Welcome to the Journal of Now and Forever. This Journal is a collection of my Star Control and Star Control 2 fiction. Note: Some of this material is, by necessity, extrapolation from the slim information provided by canon sources.

New fiction is posted first at My Livejournal before it appears here. This story is in response to 15 Minute Ficlets' Challenge #12.

The Ur-Quan like to have "representative species" as pilots for their fighters. This is how Otto understands it. Of course, he also understands that that means being separated from his own, from the Androsynth, because – from what he understands - the pilots don't come back. They stay with the Ur-Quan dreadnaughts until they die and are replaced.

It's amazing how much you can pick up if you just listen, not just to what the other aliens say, but how they say it, and what they don't say, as well.

The Ur-Quan requested certain Androsynth gunners and pilots to be shipped up to one of the dreadnaughts for testing. They were shown the small fighters, the little bullet ships, and given rudimentary training. And now they're to be taken out of system, to see how they react, how they handle themselves.

Otto and the other Androsynth had no choice. Commander Pain had no choice. The Ur-Quan have total access to Androsynth records, and picked those spacers who met certain criteria. And now they are leaving Eta Vulpeculae, and the whole thing is –

They leave system and enter hyperspace, and Otto can feel the wonderful pricking at his eyes and brain and heart and soul, the beautiful sense of feeling hyperspace flowing through him, even though here, on the flight deck, surrounded by aliens, he can't see the pulsing bright redness, can't see the quarks heading for the galactic core.

He starts to rein in his responses, as he has for decades, and then realizes: this is the only time since Exodus that he isn't flying, he isn't piloting. If any time is safe to let go, it's now. And if the future is as bleak as he expects it to be, this might well be his last chance. He has only a little to lose.

So he doesn't clamp down on the hysteria, but welcomes it, allows it all to flow through him, through his brain and body and every fiber of his being. It fills him with light and sound and rushing, and the tears fill his eyes and spill over as he laughs, it's so beautiful and it's an ecstasy he hasn't allowed himself to feel in twenty-five years, and it's so horrifically wonderful.

He gets the sense of falling, of things happening around him, but he doesn't truly see them, doesn't see much of anything, with the ongoing ecstasy wrapped around him like a heavy silk blanket. He's caught up in the moment, which just keeps on and on and on, until even in the back of his brain part of him wonders if maybe this was such a good idea, because he doesn't seem able to break out of it. And unrelenting joy is its own strange torture.

He can hear things, dimly, through the pounding in his head and the laughing shrieks in his mouth, and knows that he should probably do something about this, but he can't. He's caught up in the infinite moment.

Otto later finds out they were in hyperspace for only a few hours, because the captains weren't sure what to do about this, and waited for him to come out of it, but he didn't until they returned to truespace, and in the meantime nobody wanted him anywhere near a ship...

After he regains true consciousness, and realizes he's in truespace again, he can only lie there, exhausted, aching, his brain burning. And he knows he won't do that again anytime soon. But he also knows he won't deny another chance to return to hyperspace, if they'll give it to him. He'll hold it in next time, keep it in check.

The Androsynth pilots and gunners are returned to Starbase, with Otto carried by two of his fellow clones, since he's not entirely capable of walking a straight line just yet. And there they wait, and wait, and wait, but they aren't called up again for service in the bullet ships.

Aliens might be kill-crazy, they might be stupid, they might be both, but it seems no alien wants among its pilots a race whose members are prone to seizures upon entering hyperspace. The inclusion of the Androsynth is delayed for the time being, says Commander Pain to the spacers...

Comments? Email me: laridian at aol dot com