You’d think we would have portable phones in the ship, what with how big it is. It would be great to get briefed as you’re climbing up a ten-thousand-foot ladder to get to your office. We don’t have those, so I get a long, boring climb that I’m probably only able to make because the gravity is so low. Once I got off of the cryo ring into the main shaft of the ship, I don’t even need to worry about half an earth-g, just a bit of gravity from the acceleration going on. I could probably fling myself up rungs ten at a time with minimal effort, but that would be dangerous and against safety protocol so I’m not doing that. The fact that I got in trouble when the cameras caught me using that method a few years back has no bearing on my decision.

They put cameras in here, why not some sort of sound system? Then I could get back to videogames faster where I could. . .face my irate guild leader who is doubtless waiting to chew me out.

You know, I could do with a nice long climb. Really take my mind off my recent demise and wonder what’s going on that they need me to take a look outside. It can’t be something too ordinary, or they would just use the normal telescopes and radio waves to check it out. Anybody can look at those and know what’s going on. They only bring me in when they need to coordinate a few of the different cameras. I think that’s what it is at any rate.

What I do is sit in a chair, plug my brain into their computer that flashes images at it. Most people and computers look at that feed of images and get a seizure or something. Something about parsing multiple sets of data simultaneously while cross-referencing for patterns? What it comes down to is that I get a nice, orderly picture from what they send me and I tell them what I’m looking at.

I feel a bit like those guys in the starship vats from Dune, but I’m nowhere near as powerful. The way it got pitched to the people who were recruiting for this trip is the easiest to understand for someone without gratuitous science knowledge.

They could either take a giant computer with them that weighed a ton and only acted as an image decryptor, or they could take me. Granted, I take a lot of resources to keep running as well, but unlike the computer, I can do other things besides looking at stars. Mostly that devolves into lugging things around through the ship every once in a while or piloting the drones to get a look at or inside the hull. Turns out that my brain is really good at dealing with multiple video input feeds which extends to really great spacial manipulation when I have enough eyes on the scene. Supposedly that’s the opposite of how most people work, but eh, I get to play great videogames for most of my day so I don’t worry about being to abnormal much.

It’s just times like these where I’m becoming pull-up champion of the universe that end up pretty bored. That and when the guild leader says I have to stay inside the city because there are signs of a dangerous monster in the vicinity and they might need my help to fight it off but it doesn’t show up in weeks and I would rather be out in the woods fighting monsters than cooped up in the city so I take a really quick trip out to one of the known dungeons for a breather and the monster, as if it knew I left town, decides that that exact moment when I’m halfway through killing the dungeon boss is when it needs to raid the city.

Is it really my fault that nobody else was able to kill it before it fried them? It’s not like magic immune monsters were scarce, and pretty much any dragon type monster would be a laughingstock if it weren’t magic immune. Somebody should have been able to shoot it in the eye or overpower it before I got there, right?

“Jackson, finally. Get plugged in and take a look toward sector 168-177 and tell us what we’re headed toward.”

“Aye Aye, Captain.”

Captain McGreggor is strapped into his chair. A large man, but mostly muscle. His mustache is certainly the bushiest of any crew member, though it seems to be going grey since we’ve been out here in space. Maybe being woken up so often for important ship things is letting him age a bit more than the rest of us? Might be why he’s so grumpy and formal all the time. I’d hate to think that was his natural demeanor. Nobody should be cursed with that personality from birth.

Though, now that I think of it, a baby with his mustache and grumpy face would be hilarious. . .

I’ve got time to think as I strap into my own chair and start plugging myself in. You’d think with all this advanced space tech we could do this wirelessly, but I think it’s some sort of safety feature that almost everything is a wired connection with quadruple backups of quadruple backups. That’s also why I can’t just look at the stuff from inside the cryo pod. Ship systems and the pods are on completely separate systems just so that none of the incredibly smart and suddenly bored techies gets the idea of messing around in the actual important software or hardware and mucks things up. I’d say they were paranoid, but a few of the passengers turned into demon-lords intent on ravaging the countryside in-game, so all the safety measures are probably a good idea.

Anyway, sector. . .

“Which sector was it again?”

“168-177, Jackson. We picked up readings of a massive object there a few weeks back and yesterday the computer went a bit haywire trying to look in that area.”

Lets see, type in the coordinates on the armrest panel

168. . .1. . .7. . .7

Got it. Let’s see. . .

“. . .Did somebody hack into the sensors, captain?”

“What are you looking at, Jackson?”

“Well, uh, I don’t think its the right sensors is all. . .”

“Jackson. . .”

“It just looks like a petrified squid floating in some sort of ocean, uh, sir.”

. . .

“What?”