Chapter 0003

“Hey you, with the moves!” shouted a crewmember. “Get yourself in a boat already! We don’t have the time for any of this!”

Eva nodded before she dashed over to a different lifeboat and ducked inside. The lifeboat was long and thin, like a sausage. And also extremely cramped. There was a gangway down the middle that led straight to the pilot’s chair, which was currently empty.

There were seats on both the left and right of the gangway, in pairs and in three rows. So basically, six seats on each side. The seats themselves were bucket-like, and had six-point harnesses that kept the passengers strapped in tight.

She swiftly made her way past the anxious passengers and secured herself the only remaining seat up front.

Next to her was a teenaged Asian girl who was small and slender. She also had black hair like Eva, but hers was long and straight rather than shoulder-length and tousled. More importantly, she was also wearing the same pressure suit, which made Eva wonder if she was also a player.

“Hey, um, sorry to bother you,” she said. “But do you… did you play Bellum Aeterna?”

The girl’s eyes widened, then she gave a short nod. When she replied, there was a light accent to her voice.

“Nn, I did,” she said.

“Were you a pilot, too?” Eva asked.

But the girl shook her head.

“I chose the Engineer class,” she replied. “Although I can pilot too. I am simply not very good at it. No, that is wrong. I am competent enough.”

“Lemme ask you something,” Eva said in more hushed tones. “Do you think we’re in Bellum now? Like, in the game itself?”

The girl leaned back as she thought about it for a moment.

“Now that you mention it, this does feel familiar,” she replied. “It is all very similar, however nothing is identical.”

“Wait. What’cha mean, not identical?”

“For one thing, respawning was mostly a cutscene, neh? We would watch a video of us stepping out of the regeneration chamber, which looked very different, and then would go into the processing chamber. From there, we would claim our insured loadouts, pay insurance premiums, then re-equip ourselves.

“Here, we respawned directly inside of a regeneration capsule, which was never in Bellum Aeterna.”

Eva realized that the girl was right. There were many things that were the same as the game, such as the name of the galactic nation they were in - the Sol Federation. But most other things were completely different. The lifeboat, for example. Escape pods in Bellum were single-seaters. But the one they were in now was more like a bus.

A sausage-shaped space bus.

“Observe the crew members,” the girl continued. “Every single one has been different: age, size, skin color, hair, fitness level. Even their personalities are different and varied. Their uniforms and pressure suits are well-worn and even stained. They have loose threads or have badly fitted straps.

“Some even wear jewelry, or have other… um, what is the word? Accouterments? Accessories. In other words, no-one appears to be cut-and-paste NPCs.”

As the girl continued to lay out her observation, Eva realized that she had taken her new life for granted. Just because some things reminded her of Bellum Aeterna, she automatically assumed that she had woken up in that universe. But now she wasn’t quite so sure.

If this isn’t Bellum, then where the hell did we end up?

“Oh! By the way, I’m Eva,” she said.

“My name is Miko,” the girl replied. “It is good to meet you.”

Eva smiled widely - her first friend!

But before they could chat any further, another heavy shell struck the station. This time it was much louder, and they all felt the shockwave course through their bodies sharply. It was clear that the point of impact was closer than ever before.

People have always carried a massive fear of death, and having red-hot slabs of metal propelled at them had a tendency to magnify that fear.

“Let’s get this going!” yelled a frightened passenger. “Not trying to die out in the middle of space!”

“S-sorry!” yelled a crewmember. “We’re doing our best!”

The crewmember who replied dashed into the lifeboat and ran down to the pilot’s seat. He awkwardly strapped in and adjusted his posture and position a couple of times, unsure if he was doing it correctly. He then unstrapped himself, then reapplied his harnesses.

It was clear from his demeanor that he was incredibly inexperienced, and he even fumbled a little as he powered on the lifeboat.

A number of screens and multifunction displays immediately blinked into life in front of him - each one reported all manner of data as the ship’s systems booted up.

It dawned on Eva that unlike Bellum, or really most other sci-fi shows and movies she had watched, this lifeboat didn’t have a transparent canopy. Instead, it was completely enclosed, and those screens displayed live feeds of what was outside.

She leaned over to Miko with a questioning look on her face.

“Hey, did Bellum ever have ships like this?” she asked. “No windows, I mean. I remember every ship I flew had huge windows on ‘em.”

But Miko shook her head.

“None that I personally saw,” the girl replied. “This makes so much more sense from an engineering standpoint. Glass, or even transparent metal would be a weak point in any ship. It does not matter how much armor the body has - all anyone has to do is target the pilot and defeat the ship. This design mimics that of a submarine, which perhaps is what spaceships should be like.

“The ones from our fiction are designed to be flashy and interesting, not effective or practical.”

Eva glanced over at the would-be pilot, and sighed as he flailed at his numerous displays. He seemed utterly confused as to what to do next. As though her thoughts were being mirrored by the other passengers, one of them yelled out.

“What the hell are you doing? Why’re we still docked? Get us out of here already!”

The yelling freaked out the already panicked crewmember, who began to hyperventilate and began to hit all sorts of buttons and controls wantonly. As though that would help. Audible errors erupted from the displays, accompanied by the crewmember’s frenzied curses.

Eva unbuckled herself, leaned forward halfway into the pilot’s personal space, and slapped him. It was more than enough to bring him back to his senses, at least for a moment.

“Get out,” she said.

The crewmember nodded, unbuckled himself, then hopped out of the seat. He then got into Eva’s old seat even as Eva slipped into the pilot’s seat. His hands were shaking even as he fastened his harness together.

In fact, he was so nervous that Miko edged away from him, afraid to catch his anxiety.

Instead, she focused on Eva, and wowed at how much she contrasted the clearly green pilot. She fastened her harness as though she had done it a million times before. Then she went through the screens and MFDs, and configured them to exactly how she wanted it - a clean mix of pure sensor readouts alongside live feeds of their surroundings.

And with the flick of a few controls, powered up the lifeboat’s thrusters.

“This isn’t exactly difficult,” she said. “Dunno how you kept bungling this up.”

“I-I’m new, alright?!” said the crewmember. “Literally never flown anything like this before! And in an emergency! Way different from the training holos!”

Eva frowned and glanced down at her controls. Sure, they were a little bit different from what she was used to in the VR pod, but not that much more.

She grasped the yoke in front of her with both hands firmly and pushed it forward.

At the same time, one of the frightened passengers yelled, “Can we please get the hell outtaaaaaaaaahhhHHHH!”

Before he could finish his sentence, Eva engaged the lifeboat’s single-shot thrusters and pushed them to the absolute maximum. The lifeboat itself shot out of the ejection tube with blinding speed and increasing velocity.

Everyone inside was pressed into their seats by the sheer force of acceleration, more and more as the seconds ticked by.

Eva herself had only ever experienced these kinds of g-forces from those spinning rides at carnivals and fairs. They usually boasted up to 3 G’s - three times Earth’s gravitational force.

Old memories filled her, of when she was much younger. Back then, whenever a carnival ever came to her town, she made sure to go. Or at least, she made sure to plead with her grandparents to take her. And every time they went, she went on those spinning rides.

She absolutely loved getting in them. The sheer thrill as her body was pressed up against the wall was nothing else she had ever experienced in her life.

In fact, she rode in it so much that she eventually became used to those 3 G’s. At first, she could barely lift a hand. But by the hundredth time, she was able to sit up and grin. It was hard work getting to that point but it was well worth the effort.

She remembered the very first time she sat up and looked around. All the other kids had wide eyes as their faces were plastered back - they couldn’t believe that she could do something like that at all.

Those memories all wove through her, even as the acceleration pushed their bodies with 7.6 G’s. And although almost everyone behind her were almost literally pressed flat into the heavily cushioned seats, Eva found that she could more easily resist it.

Perhaps it was her body’s newfound resilience. Perhaps it was her ‘training’ from way back when. Perhaps it was a combination of both.

No matter what, she realized that she was having the absolute time of her life. Her heart beat heavily in her chest as she realized that it was one thing to fly a ship in the comfort of a VR pod, and a completely different thing to actually fly one in real life.

She could feel her blood pool to her back as it was pushed by gravitational forces.

While she enjoyed the thrill of their escape, the single-shot thrusters sputtered out, empty of their fuel. Without the constant energies increasing their acceleration, the lifeboat quickly hit terminal velocity, and the G-forces that wracked their bodies began to fade.

Eva then activated the boat’s retro thrusters and began their slow deceleration down to a more manageable speed.

Each of them then felt as g-forces pushed at them from behind, though their deceleration was slow enough that their bodies could easily cope.

Some passengers exhaled audibly, and relief was plastered on their faces.

Eva noted that numerous blips from the other lifeboats appeared on her displays, as picked up by the boat’s interconnected sensors. She began to maneuver their boat over towards them, even as they slowed further and further.

She wowed as she did so as she was completely taken by the sight of space all around them. She quickly flipped all her screens to display live feeds from the exterior, and enjoyed an expansive, wide-angle view of open space.

Out there, brilliant star clusters shone amidst luminous nebulae and violent pulsars, which kept her awed and humbled at the sight alone. Out there, she felt small in an otherwise infinite and beautiful galaxy. A part of her was certain that she might never get to see all of it in her lifetime.

Not that she wasn’t going to try.

There it is, she thought to herself. One vast wilderness like never before. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Everything I could ever want is out there, ripe for the taking. My old life is dead. Long live my new one.