"Jesus, Nick, you fucking died!?"
Brian and Maggie were aghast. They were sitting on his bed while Nick sat in a chair facing them. He'd been talking for a while, and there was still a lot to cover. Petra sat on her shelf, slowly printing her expansion module.
He'd already introduced them to Petra, and they'd watched him feed ingots in as she worked on her Vorzagik Zembulator, whatever that was. It was always a slow process to produce an expansion module for Petra, and only Petra could print one. None of the other printers had the necessary sophistication.
Nick sighed. "Yup. I died. Ca pretty close on a few occasions, but going over a cliff inside a tal box filled with lumps of ore was enough to do the job properly. Petra saved , yet again. She put , or my body anyway, in a kind of suspended animation until the resources were available to heal and resuscitate . By the way, thank you, Petra, again, for saving my life."
"You're welco, Nick. Thank you for creating my support sh."
"You're welco, Petra." To his friends, he explained, "The silvery web wrapping Petra is not part of her original structure; it's basically a sling. I eventually found the missing piece of her that chipped off in the accident, and the sling is holding it in place, as well as serving her as a kind of antenna so she can talk to her remote pieces. Apparently, glue is the wrong tool for this job."
"I should think so," Brian murmured, taking another look at the alien artifact.
"Back to the story, Nick," Maggie demanded. Nick nodded. I need to focus.
"It took Ktheg!lik months to build everything needed, and then the fucking Goldaskian Marines blew it all to hell. It's like they never heard the advice, 'loot, pillage, then burn.' But, that part ca months later.
"I was still in the sick room when this one guy tried to kill . Stabbed in the chest."
"What? Are you fucking serious?" Maggie yelled.
Nick rubbed the spot a mont, a little habit he had picked up at so point. "Yup. Right where an Ooafan heart is. It wasn't the brightest plan, since at the ti, they had all the resources needed to put back in stasis and then heal again. But, to be fair, he probably didn't understand that."
"What happened to that Ooafan?" Maggie said in a dangerously quiet voice.
"He died." Maggie's anger visibly started to subside, slowly. "It the fight with the Marines, he used the reactor on Level Twelve to take out a squad of Goldaskians in power armor. Gave his life for his people—he was consistent, anyway."
"Aren't you still angry?" Brian asked.
Nick shrugged. "If I held all the grudges I've developed, I'd have been full up just from my Dad before I was a teenager. This guy attacked out of fear. He's dead, I'm not. Case closed, as far as I'm concerned. Granted, at the ti I was pissed off enough that I packed up and left."
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"But it was your ho!" Brian protested. "Why didn't you make them leave?"
Nick looked at his friend. "Think it through. Would you condemn all of the last survivors of a dying race to die because one of them made a mistake? Because that's what would have happened. Sure, we could have spent weeks getting them out in an orderly fashion, back to their silver mine or sowhere else. But I was in absolutely no mood to wait and risk another assassination attempt.
"They were bigger and had more inertia, and I wanted to get the hell away from them quickly. Ergo, I was the logical one to move. I'd already built up a base once with Petra's help. I was sure that it would be a lot easier the second ti around, because I knew what I was doing and I had a starting set of bots and gear."
Maggie shifted on the bed. "Nick, have you noticed that you're acting a lot smarter than you were even at the start of this story?" she asked.
He nodded. "Yeah. It's pretty wild. I wasn't going to say anything until one of you ntioned it. I can't help but wonder, though—is the way my brain works now actually like that of a normally smarter person? Or do I only have boosts in certain areas, like autism?"
"I guess we'll find out," Maggie said. Nick noticed a bit of extra freight that sentence was carrying. She was reminding him that she was sticking with him, no matter what. Thinking about their talk earlier, Nick wished a magical boost in wisdom were forthcoming.
He sighed. "But yeah...being smart is nice. I'm so jealous that you guys had this all along."
"Well, I hate to break it to you, but we'll probably be back in the lead pretty soon, after we get the brain-boosting surgery," Brian declared. "No way am I turning that down."
"Hey, that'll just be restoring the natural order of things. Hard to imagine a world where Maggie isn't loads smarter than , right?" That got a small smile out of her.
"That world was Earth. There are a whole lot more worlds out there," Brian joked, leaning back. "Maybe there's a planet where stubbornness is considered the height of intelligence! In which case, you two would be the absolute rulers."
"The Planet of the Indecisives," Maggie mused. "If we're going to be king and queen of a planet, I vote we go elsewhere."
"Hey, I am perfectly capable of being stubborn and indecisive, thank you very much," Nick answered in a snobbish accent.
"Oh, we know, Nick, we know," Maggie assured him in a very serious tone.
Nick paused and thought hard for a few monts as sothing occurred to him. Oh, shit, please let be wrong...I'm not wrong, am I? Shit.
"Nick?" Maggie asked. "Another hallucination?"
He took a deep breath and sighed. "No. I just realized...I probably can't go down to Earth, ever again, can I?" Neither Maggie nor Brian looked surprised. Seeing that, Nick groaned. "Ugh, and you smart people figured that out way before I did, didn't you?"
"Well, yeah. Unless, of course, you conquer Earth."
"So days, I am so fucking tempted..." Nick admitted. "This is why I don't watch the news. But I suppose that's just a coping chanism, and being in denial. I really don't want to run the Earth, though, and I doubt there's anybody I would trust to rule in my stead. That's just too much power in one place, in one person. It never works out."
"Power corrupts..." Brian said.
"Absolute power is kind of neat, though," Nick said thoughtfully, and watched their reactions. Just as they were showing alarm, he grinned. "Gotcha." Both of his friends let out gasps of relief.
"You bastard," Maggie grumbled. "Co over here so that I may hit you." Nick's smile grew and he stayed where he was, unrepentant.
"God damn, even his codic timing has improved," Brian said. "My appointnt for brain-boosting cannot co soon enough!"
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