Only wrote a half day today. It doesn’t set me back, but it doesn’t keep me ahead. I’m on track now to reach 100,000 words by the 30th, and I’ll be writing to 120,000 until December 6th, when the story will end! Woo!

Word Count: 86685

When the time was right, he told the group about everything. Graham and Ames had been waiting in the main room, hoping to hear any sort of good news from Variable – but of course there was none to hear.

“The test results were correct, unfortunately. We need to go to Country 200 if we want to have any hope of finding Maiya – I can understand if you don’t want to go. It’s dangerous, and certainly not legal.”

“Where is Country 200?” Graham asked.

“Country 200 is an abandoned hovering space station. I don’t know why it was abandoned; I only know that going to Country 200 is one of the few enforced laws on Cydia outside of The Collective. Vacations there are prohibited as it is abandoned, and, well, I suppose the rest would be self-explanatory. Since it’s abandoned, maintenance has been non-existent – I’m sure The Collective has been wondering when it is to crash down to Cydia.”

“Well, don’t you guy guys have that huge elevator?” Ames asked. “We could just ride that up to the station.”

“Won’t work,” said Variable despondently. “The space elevator doesn’t go to the station, and the one that does was torn down. We will need to commandeer a ship; there are several nearby the port used for interstellar travel. It’s neigh impossible to actually get one, so we’ll have to hijack it. And, since I sense you’re about to ask yet another question, no – Cydians cannot simply buy these ships. They are for manned research only.”

“Alight,” said Graham, “if you’re sure we can get one of these things and find Maiya, I’m all for it. Are you sure Maiya is the only person that can give us information, though?”

“This is beyond being sure, James! This is one of my dear friends; we cannot simply let her slip away this way. As I’ve said, if you won’t go, I understand – but I’ll be off within the next five minutes. If you help me find her, you’ll have both her aid and my gratitude.”

“Ames?” Graham said.

“We don’t really have a choice. If Variable leaves, we’ve lost our one connection to The Collective, and by the sound of it we can’t just go there ourselves. Let’s go to Country 200.”

And so the group left the apartment and all of the secrets contained within it, setting off once again for the port. Graham’s legs would have ached from all the walking without the existence of the light tram, whose tracks on Salvia spanned several miles in distance, and allowed the passenger to cover this distance in less than a millionth of a second. Within ten minutes they had arrived at the harbor, and Graham was a tad more than queasy; he looked about to vomit. Ames held him and comforted him, but it was too late for the man; Variable and Ames stepped back.

“This isn’t going to happen to me on the ship, is it?” Graham asked, looking sickly.

“It should not,” said Variable. “But even I have never been on one. I’m not the traveling type, you see, beyond the small trips to other islands.”

Variable led them to an area of the port uninhabited by people sprawling about, but inhabited in great numbers by Leaves. Their virtual LED faces floated aimlessly in the air, waiting for a purpose, or perhaps, for someone to deactivate them. And yet they stood proudly, marking every object in sight as the property of Cydia. Variable shoved several of the objects aside with the Leaves that covered them in anger. Several of the objects were destroyed in the process, mostly nameless boxes and mechanical instruments sitting against a wall.

What Ames and Graham hadn’t seen, at first, was the door behind all of those boxes and parts. The door to the ship garage – a rusty old steel door with a primitive handle and surrounded on all sides by bricks. While modern to Graham and Ames, it must have been ancient to all Cydians alike. Even if the ships still functioned, they were most likely as old as this building – and even Graham could not determine that. Yet even as he thought, Variable was ripping the door off its hinges.

“Nobody is going to come in this way. We can grab a ship without much effort, I think.”

The group ran through the door as quickly as possible so as not to be seen by any possible passers by, and shut the door behind them, leaving the broken boxes and tools as a clear sign of their entrance to the ship garage. The ships, however, were not in immediate view; rather they were several rooms over. The door had taken them through to the back of the garage, and they were currently in some sort of control room. Several glass screens and keyboards floated in the distance. Graham was only just getting used to Cydia’s strange keyboard layout, and to see so many keyboards at once, and clearly meant for only one person to use, was insanity to him.

They trudged onward, keeping on the lookout for any people. Yet, even though they had all expected to find many scientists, mechanics and researchers sprawling about, instead they found nobody – the entire garage was empty space, as empty as Curie’s shed. Yet, like Curie’s shed, Graham realized that it concealed a great space for something important – and soon enough they had come to the ships, massive structures of black steel and unknown materials that hovered above the ground. They could easily have fit an entire congregation of people, and Graham was once again in shock; he hardly trusted Cydian technology up until now with the exception of the glasses, and to say he felt any different about these ships would have been an outright fabrication.

Yet he dragged himself up to their hulls, continually checking the surrounding area for signs of life. All three of them thought that something was strange; why were there no people? Variable, perhaps, was the most curious of the three, for he knew that there were always people inside the garage working. It should have, by all calculations, been a hotspot for Collective activity. That it was not meant something was terribly wrong – or the focus of the entire Collective had shifted.

“It seems this isn’t going to be as difficult as I perceived. The ships are locked, yes; but with the knowledge sharing in The Collective comes the loss of privacy, and hence every citizen on Cydia knows how to commandeer these ships, even myself. Let me open the ship for you, and I’ll pilot us to Country 200.”

Variable stood against the oblong side of the ship and materialized a large circular structure. He pressed the flat end of this structure into the side of the ship, which caused a door to his right to react oddly by beginning to shake. Variable then began rapidly pressing virtual buttons upon the circular mass, which fiddled more with the door, until it swung itself open. “There,” Variable said. “Let’s go.”

He guided the two travelers onto the ship, whose interior design rung of Maiya’s penthouse apartment in aesthetic, and in functionality – the entire ship was a hovering research laboratory. The door led through a small passageway that emptied out into a large control room; Variable immediately took the helm and urged Graham and Ames to explore elsewhere while he rummaged through controls attempting to figure out what model of ship it was. Passageways were everywhere; the ship seemed to be more of a network of pipes and tubes than anything else, with small roomed back in between the network.

Very quickly did Graham and Ames locate the sleeping area, the restroom, a small laboratory setting, empty storage rooms – the entirety of the ship remained spotless and untouched. It looked as though it had been cleaned – possibly even detailed – the day before, but the signs of rotting of the actual garage in which it rested said otherwise.

Suddenly, the entire ship shook, and Graham and Ames fell over, hitting a nearby wall. Ames left a bit of blood on the wall from her head due to the violent shake, and seeing the blood Graham rushed to pick her up.

“No, don’t worry – it’s nothing. I can pick myself up.” She did so, and simply wiped the blood off of her head, and onto the ship’s wall. “Well, I suppose my head thinks it’s not okay.”

“I think Variable just started the ship. Go see if there’s running water – I don’t know how long of a trip this is going to be, or if there will be complications. I’ll keep tabs on him and make sure he’s taking us to Country 200. Keep looking around and I’ll meet up with you somewhere.”

Graham left Ames alone while she washed off her head with the running water made recently available by Variable turning on the ship. Variable was diligently working at the command line of the ship, and having trouble lifting it off the ground. Even with his vast knowledge, he was still not a pilot. He banged down on the non-existent panels, which shattered into thousands of sharp, small shards, and screamed in pain. It was then that Graham realized that Variable was not normal – not because of his inability to pilot the ship, but for his ability to feel the objects in virtual space. And Graham was sure that there was no other man or woman on Cydia with the same ability – or curse.