Chapter Text
The game had felt so real until you were brought fully back to life on Alternia as if waking up from a fever dream straight into a nightmare.
It’s confusing, waking up, like you’ve been caught in a delusion, but you quickly see Karkat’s memo, quickly put together that whatever you’ve been experiencing is real. It’s terrifying and overwhelming. You feel humiliated you ever thought you could escape this place, lost in a fantastic mirage, but it doesn’t matter anyway.
You were always made to be composed of pixels.
You are able to make out that time has passed here, (almost two sweeps) and you read up on current events immediately, but it doesn’t matter, because soon enough you’re not going to be a part of this world either. Why do you even try to cling to philosophies, to realities you aren’t to be a part of? The game was real, you know that, you know that from that one memo Karkat sent out and the responses to it. Unless that was some sort of psychotic haze as well, with your mutated pan finally blurring everything completely. But you don’t know how to cope otherwise, and you can see the duality behind how real and unreal this all becomes, so you just accept in your bloodpusher that it was. That the game was real.
The same way the fact that you are a troll is real. The same way your consciousness is real. The same way the fact you are alive is real.
It happens so quick, like the second you came back some alarm went off. You assume perhaps it was Karkat’s memo, that you were all being monitored. You don’t even get a chance to say anything to anyone. All you receive is one message from an unlikely source. The ping goes off, and it’s the last thing you see, a glance on your screen, before the new, quick nightmarish flash of Alternian cognizance, disappears too.
caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]
CA: run
The flood of connections into your pan at first is completely undecipherable to you. There are flashes. Green neon in blue dawns or the glow of your computer screen. But they happen beyond what they are; they are not in any sort of realm of language. It reminds of you trying to think while your psionics fizzle violently through your think pan. That connection itself is like a ray of light devoured by blackness. It disappears and you’re onto confusion again. Like the brief flare of fear that you’re being immutably damaged.
Sometimes you think it’s in a light blue, almost white, like some sky you saw by some beach right at morning before you fell asleep safe in someone’s arms. Then you see your recuperacoon, except that can’t be right because there are other connections tied to the idea of a recuperacoon that don’t follow, but you see the shape and the word pops into your head. Like bright fluorescent lighting. Eating shit food while being schoolfed information so basic you learnt it yourself sweeps prior. Hours and hours of coding, except that it means nothing to you. Like binary that means nothing, the same way letters blur to be meaningless. It’s all foreign and surreal. But there’s nothing to ground you. It changes and you can’t remember anything before it happens again.
Your vision floods with brilliant magenta. For some reason, it makes you ache.
YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN WITH GREAT HONOUR TO BE A HELMSMAN OF THE EMPIRE. YOU ARE UNDERGOING NECESSARY REWIRING. STAYING CALM CAN HELP THIS PROCESS. FAILURE RESULTS IN IMMEDIATE CULLING.
Fear ravages your mind, long enough for you to actually notice that it is anything at all, to gain some sort of awareness. You can’t remember the message after it fades, but you do know it’s your worst fear, and it’s beyond language once again, but the feeling stays instead of being swallowed immediately by fractured spikes of electricity. You can’t let go of your doom until you’re saturated with memories.
Some of the memories seem more distant, like perhaps they’re not truly yours but yours adjacent. But they adjust into your head as real as any of the rest. You see so much red and blue, sparks, planets and stars and your own think pan being damaged. But what you hold onto in some deep sense, is the flashes of people.
You see Aradia, and your heart swells. You can see her in every colour, throughout time and throughout weather. Messages and late day calls and her looking at you with love in her eyes before you kill her. You see her sweet face basking in the glow of the green sun with you close to her. It seems infinite, the memories you have of her, but throughout all those combinations of possibilities you see her in, there is some sort of care there that makes her feel wholly safe.
You see so many people though, so many others; you see love between people you never thought you could even care about, like Equius touching you gently after you find out Aradia has entered a kismesistude with Feferi. You see Karkat’s look of shy confusion when you grab his wrist harshly, insult him, then kiss him. And Feferi’s blood staining Kanaya and your clothing before watching Kanaya attacked too by Jack, your hands shaking, somehow without access to any powers at all. You see yourself kiss Vriska, of all people, and you see Terezi giving you tips on how to excel while blind. You see everyone you know do horrible things and everyone you know do extraordinary things, and once you realise that you also have access to seemingly unlimited resources of these memories deaths, and what happens after, your think pan floods with tales of the dream bubbles as well.
The possibilities feel infinite, but the more likely ones slot themselves into your mind as what actually seems to be real. Like how Aradia shines so brilliantly, like there’s something lost in the lives you’ve lived without her. Or how often early on, in lives or afterlives, you are drawn to Karkat. A lot of it makes sense, given the life you have lived, but not always, and you turn the memories and lives into the concepts of these people so they’re real and you’re not alone.
The thing, though, that shocks you the most is the glaring significance of Eridan Ampora.
It hurts. You don’t understand why it hurts. Shouldn’t they have the technology to make it so it’s at least not so physically painful?
Your pan is working enough again for you to realise the situation you’re in. You can’t quite process it, but that might be an emotional problem, given this is your absolute worst fear and complete horrors are going to be done to you for the rest of your life.
You’re prompted to follow simple directions, like games in your head, navigating physical space as if you’re actually there, but you’re nearly certain you’re still unconscious. You’re very good at it (it’s fucking easy), and you advance quickly, and learn the different ways to control certain elements of the environment artificially placed in your think pan. As it gets more difficult, it also expands to electrical components and names for the levels. Your job for most of it is just regulation, from temperature to speed. The one thing you notice is that all the information fed into your pan at once can practically be felt simultaneously. But there’s actually not much to the regulation, and it’s really just boring while your pan feels like it’s being fried.
The more elements that are added to the simulation, the less weight any of your thoughts have. They are simply another component, and you can ignore them. Like when they add your body sensations back, and you realise how much in pain you truly are, your arms bent out of shape, everything aching, wires deep into your flesh, it’s but another thing to regulate. You do not have to spend much time thinking of the pain unless you want to. And you don’t want to. So you process it distantly and as quickly as possible.
When you’re eventually moved onto a ship, your first thought is to crash it, and that thought immediately triggers deep electrocution that feels like intense shocking burns. It hurts so much, and you’re put out black, but when you find yourself again on a ship, the same thoughts come.
This happens forty-three times.
You learn to control your thoughts.
You think of moving asteroids, think of saving your friends, think of Eridan’s stupid fucking face this one time you kissed him in the afterlife the second he got there, just because he’d been tortured before being killed, and he was frantic and traumatised. You were his matesprit into the foreseeable future.
That time was strange. Generally, it took time for you and Eridan to find each other. It puzzles you. It’s like you were fated for one another, maybe he’d say you were fated matesprits (though often you’d just be moirails, but you remember what it’s like to kiss him, and you think yeah, matesprits). The thought of him saying that, however, makes you embarrassed to even know him, which explains why it took so long, why it took time or kismesitude or forced friendships to make the two of you see what now, to you, seems so obvious.
Sometimes you think about how he is still alive, how you want to presume they all are. Sometimes you torture yourself by thinking about how he probably just sees you as the guy he blinded in a duel, the guy who dated the girl he liked, the guy who didn’t give a fuck about him at all, including his lame black solicitations. You wonder if he’d care that you disappeared. You seem to remember him warning you, so perhaps? You also sometimes torture yourself by thinking about Aradia finding out you’re missing. Most of the time you can’t think about her though.
Sometimes you wonder if these floods of memories are real. You wish you could talk to anyone, even Vriska, about it. Is the reason you’re so focused on Eridan because his trollian was the last thing you saw before you went dark? Is your pan fabricating all of this? If Eridan found out about these thoughts, would he just mock you for them?
You wonder a lot about how much time has passed. You wonder if something bad happened that makes any of these questions frivolous. You wonder and wonder and wonder and ignore the fact that you are constantly in agony and can’t think about anything treasonous without being tortured and reset.
It’s not until you’ve been running the spaceship for an undetermined (very long) period of time, that everything goes dark suddenly.
You’re screaming when you wake.
You feel a hand against your cheek (your cheek? Your body? You thought you felt your body before, but this is different, this is your body). You’re unmistakably aware you’ve been disconnected from the ship, and it occurs to you now that no matter how much agony with electrocution they put you through, this was the torture that was enough to make you submit to anything.
You feel it all, you feel the aches of your body, you feel the fear coursing, rough adrenaline while you remain hanging up, your arms above your head, your body against a wall, and you open your eyes to see a cerulean blooded female troll, shoulder-length hair and sparkling black lips, staring right at you.
You think of Eridan, and you don’t care what he remembers of you, or whether or not all the deep affection you feel for him is misplaced and delusional; you just want him here.
“Hello, Helmsman of the Castor and Pollux Melody, nice to make your acquaintance. My name is Nalera, and I am your official proctor. What would you like me to call you?” she asks, pulling her hand away only to look at a screen to read from. You’re confused. Did you do something wrong? Did your psionics already run dry?
You don’t think you can talk, so you keep your eyes open and stare at her, confused and hurting.
“Helmsman of C.A.P. Melody, I am going to insist you give me a name to call you by,” she adds after a moment of your silence. You’re still unsure how she’s expecting you to speak, but she pulls from behind her a long baton and hits you violently with it. It’s the first time you’ve been physically attacked in a long time, and you give out a grunt, coughing. “Please answer,” she says, quiet and almost pleadingly, like it hurts her that she just hit you forcefully while you’re completely helpless.
“Binary,” you cough out, and it surprises you, the breathless word.
“Okay, Binary, today is the scheduled liftoff, and the mechanics will be very similar to the simulation you have been running, but the experience may feel much different. I’ll give you the basic rundown of the biological aspect, but you will see later today about the rest,” she says. So this has all been a simulation? You’re overwhelmed, and you can’t escape it. You can control your body, but barely, all strung up. You notice you’re in the same shirt as you were before this all started but different pants that are black and button down on the sides. When she steps back, you see a small, mostly empty room with a large lock on the door, some brooms and wires on the dark purple walls and low light, and a large rectangular stand with a switch about chest level connected to a monitor you cannot see.
“What sweep is it?” you ask, the words mangled in a lispy wheeze.
“You should have the choice to access all that basic information from the mainframe, don’t worry. It should be a lot less confusing than the simulation. I am here to explain the biological aspect, though. I am not the mechanic,” she responds. Why would she need to be a mechanic to know what sweep it is?
“I just want to know how much time has passed,” you say. She furrows her eyes at you, looking uncomfortable.
“Since you started helmsmen training, it has been just over two sweeps,” she says, before quickly changing subjects. “This,” she points the large button on the tall stand. “Reads three of your most basic emotions.” She presses it, glances at the monitor, and records something in a tablet.
“What?” you ask. “What were they?”
“Uhh..” she looks a little off-put. “Well, you care to know?” she asks.
“You’re just... just..” There’s a fucking machine connected to you that reads how you feel? Is that not needlessly invasive? You feel even more helpless and scared. “Why is that necessary? What does it say?”
“Sometimes helmsmen check out and stop responding to prompts after sweeps. I need you reactant at first, but after that, it is just your responsibility to pilot the ship,” she says.
“Why can’t I know?” you ask brokenly, barely able to even respond to her. You can tell you’re making her uncomfortable, which kind of makes up for how embarrassing it makes you feel, even if you are very scared she will start beating you.
“Would it make you feel better if I always read it out loud?” she asks, and you can tell that’s not standard protocol, and for some reason, you are filled with choking gratitude for this troll. You nod avidly.
“Yes.”
“The emotional monitor read ‘helpless, confused, pain,’” she says. “Pain means physical distress, but that is normal considering this is your first day. May I continue?” You nod. “You are kept alive biologically through wires and therefore have no necessity for basic food or digestion, however, I will need to do a physical examination and cleansing on a semi-regular basis. This switch here,” she walks over to you and points to your right on the wall out of reach. “Controls your perception. It will switch you back to the state you are in now, the biological body, without connection to the mainframe, and so forth. You can be in this state for several hours before the ship alarms me, but you also have access to your physical body as well while connected to the mainframe, so you’ll spend most of your time like that,” she explains. You never thought you’d be so excited to be connected to a ship, but you have some hope you can start filtering these sensations again like the simulation, and that seems very important. “Besides the switch here, the only other way your perception switches is if there’s a perceived threat to the ship. I would warn against being said threat,” she says.
“Will I have connection to the internet?” you ask, and the hope must be in your voice because she looks at you sadly.
“You can monitor the internet used by anyone aboard the ship, but you are strictly locked from accessing it yourself. You are free to watch everyone through the cameras as well, though, so it should be a great deal less boring than being stuck in the simulation.” You think she does a very good job putting light to the fact you are a slave being beaten and pan-damaged for an empire that hates you, and you have no chance of living any life but this. “You will also be assigned a quadrant proctor so you can provide slurry to the drones,” she adds. You’re washed over with coldness. It’s the first time you’ve been surprised by your fear this whole time. You can actually feel the nausea in your body. You want to escape.
“I.. I... someone will pail me? While I’m like this?” you ask, voice almost a whine. You’re so pathetic right now. You really thought you were done caring what happened to you.
“Yes, it is your duty to the empire. We are especially in need of more helmsmen, so you cannot be left off the hook,” she answers. You hear the hesitance in her voice. She feels bad for you. But she continues on. “They have power over whether or not to use the perception switch, and they will record your emotional response after. The goal is to have it read pity or hatred, or a secondary romantic response such as respect or care. Besides me and them, no one, besides the mechanic and the captain both whom you should not see unless there is a major problem, will have access to you in this room. There will be an option to alert me of an issue once you get connected,” she plows on. She looks at her tablet. “Alright, I need to do a quick physical examination, and then we’re good to go for take-off. Nice to meet you, Binary,” she beams. You don’t respond.
She puts the tablet in her backpack before she puts her hands on you, and it’s worse than the helplessness of being in the simulation, policed and tortured for your own thoughts, to have her touching you, lifting up your shirt and examining you. You can tell she makes it as quick and utilitarian as possible before she touches the perception switch.
You find great respite in simply becoming a ship.