Chapter 3
The Best Revenge Is Finding Joy in Your Reality
Lily
“Hello and welcome to the IMPERIUM, the Intelligent Morpho Planetary Entities’ Systemic-Interaction Union of the Multiverse!”
Lily muted it.
“Yeah, okay. Still kidnapped,” she muttered.
“While the circumstances that brought you here may be tragic, we acknowledge your survival skills and your indomitable will to live.
As representatives of the interstellar government of all spacefaring species, we say: may the Cradle bless you, in honor of the beginning of all life that binds us. Just as the Cradle gave rise to life, the IMPERIUM exists to unite and safeguard all star-citizens beneath its authority.
Do not fret. You will be educated in our ways so that you possess the knowledge necessary not merely to survive, but to thrive.
Your first and most important lesson is the observance of IMPERIUM law. Under our watch, no being goes hungry, no individual may be exploited for their reproductive capacity, and no citizen may be subjected to abuse.
Your vessel’s AI is programmed to notify you of any deviations from the laws of the local star cluster. The protection of every star-citizen’s well-being is our highest priority, and violations are addressed swiftly.
The IMPERIUM encompasses all species across all known galaxies.
While you were taken from what was once yours, you are now one of us.
You are under our protection.
Welcome to the IMPERIUM.”
Standard Welcome Message to Protected Beings upon First Contact
Lily rested her forehead on the control panel.
“Goddammit.”
The ship didn’t break the silence of space for a long time after that.
Ninety universal chrono-cycles later (approximately 112.5 Earth days)
Lily had never felt this free.
Her health glowed from the inside out. She was in the best shape of her life.
Her days brimmed with study, training, exploration, and play, with no one to tell her what she should or should not do. She commanded a small but technologically superior starcruiser and wandered the endless night of space by her own will alone.
She did not know Earth’s coordinates, so at the ship’s suggestion she set course for the nearest general station.
The ship’s AI explained that they were deep in unmapped space.
Reaching civilized territory would take more than three Earth months in conventional mode, without deep-void jumps.
Those were off-limits until she completed the IMPERIUM’s mandated training.
The Universe, it turned out, had opinions about who was allowed to fold spacetime.
Lily protested at first, but after the ship insisted, she began the acclimatization program. It became the best decision she had ever made.
She learned to fly the ship.
The first time she overshot a docking maneuver, the ship quietly reduced her control access for a quarter of a chrono-cycle.
She never missed again.
She mastered its life support and emergency systems. She devoured cultural archives from countless species, though even a dozen lifetimes would not have been enough for true immersion.
She mapped every corridor and chamber. She uploaded her genetic blueprint into the medical bay and let the system design a personalized regimen of nutrition and training.
In time, she renamed the ship Helios, after the Greek sun god. True to the name, Helios saw nearly everything and understood even more.
He taught her that the deep void teemed with life. Species ventured beyond their stars and eventually encountered an IMPERIUM envoy, becoming part of the grand alliance. In truth, it was not optional. Refusal meant facing the combined military force of entire galaxies.
Membership came with real benefits and strict rules governing diplomacy, trade, and conflict.
Because Lily had been taken aboard a vessel that met universal standards, the same rights and obligations applied to her as to any Registered Spacefaring Species. She wasted no time learning them.
At one point, Helios played her a jingle of a youth show about the common scientific belief of the IMPERIUM, the Cradle of Life:
“What is this movement?
Is that light?
No, it’s just a tiny cell!
How can this be?
I don’t know,
But now it’s real as well!
What is this movement?
Is that light?
No, it’s a meteor in flight…
And that’s the Cradle of Life,
scattered through the universe,
binding us together forever
in a protein burst!”
“Absolutely not,” Lily said. They never spoke of it again.
Helios also explained that universal standard gravity was lower than Earth’s.
If she ever wanted to walk on a station’s surface without falling on her face, she would need practice.
Helios recalibrated the ship’s gravity fields, and Lily discovered a new kind of joy.
In lower gravity she could leap impossibly high and toss heavy objects as if they were feathers.
In higher gravity, even raising her arms became an exertion.
Against Helios’s warnings, she even tried zero gravity. She laughed as she chased floating beads of water, catching them one by one like a child playing a cosmic game.
Then she slammed into the ceiling.
Hard.
“Okay. Not graceful,” she muttered.
Then, she set the gravity to one-sixth of Earth’s, remembering it matched the Moon’s pull, and bounced around the cargo bay in clumsy, exhilarating arcs.
Helios warned her about muscle atrophy, and Lily remembered Earth’s returning astronauts, who sometimes fainted after standing too long.
In the end she chose a compromise: gradually increasing the gravity each week, building strength while practicing her balance at universal standard.
She made it her mission to climb the cargo bay walls on safety tethers, eventually scaling the ceiling.
It became a daily challenge, each time under heavier gravity.
The food dispensers, however, were an uneasy truce.
She did not enjoy the bland taste of synthesized meals, but she could not deny the results.
Her hair grew long and glossy. Her nails, once brittle and easily chipped, became smooth and strong.
Even her skin looked younger and fresher than she remembered.
She adapted to the longer rhythm of a universal chrono-cycle, which flowed differently from an Earth day.
The medical bay alone could have kept her occupied for weeks. Eventually, she gave in to every long-delayed curiosity. Permanent hair removal, everywhere she wanted it. The faint imperfections she disliked were erased, though she chose to keep some scars as mementos.
One day she covered both arms in tattoos from wrist to shoulder. The next day she had them removed.
To Helios, it was trivial.
To Lily, it was intoxicating.
After a lifetime of uneasy collaboration, her body now felt like hers.
While the medical bay was not capable of regrowing hair from nothing, it enhanced her natural growth patterns with almost surgical precision. For the first time in her life, Lily managed something she had never quite succeeded at on Earth.
She found the perfect fringe.
After a few experiments, she settled on an asymmetrical cut that framed her face just right. It felt deliberate. Cinematic. Like the kind of haircut a protagonist acquired halfway through an old science fiction film, when her life finally tilted into motion.
She had feared she would be sick with loneliness, hollowed out by missing her family and friends. But the acclimatization program softened the ache.
And if she was brutally honest, she had not been truly happy on Earth.
Her personality, her circumstances, her environment, none of it pointed toward change.
She was young, in her early thirties, but not so young that endless parties or late-night bar-hopping held any charm.
Lately her life had been nothing but work followed by collapsing in front of a screen.
Her job bored her. Her friends were marrying, having children.
She had dated, but nothing lasted, and she had grown weary of men who were selfish, indifferent, or incapable of truly seeing her.
Yes, she had lost Earth. For now.
But she still had her phone. Helios absorbed its entire library of music and books, then supplemented it with the near-infinite archives of the IMPERIUM. Together, they gave her an ocean of entertainment.
For the first time in her life, Lily felt she had finally found herself.
Only one question remained.
If she ever found Earth again…
Would she even want to go back?
It was not as if she had the choice.
Until then, she could only hope for more.