To Flail Against Infinity

Contents Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Epilogue Leave a Review! More from J.P. Valentine Guide Contents Start of Content To anyone and everyone who’s offered their feedback. CHAPTER ONE THE DAY I died started off as boring as the day before it. My holopad beeped angrily that Foreman expected my brother and me five minutes ago, but I ignored it. I could wait for Brady at the locker room, or I could wait for him here. I liked it here better. I breathed deeply into my belly as my eyes drifted over the viewing deck window, my mind at rest as I contemplated the vastness of the nothing that awaited just beyond a few inches of reinforced glass. Every day I came up here, taking Brady’s excessive morning routine as an opportunity to gaze off into space and clear my head in my own, mortal simulacrum of actual meditation. None of the sects bothered to teach lowly vac-welders fuck all about cultivation, but I’d seen the way they breathed, and gods knew they meditated a lot. I just did it because it felt nice. It kept me calm. It stopped me from thinking too deeply about just how many punctures I’d sealed up in this tin can we called a home. Hey, just ‘cause I wasn’t meditating to manipulate qi or sense the way of the world or whatever spiritual bullshit didn’t mean it wasn’t useful. You should try it some time. “Keep that up and I’ll have to report you for VIP.” “Maybe someday that joke’ll be funny, Brady. Looks like it’s not today.” I turned away from the windows to face my older brother. Growing up, people always thought we were twins. We shared the same sickly-pale skin, over-pronounced cheekbones, and soft jawline. Hell, we even smiled the same lopsided grin when we thought we knew something somebody else didn’t. These days, we differentiated ourselves with our hair. He kept his head shaved, as if anybody wanted to see more of his uv-starved skin, maintained as much of my brown locks as would fit inside a vac helmet. It wasn’t much. “Maybe I’m serious,” Brady said. “You spend too much time up here. People will start to think you’re losing it.” “I’m not a cultivator. How am I gonna get VIP?” “Knowing you?” Brady snorted. “You’ll discover a whole new type of crazy, all your own.” I rolled my eyes. “C’mon, we’re late. Foreman’ll be pissed.” I stepped past him, putting an end to the conversation even as my gaze lingered on the poster next to the door. “Know the Signs of VIP,” it read, just above a series of images in that hyper-generic corporate art style we all know and hate. The posters were everywhere, everywhere enough that I’d long memorized every inch of them, including the bit depicting a cartoon man staring forlornly into space. Obsessive thoughts about space was symptom number one of void-induced psychosis, a disease, I repeat, that I very much did not have. It was just common enough for people to worry about it, but not quite common enough for them to actually do anything about it. Other warning signs included pallidification of the skin, depression, extreme and insatiable appetite, and, finally, homicidal rampage. Basically, every once in a while, a cultivator in deep space goes batshit from the lack of qi in the environment. They start running around draining the qi from everything and everyone they can get their hands on, until either someone puts them down, or all the foreign qi kills them. A bronze core cultivator can chew through about a dozen mortals before that happens. Keep that in mind. Our station—officially RF-31, but we all called it roofie—floated far enough from literally anything that we had these VIP prevention posters all over, not that VIP ever manifests on tiny refueling stations with no cultivators. Still, our ambient qi levels sat low enough that Allcorp regulation mandated we keep the posters up, so up they stayed. Brady liked to wonder how a bunch of mortals were ever supposed to stop a void psycho, but whenever he asked, the higher-ups just regurgitated some line about catching it early. Our roofie sat on the proverbial crossroads of two midsized long-haul shipping routes. Most freighters didn’t need the re-up, but every once in a while they had to burn some fuel to escape pirates or reroute around a void beast. When that happened, they’d stop here to replace what they’d spent. We didn’t get many visitors. Other than our quarterly resupply, someone’d stop by every other week or so, but nobody stayed long. The cultivators especially hated it out here. VIP aside, the low ambient qi made their lives harder. We liked it that way. Our little family got to steer clear of the arrogant bastards. Roofie kept on a small full-time crew to keep the lights on, about half of which were vac-welders like my brother and me. Our job was to patch up the various holes in the hull caused by random bits of space debris—a common hazard on these trade routes. Between us, management, agri-production, and maintenance, RF-31 employed and housed a grand total of seventeen people. Remember that number. “Hey, I didn’t know we had visitors.” Brady’s voice pulled me from my thoughts as we passed the window to dock four. Sure enough, the gangway led to a small skiff. I squinted through the glass as we walked to try and get a glimpse of its name, but the angle was wrong. All I got was pristine matte