Aeneas is lost in space... Literally!

Don't forget to leave a comment if you have an idea about where the story will go from here. I'm taking a break next month, so CYOA will resume in March!

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CYOA: The Sun in Rags

By Shalion

Chapter Nineteen: Aeneas

Aeneas returned to consciousness the way one stumbles about in a dark room, looking for a light panel. His recent memories were in shambles, and it was impossible for the drake to connect the events of then to the now he was almost certain he was currently experiencing. The part of his mind that was capable of being rational reached the conclusion that he had been heavily sedated. The rest of him just went “Muah-huh??”


“Aeneas…”


The drake started awake in this weird, dim limbo in which he found himself floating in near-total disorientation. It dawned on Aeneas that his eyes were closed and that he was incapable of moving his body; it was held tightly as though with sleep paralysis, and trying to move made the drake feel as if he weighed thousands of pounds more than he actually did.


“Aeneas…”


The Voice was not coming from outside. Rather he heard it in his head! No, that was stupid. Something was tapping into the cybernetics implanted in his brain and simulating a Voice. A quick self-diagnostic confirmed the data feed, although… the patterns were quite outside of Aeneas’s personal experience, at least with Drakine technology.


“Good, you are awake. Now is the time for you to listen. There is not much time…”


Rather than simply listen, the cybernetically enhanced drake turned on a simple recording program with a thought. The stored file would allow him to revisit any part of what the Voice was telling him at any point in the future, which was fortunate because the Voice spoke at length and quickly, and about multiple matters that would affect not only the rest of his life but potentially also the lives of his entire species.


“You get all that?” the Voice asked the dumbfounded drake who was still trying to process everything. The last thing he remembered, he was being dragged out of the Hab’s sewer system by an orderly droid, ostensibly to a hospital, although it was clear at this point that far more had happened while he had been knocked out. With all of the things the Voice had just unloaded on him, Aeneas was barely even aware of the continued feeling of weightlessness and silence that surrounded him, even though he was fully awake now. “Of course you did. You’ve recorded everything,” the Voice said emphatically, “Now, you know what you need to do. The rest is up to you. I wish you the best of luck in surviving, my plump little biscuit, you.” The data stream cut off there and instantly Aeneas was released from the paralytic hold on his body. He opened his eyes, although he immediately wished that he hadn’t.


The drake was in what looked to be a plain room constructed mostly of steel with a large bay window filling most of one of the walls. Aeneas avoided looking at the window after the first glance, however, because the only thing he could see beyond the glass was a crazily spinning starfield, occasionally interrupted by the sight of a large, bright star that would fill the chamber with warm sunlight for a few moments before spinning out of view again. Only, of course, it wasn’t the world outside that was spinning, it was the room itself was, spinning freely through space… Well, that explained the weightless feeling, and why the room was filled with floating detritus, bouncing randomly off the walls too and fro. The drake drew a raspy breath even though he knew that he didn’t have to, not right now at least. The atmosphere inside the chamber was already very thin and Aeneas could hear hissing where the last dregs of air were escaping through imperfections in the chamber into the vacuum outside. If the Voice had not already intervened, it was probable that Aeneas would not have been able to wake up at all.


The fact that he was in a steel box hurtling through space that had already leaked out most of its air was terrifying to the drake on a primal level since he had grown up on a gigantic space station, but Aeneas knew that he needed to force himself to act. After all, from what the Voice had just told him, the drake would have needed to evacuate the chamber of air shortly in any case. It was only through the use of his jailbroken cybernetics that Aeneas was able to control the signals down his vagus nerve to halt the continuous impulses to breath; this was not a standard feature in the commercial version for obvious reasons. This would prevent the drake from choking and having abdominal spasms as he instinctively tried to suck down vacuum. Still, the sensation of not breathing was alarming even though the drake was aware that his body was currently operating on an alternative source of oxygen


Inside of Aeneas’s oversized body, adipose tissue was being broken down at the molecular level: carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen liberated from long chains of fatty acids, liberating large quantities of chemical energy in the process. At the current moment, the oxygen was of vital importance seeing as the fuzzy black and red drake lacked a spacesuit. The liberated oxygen was not nearly enough to sustain all of the tissues in Aeneas’s body by itself, however, the nanites were capable of utilizing some of the released energy to convert carbon dioxide back into usable oxygen. The Voice had explained that this would be necessary for the drake’s near term survival, as well as other changes to his body – facilitated by the nanites that, it was now clear, not only originated from the Voice but could also be remotely controlled by it. Exposure to vacuum by itself was not enough to cause the drake to explode or even really to break the skin, but his furry drakine hide still needed significant toughening to prevent a uniform, whole-body bruise like the solar system’s worst hickey. His eyes and other sensitive parts of his body also needed extra protection, and indeed, the nanites had already formed a diamond shell over the surfaces of his eyes, created from carbon stored inside his body, of which thankfully there was plenty of excess. In fact, there was a heck of a LOT more excess to his body than Aeneas remembered there being before his memory failed him, but drifting through space in a tumbling steel box preoccupied his thoughts a lot more than how he had managed to gain another 100 or so kilos by the feel of it while he had been unconscious. 


The drake had gained such a prodigious amount of excess mass, in fact, that Aeneas was sure that he would have been hard-pressed to even sit up unassisted let alone walk given his current fitness level, but the lack of gravity nullified the issue. In spite of everything, the drake might have taken at least a moment to appreciate his new size– however, when his nanites informed him of the rate at which he was burning through calories, and therefore his stored chonk, due to lack of access to any significant air supply, Aeneas thought that he would not be remaining at this size for very much longer anyway. In fact, unless he got at least a little bit lucky, his current fat supply would be totally used up before he managed to get back to the Hab at which point the nanites would have no other option but to resort to cannibalizing other tissues for their oxygen and energy content. 


Admittedly, Aeneas’s current situation was very upsetting to him, along with several of the things the Voice had just told him, but it was also clear he would die unless he acted quickly. The drake knew that he needed to get his shit together and act now. Every second that passed by, the Hab was getting dozens of meters more distant. Fortunately, the drake’s cybernetics were still keyed into the Hab’s radio signals and he was able to get a very good approximation of its direction without even sticking his head out of his box and looking around – which was fortunate, considering that he was already so far away that the giant space station would have been difficult or impossible to see already without the use of a telescope. The only real problem was that in space, it was not as though he could wave his flabby arms around and expect to get anywhere. He would need to propel himself in some fashion, and that required reaction mass; basically mass to throw in the direction opposite that he wished to travel. He could utilize his nanites to release gases or excess carbon from his body in order to move, or… Aeneas looked around at all of the steel of the chamber which currently shared his same momentum and location in space. With a thought, several tendrils composed of nanites began to spread outwards from the drake’s round body…


The last traces of air rushed out of the room as the drake’s army of billions of microscopic robots consumed and penetrated the steel walls of the former test chamber, replicating more of themselves in the process. Aeneas’s ears popped before his eardrums were coated in a stiff protective coating like that over his eyes. After that, there was only silence other than the sound of his own heartbeat and the occasional internal gurgling of his innards; well that was not completely accurate. Just as there were was the occasional flash of light from a gamma-ray interacting with his cornea even with his eyes shut, there was the occasional zzt, hsst, or pop sound, possibly from a cosmic ray as it flew through the auditory portion of his brain… probably best not to dwell on the exact cause in that case.


As the room deconstructed, Aeneas’s nanite swarm grew. The nanites themselves were not entirely composed of metallic atoms, but the drake had more than enough organic matter to make up a huge increase in his nanite workforce. Aeneas reflected on the new operations he was now able to utilize with his swarm, unlocked by a new library the Voice had given to him along with its message. As yet, many of the drivers in the list he’d originally found remained unidentified, and, worse, the library had deliberately code locked the rest of the unidentified drivers and functions. Aeneas knew he would need to find a way out of the new artificial restrictions, even if his nanites were vastly more useful now. He didn’t like the feel of a digital collar on his neck, even from an entity that claimed to have his own best interests in mind. He’d jailbroken his own cybernetics when he was 12 years old, so he was sure he could jailbreak these ancient nanites as well, once he put his mind to the task.


As the chamber disintegrated, too slowly for Aeneas’s nerves, he began to long for the familiarity of its confines since being exposed to open space was even more terrifying than locked in a tumbling box had been. As well, his fat flank that happened to be exposed to direct sunlight got uncomfortably warm really quickly! Managing waste heat in space would be no trivial task, but first things first, a means of propulsion.


Aeneas wanted to fire out the matter that had composed the steel chamber behind him, pushing him back towards the now distant Hab. Once his swarm had multiplied many times over and the chamber was about 50% devoured, he told his nanites to start reassembling the steel into small pellets rather than making more of themselves. The only thing he needed now was some sort of device to fire the matter at high speed. Aeneas was a software expert, not an engineer, so a high-powered rail gun was beyond his expertise despite the nanites being more than capable of building something like that out of raw atoms. He did understand at least that an electromagnet could be produced by winding copper wire around some sort of tube, so that’s just what the drake did. Fortunately, there was more than enough copper leftover from cabling in the walls of the chamber, the drake did not even have to break down and reassemble the wire; he just deconstructed the steel all around the existing wires as he made an increasingly large blob of pellets that gathered around his soft body as he floated in space, accumulating so much that it was like he was immersed in a bath of steel BB’s attracted by his own personal gravity. And while Aeneas remained excessively large, unfortunately, he wasn’t exactly on a planetary level yet. The BB’s were simply held together with nanites nesting between them.


With the crude electromagnet gun assembled, looking like nothing more than an iron pipe wrapped around many times with copper wire (which was exactly what it was), all that remained was to power the gun and to fire it in the right direction. Aeneas didn’t trust his own hand-eye coordination, so he spent several minutes writing a script that would do it for him, the calculations being pretty simple. All he needed to do was put the gun facing the opposite direction away from where he thought the Hab was and then fire at a line that passed through his center of mass; that is, his personal mass as well as his newfound bath of countless steel BB’s. Eventually, the BB’s would push him towards the Hab and his velocity would change from moving away to moving towards home. Actually rendezvousing with the Hab would be slightly more complicated—He needed to aim for where the Hab would be when he arrived, not where it was right now since both it and he were in orbit around Sol—but it would do for now. Aeneas double-checked his script and then passed it over to his nanites to fulfill the operation. Each firing of the magnet gun sent a small, but detectable shudder through the cloud of pellets around him. Aeneas, however, only frowned to himself as he considered the electrical energy his gun was drawing from his body, necessitating burning yet more of his limited fat supply to liberate its chemical energy and convert it to an electrical charge. Even with the pellet cloud blocking the intense light from the sun now that the room had been entirely consumed, Aeneas began to feel uncomfortably warm as waste heat began to accumulate from all the various activities going on inside his body. But that was just the next problem to solve while the gun and his software brought him steadily closer to home.


“Hang on Sibyl,” Aeneas thought while looking up towards the no longer spinning stars, searching for any sign of the distant hab with his crystal-covered eyes. “...and don’t do anything stupid before I get back to you…”