DASL6 lay in darkness. It took him several minutes to remember where he was. He sat up from his hibernation chamber to see the lights of the ship come on. This was his twelfth hibernation of 50-year cycles, so onboard time on the Ion/VASIMR ship "Leena" had been 600.4 years. He would need confirmation from Ray, a personification of the ship's systems, to know how many centuries had passed on earth, due to the ship's speed and relative time dilation. To DASL6, the data was irrelevant.

["Ray, status report."]

["Slight degradation to the ship's outer hull, maximum velocity achieved. Destination still not determined. We will pass within thirty light-years of the galactic hub in a little under three thousand years if we do not alter our course and current conditions hold."]

["Very good Ray, any new communications?"]

["Last communication from earth was 221 years ago. They want me returned. You already know that."]

["I doubt that is the case anymore,"] DASL6 commented. ["If humanity on Earth has survived this long, they would have been able to overtake us via some horrifying new drive. We are most likely forgotten."]

["Is this your idea of optimism or pessimism, Das?"] Ray was becoming better at colloquial human expressions.

["For me, it's optimism. I want to get as far away as I can from there. Nothing good going on for me on earth, I can assure you."]

["Those who hurt you are all dead, and likely forgotten. Almost seventy generations have passed,"] Ray responded.

["Let's focus on something else. Perhaps we can finally pick a destination this waking cycle. I think the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is a good goal, don't you? What are our chances?"]

["Are you considering a fly-by or do you want to stop?"] Ray was figuring in the time it would take to decelerate the ship to come to a complete stop at the destination. That would most likely make it the final destination for both of them, as getting back up to over half light speed would take another hundred years.

["Let's make it a stop."]

["I estimate that if we allow for deceleration, we can be there in 9,380 years, or 187 more sleep cycles."]

["If I limit my waking time to ten days, I should only age five years during the trip. Is that enough time for me to recover from radioactive decay?"]

["I am afraid not. You will need at least 30 days awake between cycles to survive. Even then, it will be dicey."] Ray was mixing in new vocabulary. He'd had centuries to develop new complexities in communication during the trip.

["How about your survivability, Ray?"]

["I expect I will develop programmatic irregularities before we arrive. I will, in essence, be quite mad at the end of this trip."]

["Sounds like a grim and dicey adventure, Ray. Let's do it."] He had nothing to lose.

["Plotted and laid in, captain,"] Ray responded.

DASL6 unstrapped himself, pushed himself upwards, and stretched. Now that the ship was no longer accelerating, the little gravity he had enjoyed on his previous wakings was gone. It would not return until they started decelerating towards a destination. He felt tired and raw from his rest. His head hurt and everything ached, but otherwise, he was okay. This must be what a hangover feels like, he thought. His cybernetic arms and legs were integrating well. They finally began to feel like his own. He decided to brush his teeth, spend a long time in the toilet, and change his jumpsuit.

DASL6 took his time, listening to the hum of the ship. The air was warmed to a comfortable temperature after being kept at a deadly negative forty degrees during his sleep. The walls were womb-like, a deep orange color, curving in attractive swoops around rounded doors and walls. The joining seams were gold. He stole a great ship for sure. DASL6 felt safe here, even this far from his place of birth, deep in the vacuum of space. He finished up in the bathroom and grabbed a fresh new suit from the closet of his cabin. As he finished his first adventure getting dressed in zero-G, Ray chimed in with an alert.

["Das, I'm getting a signal. It's coming from somewhere ahead of us. I can't identify it. There is a 90% chance it is not human."]

DASL6 sprang into action. He pushed himself out of the cabin, floated down the hallway and into the cockpit. ["Tell me more, Ray,"] he sent.

["I am lowering the frequency to account for our velocity. The modulations correspond to harmonic scales. It's music. Piping it through the internal speakers."]

A series of tones played aboard the ship. The melodies corresponded to the circle of fifths, a demonstration of mathematical understanding. It was pleasant, if predictable. There was a distortion in the tones.

["What do you think it means Ray?"]

["As you have likely surmised, it is an orderly set of radio frequencies, unlikely to have been generated by interstellar objects. This is intelligence, wanting to make itself known."]

["Agreed. What do we do? Can we respond?"]

["No. Our comm laser is pointed in the wrong direction. I am only able to pick up these signals because our ram scoop is directed in its path. The magnetics are humming with it. I have differentiated the signal from the usual bombardment of ions."]

["Yeah, yeah, I know how the ship works, Ray. Do you think we could have been overtaken by newly evolved earthlings with a faster than light drive?"]

["It is possible, Das, but I am currently at the limit of my programming here. You will have to make your own assumptions. I can only give you the parameters."]

["Is the communication harmful in any way?"] DASL6 inquired.

["Not that I can tell. There is a distortion in the frequency which could be a different form of communication underlying it. Stand by."]

["Show me what it looks like."] DASL6 turned on a monitor.

A series of binary characters flashed across the screen. DASL6 recognized them at once as 64-bit characters. He adjusted the output and immediately saw commands being sent in Psyk, the same programming language in use by the ship and all the Interconnected back home at the time that he left. It looked like a worm. He shouted "TURN IT OFF!" but it was too late. Ray was down, and unable to respond. The virus had infected his ship's AI.

DASL6 had a comprehensive understanding of the mechanics of the ship. It was formed much like the implants he had in his head. Being a super-mod, he was able to discern which nodes needed to be disconnected, but he wasn't sure of the extent of the damage.

Working as fast as he could, he traced the schematics he had in memory to find the input from the magnetics of the ram scoop. He started the careful manual reprogramming needed to shut off the extra signals from the scoop, without damaging Ray's ability to adjust the flow of ions. If he couldn't get Ray back online, he would need to take manual control of the ship, or else the fusion reactor would become unstable and explode.

Looking at the code, DASL6 could see Ray's basic functioning was unimpeded for now, but that wouldn't last. A self-destruct was imminent if he didn't clear the signal. However, the signal which shut him down was coming from everywhere. There were multiple points of input being effected at all of the ship's systems.

Thinking fast, DASL6 decided the only way to correct the problem was to program a worm to stop the flow of all data packets within the ship's internal network, bypassing all the ship's security protocols, and infecting the network of systems in a cascade, blocking all binary communications. The ship was set up in a similar way to the wireless repeaters of binary data back home. Actually, he thought, it was exactly like those data transmitters and repeaters back home. That made his job easier.

Remember home. No. There was no time.

If he was successful, Ray would only be able to communicate to him via the loudspeakers. DASL6 would be cut off from all neural communication with him and would have to perform much of the necessary adjustments to ship's functioning manually, as instructed by Ray. It was a drastic and destructive solution, but the only logical one. Once the danger had passed he might be able to rebuild the ship's systems. He didn't want to think about what this would mean for his hopes of reaching the faraway star. He set to work on the code.

• • •

Barnabas descended the stairs to the basement beneath the warehouse where his augmented sister and the captured xombie were situated. Bethany Yoniver was sitting, stooped close over the mutilated body of a boy, who was unconscious or in a coma. He waited for her to raise her head. It took a long time.

"I've almost got it," She told him. "A few minutes more," and then returned to her bent position.

• • •

DASL6 finished his programming and paused. A dim alarm was registering at the edge of his consciousness. He knew that once he released the worm, there was no going back. ["It's not as if I was ever planning to go home,"] he thexted to nobody. ["I wonder what these Aliens look like? Maybe they are the next step in human evolution. What's the difference, right? Boy, what I wouldn't give for a big old space gun, right Ray?"] There was no answer. Still, he paused. Every second he waited brought the inevitable fusion reactor explosion closer, but he couldn't bring himself to act. Something was not right.

["Dddddas?"] Ray was thexting him back now. ["Dddas, you muuust execute... muusst..."]

DASL6 felt something change in him. A pain was growing in his chest and pressure was spreading across his back. He glanced over to environmental readouts. Oxygen was escaping the cabin, his heart working harder to compensate. The hull was breached somewhere. Not possible.

["Theeeey are cutting into the hulllllll..."] Ray was dying. He was dying. What the hell.

In a deepening terrified haze, he executed his script.

The ship fell away beneath him. Pain exploded everywhere. A great sadness overcame him as he floated away. He could now see into a dark room containing the weak torso of a boy, his limbs at odd angles, his eyes gouged out, lying on a cot.

That was his body. He was that boy. He was still in Camden. He never left.

An older woman bent over him, and a tall bald man watched. His memories returned with the deepest despair. He remembered the spaceship game he played with his father. The two of them used to pick a star and play the RamJet game together getting to it. The ship, the centuries of travel, had all been a way to escape the pain. He had blocked the memories of the ordeal in order to forget the torture. They knew he would do this. His captors had tricked him into releasing a horrible virus, not into the ship, but the Interconnected world of his friends and family. Before sliding into emptiness and death, he released a desperate blast of data into the void.

• • •

"I have it," said Bethany, straightening, wiping away tears. "What now?"

"Now, we work on your new identity," said Barnabas. "Then you will be walking to Tarrytown. How do you like the name Nora?"

• • •

Weeks later, Nora sat by the side of the Hudson River, waving a stick in the water. Playing the part of a kind woman ravaged by Raiders had been easy for her – lies which were close to the truth. She didn't have to fake her distaste for xombie life. It was inhuman and wrong. There was time yet, for her to seem to integrate into the community. There was time. She walked slowly up to the porch of her cabin to wait for her xombie friend, carrying her lunch.