“Miss, the current power supply require your att-”

“Override order,” snaps Katare. “Nel, if you interrupt me again while I’m busy, I will have your parts melted down into slag.”

“Yes,” replies the SI.

Katare focusses back on the important thing she is doing. This game isn’t going to get a new high-score by itself, after all. Furiously concentrating on culling all the union-led rebels, she targets their ramshackle housing. Taking out the backline and the families of the insurrection is usually a good way to quell annoying little protests like this one. Smiling at the results of her actions, she sees that the simulated strike of workers vanishes like it was never there.

Her planet-spanning factory complex doesn’t need much managing at this point. The game she is playing is one of the more famous simulation games. A smile creeps on her face as she sees that she will reach the next performance bonus with a couple of hours to spare. The workers might be permanently in the unhappy zone this way, but the results speak for themselves.

As she bathes in the satisfaction of having set a new efficiency record - ignoring the new achievement she got for having her worker population permanently in the ‘severely unhappy’ portion of the happiness meter - Nel interrupts her again.

“Miss Katarenin Auchinfon Peezes Tomat. Please, be advised that it would be wise to take a more pro-active approach. The amount of power available in this facility will only last for another week at best.”

“What did I tell you earlier?” says Katare while sauntering over to one of the fridges that still has food. “You just shut up and leave me be. I swear to all the outer-galactic horrors that be, if you don’t let me relax and destress for at least another week, I will wear your deactivated core around my neck like a trophy.”

Humming softly to herself, Katare rummages through the fridge. She throws some of the vegetables that she doesn’t feel like eating out, tossing them onto the growing heap of trash that has been accumulating. Snacking on one particularly delightful stick of crunchy sweet-leaf, she walks back to her gaming corner.

Before she can get stuck in another session of the simulator, her entire apartment trembles. She stumbles and barely manages to avoid falling face-first into the broken items and trash that’s started to gather everywhere. A few of the remaining valuable decorations fall from their perches, adding to the mess.

Very little of the apartment is still intact. The fit of rage she had gone through after gathering herself had been legendary, to say the least. Little easily accessible and destroyable items had survived the bout of red-hot anger she had experienced.

The way Dee-KeeTaa had talked to her, combined with the terrible news he had so callously thrown into her face had left her paralyzed with a weird form of grief at first. It hadn’t really been the news of Solan’s death that had done her in. She oddly enough had felt like she had already known about his demise for a while. What had shocked her to her core was the fact that the practically infinite amount of money that he had represented is no longer available to her. She had ordered Nel to go through her accounts. The news that all of her assets are either frozen, sucked dry through loopholes, or just outright gone had only deepened her destructive rage.

As a result, the entire apartment is trashed, every single decoration, appliance, and piece of equipment that’s not bolted down is now in pieces. Luckily for Katare, the suite of gaming cabinets, full-dive pods, and arcade machines aren’t that easy to destroy. She thus has been stubbornly continuing her relaxing session, powering through her sabbatical despite all opposition. She is in relax mode now, and come warp or catalytic meteor, she will continue to relax!

That is, only if all of these dying defense systems could stop their whining. She does not want to know how she is hearing these alarm calls of defense grids being deactivated. Nor does she care for the murmur of lasers dying, armored panels failing to close in time, and auto-turrets being destroyed. What is important now is to get the new high score in this asteroid mining race game she is currently addicted to. It takes all her skill and attention to maneuver through the randomly moving asteroid belt. Having to keep an eye on the scanner for high yield mining sites is a challenging task by itself. Sending out scanning drones to confirm the findings, making them take samples out of the astroids while staying in fist place takes all of her concentration.

She really gets into it. Submersed in the holographic cockpit of a mining and racing hybrid shuttle, she ignores the alarm bells sounding out around her. The panicking voice of Nel fails to penetrate her haze of focus. The constant digital screams of broken doors and sectors being breached are splendidly ignored as Katare has the time of her life.

She has just started the second lap, still in first place with the runner-up close on her heels, when things go wrong. There is a flash of brightness below her, something she has never seen before. Fearing a new trick from the other mine-racers, she looks backward. Instead of craning her neck to look through her back windows, the entire cockpit starts tilting. Instead of launching her mining probes, a cold numb-ness start creeping up from her extremities. She then finds that she can no longer control her body, and her vision starts spinning.

Speaking of her body, isn’t that it? Katare looks up at a rather nice sight. A voluptuous image of perfection sits straddled on top of the racing seat. Then every curve lights up in the glow of the explosion. Looking at the holo-screen, she sees that she has driven into an asteroid, and is quickly overtaken. To her horror, she realizes that she is suddenly in last place. Then, she is picked up by her hair.

A voice speaking in a common language punches through her confusion. “All clear, guys. Everything is dead. Switch to audile comms.”

“Was this it?” asks the helmeted humanoid form that is now carrying Katare. Looking around, she sees that maybe she should have been paying attention to what was going on around her.

Her apartment, which was pretty messy to begin with, is now totally ruined. Two new holes in the walls are barely visible through the thick smoke filling the place. Her front and backdoor are in similar states, reduced to splinters, their doorframes blackened pits filled with acrid tendrils of smog.

‘What?’ she tries to say. Then the realization hits that the body in the gaming chair was hers. The bright flash below her hadn't been some trick to sabotage her shuttle. It had been that glowing sword over there as it decapitated her. Slowly she realizes that she is currently in an ocean’s worth of deep shit.

“Wrap it up, men. Praise the Order, mission accomplished. Stasis that target. Boss said to warp-net it, so do that too. This was a hardwon battle, alright? No word of how easy it was during de-brief. There will be no talk of underpowered lasers and low-energy drones. This was a tough fight, and we deserve a bonus.”

“Yessir!” snaps a chorus of voices.

Then the person carrying her starts talking. “This was too easy, though. These planets are supposed to be near impenetrable. This is the Tomat Vault Home, after all.”

Another voice replies and Katare manages to glimpse a black-clad assassin female. “Tomat is done for. Solan’s reported dead.”

“Damn. I really thought that those Peezes fucks were like true immortals or some bull-skeit like that. Aren’t they supposed to be perpetuals, as in, they can’t die?”

“Nah, that’s just the Grandmaster. He’s one of the few galactic constants.”

“Right. Thanks for reminding me, man.

“No problem,” the sleek assassin replies before walking off. The woman inspects a few of the shards on the ground, surreptitiously pocketing a few.

Why are there mercenaries having a nice post-op chat in her living room? She quickly recognizes the signs of a high-strung team finally getting the chance to blow off some steam. Why are there four smoking holes in her apartment? A team of eight fully suited humanoids is just meandering through her living space. A few even dare make comments on the fact that she is living in a trash heap.

Her first instinct is to call out for Nel. The fact that her voice doesn’t work without a body takes too long to register, and Katare once again realizes that she is currently extremely screwed. Then the sapient carrying her by her hair puts a slimy package on top of her head. The cold item explodes around her head, wrapping her entire being in chains. The world around her stops existing. The claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in cement slams into her muddled mind. Then she is put in a transparent cylinder. The top is slid closed, and she sees the man carrying her push a button.

The world around her freezes, the universe goes black, sounds stops, and everything just halts. She quickly puzzles out that she is put into a stasis chamber. Decapitating and freezing a target is standard practice in a lot of bounty-hunting circles. There are myriad ways of keeping a decapitated head alive, and carrying around a sealed stasis container negates all the risks of having to transport a live prisoner.

Then the fuzziness that comes with skirting the edges of ner neural block is back. She briefly wonders why a purely physical treatment method still works while she is inside a stasis field. She then realizes that she shouldn't be thinking in the first place, as she is inside a stasis field. Her circular thoughts are only broken when her consciousness breaks the neural dam in her brain.

Katare spends the next couple of minutes going through a major personality crisis. She is completely unable to perceive anything that is going on around her. There are only three things that manage to penetrate the perfect darkness.

The first are the occasional mechanical whispers at the edge of her hearing. Like the gentle flow of a massive amount of water whispering words and meaning into her mind, it’s like she is hearing ghosts now and then.

The second one is the small gathering of small blue dots in the middle of her head. They form a cohesive whole, a gentle gradient of blue, forming a bright spot in the middle of her brain. Yet somehow, she knows that there are separate units inside that single glowing spot, distinct units of power that make up the odd field inside her brain.

Thirdly, the blinking blue dot at the bottom of her vision is becoming impossible to ignore. It has been there for as long as she has been relaxing, but the brain-fuzz that she experiences each time she even looked at the thing had dissuaded her from investigating the thing until now.

But Katare can fully recognize that her current situation is not likely to get any worse. Her father is dead, her friends turned out to be fake, and the only one that was even willing to speak to her in person hates her guts. Her apartment is now totally ruined, and a rag-tag group of soldiers somehow managed to penetrate the very core of the Tomat empire.

Feeling like crying, but with her head in a stasis field, being completely unable to do so, and without working tear ducts, she mentally pushes the blue blinking button.

[ Anesthetized ]

[ Unconscious ]

[ Previous apparel nWear Custom H2OGpat Emergency BrainPreserver is no longer present ]

[ You have donned UNKNOWN. You have one apparel slot remaining. Activate UNKNOWN? ]

[ Integration time remaining; NAN ERROR ]

[ Apparel scan of UNKNOWN at 0% ]

[ Brain Damage ]

[ Neural Block ]

[ Brain Damage; ended ]

[ Anesthetized; ended ]

[ Apparel scan of UNKNOWN at 100% ]

[ Apparel slot Berry FullBionic iSleeve HominoidAndroid integrated ]

[ Unconcious; ended ]

[ Magical Integration lvl 8 ]

[ Magical Interfacing lvl 6 ]

[ New skill generated; Arcade Gaming lvl 1 ]

[ New skill generated; VR Gaming lvl 1 ]

[ New skill generated; Racing Gaming lvl 1 ]

[ New skill generated; Gaming lvl 1 ]

[ Skill Arcade Gaming lvl 1 consolidated into Gaming lvl 2 ]

[ Skill VR Gaming lvl 1 consolidated into Gaming lvl 3 ]

[ Skill Racing Gaming lvl 1 consolidated into Gaming lvl 4 ]

Evot pauses the blue screen here, just so she can reread these last few messages. A lot might be happening inside her head right now, but that doesn’t mean that something as stupid as the sequence of blue screens she sees here can be excused. Putting those complex feelings to the side with the rest of the emotional mess inside her head, she tells the messages to continue.

[ New skill learned; throwing lvl 1 ]

[ Throwing lvl 4 ]

[ Magical Integration lvl 9 ]

[ Magical Interfacing lvl 7 ]

[ Decapitated ]

[ Neural Block; ended ]

The moment the trickle of blue messages come to a halt, all her memories are back. Suddenly, she wonders how she ever could have forgotten about Douglas. How she managed to not remember the idiotic skeleton, the terrible treck through the space station, and all the Histaff. Then she remembers the last moments with Solan, how she had chosen to become a deity of death just to spite the man that had given her life and everything.

Come to think of it; the very same situation seems to be happening right here, right now. She should be frozen in time, her every cell and atom stopped on a physical level. Trying to feel for her body, attempting to get a better feel for what is going on inside her head, she starts to get a glimpse what is happening.

Her brain is actually physically frozen. Not a single bit of her brain moves, all the electrical impulses stopped in their tracks. What she now recognizes as mana, however, is still very much moving. It seems that the introduction of the blue glowing stuff has changed the very core of her being on a fundamental level. Her consciousness now seems to be housed in her mana instead of in her flesh.

[ Mana Sense lvl 4 ]

That is a great discovery and all, and figuring out something new while having it validated by the blue screen goes a great way to let her feel in control again, but it doesn’t really help. She is still a brain inside a decapitated android body. She is being carried around by some no-name grunt, being carted off to warp-knows-where, and that is terrifying on a lot of levels.

And then, to her great surprise, she actually knows where they are going.

[ Magical Interfacing lvl 8 ]

Plucking data from the massive stream of information that always seems to be flowing around her nowadays, she knows where they are going. Like reading a single headline from an avalanche of news articles, plucking their destination from the data-sphere around her is actually easy. Digging up some more maps from memory, she starts puzzling out where they are going exactly. To her great surprise, she puzzles out that the ship is plotting a jump relatively close to the Evengi system.

[ Magical Interfacing lvl 9 ]

Then she learns that they are rendezvousing with the CHCS Purgatory? She remembers that the CHCS Purgatory is one of the compartmented decontamination fleets. She also recalls that this particular semi-fleet of vessels is seen as one of the leading factors in the Histaff decontamination efforts.

Katare ponders all this information for a while. She spends some time with trying to listen in on more of what’s going on in the outside world.

[ Magical Integration lvl 10 ]

[ Magical Integration lvl 10; Technician 1/4 ]

She then realizes that a part of her implant is data storage and that she can utilize that to great effect. Almost slapping herself for this massive oversight, she goes over the elements embedded inside her brain one by one. The quiet around her - along with the hauntingly familiar lack of any bodily sensations whatsoever - is starting to force her to face the truth of things.

She is reduced to a thoroughly wired-up brain, a fate that a lot of well-educated people see as worse than death. The brain-in-a-jar status that’s plastered to the bottom of her status is something that is usually reserved for less-than-desirables. There are simulated reality planets filled with nothing but cerebral holding tanks, all of them linked up to fantasy make-belief dreamlands. A lot of peasants work their entire life to be able to afford that cursed immortality. They usually languish in their digital domains for centuries, possibly millennia. Then once the inevitable mental degradation sets in, they are bound to fail their Galactic Citizen Sapience exam after a while. Then, once they officially labeled as sub-sapient, little more than animals, they can be safely discarded.

And now Katare, scion of one of the highest powers in the galaxy, is in the same boat. And she will need to work hard to prevent it from sinking.

At least that partially explains why every single person in her old social circle acted like she had some holo-comm transferable disease. Calls coming in from someone with a life signature similar to the one that she must be giving off now are usually not even answered. To Katare, they feel similar to a stinking hobo rolling into a super fancy lobby. In this case, she was the hobo, and she had expected to be treated as an honored guest.

Katare then realized that she personally would have seen potential in a homeless, stinking, intoxicated hobo that had the guts to do that. She would have to give the hobo some measure of respect. A brain-jacked jar-head like she is now? Old Katare would have tossed it into the gutters without its cerebral fluid. And then she probably would have ordered someone to stomp it down the drain.

Katare suddenly sees the universe in a new light. The only way for her current self to sink any lower would be to fall for one of those digitization scams. People that believe that their consciousnesses can be transferred just because their brains are copied and simulated onto processers deserve to die, after all. At least she still has her real brain and isn’t an empty simulation, devoid of consciousness and soul.

And so what, she tells herself. She has magic now, bitches! The floating blue screens and mass of glowing blue power inside her head is something that only one other being in this galaxy - as far as she knows - has. She as warp-fracked magic. And although the memories might be distant and vague due to the neural therapy and the fact that she was controlling a clone, she knows what magic can do.

But first, she should contineu taking stock. First, she must know what her current situation is. Then, she can set a goal and start to work towards it.

Katare feels oddly calm now. Were she previously had been clinging onto her past, which had already been lost to her, now she knows she has nothing. Solan’s reputation and staggering capital are no longer worth anything. Her status as scion to the Tomat family is more liability than anything else. She is just a brain and a complete FullBrain implant. She might be currently encased in a Berry FullBionic iSleeve HominoidAndroid head, but she should stop relying on outside means They will all fail, as has just thoroughly been proven, and she only has herself to rely on.

Deciding to start with the basics, she tells her status to come up again.

[ Name: Kat ]

[ Race: Human ]

[ Level: 1 (0/100) ]

[ Class: Technician (1/4) ]

[ HP: 10/10 ][ HP/h: 0.01 ]

[ MP: 150/150 ][ MP/h: 014 ]

[ STR: 1 ]

[ AGI: 1 ]

[ CON: 10 ]

[ VIT: 1 ]

[ INT: 14 ]

[ WIS: 13 ]

[ Universal Language ]

[ Central Nervous System ]

[ Berry FullBionic iSleeve HominoidAndroid ]

[ Decapitated ]

First off, she notices that her 'brain in a jar' status has been upgraded to the more apt sounding Central Nervous System.

[ Central Nervous System; you are but a central nervous system. Except for your brain, cerebellum, and a part of your spinal cord, your entire body and peripheral nervous system are removed, and you are being kept alive artificially. HP max 10, STR max 1, AGI max 1, CON max 1 ]

Katare feels like she should give a pity slow applause now. This is yet more proof that this blue box system is making things up along the way. It seemed to have learned about things like central and peripheral nervous systems. No mentions of the main difference between the two systems, namely the blood-brain barrier, so it has a way to go as of yet.

Second is the android body she had chosen.

[ Berry FullBionic iSleeve HominoidAndroid; mechanical body. UNKNOWN. STR NAN, AGI NAN, CON NAN, VIT max 1 ]

This system is a total hack, Katare concludes. Suppressing an internal sigh, she asks what it thinks of her current status as just an android head.

[ Decapitated; you are decapitated ]

A total hack, she once again concludes. Katare feels kind of sorry for the poor saps who actually got decapitated while under the influence of these blue screens. They would likely have spent their last moments staring at that single line of useless text.

Katare then remembers that she is in a very bad situation, and all her attention immediately snaps back to herself.

She is in deep shit, after all. And most of all, she knows that she is in deep shit because she just picked up on a data stream between the pilot’s console and the warp drive. The jump that the ship has planned will take a whole week.

Normally, a week to get across a good third of the entire galactic disk would be a wild and needlessly expensive luxury. Warp drives are inherently simple, and aside from the fact that the universe doesn’t like to let things go faster than light, it can be bribed. The only currency the universal laws of the universe seem to accept is energy.

A warp drive functions by twisting the space in front of the spacecraft. It takes it from the back of the craft and shoves it all to the front. Moving through the compressed space lets you move many lightyears, while seemingly only traveling the length of the warped field. Nature seems to begrudgingly allows this, but it takes revenge by freezing time inside the travel bubble while letting it move on naturally outside.

Popular fiction is rife with tales of star crossed lovers, who struggle to save up enough to finally reunite. But, because of the relativity of it all, one of the two will be much, much older than the other. Thus, the love will end in a most juicy and tragic way, making many bored housewives cry their eyes out.

This period of skipped time can be shortened by pumping more energy into the warp field. A week to cross a third of the galaxy is super wasteful. The cost to warp that quickly is prohibitive to all but the most powerful powers. Even the biggest moneybags in the universe don’t make such speedy trips lightly.

But, as Katare knows from experience, she doesn’t seem to do well in frozen time. Last time she did that, she blew up one of the galaxy’s most advanced and most expensive space ships, along with her father, while becoming a planar deity of death, for crying out loud!

Completely and utterly unwilling to go through that entire debacle once again, she starts frantically thinking of ways to prevent a week-long, madness-inducing period of potentially going hyper-bat-shit insane.

Lucky for her, she actually has some time to come up with a solution. From the data-sphere that’s continuously flowing around her, she has managed to gleam the ship’s current trajectory. She seems to be on a small troop transport, but the minuscule warp engine will not be able to supply all the power for such a speedy warp. They are thus traveling to this system's single warp gate. It used to be her father’s, but after the news of Solan’s death made all Tomat stock prices crash to near zero, it must have been brought out relatively easily.

And these terribly dressed, incredibly rude, unwashed primitive savages are going to use a fraction of its stored power to help their warp engine go a lot faster. The leeches already have a buyer for the rest of the power waiting in line. Readily accessible power is one of the galaxy’s most wanted commodities, after all. Rare elements are good and all, but as long as you have access to a massive supply of usable energy, everything can be synthesized. This crew of mercs is looking to make a payday that will set them up for life.

It's just a shame that Katare also caught wind of a widespread array of spying features baked into the troop transport itself. Their superiors must know about every single movement that these dumbass gunslingers have been making, every single fart and grunt recorded. She wonders how a team like this can eve be alive to this day. Don't their superiors care about these blatant acts of insubordination?

Putting that issue to the side, for now, Katare knows that she will have to make something happen, or else she is very much going to go insane. If that infuriatingly hard to ignore blue dot at the bottom of her vision doesn’t make her go coo-coo first, though.

[ Magical Interfacing lvl 10 ]

[ Magical Interfacing lvl 10; Technician 2/4 ]

[ Mana Sense lvl 6 ]

Reading that she leveled her Mana Sense skill seems to shake something loose in her perception. She suddenly realizes why she can actually sense the inside of the vessel to such an extent. Inside many of the main components, and especially the merc teams’ gear, and all the spying features inside the ship is mana!

This is her first time coming across mana in the wild, she excuses herself. That, and the panic she was in because she is a decapitated head in a stasis field are pretty compelling reasons not to notice something massive like that for a while, right?

Nodding to herself that all that nonsense is really true and that she is amazing for even noticing the copious amounts of mana in the ship in the first place, she gets to work.