The Good Regulator, Part Two
Fictionalization of a Mathematical Proof. 924 words, 2 minute read. With Gemini.
The groan of stressed metal was a sound Elara knew intimately. It was the sound of a ship pushed to its limits, the sound her mentor, Kaito, had called “singing.” Today, the Starglider’s song was a ragged shriek. A slab of crystalline ice, big as a freighter, cartwheeled past the cockpit, its shadow momentarily plunging them into darkness. The impact that followed was a glancing blow, but it was enough to make the ship shudder violently.
“Kaito taught you that flourish, didn’t he?” Jax’s voice was quiet, but it cut through the alarms like a laser. “A little slip-and-roll under pressure. It was beautiful when he did it, too. And just as dangerous.”
“Kaito was the best pilot in the fleet,” Elara snapped, her hands already moving, coaxing the ship into a delicate weave through a fresh spray of debris. She flew by the ship’s vibrations, by the hum of the engines in her bones. It was a connection, a dance. “He said you feel the path, you don’t calculate it.”
“He was my friend, Elara,” Jax said, his tone turning to ice. “And he is dead.”
Another jolt, harder this time, threw them against their harnesses. The main power grid flickered, and the recycled air tasted of ozone. On the console, the schematic of the ship now showed a rupture in an aft coolant line.
“His ‘path’ led him right into a gravitational anomaly he didn’t bother to calculate,” Jax continued, his eyes locked on his telemetry screen. “I have his final flight log. Your response curves are starting to look just like it.”
The words hit her like a physical blow. But there was no time. A new proximity alarm began its insistent, deep-throated cry. A mass of tumbling, conjoined asteroids blocked their path, a wall of chaotic motion.
In the sudden, tense quiet between alarms, Jax brought up the holotank. It wasn’t a tactical map he displayed, but two overlapping graphs. One line, glowing in a calm, steady blue, was labeled ‘Protocol.’ The other, a chaotic, spastic scribble of red, was labeled ‘Elara.’
“This is you versus the physics of the situation,” Jax said, his anger now worn down to a sharp, painful edge. “Every time a Class-Four spinner has appeared, you’ve tried something new. A different ‘artistic’ solution.”
“It’s improvisation!”
“It’s suicide!” Jax’s voice cracked. He stabbed a finger at the holotank, and the red line flickered, syncing with a new data set. A ghostly third line appeared, nearly identical to hers. It was labeled Kaito—Final Log.
Elara felt the air leave her lungs. It was all there. The same daring flourishes. The same gut-instinct dodges. The same arrogant, beautiful, and fatally inefficient scrawl. She was flying like a ghost.
“He believed art could conquer physics,” Jax said, his voice now a near-whisper. “He thought mastery was about forcing the universe to bend to his will. But that isn't mastery, Elara. That’s ego. True mastery is understanding. It's knowing the system so completely that you become its perfect counterpoint.”
He looked at her, and the years of his grief were plain on his face. “I can’t watch that happen again. The system presents a question. We have the book with all the answers. Please, just use the book.”
The great mass of rock loomed in the viewport. It had a specific tumble, a unique gravitational signature. S1. Her intuition was a screaming void. Kaito’s art had no answer for this. There was only the cold, undeniable proof glowing in the tank, and the memory of her hero’s failure. It was a choice between her faith and his fate.
“Protocol R9,” she said, her voice a stranger to her own ears.
Jax looked up, surprised. “Five-degree pitch up,” he instructed, his voice regaining its professional steel. “Align with the equatorial fissure. On my mark, full burn.”
Her hands, which had once danced, now moved with the cold precision of a surgeon. The ship tilted. A vast canyon of shadow and stone slid into view across the asteroid’s face. It was not a path she felt, but one she knew was there.
“Mark.”
She pushed the throttle to the wall. The engine’s roar was no longer a song of rebellion, but a chorus of pure, focused power. They did not swerve around the behemoth; they pierced its heart, flying through a chasm opened for them by the laws of celestial mechanics.
The next threat appeared. Tumbling Pair, Class-Two. Her mind identified it, and her hands executed the solution. R7. The ship slid between them with an impossible grace, a single, perfect brushstroke of motion. S4 was met with R2. S7 with R4.
It was then she understood. This wasn't the death of her art. It was its apotheosis. Kaito had been a brilliant musician playing a chaotic, self-taught melody. But this—this was the symphony. The cold logic of the protocols, when executed perfectly, possessed a stark and breathtaking elegance. It was the beauty of a flawless equation, the harmony of a system brought into perfect balance.
The last of the debris field fell away, revealing the pristine, silent black of open space. Elara pulled her hands back from the controls, her fingers tingling. She looked over at Jax, who was watching her, no longer a critic or a ghost of the past, but a partner.