>>5556749>>5556732>>5556719>>5556695>>5556571>>5556360>The ship itself is affecting your mind and emotions through your implant.Distantly you hear the surprised yelp of your crew as the deck continues to heave and shudder underneath you. Your heart pounds in your chest and your breath comes quick and shallow yet strangely you are not afraid. Your gaze flits hyperactively around the maintenance bay, never lingering long on any detail, and you vibrate slightly with manic energy. You feel alert, as if you had mixed stims into your morning coffee and then dumped a canister of icy coolant down the back of your uniform.
But your sharp mind and careful logic pick out the incongruence of these feelings and the situation all around you, this all smothering sense of wonder and contentment is not your own.
Your eyes widen slightly. Could the phantom pains you were experiencing earlier be related?
You reach up and touch a single fingertip to the warm metal at your right temple, your command implant - your link to the voidship - has stopped throbbing for now and instead feels almost like a seamless part of you. A potentially terrifying revelation, an isolated part of your mind notes. The device serves as a link between the Captain and their ship, allowing them to direct and monitor its systems remotely. A security feature and backup in case of command station destruction. But such a link could work in both directions, surely.
The violent rumbling settles down to barely perceptible tremor, and the warm feeling in your chest as well as your jittery nerves fade with it. Your eyes finally settle to watch the party investigating the boarding craft vacantly as they resume their activities with organised professionalism. The lights in the bay flicker and come back slightly brighter and you hear a soft hum as life support begins to start filtering the remaining smoke from the air in earnest. Main power has been restored.
The evidence continues to stack up and you begin to sound out aloud your ideas.
“These feelings and emotions, could they be some kind of sympathetic link to the ship’s network of sensors and interconnected systems? It could certainly explain the phantom pain I felt in my side and chest,” you mumble, recalling the damage the ship had previously taken.
“But then, why do I feel like this? The desperate need, and then the satisfaction despite what I just had to… to do.” You trail off trying to recapture the anguish you felt before finally giving the order and the self-justification and content dismissed it. It's there, somewhere, just buried deep.
“A ship doesn’t feel, it doesn’t have wants, it doesn’t desire… right?” you muse.
You sprawl lazily, your palms flat against the cool deck plates, propping you up as your legs stretch out comfortably before you. The crew breach the still annoyingly blank mouth of the boarding pod and disappear from sight. No gunshots still after a few seconds so you suppose everything turned out alright.
