Drick had taken the lead after their short interaction. Turning quickly away from Marsh and scouting around the hanger bay. Once they had made sure they were the only organic creatures moving they had turned their attention to the many doors that led in and out of the vast space. They chose a doorway that looked as if it led forwards.
There was no good reason to place a bridge of any vessel at the front of a ship. There was a lot of historical precedence, but no good reason. Space vessels had used sensors to view the outside for millenia. The reliance on a visual view had died in the early parts of the twenty-first century. Even then it was an artefact of history, an anathema. Ships did not need a real time external view except via a screen.
It was hundreds of years since the view of the outside was replicated in real time over the consciousness of the pilot. The pilot, if they needed to be, could be the vessel. They didn’t use their actual eyes, so why have an actual window.
But the tradition still existed. For some it was a style choice. For others it might be the desire to pilot a vessel using only their wits and real world senses. For many it was comforting to use their biological systems when experiencing some sensations. On a ship this old it was part of the tradition. The bridge was at the front on an upper deck, the engine room at the stern, lower decks.
Drick and Marsh moved through the airlock and into a main corridor. Drick’s incursion into the ship’s systems had given them a brief layout of the vessel. They needed to get to the very front of the ship and to deck four. Because of the large hanger and even larger cryo chambers there were only five decks at the bow of the ship. Towards the stern, where the vessel was expected to act as a home for the colonists during the decades of terraforming there were nearly sixty decks.
Marsh wanted to ask Drick about the comment but he had also known that he didn’t have to. They had said that they were often guided, often sent to perform a task. If it were any other person, any other time, he would have called it paranoia. But he knew Drick. Knew them well. This wasn’t paranoia. If Drick was sharing a concern or a theory then it was valid and probably correct.
So Drick, in their own words, was a puppet on a string. They were still being guided in some way. They were being shown a path here. Maybe all of this was controlled and pre-determined. Even for Marsh. Not, perhaps, every step, not every action. Drick had made it clear that the forces that did this were subtle and allowed for there to be variation. There was no precise master plan where every event was set. There were governing lines, barriers that forced the action and flow of motion into a certain path.
How an operative and those they interacted with responded to this, what they did, that was not predetermined. It was all merely placed into a matrix of acceptable outcomes.
A part of Marsh was furious at the organisation that guided Drick. Not on their behalf, on his. The notion that the only reason Drick was there to help him, to save him and uncover this entire event was because it suited some mysterious groups own ends was maddening. But on the flip side of that was the knowledge that he owed his life to that interference. How many others had there been like him before they interfered? For what reason did he even exist? How many more like him would there be in the future?
This all had to stop. He understood that. It didn’t make it any easier that he felt that, like Drick, he was also a puppet on a string. It had to stop. The creation of people like him, the whole situation. They had to know what it all meant, and it had to stop. Life was worth more. It didn’t matter if you could cheaply make it. It didn’t matter if you could clone a copy and drop into a new body. To treat existence as a commodity was just another form of slavery.
