Integral by Julie Steimle (ready player one ebook .txt) 📖

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“How long is a while?” Tacy looked back at Marka more sharply.

Marka merely gave that tired smile and said, “Doesn’t matter. You’re awake. That’s all that counts.”

“Can you step out?” Larke asked, reaching towards the gel.

Immediately a ripple of energy from inside the interface jolted across and connected with his hand with a shock, sending sparks. Larke drew back his hand, cradling it.

Tacy gently shook her head as the gel quivered. “I can only move a bit. How long have I been asleep, really?”

Marka lowered her head and stared at her feet, her lip trembling.

“Years,” Larke said.

Looking right at him, Tacy frowned. “Years? How many?”

He ignored the question. “Once the integration was finished, you should have been able to climb in and out at will. Are you sure you can’t get out?”

Tacy cast him a glare for avoiding the question while she wriggled in the gel to see for certain. It still clung to her body as if attached to her with fibrous cords growing out from her skin. When she tried to pull against it a searing sensation ran up her flesh, threatening to tear long cracks down to her bone. Letting out along sigh and settling back into the goo, Tacy shook her head. “No. I can’t.”

He frowned. “Then the integration is not complete. Tacy, I’m sorry.”

“It’s not complete? After how many years?” Tacy’s throat choked with saliva. “How long have I been out?”

His frown deepened. “Eleven years.”

Marka sobbed. “We thought you were dead at first. Then Larke found your vital stats on the monitor. It also marks integration, but it said you were already complete—only you didn’t wake up.”

“Eleven years?” Tacy whispered aloud, not even sure she had heard it.

Larke nodded. “I’m sorry for making you do it.”

Tacy lifted her eyes to his, feeling strangely supported in the gel despite standing in a cabinet for eleven years. “But did I do anything?”

Immediately both Larke and Marka nodded their heads as vigorously as dashboard dolls.

“Are you kidding?” Marka’s eyes flashed with a great deal of pride as a grin spread across her face. “As soon as we launched out from the bay you practically took over. Those Gardo ships had nothing on us.”

“You did maneuvers that neither of us had ever seen,” Larke said, smiling also.

Tacy stared. “Me? But I was aslee—”

“Your brain was in the computer. You may have been unconscious to the ship’s cabin, but you were flying the ship,” Larke said.

“And took us all the way out here,” said Marka.

“And where is here?” Tacy looked around at what she could see in the cockpit and hallway. She could barely even bend her neck to look into the pilot’s seats. The threads from her scalp pinched.

Marka winced. “We don’t—”

“Momma! Cobie took my video game, and he won’t give it back!” A boy perhaps barely nine in age ran from the depths of the other part of the ship and grabbed Marka’s shirt hem with a vigorous tug. He was wearing an under shirt to one of their cadet uniforms with nothing else to cover him, barefoot on the metal grate floor.

“Momma?” Tacy stared at Marka and then Larke, who suddenly blushed.

“She talked!” Seeming to fly, the boy jumped behind Marka, now clinging to the back of her ratty pants.

“Dan, that’s Aunt Tacy,” Marka said, trying to draw him forward. But her efforts were fruitless unless she also wanted to tear also the back of her pants just to pull her child forward.

“Be polite and say hello to Tacy,” Larke said with a fatherly look.

Tacy just blinked at the boy who stared straight back up at her with horrified blue eyes. Then she closed her eyes. “He doesn’t have to.”

“But Tacy—”

“He sees me as part of the machine.”

Tacy then blinked. Her eyes suddenly dilated again as somewhere in the back of her head she saw something else entirely from where she stood. The cabin itself faded away from her sight like a fog, a sharper more demanding image coming to her mind. She said aloud, “We are approaching a spherical structure with a clear dome. It glows.”

“The view screen, Marka! Quick!” Lark’s voice seemed to echo from somewhere else.

“Right on it!” Marka’s voice answered, going distant also as if entering a tunnel.

No longer feeling herself inside the cabin, Tacy turned and looked in front of herself, feeling her body floating as if she were alone in space. In front of her, Tacy could see what they came upon, an image that also showed on the manual pilot’s screen; a large glistening space station that rotated like a giant top among a speckle of stars in the vastness of eternal blackness. The spherical structure’s bottom scooped round like a bowl. The top of the rotating structure looked more like a glass ceiling to an open-air stadium for baseball games they used to go to when they were little. She could even see in. It scooped down like a stadium with levels all the way down to a broad open center. Tacy just stare at it, wondering what it was, wondering where she was.

“Oh crap!” Larke’s voice echoed from somewhere else. “We’re on the edge of Gardo territory.”

“We have to move fast.” Marka responded to him, her voice sounding much more mature than Tacy remembered. Their voices were like all those adults that trained them in the flight school back home.

“Tacy? Are you still with us?” Larke shouted out.

Tacy tried to respond with her voice, still staring at the space around her as if she were just swimming in it, but somehow her answer came out into the computer on the screen first. “Yes. I’m here.”

“We need a quick escape!” Larke called to her while also typing it in as if he could not reach her anymore through her ears.

“To where?” Tacy murmured as her words relayed back with a flash of electrons on the screen.

Tacy heard the child her sister had been talking to just a moment before gasp. “Dad! She’s sinking back into the gel!”

Larke did not seem to hear him. “Back into our territory, please! And fast!”

Back home and fast. Tacy could feel the energy swelling over her again as she turned the ship in the void of space that she could see all around her as if she were not lodged in a compartment filled with bioelectric gel. Once more the world immediately around her spun into nothing but blackness and flashes of light.

*

It was a deep breath.

Then another.

She could feel her chest rising and falling.

Tacy opened her eyes expecting to see the cabin wall in front of her and perhaps one of Marka’s boys running around. She had had visions of them, blinks and flashes of their motions around her.
Occasionally, as if in a dream, she saw Larke and Marka talking to her, both looking at her face with worry that she would never be able to speak to them again. Larke often told her how sorry he was for forcing her into the gel. Now, as Tacy pulled forward from the gel, she heard an irregular melodic hum. In front of her face was a dark metal sheet.

The door was closed.

Her hands pulled from the gel. It was easy, as if the gel itself had shrunk somehow. Pressing her palms against the sheet in front of her nose, feeling for a latch on the inside (hoping for one on the inside at least) Tacy heard the catch detach. The hummed tune she had heard from outside the door became clearer, then switched into a childlike song.

Must feed the Tacy or the ship won’t run.
Must feed the Tacy or the ship won’t run.
And what will we do if the ship won’t run?
Don’t wanna know when the day is done.

Tacy drew in a breath, feeling the door slide as she pushed it open. She peered out through the small gap, breathing in the fresh air that flowed in from the hall. It was even fresher than normal.

Striding past the crack in the door with a hop in his step, Tacy saw a man dressed in what looked like a bright orange repair suit carrying a shiny stainless steel canister in his hands. He was whistling to himself that same tune as before.

Quietly sliding the door open further aside, Tacy lowered one leg to the floor taking care not to make a noise. The drop looked a good ways below from where she had been standing in the goo, the same height Larke had to heave her over. After all that time, and she had not gotten even an inch taller? Tacy frowned, wiping the residue of the gel off the back of her neck as she pulled herself entirely from it. She glanced back at the tall compartment watching dull surges in the gel quiver with filmy ripples of light as she detached herself completely, the goo shriveling against the walls like popped bubblegum; then very gently she slid the door shut.

“Hey! Cadet, what are you doing in here?”

Tacy turned. There in front of her, the man in the orange jumper stood in the hall just next to the manual pilot’s cabin holding the lid to an open canister in his hand. His eyes fixed on her face, almost immediately going wide. He suddenly seemed to choke.

“Are you Dan?” Tacy asked, surprised to find her own throat not dry from disuse.

He still stared.

“Cobie?” Tacy tilted her head and looked around the hall to see in the cockpit if Marka was there. The cockpit looked desolate.

The man shook his head slowly.

Tacy blinked then looked around at the rather clean and strangely shiny metal works inside the ship once more. The metal had been getting quite tarnished the last time she recalled opening her eyes. “Where are Marka and Larke?”

He swallowed, his hand shaking as he still clutched the canister lid. “You’re Tacy, aren’t you?”

Tacy retreated from him. “Where are Marka and Larke?”

The man turned slightly put the lid back onto the canister. “You’re asking about Marka Jensen and Larke McCain the ship thieves, aren’t you?”

“Ship thieves?” Tacy’s mind raced. She had taken them back into their space as Larke asked, but to what? They had stolen the experimental ship; now they would be executed as traitors—or worse, they were already dead.

Tacy covered her mouth with her hands when she thought it. She killed them. “No!”

Spinning to the right Tacy, rushed to where she saw light, hoping it was a way out. The open hatch was where she remembered it, the stairway extended as if they had never gone in and shut it behind them when they stole the ship. Slipping as she ran, Tacy grabbed the edge of the doorway to brace herself as she went feet first out the door and over the steps into the open hangar, leaving green drips every where she made contact. She heard shouts after her, but Tacy did not look back. The slap-slap of her bare feet against the concrete hangar floor echoed in huge open space as she