Ravens of Eternity

103 Here and There

Eva walked down her dorms’ hallway and passed door after door until she came to her assigned unit. This was technically the dorm where the Admiral, the Commander, and all of the other officers were assigned.

However, she, Miko, and Redstar were also assigned here. When the Drogar were determining who the Admiral’s officers were, she told them that they were part of her personal retinue. It was purely because she wanted to keep her test pilots close to her.

As EVA reached for her room, the door slid open with a near silent SHWA and invited her in. She walked through and took a few steps before the door shut behind her with a SHWIF.

The room was perhaps 20 square meters at best – twice as large as her hab on Tartarus. In fact everything was twice as large – hallways, doorways, everyways. Since the Drogar were larger than them, it made sense.

But it didn’t stop her from feeling small regardless.

There was a large open space in the middle, a standing desk in the corner with some sort of strange terminal on it, and some empty shelves in the corner opposite.

To her left were some steps that led upstairs to the kitchenette and bathroom. A couple of Drogar characters and an arrow told her so. She peeked up the steps, but decided to take a look up there later.

She thought about it for a second and realized that the room didn’t have a bed in it, then wondered if the Drogar needed to sleep. But she shrugged. Not having one didn’t impact her in the slightest, so she didn’t think too much more about it.

Despite how small the room was, she was quite happy and content with it. She had always lived in tiny rooms all her life and enjoyed the minimalism of it. Comforted, even. To her, huge houses such as mansions were completely unnecessary.

.....

Why have all those rooms that no-one uses? She certainly wouldn’t have known what to do with all that space, if she lived in one. Best she could do was waste it, and she was never a fan of that.

Something danced in the corner of her eye, and when she turned to look, a portion of the wall on the right revealed itself to be a touchscreen. It appeared to be the room’s control panel, but it was covered in Drogarii script.

It sort of reminded her cuneiform, or at least some incredibly advanced version of it. It had a mix of hard lines and soft curves that spoke of a very storied history of development. And much like the logographic languages in her old universe, Drogarii appeared to represent symbols and ideas rather than sounds.

Her DI was able to translate the words with relative ease, but the logic of it was always a bit off. She imagined that whatever poetic characteristics embedded in the imagery was lost at some point during translation itself.

But at least their direct and literal meanings remained and she was able to read what was on the panel itself. For better or worse, anyway.

As she went through its menus, she recognized there were toggles for everything – lights, containers, chairs, desks, the bed... The bed!

Eva quickly tapped the control for the bed, and a section in the very middle of the floor slid open. Inside was a futon-style mattress, and she could control at what height it came up. If she wanted, it could be sitting a couple of decimeters down, or up.

She then opened up other containers, made chairs morph out of the walls, lit up the sconces on the walls, and played with her apartment for a few moments. She found the morphing incredibly impressive. It was as though the walls were elastic, and changed their shape to fit whatever she had asked for.

For example, she could easily adjust the height of the standing desk in the corner, and even create a stool with the right height to accompany it.

Not only were there options to make tables, benches, and shelves, but there were also options for somewhat more complex shapes as well. As she went through the categories, she saw options for armor and weapon stands, easels, pull-up bars, and so on.

There were dozens of different designs, all of which suited multiple scenarios. She was completely awed by Drogar technology as she morphed a handful of them, one after the other. Once she was fully amused and satisfied by the whole experience, she closed everything up and made sure everything was nice and tidy again.

Then she walked over to the standing desk in the corner and activated the terminal on it. It wasn’t a standard rectangular screen that she had been familiar with her entire life. This was circular and concave.

As the screen came on, everything was warped, as though she was looking at it through a fish-eye lens. Though she found it a little disorienting, she welcomed the difference, and tried her best to get used to it.

Although odd in appearance, the screen was incredibly intuitive to use. All of the controls ran along the edge, with the most useful clustered to the left and right edges. Because it was warped, the clearest point of the screen was the middle. Any subject that was placed there would appear with great clarity.

Eva found this a seriously nice change. Humans often had mostly static screens, and our eyes moved along them to focus in on specific details. This screen acted like that, except it was as though it was the eye itself.

When she looked at an image, she had to physically move her focus all around it. And though it was more effort, she ended up with a greater appreciation of what she was observing in the first place.

On the screen was a welcome message and login prompt into the Imperial Nexus, which was the equivalent of the Federation’s SolNet. Everyone had complete access to these networks, at least while within their respective territories.

Eva and all the other prisoners were too far from Federation space to pick up any signals, and so their connections were pretty much dead. As a result, their communications spun in an endless cycle of timing out and seeking for any signals.

Of course, they were given access to the Nexus, but it was highly limited. They had the authority to do standard DI messaging and communications, minor commerce, and so on. But there was very little in terms of information, and what they could see had gone through the lens of the state.

Some of it was even blatant propaganda.

Although she couldn’t connect with anyone in the Federation, she still had the ability to reach out to Earth. So she decided to reach out to Mack and say hello. It had been some time since they last had a chat – maybe a month or so ago?

She wasn’t so sure. Keeping track of time while in space was tough as hell.

When he answered her call, she was immediately surprised. Mack looked a bit gaunt and pale, heavy bags under his eyes. And he looked like he had lost a bit of weight.

In all, he looked like he was overworked and stressed.

“Hey, you doing okay?” she asked. Concern was laced in her tone.

When he responded, he was a bit hazy, like he wasn’t all there.

“Hm? Oh, yeah. Totes fine. You?”

Though he brushed it off, he also avoided her eyes when he answered. He was clearly hiding something, but she decided not to press him. He looked stressed enough as it was.

“Ah, yeah, kinda. We’re all prisoners on some alien planet somewhere in the galaxy.”

Mack shot up in alarm, his bloodshot eyes widened as he spoke.

“What? Seriously? Holy shit! You need me to like maybe get some sorta influencer rescue team going? Like ask them to get their buddies in your universe to save you or someshit?”

“Oh!, No, no. Don’t do that. They’d get annihilated. Trust me on that. I mean, I’m mentioning it because we’re gonna be streaming more often again.”

“Thank fucking god,” he sighed. “We lost so many viewers ‘coz we couldn’t publish a whole lot.”

“Don’t sweat it. People will come and go. And besides, we couldn’t have lost too much, right? I mean, it was only a month we were kinda low, yeah?”

Mack blinked at her. A month? What was she thinking? She had told him herself how much time was different between the two universes.

“Don’t you mean three months? And actually, that’s three of your months.”

“Okay, so it was what, four months your time? Not a big deal, really.”

“You know, your months are way longer than my months, right? Way, way longer.”

“Wait, what? What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what? You told me yourself – 100 seconds equals a minute, 100 minutes equal an hour. Here, we’ve got 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes to an hour. Those seconds really add up!”

“Sure, but it’s only ten hour cycles, while you’ve got twenty-four hour days! I figure two of my cycles equals about one day, right?”

“Your math is seriously the worst. 60 times 60 times 24 is 86,400. 100 times 100 times 10 is 100,000! Each cycle you go through is longer than a day on Earth!”

Eva was immediately taken aback. Her sense of time had always been crappy. Combined with the fact that she no longer aged, she realized that her ability to track time was shot beyond belief. But she didn’t think it was honestly that bad.

“Multiplied by 30 days, we’re now up to 2.6 million seconds. For you, each month is 100 days, so that makes your months 10 million seconds. 2.6 million seconds times 12 months comes out to 31.2 million seconds per year. Your year has 100 million seconds!”

The numbers spun around Eva’s head. She couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was trying to get across. It didn’t help that he threw number after number at her, as though he was trying his best to unbalance her.

“What the hell are you trying to say?!”

“It’s been a year!” he yelled.

After a moment, he calmed down and continued. But tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke.

“Since we started the Conspiracy, it was three months for you, but a year for me, alright? You sent me all your footage, your stream. And in all that time, you barely ever sent me your hello’s. It might only be a few weeks between calls for you, but it’s months for me. And that’s real tough to bear by myself!”

Guilt immediately washed over her. It didn’t matter how bad she was at letting the time slip by – she shouldn’t have let her connection with him slip at all.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

“Sure you will,” he replied solemnly.

He wiped the dampness from his eyes and sniffed quietly. And as he sat there and cleaned himself up, she looked around on his table. Among the items that sat near him was an orange pill bottle.

With eyes narrowed, she moved her fisheye perspective over to its label – Fentanyl was scrawled on it with barely legible handwriting. The pills inside it were large.

“What the hell are you doing with Fentanyl?” she yelled. “And who gave that to you?”

His eyes went wide, and he quickly snapped up the bottle. But it was too late – she had already seen it.

“Been having some pains lately,” he replied.

“Some pain? What, did you break both your arms or something? What sorta pain are you in that you need fuckin’ opiods?! How long have you been taking them? Look at me! Tell me!”

“Not... not long. Maybe a week.”

He avoided her gaze as he stuttered out the words. It was clear that he was lying. Alarm shot through Eva as her anger almost immediately peaked. And although she was about to boil over, she instead took a breather and calmed herself down.

It wouldn’t do any good to get angry at him.

He had hooked himself on opioids, somehow, for some reason. And it was her fault for not paying enough attention, for not caring more for his health. Just because she was an entire universe away didn’t mean she still couldn’t be there for those she loved.

“Let’s get the family together,” she said softly.

“Okay,” he replied.