My name is Kevin Jackson. I am the third man in my family to carry that name. It used to mean something on this ship, but it doesn't hold much weight anymore. My grandfather was captain, my father was the science officer and second in command, and I'm working the cash register at Main Street Electronics.

I stared up at the clock, thinking about what time it would be if we didn't use a system based on rotations of a planet that was who-knows-how-many lightyears away. All this adherence to a foreign culture that none of us had ever experienced really annoys me at times. Our experiences should be our own, not that of some people on a swamp-covered ball in a galaxy named after cow juice.

If I didn't need the money, I'd quit my job. I'm really sick of having to deal with people complaining about the lack of colors available on our line of robo-puppies. People on this ship are so obsessed with emulating everything from the planet we left behind, but they still end up asking for replications of pets in crazy colors that never existed. When we had to study Earth history in upper form, I don't remember seeing anything about phlox poodles, but I get dozens of requests for pets in insane shades like that every day.

Ugh, finally. Oh-seventeen-hundred hours on the tick. I can't wait to leave this madhouse and get home to my wife and sons. I am so glad that my son Jonathan put in the request to authorize my use of the crew corridors, and I'm even more glad that the captain approved it. It's so much quicker to go through the crew corridor just outside of Main Street than it is to walk to the housing district directly. In my case, it's not a matter of favoritism over the fact that my sons are part of the crew on this ship. An accident left me as half of the man I once was, literally.

I used to work as a digital component programmer in a simulated sawmill that was located in the ship's simulation of the Scottish Highlands. It was a great job until the electronics on the saw arm malfunctioned, and I lost my limbs in an excruciating minute that felt like an eternity. The audit of the accident showed that the machine's processor was faulty. As it was a hardware issue rather than a software issue, the ship's treasurer, Adam Rockseed, authorized complete payment for my hospital stay, rehabilitation, and for my robotic appendages.

The good side of that ordeal was that my pension would still grow as long as I worked, even if it was not at the sawmill. That was music to my ears, as I got far away from that God-forsaken place as soon as I could. Thus, I moved, with my wife and infant sons, from one simulated Earth location to another. We left our residence in the artificial Scottish Highlands to reside in the residential living quarters just off of Main Street in the simulated United States of America.

My sons are now grown men, but we still live off of Main Street. However, we're now in a much more convenient location. It is nice since, due to the fact that my sons are officers on this ship, we're allowed to live in the living quarters in the area reserved for senior crew members. Plus, now with my access to the crew corridors, I can leave work and go straight home.

Our sons have their living quarters, separate from my wife and me, but our family is still together. The three spacious living quarters, each with their own toilet area and shower, are combined with a kitchen and a living room in a structure that has the facade of a domicile designed following Victorian-era architectural norms.

Even as a juvenile, I was a genius when it comes to programming, so as you can imagine, living on a ship sailing through space meant that I had my pick of careers. At the time, I didn't want my life to be determined by the career path of my father and grandfather, so I went against their wishes and took a civilian job. That was the biggest mistake of my life.

I chose the Scottish Highlands simulation because I thought it was so beautiful and lush with vegetation. After the accident, all that I can do is look at it and see nothing but its artificial components, and I can't help but see that even its existence is artificial. It attempts to mimic something so precisely that no one on this ship has ever actually seen. Everyone on board this ship only has an inkling of what Earth really looked like due to the digital archives created centuries ago by our ancestors.

To be honest, I can't help but see every part of the ship that way now, as I feel that we can be so much more if we forge our own path in architecture and design instead of using designs created by people who died ages ago. The Main Street location allows me to remain close to my sons, who are now both officers on this ship, so I don't let anyone else know about my inner thoughts. I grin and bear it, as my family is more important to me than anything else.

When I finally left work, on the way to the elevator, I walked past the pathetic attempt to recreate the stone, gravel, and sand that made up the faux-asphalt in our simulated, sanitized, 20th-century-America-inspired downtown facade. Our ship's depiction of Main Street is so far off from the virtual augmented reality simulations that we viewed in school.

The real downtown districts from that time period had real character, style, and a sense of being that we sorely lack. The real, unfiltered, storefronts of Earth sold similar items to our stores, but the owners weren't afraid to show the dirt, grime, and decay that naturally occurred on the planet over the decades. They were actually proud of it, as our dictionary notes that they coined words for the natural aging of buildings, calling them "weathered", which was seen as a positive trait. They also had phrases that emphasized their approval of natural progression, stating that "things only got better with age".

We have a clean oxygen supply throughout the ship, but Earth's atmosphere is an amazing cocktail, containing many disparate components such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and water vapor. That's not even going into the chemical byproducts of pollution that gathered within the perimeter between the Earth's atmosphere and the cold vacuum of space that we are always floating aimlessly through, but do our best to pretend we're not. I can't even imagine what it would be like to breathe that wonderful mix of elements into my lungs, but I'm sure it tastes a lot sweeter than the cold, sterilized oxygen that we're forced to breathe.

My parents took me to a theme park simulation in the ship's Augmented Reality Entertainment Network Archway as a kid, and even their make-believe Main Street seemed much more realistic than ours. The builders on Earth made these romanticized attractions to escape from reality, but our sterile attempts at mimicry are not an escape, they are our reality.

I can't speak from experience, of course. Maybe our downtown really is accurate. Maybe the dirty, gritty, virtual AR simulations that I experienced in school were just a fluke. It's possible Earth's downtowns really did resemble the ARENA records of a theme park's Main Street. But, if that is the case, at least the saccharine structures in the theme parks were real. There was a designer who wanted to bring back the joy of the Main Street storefront that he or she remembered. Our attempts to rebuild the theme park version of 20th century America are hollow. None of us ever experienced the real thing, nor did our parents or grandparents.

Well, enough reminiscing. I'm finally home. It's time to kick back, relax, and enjoy some downtime with the people I love.

Chapter Six

The atmosphere in the Jackson household was anything but relaxed. Junior Lieutenant Stephen Jackson was waiting for his father to arrive home from his shift at the electronics shop, and he was not the harbinger of good news. He only had a few minutes of break to talk to his father before he had to return to his new position on the bridge crew, but he aimed to make the most of the time he had. His father had to be told about what happened to his wife and oldest son, and he was adamant that he’d be the person to tell him.

Kevin Jackson opened the door and was surprised to see that his son Stephen had arrived home before he did. He could tell by the angry look on his son’s face that something had happened at work. The fact that his son was standing here meant that he likely hadn’t been involved in a brawl, but the look on his face made him apprehensive. What on virtual Earth had made his son so angry?

“That freak of a so-called-captain locked up mom and Jonathan. The splicer baby that calls itself a counselor beat mom senseless and the captain had the nerve to lock them up! The splicer spawn only got a day in the brig, while mom and Jon are being held with no set release date.”

The elder Jackson now had a look of anger on his face that made his son look like the Dalai Lama in comparison. “He did what?!”

His son didn’t say a word, but instead reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, metallic, silver disk approximately the size of a quarter of his pinky nail. He held it in the palm of his hand, then spoke. “Play file. Timestamp one-five-point-three-six-point-oh-seven.”

The room became filled with colored light as the augmented reality surveillance disc turned the Jackson family living room into Main Street. Kevin Jackson’s face turned white as he watched the monster beat his wife. That thing had actually come into the shop today. He wished that he hadn’t ignored her. If he’d beat the living tar out of her, as her kind deserves, he could have spared his beloved Carla from any pain.

As he recalled the blood-curdling high pitched scream that he heard this afternoon while he was in the repair room at the back of the shop, his blood boiled as he began to wonder if that was his wife that screamed out in agony. With his temper now at its peak, he turned to his son and asked for the disc. “Give me that disc, son, and head back to duty before you get into trouble too. I’ll make sure everyone on this ship knows just what kind of demon spawn these splicer babies really are.”

With that, Stephen handed the disc to his father. They didn’t need to say a word to each other, as they knew exactly had to be done. They both walked out of the house, silently, and entered the crew corridors. The son headed for the bridge, while the father walked towards the maintenance tunnels.

Just as Kevin had suspected, he did not have proper clearance to enter the maintenance area. Putting his programming skills to the ultimate test, he downloaded the code to his memory banks and quickly set to work decompiling and reverse engineering the detection code. Since he needed a hasty solution, he simply altered it to skip the bio-scan completely, and hardcoded the system to always register as a specific individual. Kevin Jackson might not be able to go wherever he wants on this ship, but that shouldn’t be a problem for Lieutenant Rodriguez.

Once inside, Kevin quickly made his way to the emergency alert system. He needed to be extremely fast, as his quick-and-dirty hack meant that it would be extremely easy to detect. If any crew member entered the maintenance corridors now, they would definitely be suspicious if the bio scan tells them that they are Mario Rodriguez.

He quickly set up wireless communication between the two devices and copied the relevant portion of the video straight to the storage unit. Now that the video was in place, he set an emergency timer to begin in half an hour. That should give him more than enough time to remove any traces of his code and his presence from the maintenance systems. He gave himself enough leeway to do what needed to be done while still setting the presentation to start in a relatively short amount of time. He didn’t wish to delay the retribution of the race of creatures that had attacked his wife. Soon the entire ship would see these things as the bloodthirsty monsters they are.

At the exact moment that Mr. Jackson had finished erasing all traces of his unauthorized entry into the ship’s systems, the ship’s captain was finishing a conversation with the ship’s counselor, the latter of whom was presently being held in the brig. “I’ll do everything I can to try to calm tensions down. Sadly, there’s bound to be increased anger after today, but luckily it was just one small part of the ship that witnessed everything. I’ll make sure that the people of Main Street know the whole story. Hopefully, once they know everything, the people of Main Street will quell the gossip on the other areas of this ship. It may not seem like it now, but most of the people on this ship are caring people.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll nip this thing in the bud. Your safety and the safety of everyone else on the ship is my primary concern. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that it doesn’t get out of hand.”

At that moment, it seemed that the universe had conspired to play another cosmic joke on them. All of the emergency screens on every part of the ship turned red with the dreaded emergency alert text. Both counselor and captain tensed up as they braced for the worst. However, the video that followed was far worse than anything that they could have imagined.

The entire ship had just seen video footage of Maria Corben, the ship’s counselor, savagely beating Carla Jackson, the mother of two of the ship’s officers. There was no context, as the video of Carla beating Maria’s mother was nowhere to be seen. All that could be seen was Maria punching Carla as hard as she could, and all that could be heard was the primal growl that Maria had uttered due to her desire to protect her mother. However, as far as the people on the ship were concerned, the video showed Maria Corben reverting to an animal-like state, savagely beating a mother of two without provocation.

Both ladies opened their eyes wide with fear. They have now entered the absolute worst-case scenario. Neither had any idea how they could possibly get things back to normal without serious repercussions.