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    Eileen's Promise
    Eileen's Promise
    Eileen's Promise
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Eileen's Promise

    By Matthew Villeneuve

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    About this ebook

    Salvor Gupta, a freelance space salvager, feels like he's finally going to have a good day. 

     

    With the help of his ever-present, but somewhat annoying, AI navigational implant named Merv, Salvor has filled his ship's cargo with salvage worth tens of thousands of credits from a job out in the deep dark. Returning to Homestead, a giant orbiting ship around Saturn's moon Titan, he quickly learns that he's not in for a good day after all, and that information, long thought to be corrupted deep within his AI's memory banks holds a promise of salvation, if he can keep ahead of whoever wants to see him dead and make sure that promise is never kept…

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMatthew Villeneuve
    Release dateJul 20, 2022
    ISBN9798201076207
    Eileen's Promise
    Author

    Matthew Villeneuve

    Stories have always lived inside Matthew’s mind, flitting about here and there until they escaped before they had a chance to be told. One day, he decided to capture a story on paper to see what would happen. This story flourished and grew and Matthew knew that he was on to something amazing. Since then, he has continued to capture wild stories, presenting them to the world for everyone to enjoy.

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      Book preview

      Eileen's Promise - Matthew Villeneuve

      The Docking Ring

      Isteered my small craft to Docking Ring 4 of the orbiting station. The clamps engaged with a loud clang, causing the craft to shudder. A small bobble-headed figurine of an Earth canine, a souvenir from a salvage operation when I first started this job, nodded in annoyance with the carelessness of the docking operation.

      Ring 4, secured, came a staticky voice from the com system.

      Ring 4, acknowledged, I said, speaking into my helmet.

      It had been a long trip this time. Given a lead on an old satellite that had been missing for almost a century, floating around a million kilometres off Jupiter’s aphelion, I had been the first to find it, derelict and dead, so I had filled my cargo boxes with a ton of valuable parts and goods. Now back at Homestead orbiting Titan, I would be able to make some trades and get some much-needed repairs done to my ship.

      I undid the safety restraint that kept me in place during the docking process and stood up, remembering to stay bent slightly, so as not to hit my helmet on the control panel above my seat. Once past the confines of the cockpit, I stood, stretched, and walked into the corridor that led to my cabin door, first having to pass by the airlock to the station and the door to my small personal toilet.

      I took my helmet off; now that the ship had docked, I didn’t need it anymore. Linked wirelessly to the helm, the helmet helped me to navigate through the deep darkness of space this far out from Sol. I looked the helmet over as I held it in my hands. A second-hand unit, it had seen better days, its dark green paint faded and worn, with dents and scratches from where it had saved my skull more than once.

      With my bare head exposed, I reached up with my left hand to the back of my scalp. I moved instinctively, as I had a hundred times before, and found the small connector and cable that stuck out of the base of my skull. After pulling the plug out from the back of my head, I stuffed the cable into the helmet, then returned to the little port in my skin and gave it a good scratch. Having the cable plugged in too long always gave me a rash around the connection point.

      If we keep scratching at it, we are going to bleed, came the voice out of nowhere.

      I know, and you tell me the same thing every time I unplug, I said out loud. I knew I didn’t need to say it out loud, but after a few months out in the deep dark by yourself, you started to talk back to the voice, just so you could remember what you sounded like.

      And yet we keep doing it, the voice answered back. Only I could hear this. All deep-space pilots had their own voice only they could hear; part of the AI built into the implants we had in our heads.

      History books could tell you about how humans had begun to push out from Earth to the other planets in the Sol system, starting with stations around our home planet, then cities on the moon, next Elonton City on Mars, and, after that, the giant stations built to orbit some of the Moons of other planets. Homestead was one of a few orbiting Titan, and not the newest or the nicest, either. But the docking fees were low, and if you watched your back, it wasn’t a terrible place to make deals and get paid.

      Earth had been a tough place to live if you weren’t born with money, and like most deep-space pilots, I wasn’t. When I got tired of getting beat-up, threatened, and arrested, I decided to leave my home planet and try my luck out past the asteroid belt. But here’s the thing – in order to survive out here, you needed to be able to interface with a lot of systems in your vessel all at once, and that wasn’t something that was easily done by a regular human. So us pilots signed a waiver, went under the knife (I mean, I say knife, but it’s really a laser and it’s over and done with in about 20 minutes), and got these implants.

      The AI in the implants plugged into shipboard systems, helped navigate the deep dark, let you know your ship’s status, and interfaced with your brain to make decisions before you consciously even knew that a decision needed to be made. Since it was embedded so intimately, it also knew everything about you and your body, which could get very annoying.

      Like now.

      Our bladder is currently at fifty-seven-percent capacity. We suggest emptying it before going station-side, the voice proposed. If I could have described what the voice sounded like, I would have said a middle-aged man who works as an accountant in a huge company that only has him listed as a number and treats him as one. He was the one with a receding hairline and a boring wardrobe, mostly beiges and browns. Not only that, but he was disappointed with every life choice he had ever made. I called him Merv.

      I got Merv second-hand and on the cheap, when I decided to become a pilot and get the implant. It was impossible to remove an implant once it was inserted – unless, of course, the pilot was very much not using his brain anymore – that’s how I got Merv. They said Merv’s original pilot had flown a little close to Sol and had been hit by a burst of radiation in a freak storm. It would have explained some of Merv’s quirks, but he never talked about it; he just said that some of his data was corrupted and he couldn’t access the memories when I asked. Which sucked, because it meant he only had about fifty percent of the memory space he should have.

      I set my battered helmet down on the bench next to the airlock door, took stupid Merv’s advice, and hit the head. It had become annoying how, after Merv pointed something out to me, I couldn’t help but notice it, and if I didn’t do anything about it, he’d just keep repeating it until I did.

      After emptying my bladder and Merv telling me to fill it back up by getting something to drink because I was becoming dehydrated, I plugged myself into my ship’s memory banks to download newer information from Homestead. Like I said, Merv couldn’t fill his memory to capacity, so I spent a lot of time deleting old info and downloading new stuff. In this case, I had to delete the navigation charts to the derelict satellite I had just salvaged and upload Homestead’s schematics, along with all the particulars I had on the local traders and past deals with them.

      We hope we are not going to go back to that dreadful Myles character, Merv said, as the new data transferred into his memory chips. We have notes stating that he undercut us fifteen-percent last time we dealt with him.

      Yeah, I remember, I said.

      Judging by our voice’s timbre and the fact that our heart rate went up by seven beats per minute, we are lying, Merv quipped back. We are bringing up a list of past interactions with him for us to review. Suddenly, the vision out of my left eye had a bright-blue overlay with a list of sales and rates between Myles and myself over the last few years.

      I sighed. Fine, Merv, I won’t go to Myles this time. I’ll go to Janice instead.

      Merv, as a standard pilot AI feature, could interact with several of my body parts, all on the left side. Part of the functionality included overlaying star charts and maps on my field of vision so I could

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