Psycher Chronicles

Chapter 39

Status Change

(Misha Tulley)

The past two weeks were rather chaotic for everyone around the world, not just the residents of Jackson West Virginia. As the solar flare that ripped through the planet and destroyed, disabled, or deactivated all electronic devices was still being dealt with.

Misha thought that right about now would be a good time to pose the idea of crystalline power generators, they were more efficient, more resilient, and most importantly they would be mostly immune to the greater communications of the noble spacefaring races.

Hidden amongst the chaos that was the world collectively being thrown back into the Victorian Era of this planet, if only for a few days. Still it proved that the planet was not resilient enough to withstand true solar powered communications.

Bright light.

Worst of all was the fact that in her room, immediately after the power went out initially, Misha had seen the signs she had been hoping for. A simple crystalline receiver that to anyone not familiar with Psycher technology would assume was little more than a crystal being held in place by invisible plastic spikes.

Misha did have the plastic spikes in place, but that was to keep everyone else from realizing that the crystal would actually float freely if not acted upon by external forces.

For now, the crystal just glowed brightly with the traces of a stored message deep within.

When she first tried to access the message, she was flat out refused entry. For a time, she wondered if she had somehow created the crystal structure incorrectly. She was after all a maintainer of equipment and not a developer or communications expert, as would be more familiar with designing the message relay system.

However, being a lead engineer of a section, it became routine to know how the wiring of the communication crystals worked, and most importantly how to fix them to relay messages to the command deck promptly. As such, while she had never been given express permission to learn how to fix the communication nodes, it was something she was very familiar with by this point.

That was why she was fairly positive that she had created the crystal relay and collection system properly. Especially as she got a very unique message.

Access Denied.

Of course, the message was actually depicted in Psycher Runes, and formed clearly on the surface of the crystal in glowing brilliance. There was even the section where Misha was to enter in her fleet credentials. She did, but each time she was met with the same message.

Access Denied.

A day after receiving such a message, Misha began changing tactics, cycling through the known login prompts of the others from first her section. She started high, and then worked her way down the line, until she got to Ulu-thin-lu-Mo-Sar-in-Nu’s codes. He was a Psycher who went missing the mission before her final death, for whatever reason his codes were still seen as valid. He was also the head cook for the maintainer’s dining hall.

As the head maintainer, Ulu-thin-lu-Mo-Sar-in-Nu often relied on Misha to fix his problems. Technically he should have been maintained by another group, but there was always a weird dichotomy between the sections. One that only seemed to make more and more sense as to why, now.

Only upon using Ulu-thin-lu-Mo-Sar-in-Nu’s codes was Misha finally able to see the message being sent by the Matriarch.

Access Granted.

With that granting of permissions, Misha was able to see the message to the fleet. That was when she saw the universal release code.

Seeing the code, Misha realized that with this, her last few restraints to the fleet would be removed.

For a few moments she just sat there in quiet contemplation and meditation. For millennia she had been bound to the greater will of the fleet, but was that truly a bad thing? Yes, she had been pigeonholed into one position, but she had done exceptionally well with that position, and been rewarded for her efforts. Or so she had thought.

Yet, once she took the release code, and applied it to her mental psyche, she felt parts of her mind unravel. As the unwrapping began, she almost felt naked, as she felt her mind able to open up and stretch. Only now realizing that she had restraints set in place.

Restraints that forced her to devote herself only towards the improved maintenance of the Psycher fleet. They also tried to slow down her innovative thoughts, at least that was what Misha internally classified the next set of codes that were released. For a moment she wondered why such commands were presented, then she remembered countless meetings about needing to work with what we had, and to not focus on new innovations.

There were also a few times when she overhead the thoughts of others complaining about how the maintenance workers were trying to rise above their station.

With everything being for the fleet, Misha was often able to disregard these thoughts as they were not pertinent to her or her crew’s role in the fleet.

Everything had been perfect, right? At least that was what Misha thought, now it almost frightened her the fact that she couldn’t see how bad everything was for her, compared to the others of the fleet. She had been forced to eat in the maintenance dining room, which was easily the worst one of the fleet. Only now, with her mental restraints being removed, did she truly begin to understand something.

This same fact was taught to her in the history of the world she was currently residing in, as well. Namely that she was at best a second-class citizen and at worst, she was what some might consider a lesser being among the ship’s occupants.

Silence.

Now that the restraints had been lifted and Misha was finally able to make certain connections in logic that were always denied her, she began to think and prioritize different objectives.

Her last orders from the Matriarch had been to continue to fight against the Bakshee, but they were no more compelling to her now than those of her body’s biological mother. Yes, she would listen to them and likely try to follow them so long as they were reasonable and made sense. But the first time they seemed to be lacking in consistency or relevance to her current goals, she would dismiss them entirely.

Logically, the command after being set free made no sense.

This was what Misha was pondering when she realized that there was still a larger data component to the crystal, implying that there was a rather large data source within the code that was sent.

Looking at the coding Misha tried to access it, but realized that by trying to access it all at once, she would likely break the weak repository crystal that she had created. While the crystal was large enough to capture the transmission burst, it was not robust enough to display all the information that would be pertinent to understanding the device.

Mentally, Misha saw the data set as a giant puzzle, one that could be moved and maneuvered slightly, in order to reveal a portion of data. With that, she first tested things she knew for a fact, however, the details she gained began to cause her to question everything.

Ship Maintenance Diagram – Layout

Commander’s quarters adjacent to the Command deck.

Communication, Combatants, and researchers quarters adjacent to the mid-decks.

Maintenance bays, engine rooms, and degraded dining areas at the lower sections of the fleet.

Only after having the ship’s layout displayed graphically did Misha begin to notice a few things. Things that she took for granted as the obvious while she was on the fleet, but now all seemed to be glaring in bias against the maintainers. First of all, no sleep facilities were needed, instead what could have been sleep rooms were converted into resurrection chambers. While Misha had glad at the time that she was afforded the luxury of resurrection, she now saw it in a different light, that she was designed to die, resurrect, work herself to death, and resurrect once more.

Mentally, Misha had been at least partially aware of the other decks and that members were granted quarters. Only now, seeing the disparity in accommodations did the true existence of her status in the fleet begin to hit her.

Calm.

Misha found herself trying to take advantage of the spiritual calming techniques that all Psychers were taught, this helped her many times regain composure and continue to press on despite how bad situations became.

Now Misha used those same trainings that helped her adapt to wartime conditions and used them to help her slow down her racing mind and begin to compartmentalize what had happened.

She had been brainwashed, that much was clear. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that everyone had been brainwashed by the matriarch. The Matriarch had captains that were granted a portion of her benevolence and authority, that authority was then used to run the different ships of the fleet as efficiently as possible. At least that was what Misha had always expected to be the case, but now she could not truly comprehend what it had all meant.

Pausing for a moment, Misha gathered herself, took a deep breath and began looking at the statuses for those people around her. These were the people that she worked with tirelessly for centuries, building a reputation with each, so they could carry out their work as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The first one she searched for was her second in command.

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Name: Ulu-No-Ma-Sak-Fu

Current Status: Deceased

Position: Maintainer

Classification: Lesser Evolved Species (Expendable)

Seeing the data’s recollection of her second in command, Misha then decided to see what the status of the chef that was actually allowed to access this data was given.

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Name: Ulu-thin-lu-Mo-Sar-in-Nu

Current Status: Alive (Logged in) – Just updated from deceased

Position: Chef for Lesser Evolved Species

Classification: Middle Evolved (Upgradable)

Seeing that message, Misha realized why she had been denied access to the data and the codes. At least she thought she knew. But to have the restraints removed from her mind so she could begin to truly understand the bias that had surrounded the fleet and operations, it made her sick.

To her, she had never been more than a useful tool who was capable of making it so the commanders of her ship could go out, expand the territory of the Psycher, while always remaining onboard the vessels.

At the time she had been happy with the arrangement as she and the others often felt apprehension about leaving the ship, or their well-maintained maintenance areas. Yet now that the layers of coding directly into her mind were being released, and she could mentally feel the areas where these commands once resided, she wondered how much of her xenophobia was natural and how much was produced by constant reinforcement from her indoctrinations.

Then she had probably the most heretical of all thoughts. Maybe the Bakshee were right in their mistrust of the Psychers?

Just having the thought caused her to flinch as if she were punched. As she paused, she realized that this was often where she would inadvertently feel an electrical shock telling her she was wrong, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, she only found yet more validation that her mental conditioning was not meant to make her the strongest version of herself, but the strongest version of herself that would work tirelessly for the fleet. With that distinction in mind, Misha felt something rattle loose in her mind. Or maybe it was just her mind slowly beginning to expand into areas that had been forbidden for centuries.

Then finally, she realized that she needed to do the most heretical thing of all, namely she needed to find out truly what the fleet thought of her. She had done so for her second in command, but that was acceptable as he was a subordinate. One was never supposed to search their own status in the fleet. At least that was what the lingering commands in her mind told her.

She felt those commands, commands that had been burned into her mind and body with lifetimes of negative reinforcements, and then decided to push on.

Then taking a deep breath, Misha stilled her mind, as she prepared for what she would do next. Then not feeling any signs of retaliation, she relaxed a little as she entered her own name into the dataset to see what the fleet actually thought about her all this time.

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