Snake Eyes

“Well what the hell just ran over my foot? Pause it and bring the lights up full.”

In the glare he saw three vacuum spiders dart for cover.

They were the curse of the void, able to float through space indefinitely in rocklike cluster colonies, reanimating when they made contact with anything that would support them. Usually they drifted in asteroid fields devouring every one they made contact with but sometimes they found their way onto ships.

He’d experienced their excruciating but venomless bites but they were far more interested in staying hidden and eating the ship one succulent cell at a time. Johnson had based some of his best cabal material on them. In truth, they weren’t spiders at all. However, no one had been able to classify them before the Angelina had set out, no more than a seed, so many generations previously. As far as Johnson was concerned they were just...

“Fucking little bastards...they mutate every time. Resynthesize the poison, Weaver.”

“Of course. And may I say that, on this matter if on no other, I share your feelings. They are eating through much of my germinal cortex as we speak.”

Johnson was aghast. Amongst Weaver’s many inadequacies was its inability to make a joke.

“You’re not being compromised are you, Weaver?”

“To my mind, Captain, I am. However it is nothing that will affect you at this time. I take it that is where your concern lies.”

“Of course. How long until I will notice?”

“I would estimate a period of nine months.”

“Jesus wept. Why haven’t you told me about this?”

“You seemed a little...distant.”

Weaver, the consciousness of the Angelina, was referring to Johnson’s not wanting to talk on returning from the cabal but really, it was Weaver’s own fault. It could have woken him from his experience to inform him of the worsening spider problem but Johnson had expressly forbidden it to do so. An experience broken before it was completed was a waste of weeks of preparation and months of potential intrigue.

Johnson, too, wondered about the wisdom of his orders. There was now a chance they would cause him to lose everything.

“If I’m going to die, Weaver, I’d like to do it mid-cabal or by my own hand.”

“So you are fond of saying, Captain.”

“Nine months. Shit.”

“Perhaps you would care to review your latest ascent through the tiers at a later date.”

Johnson thought about it.

“No, Weaver, these experiences are all I have left. Play it.”

Returned to gloom, Johnson watched the other lives he had created for himself and marveled at how well he had found his way through them. He’d always included a failsafe in each tier of the cabal so that if he became lost or disorientated to too great a degree, he would come across clues that would help him to keep searching for a way out.

The theme of escape was a natural one for Johnson to pick after all these years alone on the Angelina. Every single cabal he’d designed had the theme of escape at its core and this last one, with four tiers instead of three, had tested both his endurance and his desire to survive.

He watched his progress through the fourth tier, the most action packed arena of the whole experience, with enormous pleasure. He commanded Weaver to forward to exciting areas and replay scenes in which he had performed particularly well. His defeat of the matriarchal spider and subsequent escape to the third tier had his heart racing almost as hard as it had when he was there. These were his memories now, he reflected, not the years spent idling in the ever-expanding pods and deserted ventricles of the Angelina. The real Johnson was a man who fought against terrible odds and triumphed; a man of will and experience.

In Weaver’s vast memory there were more than two dozen of his cabals. The first ones were primitive and the plots were terribly linear. They were the days of the ‘one-tier trip’. He’d even become self-aware in some of the earliest ones with no choice but to terminate the experience part way through.

Now, however, he had mastered the plot programs and was a more skilful designer than any of his predecessors. He remembered how the crew had raved in his youth of the single tier experiences written by the likes of Geoffrey W. Payette and Christina M. Poole. Johnson’s works were feature length movies to their five-minute cartoons.

His own early desire to access the complete history of visual entertainment in Weaver’s mind ended with his first cabal at the age of fifteen. Many of the crew born after him had still enjoyed the films made on Earth but he had always needed a bigger thrill.

Johnson was already tinkering with the plot programs when the crew began to sicken in great numbers. He wrote soothing natural scenarios for those close to death. He hoped that it would ease their passage from life and Becker; the ship’s true captain had encouraged him to do it.