16. The Race, pt1

  “So, I’ve been thinking about what to do next,” Tess said, “And honestly, there’s an opportunity coming up which might be a chance to clear all of our debts. I mean, the Alliance already offered to do that, but we’d be giving up our shares in Yoji, and none of us want to do that. Even though they don’t mean the same thing now that he’s alive, they still mean something, right?”

  The other members of the crew all nodded solemnly. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but they had tried to explain. They had attached themselves to me emotionally when I was still Artemis, they explained. That carried over now that I was Yoji, even though I was completely different. I was still their ship , except that it was more like I was their child instead of I was their car .

  “What’s the opportunity?” Captain Min-jae asked.

  She nodded, and she pulled out a flier. “The under-five interstellar Soulship race,” she said. It’s in three months. If we register and hurry, we can make it to the starting point in time. We’ll have to submit to a full inspection, including official documentation that proves that although Yoji’s chassis is almost forty years old, his soul is less than a year. If we win, the prize is a flat billion credits. Half that if we take second place, and half of that if we take third, with a hundred million credits for places four through six.”

  The others exchanged looks.

  “The entrance fee is a million credits,” Lila pointed out. “None of us can afford to lose that much.”

  “Yes, but if we win, we’re effectively rich,” Sanjay said. “Even after we settle our debts, we’re still...what, three quarter billion in the black? And that’s assuming that we also pay the Alliance back for all the help that they’ve provided so far. They haven’t shown us the bill for the upgrades they gave us, after all.”

  “Can we win?” Captain Min-jae asked.

  “I think so,” Tess said. “But ultimately it comes down to Yoji. If he can maintain his new top speed for the entire race, then we should be able to blow the competition out of the water.”

  “That’s a lot of pressure. He’s not even a year old,” Lila pointed out.

  “I can do it!” I said, rezzing my hologram into the crew quarters with them. “Lemme do it! I wanna race!” I exclaimed.

  The crew exchanged looks, then sighed.

  “Okay, let’s start filling out the paperwork,” the captain agreed. Tess had already downloaded the forums, and they began to do the boring part of documenting my pedigree for the big race while I pointed us in the direction of the star system which would serve as the starting gate and shot us off at full speed.

  Captain Min-jae, when he saw the spedometer, grinned. “Okay, so maybe we can win this.”

  Then I ran out of effort and we dropped back to fifty-percent.

  “Or maybe not,” he muttered, sighing and returning his attention to the forums. There were hundreds of pages of rules, regulations, and documentation that he, as captain, had to review personally. It would take him a few hours, and fortunately I, as a child soulship, wasn’t expected to know the rules. I just had to follow them.

  The rules were pretty simple, really. No weapons allowed; even a ship like me with only basic plasma canons and laser Point Defense Cannons had to agree to a system wide lockout on their weapons systems. Any other form of attack between the ships was strictly forbidden and penalized with ejection from the race and forfeiture of the entry fee.

  Aside from that, the race was divided into weight categories. There was the shuttlecraft race, the yacht class, the courier class, the freighter class, the destroyer class, and the cruiser class. I was in the freighter class, which didn’t get as much excitement as the ‘faster’ classes.

  The race would start all at once, but each weight class would follow a different set of check in points to measure progress, with the ‘faster but shorter distance’ transports only traveling to a nearby starsystem, while a freighter like me was expected to race through a dozen checkpoints, effectively drawing an entire constellation in my course.

  There was no rule against cultivating starships, we checked that much. We didn’t even have to declare that I was one. Any offensive technique was obviously illegal, but using my cultivation to increase my speed seemed to be just fine with the bylaws, so everything was looking kosher.

  In summary, I was born for this.

  But then, there were some soulships that were literally born for this, with custom chassis. While they had to fall within the regulations for mass and other factors in order to qualify, they would have had custom designed engines and other factors to increase their chances.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The race was held yearly, so each ship had five years to compete before they aged into the next bracket of five to fifteen. No ship was really expected to win their first year, especially not one with a forty year old chassis like me. Normally the winning ship was about four years old in terms of their consciousness and five or six years old in terms of their chassis.

  So when I pulled up into the dock and shared my data with the judges, and that data was broadcast to the other ships as a new contender arrived, many of them started laughing.

  But I’d prove them all wrong.

  Fortunately they weren’t laughing at me very long, because a few hours after I arrived another ship came out of hyperspace and immediately opened a channel with anyone who responded, then immediately shouted ”HEY GUYS! Have you seen this .jpg?”

  The response was a lot of collective groaning on the network as they worked to cut him out of it. There weren’t any non-quickened ships in system, that would just be stupid in an event designed for soulships, so it’s not like he was ‘dangerous.’ Almost everyone saw him as a little baby. Which he was, being only about the same age as I’d been when I met Samonosuke.

  It seems that he’d experienced a delay in his construction, which had forced his ‘owners’ to delay quickening him until it was complete, but they still wanted to compete in this year’s race. So they brought him in despite the protests of the judges, who grudgingly admitted that the .jpg ship would be of the minimum age to compete at the start of the race. By like … six hours.

  Everyone was grumbling about having to listen to a newborn talk about how great the .jpg was, especially since many of us were starting to realize that the .jpg was effectively our reproductive organ and were becoming increasingly shy and embarrassed about our own .jpg phase, which we remembered much more vividly than you humans remember being in diapers.

  It’s more like we had some ancient communicable disease like chickenpox than anything else. Except chickenpox just made other kids sick, it didn’t make unliving bodies suddenly get souls in them and become self aware. But from a certain point of view, it looks like we were trying to mate with everyone and anyone whom we could get to pay attention to us.

  I was all but forgotten, because everyone was focused on talking about the ‘baby in lane three-fifty-three.’ That suited me just fine, except that I was growing kind of mad at the crew of the baby ship. I mean, the kid couldn’t help himself, that much is clear. Remember, it’s like chickenpox or something. But you don’t let a kid with chickenpox run around naked and screaming ‘lookatmelookatmelookatme!’ If you did, they’d hate you for it when they got older.

  Upon reflection, I had to admit that, considering the difficulties of my own birth, my crew really had tried to do right by me.

  But on the other hand, the constant communications from the baby ship, only to be flooded with copies of the .jpg if I answered any of them, was indeed rather annoying. So I tried to tune him out.

  “Can’t you just tune him out?” Aster asked me when I confided my frustrations to her.

  “He’s using the high-priority line, so no, I can’t,” I said, sighing. “Man, was I this much a brat?”

  “I wouldn’t know, we didn’t meet until you were a bit older,” she reminded me. “But I think all babies are obnoxious on some level. They can’t help it.”

  “Yeah, it’s just annoying. Like being stuck next to a crying baby in economy class, except that it’s actually at the starting gate of one of the biggest races in the galaxy. Do you think that his crew actually expects to win?” I asked.

  “More likely they’re just hoping to get him experience for next year,” Sanjay said, walking into the dining area and grabbing a cold-brew coffee from the fridge. “They say that you ships remember your baby phase, so this baby ship should remember this when they compete next year.”

  “Yeah, how mortifying,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You know, he’s probably going to be mortified. Since he showed everyone his .jpg. I’m still embarrassed that I showed mine to Samonosuke. He was nice about it considering that it was in the middle of a battle, but honestly, how immature. I should have been past that. I hope he never brings it up again, but I couldn’t blame him if he lords it over me for the rest of forever,” I said.

  “Wait, you guys get embarrassed because of your .jpg phase?”

  “Yeah?” I blushed. “It’s actually mortifying in retrospect. Like a dog dryhumping everyone’s leg or something, except that we’re people doing it. It’s super embarrassing when we realize what we were doing.”

  Sanjay laughed, then immediately apologized. “I shouldn’t say anything. But it’s a phase that you all go through, I don’t see the big deal. I mean, humans were born—”

  “Humans were born pooping and peeing themselves, yes I know. I’ve heard the argument before. But if you do that when your an adult, how would you feel? Or if you did it in school and then for the rest of forever you’re the kid who was known for pissing themselves in class. How would you feel? I feel so bad for this kid’s future self,” I said. “If they enter him in the race next year, then he’ll have to deal with everyone remembering this year except for the ones who will be six.”

  Sanjay was quiet for a moment. “Huh,” he said. “I’m actually going to go have a talk with the judges, if they’ll let me. That sort of sounds like child neglect or abuse to me.”

  So he went out, and a few hours later the .jpg ship tried to leave the system, only for two patrol ships from the empire to pursue it.

  The network was filled with relieved sighs and gossip about why the ship was being pursued by the authorities. Sanjay quietly informed me that, once he’d framed it as an issue of abuse, rather than simply a strict following of the guidelines of the tournament, the officials had investigated further from the standpoint of the legal authorities and discovered several other irregularities.

  From there he told me not to worry about it. The kid took the authorities on a little bit of a chase, but they convinced him to stop eventually as he tried to shoot them down with all the guns that he didn’t have. He was still in the gunship phase, after all.

  The race officials promised a revision of the rules, which were written decades ago and didn’t accurately reflect the modern trends in SoulShip Development.

  I never did figure out what happened to that kid, but I hope everything turned out alright for him.

  ?