Chapter 5

Randomization

In an instant everything rushed back to normal, and the view screen displayed the vast emptiness of space, dotted with millions of stars. Jessica was panting hard, and had her hand up against her chest. When she realized Jake and I were staring at her, she abruptly straightened up.

“What? Neither of you thought that felt weird?!”

Jake shrugged, and nearly laughed at Jessica’s new complexion.

“Fine, where are we?” she asked.

He turned back to the control panel, and pulled up a series of maps. “Looks like we’re still in human space…somewhere on the outer rim, near alien space. But the good news is that we’re in orbit of one of our colonies!”

I frowned, and continued to look out the view screen. Jessica looked at me curiously.

“What is it, Chris?”

“If we’re in orbit of a colony…then where is it?”

Jessica looked out the view screen too and frowned. As if an answer to our question, the ship rocked violently, and the feeling of another body of gravity took over. Jake started fumbling around with the controls.

“Jake; don’t tell me that—”

“—we’re being pulled into the planet!”

I grumbled. “That’s what I didn’t want you to tell me!”

Jessica held onto her seat, and the view screen started to fill with an orange glow as the outer hull of the ship heated up from the planet’s atmosphere. Jake continued to look over the controls frantically.

“Jake, get us back in orbit!”

“I’m trying!”

Then it hit me. He was still learning how to fly this bird. He didn’t know how to use emergency thrusters. Out of instinct, I looked down at the controls on my Captain’s chair, and found a series of directional buttons. I pushed one, and the three of us were thrown back against our chairs. The thrusters had come to life, and we were now shooting straight back into space.

A klaxon started going off, and the thrusters died down. We all breathed, and Jake slid off his seat onto the floor. An image displayed on the viewer, which was a line of code.

Stabilizers normalized; orbital pattern established.

“Okay Jake, now we’re in orbit.”

Jake crawled back into his seat, and pushed a button on his controls. A new image dominated the screen, which was a view of the planet. Below was a barren wasteland, not unlike Mars.

“Jake; are you saying this is a human colony?” I said.

He frowned to, but nodded. “Yep: oxygen, water, some plant life, and apparently a population of five hundred million.”

Those might be what the computer were telling him, but I couldn’t see any water or plant life. Who knew if there was really Oxygen, and if there were really that many people down there, then how come they hadn’t said anything about our sudden appearance?

“Can we land this thing?”

Jake shook his head quickly. “Are you kidding? How am I supposed to land this piece of junk?”

“Hey!” Jessica said. “This is our piece of junk, mind you!”

Jake rolled his eyes.

“Well, if we can’t land, then how do you suggest we get down there?”

He shrugged again. “Transport down?”

Jessica’s eyes lit up. “Why didn’t we think of that before?!”

“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “Let’s go to the transporter.”

We all left the bridge, and made our way through the ship. At first we passed three spare rooms outside the bridge, which I assumed we would be using while staying aboard the ship. There was a lot of empty space, though, devoted mainly I guess for soldiers stationed onboard. We could hold an entire army on board if we had one.

Finally we came down to Level 2, and found a transporter room. I was surprised, actually. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, but there it was. It was basically a series of pads, a control station, and some funky equipment in the background.

“Okay genius”, I said contemptuously to Jake, “where do we transport to?”

Jake thought for a moment, but Jessica came to his rescue. “Obviously we transport down to the human radio signal.”

She smiled at me mischievously, and suddenly I was greeted by those deep green eyes. I blushed, and she noticed. She turned away quickly, but couldn’t help but momentarily glance back at me.

“Duh! Honestly, Chris.” Jake replied. “I don’t know how you played this game without us.”

He walked over to the control panel, frowned, but then smiled again. A few moments later we were all standing on the pad. There was a bright, blue glow, and we were wisped away from the ship.

It was an interesting sensation. Seeing as how we were inside the computer, it wasn’t as if we had moved from one place to another, as much as that the area we were in shifted in a bright flash of light from one place to another.

The three of us appeared on a desolate landscape. There was definitely Oxygen, because I took a deep breath as soon as we appeared. There was even a light wind, blowing across the barren earth. While it was mostly hills and plains, there were some mountains in one direction, and series of canyons in another. Straight ahead of us was a large metal structure that looked like some sort of construction facility.

“Chris! Look!”

Jessica was pointing to a slumped over figure lying nearby. I rushed over quickly, and looked down at the un-mistakable person. It was my Dad’s avatar, and he had several plasma scorches across his body. I bent down, and quickly scanned the body for anything of importance. Jessica knelt down too, but Jake remained standing. He looked around suspiciously, and pulled out his battle rifle.

“Guys…are you sure we should be out here?” he asked nervously.

We completely ignored him, and I continued to fumble around.

“What are we looking for?” Jessica asked.

“I don’t know…clues; something that’ll tell us where he is.”

It was then that I stumbled upon something in his pocket. I immediately recognized it as the same kind of controller the scientists had given me. Now this was what I was looking for. Perhaps it would give some kind of clue.

“It looks just like our controller,” Jessica said.

“Yeah, except that it was his. Maybe it’ll know where exactly he went.”

I turned it on, and got the same kind of menu as on me. The screen was covered with dirt, and looked a little beat up, but there was still nothing different.

“Guys, I have a really bad feeling about this… Let’s just go back to the ship, and we can look at it there.”

We continued to ignore him, and I looked at the various options: stuff such as destination vector, personal options, situation settings, etc. Then I saw something very peculiar; Current Location positioning unit. I pushed a button, half expecting it to take us right to where he was. Instead, a little map popped up, showing an overhead of the surrounding area, zeroing in right where his avatar lay. It also showed three friendlies standing next to him; us.

“Oh crap… Guys, we are so getting out of here!”

“Jake, what is it—?!”

Jessica and I both looked up, and gasped. A momentous army of unknown alien forces was coming up over a distant hill, and charging in our direction.

“Time to go!”

Jessica and I both jumped up and followed Jake as he ran towards the towering abandoned structure. While the aliens were still thousands of yards off, I could hear the thundering of their footsteps. We were starting to grow short of breath, and Jessica was panting hard.

Panting? Holy cow, this stuff did feel real. We were suffering from fatigue, and we weren’t even running.

Several plasma bursts singed the ground right behind us, and one blast even burnt the ground off to the right and in front of us. Jessica yelped, but kept running. We finally reached the structure, and began climbing the series of metal staircases that wound around the outside and inside. We made it up three floors before nearly passing out. Several more plasma bursts melted away at the metal, and we took off running again.

The structure was at least twenty stories tall, and at ten floors up the aliens had reached the structure. Instead of taking the stairs, they just latched on and climbed up like insects. Now that I good view of them, I could see that that’s exactly what they looked like. We were running from giant bugs with guns.

The good news was that because now their massive army was climbing up the side of the structure they couldn’t fire their plasma weapons at us. The bad news was that they were gaining on us, and we were out of floors to run up. On the top floor we looked down at the massive army surrounding us. They had finally climbed up half way, and there were still plenty of them on the ground to keep climbing up.

“What do we do?!” Jessica said frantically.

“Let’s blow something up!” Jake unclipped two grenades, and threw them over the side simultaneously. The first one fell into the center of the army on the ground, and managed to take out about twenty of the twenty thousand. Great…

The second one bounced down the side of the building and exploded somewhere on the way down. The building shifted violently, and Jessica lost her balance.

As the building swayed slightly in one direction, she too fell towards that way, and nearly went over the edge. I quickly grabbed her hand, and tried to pull her back.

“Chris! Don’t let go of me!” She screamed. From this point of view I realized that the grenade had done some good, in that most of the aliens had been knocked off when the building rocked.

I wrapped my second hand around her body, and used all my strength to pull her back up. My avatar must have been strong, because I pulled her up fairly easy, and then helped her away from the edge. As soon as we were on safer ground she pulled me into a bear hug embrace.

“I almost died!”

I patted her back, and was suddenly lost in a trance. Another theory was proven, and that was that I would indeed be able to smell things on the game. I could smell her, and it was strangely intoxicating. I don’t know how long we held each other, but we were eventually broken up when the building shook again.

“We need to get out of here NOW!” Jake shouted, looking over the edge.

I looked over too, and realized the problem. The aliens were trying to climb back up, but the building was placing too much stress on that damaged sections. If anymore got on, then it was likely the whole thing would come crashing down.

“How do we get back to the ship?!” Jessica pressed.

Jake’s face went pale. “I don’t know…”

I looked over at him furiously. “What?! You mean you transported us down, but you don’t know how to get us back up?!”

“I didn’t think about it at the time! Let alone that we’d be on a crumbling tower being nearly killed by alien bugs!”

Jessica gasped, but I reached into my pocket, and whipped out my controller.

“Oh yeah, well I did think about it.”

I quickly opened the transportation feature, and targeted the Anon, still up in orbit. The building rocked one last time, but it didn’t matter, as in the next second we were gone.

Onboard the ship, the three of us reappeared instantly, standing untouched on the teleporter pad. I jumped up in the air and cheered, followed by Jake and Jessica who also cheered. Jessica suddenly hugged me, and we both cheered. As she pulled back, we both looked into each other’s eyes, and suddenly out of the blue kissed. It was long, drawn out, and very, very pleasant.

After what seemed to be an eternity, we broke apart, and stared into each other’s eyes again. There were those crystal green eyes, pools into another existence. An existence that I briefly become a part of.

Jake was staring at us both wide-eyed. We quickly let go of each other, and stood at an appropriate distance. I scratched the back of my head, and she looked away sheepishly.

“What…the heck…just happened?!” Jake said slowly.

I cleared my throat, and glanced over at Jessica, who in turn glanced back at me. We then looked at Jake.

“I don’t know,” she said sheepishly.

“It just kind of happened…completely out of the blue,” I said, grinning stupidly.

Jake still looked at us like we had full-blown made-out on the teleporter pad in front of him. “Next time wait until I’m not looking…or at least get a room!”

Our momentary awkwardness was replaced by fear as the room rocked slightly. A klaxon went off somewhere. The ship rocked again, and we took off out of the room, and back to the bridge.

Upon entering the bridge all the alert systems went to code-red. The scanners displayed images of targeted areas on the ship, but apparently no damage had been done. The shields were holding off whatever was attacking us.

“What’s on the scopes, Jake?” I asked, sitting back down in the Captain’s chair.

Jake took his place at the helm, and looked at his control monitor.

“It’s those aliens! They’ve got a fleet in orbit, and they’re making their way towards us.”

I smiled. “It looks like their weapons can’t break through our shields.”

“Well, that’s because they’re still a ways off. We’re not being fired at point-blank range.”

My smile instantly disappeared. “Fire a spread of anti-matter missiles, and then get us the hell out of here!”

Jake raised his hands to enter in the command, but then stopped to look over the various controls.

“Jake, now!”

“I’m trying! I’m trying!”

He continued to look from each of the various buttons, but couldn’t decide which one to push. As he continued to search the ship rocked violently again, and the alarms became more fierce.

“Now!”

Jake went “ah-ha”, and slammed his hand down on one of the buttons. There was a loud electronic hum of energy, and the ship began to tremble. The view screen suddenly switched to the aft viewer.

The energy discharged, and a series of crazy-plasma bolts shot forth off the aft weapon nodes on the ship. They arced around through space, and hit the nearest ships, melting away their hulls. However, as they drifted to a dead-stop, the follow-up ships flew past their damaged comrades and continued to fire on us.

“Jake! I said anti-matter missiles, not plasma bursts!”

Jake turned to look at me, and slammed his fist on the control panel. “Do you think I know how to fly this piece of—?!”

At the moment he slammed his fist on the panel, the room began to warp again, and the familiar feeling returned.

“Jake! You started the Randomization drive!”

Jake looked around panicky, but his look of panic was lost as the space around us became severely warped. There was a bright flash of light, and then everything returned to normal.


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