out why that is said to be impossible practically speaking.

Evidently there were too many variables to track and still solve the equations in a reasonable amount of time prior to the variables changing. Which means, if it learned the equations, his other side could probably manage, though not particularly efficiently without some additional source of logic. Which does support the idea of some increase in the logic frames of the Pilot Intelligences of Astro Incorporato could probably cause this change as well. An Astro base here, though, based on where the stars are, would be considered by both the Service and Luxania as an act of war. Something big is going down. Quinn quickly shuts down that train of thought. Because that is an assumption, and one that will only serve to hurt the progress his system has made thus far. Best to see if there are any indicators in the old database of smugglers or pirates that manage something similar prior to any worrying.

He heads back to the shelter, to the workroom, he turns on the tablet and begins to write in his journal. The feelings he felt during his meditation, what he saw as he painted the galaxy, the systems eagerness in aiding in the math of structural engineering, and the concerning moment during his research, as well as what he ought to do tomorrow. As he finishes the journal entry, he turns off the tablet and leaves the workroom. Heading over to the closet, he takes a new canvas and stretches over yet another frame. He is not running low on canvas, he made sure he had enough for at least fifty years. Frames, he is going to run out of soon enough. He did have enough at one point, but he has been cannibalizing them for his construction projects these last few years. All the more reason to have his attic to store the paintings. Moving the completed paintings would give him an excuse to remove their frames, so they could be reused. He carries the blank canvas across the comet to attach it carefully to the easel, then he heads right back to the shelter, to his cot. Lying down, he takes a deep breath in, breathes out slowly, drifts back into sleep. Exactly the same time he does every day.