Alacritous Regress

Installment 20: God Needs A Starship

Back in the old days, everything was done on sheets of paper, that's where the term paperwork comes from. The problem with paper is it's bulky and it takes a lot space, which is why everything is digital now. The problem with digital paperwork is that it doesn't take any space. Paperwork expands to fill all space available, and with limitless space, paperwork comes in a never ending torrent.

But where are my manners, the name's Shooting Star, captain of the Interplanetary Terran Alliance starship Alacritous Regress. We're on a two year mission, to visit ordinary old planets, to mediate between the species and cultures of our society. To boldly maintain the status quo.

I click off my tablet. My reflection stares up at me from the black screen, the screen catches my nose and the lines of my muzzle, but the tips of my ears and facial ruffs are cut off by the sides of the screen.

I'm an Engea, a species of engineered soldiers created for the third Terran World War. Taking advantage of miss worded UN laws, my entire species genome was coded in a lab, built from blank amino-acid, implanted into an empty egg cell, and then carried by a Human surrogate mother. By the time the first generation of Engeas had matured enough to fight, the UN had patched up the loophole and the Engeas was obsolete.

I look away from my reflection and take a swig of my coffee. I'm sitting in the mess drinking coffee with Arron; me a dark, Arron an Irish. Arron is also a biogenetically engineered soldier, but that's where our similarities end. He's a Near, a category for anything nearly Human, but not quite. He looks like a Human, but is covered in a layer of grey fur that hides his thick skin. He takes a sip from his coffee. "Needs more alcohol," he grumbles.

"That's your third coffee," I tell him. "All that caffeine can't be good for you."

Arron laughs. His metabolism is overclocked and filters out alcohol, caffeine, THC, and all the other legal stimulants nearly as fast as he can consume them.

"Isn't that your third coffee as well?" he asks.

I sigh, feeling sleep creep into my bones. "I just finished filling out a novel of paperwork..."

"Shame, if you were just an incompetent tailless idiot like me, you wouldn't have to fill out paperwork."

"No, that's the f__king reason I have to fill out paperwork."

A computerized voice comes on over the intercom. "Shooting Star, Quick needs you on the bridge." The speaker is Al, the ship's AI. Despite the attempts of NASA's best and brightest, Al is completely free willed, sadistic, and ignorant of the chain of command. His redeeming quality is that he is...um...well at least the ship has an AI.

I gulp down the remnants of my coffee and throw the cup into the recycler. I trudge up towards the bridge. There's no time schedule on a spaceship, technically there is, but we all ignore it, we sleep when we sleep, we eat when we eat, and we all just hope that there's someone steering. The current time, to early.

I walk into the bridge. It's a rather large room relative to the cramped shuttle it's on. Along the front of the room, pushed right up to the windows, are three sets of controls; scanners, piloting, and navigation. To the starboard side of the room are the engineering controls, to the port side are the comms, and in the middle of the room is the captain's chair. My chair.

Lounging at the comms is our comms specialist, Quick Stream. She's a lion Magi, an intriguing species. Magis started with the Engea genetics, and then had them heavily modified to improve their usage of magic. Each of them has a normal torso connected at the waist to an animalistic lower body in very much the same way as a centaur. This larger body mass allows them to have more mana which allows them to power their magic, which in Quick's case, is telepathy.