The Mech That Buried Nine Worlds

Chapter 2 - Zero

Chapter 2 · 1,595 words

The evaluation wing smelled of disinfectant and warm electronics. Tavian had been in this room before, twelve times in the last four years, at mandatory intervals that the ship's administrative system tracked with mechanical precision. The room was small, designed for one subject and two observers, with the test array taking up most of the floor space. The array itself was a chair surrounded by a ring of sensor columns, each column bristling with contact pads and neural interface probes. The equipment was older than the Drift, transferred from a decommissioned military vessel when the ship was converted to salvage operations, but it was calibrated regularly and functioned within specification.

Tavian sat in the chair. The contact pads were cold against his temples, and the neural interface probe pressed against the base of his skull with a firmness that was designed to be reassuring but felt more like insistence. A technician, not the one from last cycle, a different woman, younger, with her hair pulled back tight, adjusted the pads and checked the connections. She didn't speak.

Two crew members sat in the observer seats behind the array. Tavian didn't know them well. One was a logistics officer who probably had no reason to be here except that the evaluation was open to crew observation and someone had told her it was worth seeing. The other was a junior engineer from the propulsion section, maybe here because his shift schedule allowed it. They sat with the particular stillness of people who were watching something they expected to be brief.

The technician stepped back from the array and tapped a sequence into the control panel. The equipment hummed, a low, steady tone that cycled through its startup routine. Tavian closed his eyes. He'd done this enough times to know the sequence. The system would cycle through every standard synchronization protocol in its database, sending test patterns through the neural interface and measuring his consciousness's response. Each protocol was designed to match a different civilization's relic signature: the harmonic patterns of the Lithari, the biological frequencies of the Veln, the gravitational constants of the Saurath, and dozens more. A functional sync rating required the subject's consciousness to resonate with at least one protocol, producing a measurable response in the neural interface.

The first protocol engaged. Tavian felt the test pattern, a faint pressure at his temples, like someone pressing their fingertips against his skull from the inside. It lasted four seconds. The reading on the display was zero.

The second protocol. A different pressure, deeper, reaching toward the base of his skull where the probe sat. Four seconds. Zero.

The third. The fourth. The fifth.

Each protocol produced its own specific sensation. The Lithari pattern felt like vibration. The Veln pattern felt like warmth. The Saurath pattern felt like a subtle shift in gravity that his body couldn't quite register. He'd felt them all before. He'd felt them all produce nothing.

The technician watched the display. Her face was neutral, simply uninterested. She was recording data. The numbers appeared on her screen in clean rows, each protocol listed with its response value. Every value was zero.

Behind him, the logistics officer shifted in her seat. The sound was small, fabric against the chair's surface, but in the quiet of the evaluation room it carried. Tavian's hands gripped the armrests. Just enough to hold something.

The sixth protocol. The seventh. The eighth.

The test patterns cycled through his consciousness like someone flipping through pages in a book, looking for a reaction, finding blank pages. Each protocol was a question asked in a language his mind didn't speak, and his mind's answer was silence. The protocols passed through him and found nothing to engage with. No measurable opposition. Just absence.

The ninth protocol. The tenth.

The junior engineer behind him coughed, a single, involuntary sound, quickly suppressed. The logistics officer was very still now, watching the display with the expression of someone confirming something they already knew.

The eleventh protocol. The twelfth.

Tavian's breathing had changed. He was aware of it, the slight tightening in his chest, the way his diaphragm wasn't quite dropping as far as it should. He tried to normalize it. The armrests were solid under his hands, and he could feel the texture of the grip material, a rough polymer designed to give the subject something to hold. He held it.

The thirteenth protocol. The fourteenth.

The technician made a notation on her screen. Her stylus touched the surface with a soft click that was the loudest sound in the room.

The fifteenth protocol. The sixteenth.

Tavian's gaze had dropped to the floor. The evaluation room's deck plating was standard issue, gray composite, scuffed with the foot traffic of a hundred evaluations before his. He focused on a scratch near his left boot, a thin line that curved slightly to the right. He watched it. The test pattern cycled through his consciousness and found nothing.

The seventeenth protocol. The eighteenth.

The hum of the equipment was the only constant sound. The observers were silent. The technician was silent. The display was silent. Its numbers spoke for it, and the numbers said zero.

The nineteenth protocol. The twentieth.

The final protocol cycled through and the equipment's hum changed pitch. The completion tone, a slightly higher frequency that indicated the sequence was finished. The contact pads at his temples went cold. The neural probe at the base of his skull released its pressure. The test was over.

The technician tapped the control panel. The display cleared and showed a summary: twenty protocols tested, twenty zero readings, overall sync rating zero. She recorded the summary. She didn't comment. She didn't say thank you for your participation or the evaluation is complete or anything that would acknowledge the person sitting in the chair. She turned the screen toward the observer seats so they could see the result, and then she began the shutdown sequence.

Tavian's hands released the armrests. His fingers were stiff, and he flexed them once, twice, feeling the blood return to the tips. His breathing was still not quite right. He stood.

The logistics officer looked at him as he stepped away from the array. Her expression was pity, the specific kind of pity that has nowhere to go and doesn't try to deliver itself. She looked away almost immediately. The junior engineer was already standing, heading for the door.

The technician was wiping down the contact pads with a disinfectant cloth. She didn't look at Tavian. She wiped the pads with the same efficiency she would apply to any surface that needed cleaning.

Tavian walked to the door. His legs were steady. His hands were steady. Everything about him was steady except the thing inside his chest that had tightened during the test and hadn't released when it ended.

He stepped into the corridor. The door closed behind him.

The evaluation wing's corridor was longer than the one outside the disposal bay, and it took him forty seconds to reach the main junction. He walked the entire distance without stopping. His mind was doing the thing it always did after an evaluation, running the same conclusion it had reached twelve times before, arriving at the same destination it always arrived at.

Something was wrong with his mind.

The test array was designed to measure consciousness compatibility with relic systems. Every person aboard the Drift had a sync rating. The pilots had high ratings. Orson at eighty-seven, Ravi at seventy-one, even the utility operators carried ratings above twenty. The rating measured something real: the ability of a human consciousness to interface with the cultural patterns embedded in alien technology. It was the foundation of the entire mech pilot system. It was the metric by which the world measured who mattered and who didn't.

Zero. The test array had cycled through twenty protocols representing the relic signatures of twenty different civilizations, and his consciousness had not resonated with a single one. The absence was total.

The ship's medical officer had run cognitive assessments and found everything within normal parameters. His brain functioned. His mind worked. The instruments couldn't locate the fault, but the results made it undeniable.

He reached the main junction and turned toward the disposal bay. His shift started in twenty minutes. The work would be waiting. The cradles, the wreckage, the cutting tools. The work didn't require a sync rating. The work required hands, and his hands were good.

He walked faster.

The disposal bay was already active when he arrived. Two cradles were loaded with new wreckage. The Drift had picked up a field of destroyed mech components during the previous day's transit, and the disposal queue had grown. Tavian logged in, pulled on his gloves, and started on the first cradle.

A damaged torso section from a medium assault frame. The cockpit housing was crushed, the control systems fused, but the power distribution network beneath the armor might be salvageable. Tavian opened the housing and began the separation process.

His hands moved through the work with the same precision they always carried. Cut, separate, sort. The vibration of the cutting tool through his gloves. The resistance of different alloys as the blade found its path. The smell of scorched metal and recycled air.

The work was real. The skill was real. The zero was real.

All of it was real, and none of it fit together, and he carried the gap between them through the rest of the shift like a weight he'd learned to hold without letting it show.

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