1 1.01
Imagine for a moment that you're suffering from a chronic disease. The little daily aches and pains that have become so familiar they barely even register, the ever-increasing lack of energy hindering your every action, the weight of the world increasing until walking a few blocks is a chore when you could have once run all day, your head aching every time you have to do things more involved than sitting in front of the telly. Then one day a new miracle pill is discovered, you take it before a night's sleep, and you wake up healthy, your old strength, vitality, and clarity returned. That was about how I felt as I woke up just then.
Normally, it takes me a good thirty minutes to fully get into gear, and copious amounts of cold water and a five-minute exercise to convince myself I won't be returning to bed for at least twelve hours. The evil fruits of my anti-coffee heresy, my sister calls it; thirty euros fewer monthly expenses and a lack of addictions is my usual retort. Not this time, though. I practically leaped out of bed fully awake, casting the sheets off with no hint of the usual sleepiness. In fact, I felt better than ever, ready to take on the world... and win!
The perversion of the universe tends towards the maximum, that was when I started noticing the more obvious discrepancies...
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"Just open, you stupid thing!"
I refrained from punching the locked door; it would be counter-productive. Mostly because the door was a sheet of solid metal, made to fit its solid metal frame, matching the solid-metal walls. And not the flimsy sheet metal of cars or post-modern decorations, but something with the thickness and solidity of a battleship. The cavernous room might be closer to a five-star hotel suite than a prison cell, but that made no difference to my inability to escape them. Four-poster bed, post-modern furniture of expertly-carved real wood, paintings and small sculptures of no artist or style I recognized, sheets and clothing of incredibly soft yet tough synthetic fiber; none of that would make a dent to the door's impenetrable material. Maybe if I had a rocket launcher...
I stalked back to the bed and sat down to think. The room belonged to someone obviously wealthy, and undeniably insane. Wealthy because, hello, royal suite dimensions and decorations. Insane because some things just... didn't make sense. For one thing, where were the lights? The suite was bright as day, yet there was no source of light whatsoever; it was as if the illumination came through the walls. For another, there were over a dozen pieces of tech I had never seen before, devices strewn haphazardly around the room whose function was a mystery. There was this foot-long, six-inches-wide crystal rectangle that looked like some sort of futuristic touch screen... if one discounted the weird hieroglyphics swimming through its surface. A language I did not recognize that was shared by most other devices in the room, including what looked like a keypad by the door. There were small plastic and metal chips - the non-edible kind - here and there with similar symbols on them. No, the writing was not ancient hieroglyphics; Chinese, Sumerian, Egyptian, Norse, Linear A; those were all fairly distinctive. Neither Cirth nor Tengwar fits either.
And yet the letters were weirdly familiar. Thirty-four of them in total, with over a dozen minor symbols. I tried some simple code-breaking algorithms on them just to have something to focus on other than the true source of the madness, and they worked. Soon enough I realized they weren't coded or another language, but someone had replaced the letters and symbols of fairly normal English with pseudo-runic weirdness. My brain firing overtime far more easily than it had in recent memory, it didn't take me long to start reading the simple labels and messages on the common household devices all over the suite.
The results were... not really surprising. The crystal rectangle was, indeed, a tablet... if a ridiculously advanced one. None of the lag, the sensitivity, or reaction issues of normal touch screens. None of the stupid apps, commercials, and usual garbage either; everything was neat, highly utilitarian without being boring or tiring. The contents were split; one-third was highly-technical stuff that seemed entirely alien yet simultaneously familiar, one third was newsfeeds, messages, and contacts, and the last third was silly entertainment. It didn't take long to stumble into a bunch of cat videos, and half an hour spent with me giggling over six- and eight-legged felines in purple, blue, pink, and green variations in any pattern imaginable. They were kinda cute.
Distracting as the cat videos and the alien yet understandable technical blueprints were, they were ultimately unable to keep me from reality... or rather the existential nightmare I'd been living since I woke up. Hands shaking even as my previous giggling over a six-legged, twin-tailed calico with glowing pink eyes still echoed, I forced myself to stand up and stare at the nearest mirror. A large, ornate piece that was more artwork than simple furniture, it dominated one of the walls and had obviously been meant for frequent use if the amounts of space-age cosmetics the room's occupant had stashed were any indication. It was large enough for me to see all of my new self, this new reality, and wonder if everything was a crazy hallucination.
I was tall for my age, though still a foot shorter than I had been. Hair longer than I remembered that reached to the small of my back, shiny black and too straight for my liking. Pale yet vibrant skin that probably saw too little sun, limbs long, soft, and gangly. I was better-looking than I had been at that age, though it probably wouldn't matter until a few years later. For the reality of my new situation, the weirdness of this nightmare was complete only after staring into the mirror.
I looked upon the face of a teenage girl I'd never seen in my life and laughed.
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Several hours must have passed since my bout of hysteria. Laughing crazily for a good fifteen minutes, then sobbing for the remaining time had left me in a foul mood but no less energy than before. I wanted to break something. Pick up one of the fragile-looking, obviously-expensive decorations and smash it against the metal walls until nothing was left. That, however, would be counter-productive, not to mention pointless. That only made me sulk some more. In such a moment of teenage moodiness, there was a mechanical trill, a sound obviously meant as a warning or bell, then the suite's heavy metal door opened and a robot walked in.
No, seriously; a six-foot-tall, shiny chrome android, with metal limbs too spindly for its cylindrical torso, six five-fingered arms, and an imitation of a humanoid face that managed to be both comical and uncanny. It looked around the chaos of the room, the clothes, electronic devices, bedsheets, and makeup kits haphazardly strewn over every square inch, then glared disapprovingly at me.
"Lady Andrim, what is this mess? Captain Andrim just informed me we'll be dropping out of Hyper in the Eriadu system in fifteen minutes! We might be having visitors! Inspectors! Oh, this is a disaster!"
I stared dumbly at the fussing droid as it went on and on and on in a mechanical female voice and tried not to laugh, cry, or have another bout of hysteria. Because however weird, alien, impossible the situation I found myself in might be, I understood the mechanical caretaker perfectly. That I was on a starship, that we would soon drop out of hyperspace, that we would be in another star system soon. A star system that had never existed in real life, and was yet vaguely familiar. I even recalled battles that had once happened on it, a couple of important people that had once lived there. Oh... my...
I was in freaking Star Wars!!!
