Synthetic Reality

The Zone

"...We need you on the bridge, now. Reading an extensive asteroid field. And... Oh my god!"

End voice log 2354. 

*************

Mox cleared his throat with a croak as he stared at the dusty computer monitor. A green claw manicured to a point flicked off the chunky control. A lizard hand print was left behind on the panel. The large Komodo dragon in leather pants leaned back into the ridged right angle contoured chair. 

"They were out here exploring the Zone in this relic, it's a good thing they believed in a god." He spat out his long black tongue tasting the stale air of the derelict spaceship.

Mox transmitted his thoughts through an implanted neural device. "Can you get this jalopy started? The Kalgirrite must've got 'em when they entered the belt."

Four sections back at the rear of the ship, Bloc Wave received the communication on his bright yellow headphones. They matched his thermal goggles and velvet shorts perfectly. The androgynous jet black skinned being didn't wear anything else. Rindos, though nothing like Varans, shared the advantageous traits of longevity and temperature tolerance. 

Wave focused his misty angelic eyes on the primitive propulsion system. He reached his slender fingers into the mechanism and turned a gear. Minutes later he initiated a startup sequence and restored power. 

"Everything's intact. I guess they took the crew and ditched the ship. Probably thought it was worthless. No one appreciates the classics." Bloc's right eye swirled. "They ate them, didn't they?" 

Mox raised a scaled eyebrow. "You ready to fly this thing outta here?" 

Bloc unfastened a tube from the engine and huffed a big lung full of CO2. Then he exhaled pure oxygen into the air. "Yes." 

Mox moved over to the navigation station and worked the manual maneuvering controls. The 7cm thick window had a meter long crack in it but was holding. On the other side was nothing but blackness. 

The Zone had long been declared a void of empty space. The Varan understood that a small but incredibly dense blackhole cleared the region. However, the vanished star systems had left behind a ring of condensed dark matter. An extensive asteroid belt hid the event horizon, the majority of which was heavy metals; iron, lead, arsenic, and mercury, intermixed with dark matter. This exotic combination in its compacted state interacted with matter in odd ways, particularly if you're a carbon-based life form. 

Mox was there to grab a boulder of the stuff, put it in a containment unit and haul it out. The scientists that put him up to the challenge knew there was no way to remove the dark matter material but wanted him to try anyway. For his troubles, they offered a top of the line synthetic crew member named Randall. She and her experimentally enhanced positronic net of a nervous system came bounding through the bridge door. 

Randall was physical perfection meets mental unlimitedness. Or at least that is how they boasted about her. Mox had dumped a third of the Brick's computer memory into her to test her out. The result was the greatest synthetic he had ever worked with. The fact that she had a thousand years of his personal logs memorized made her adept at working with him. 

"Alright buster, this bucket of bolts is ready to roll!" Randall bumped Mox out of the navigation seat with her hip. 

She had braided her sandy blond hair into a golden spiral that decreased at the rate of 1.61803398875 until it centered itself perfectly at the back of her head. Mox took note of this repeated form found throughout nature, now being recreated by a synthetic being. He slid into the captain's chair, his long green tail uncomfortably hanging off the side.