The Pivot

No one had shown up.

Goten had lingered in his quarters, head pressed against the plush gray velvet of the seat that ran the length of the living area. Planacorp's security guards would come for him any moment now, just as soon as they realized that he was broadcasting confidential mission information to the whole galaxy. He would cost them billions in botched and sabotaged jobs.

His escape had started to take shape in his mind. Before now, he had never really minded that he couldn't use instant transmission on the base. The Yardratian warriors disagreed — some had even refused to be stationed here over it, curling their pink lips in contempt at the idea that their abilities, such an essential part of their culture, should be stymied in this way. "It would be like telling you to live with your hands tied together," one of them had told him. The Yardratians had liked him — they respected anyone who could master energy techniques, and took it as a compliment that he knew one of theirs.

But it was company policy: no teleporting under their roof. Which meant there was no escaping that way. Even if he could have, Goten had to admit that he didn't know where he would transmit himself to. The universe was open to him — he had visited an unimaginable number of places — but he didn't have hooks on those worlds. In most places, he would have struggled to pick out an energy signature he knew well enough to grab onto. And more than that, he couldn't think of a place or a person he wanted to run to. He couldn't imagine who he would be glad to see. Or who would be glad to see him.

So, instead, he would require a ship. And that meant he would be brawling his way out of here. He was stronger than anyone on the base individually, but the guards did have some fairly nasty weapons. He'd been wounded before by Planacorp-issue wave guns, caught in the crossfire when he'd been distracted, in the midst of a chaotic battle over a valuable ore field. The beams cauterized the damage instantly, which was fortunate because it did prevent bleeding to death. They were also, less fortunately, exquisitely and excessively painful by design, in a way that might make you wish for the merciful possibility of death.

They'd turn them up to the maximum level for him, he thought, wincing. They knew too well what he was capable of. But he was fast enough to avoid their shots if he was paying attention. He'd be okay so long as he resisted the urge to stand around and square up or debate who was tougher. Speed was his ally today. The only way they were burning any holes in him was if he gave them the chance to.

Once he was through the waves of guards he would take whichever ship he fancied. Something modern with good AI. Planacorp's fleet was full of sleek little numbers with every facility you could want. They weren't very spacious, but he was going to be alone, so that was hardly an issue. The autopilot was the main thing he'd need. Although he could manage the basics of space flight, the company had kept him focused on what he was good at — fighting and destroying things. He hadn't been trained for self-sufficiency in space. Normally there were droids and pilots and auxiliary crew for that kind of thing. But a good ship that mostly piloted itself would solve most of his problems and he'd work out his next steps from there.

And then Planacorp had not sent anyone to his rooms. No-one had shown up for him to fight his way past. For the first few hours he hadn't known what to do. Should he wait? Leave of his own accord? That would give him more time to select a ship. He found himself frozen with indecision.

He slid down the couch and stared at his own feet. He was like his father physically, in almost all respects. Sometimes he thought it was as if the gods had neglected to add his mother into the mix at all, as if they had cut him straight from Goku's cloth instead, no weaving required. But when he looked at his feet — so much narrower and knobblier than his dad's — he saw his mother, and Gohan, and knew that something other than his father had gone into his making. He didn't much like being reminded of that right now. This wasn't the time to be thinking of being six, and his mother sighing that his feet were just like her own as she wiped his bare soles with a flower-patterned cloth to prevent him tracking muddy little footprints up the stairs.

He went to his clothing pod and pulled a luxuriously thick pair of brown socks from the neat, metallic drawer inside. He put them on, business-like, all the while staring out of the window at the planet below, its cold, green gaseous stripes backlit by the system's star.

As he dressed, he wondered with a jolt whether he had screwed up the comms. Had he sent nothing at all? That would explain the lack of retaliation. He was going to feel incredibly silly if the data hadn't even left the base. He vaulted back to the living area and snatched up his tablet. He could see the information bouncing back, ricochetting around, being forwarded, echoing, acquiring delays. Telltale fingerprints that meant someone was taking hold of it and sending it beyond where it had started. It had worked. He had leaked it. And it was being gobbled up.

So it was useful. He sat down and watched its progress. The flutter in his chest surprised him. He had been so focused on hurting Planacorp that he hadn't thought much about the people who would take receipt of the information. But somebody was reading it and they thought it was important enough to amplify. Maybe they were even excited by it, or grateful.

He rose, and with renewed energy began again, using his fairly limited computing skills to messily scrape more data and broadcast it. He watched with bright eyes as it reverberated, its reach boosted by invisible co-conspirators.

Several hours later, lying on his front, he finally lowered the tablet and gazed out of the window. He had pushed through his tiredness without much difficulty, but now his stomach was rumbling, and that was a different matter. The area around him was littered with brightly-coloured wrappers: he'd eaten his way through the various nutrition bars and snacks provided daily to his quarters. Normally they'd be topped-up while he was out, but today he had been resolutely in residence. He'd given the burnished, whisper-quiet droids no opportunity to swing by undetected.

His stomach dropped at the thought of leaving his rooms. Was Planacorp pretending not to know, hoping he would let his guard down? Would they come for him just when he'd begun to believe that — by some miracle or some great incompetence on their part — his activities had escaped their notice? Or was he being paranoid? He felt unmoored, no longer part of this place but somehow still inside it, in the belly of the monster.

The door to his quarters closed noiselessly behind him as he stepped out. With a sense of unreality, he navigated the wide glass corridors, the inky perma-night on three sides as he walked, and made his way to the canteen. Base guards and staff passed him without so much as a backwards glance. Did they always ignore him? He couldn't remember. He had never paid attention. His mind was always full of the previous mission, or the next one. Now the whole place felt unfamiliar, as if he had not lived here for years.

He made eye contact with a guard, who nodded and continued walking. Goten's head swivelled, watching the alien's bubbled beige scalp grow smaller as the distance between them increased.

Surely, someone was playing with him. This smacked of Tarlow: the only person twisted enough to bring a whole base in on his plan to humiliate someone. Goten swerved away from the canteen, opting instead to raid a cupboard full of mission rations and mineral drinks. He sped back to his room, and hunkered down again. The previous pile of wrappers was gone, the cupboard restocked. The droids were paying attention to him, at least.

Days passed. At Planacorp, fighters were encouraged to take as few or as many missions as they wanted, so no-one came to ask why he hadn't picked up a brief for days. He wouldn't be missed until someone remembered how useful he was — how good at killing — and asked for him specifically.

During the quietest hours, he would leave his nest and wander the corridors, avoiding everyone. Sometimes he would stand in the deserted glass corridors, press his fingertips to the cold, curved surface, and imagine blowing the walls out. It would freeze him solid in under 10 seconds. It would damage the base too, creating a wave of deadly, scattered debris that would orbit the planet and take years to clean up. It would be simpler for the corporation to abandon it and make a new base somewhere else. Should he do it? His warped reflection, all black hair and blacker eyes, seemed to have no opinion.

He had been shocked by how many things he had observed for the first time over the last few days. No two pairs of socks from the clothing pod were ever exactly alike. They were giving him brand new ones every time. The energy bars were never the same flavor, he now realized. The color of the corridor lighting changed subtly every 12 hours. The droids needed four minutes to replenish a room's supplies. Planacorp made sure you wanted for nothing — except excitement. And you got that from your missions.

He had stopped messaging Marron. When Planacorp eventually did close down his information-sharing racket, he didn't want to have put a target on her back. They'd assume she was an accomplice. It had been nice speaking with her, but all good things had to come to an end. He supposed that Marron, Trunks and Pan would give up soon and head home to get on with their lives. He did a quick calculation to work out how old Pan would be now. Just hitting college age. He wondered fleetingly what Trunks had ended up majoring in, whether he was getting his PhD like he'd always planned, and teeing himself up to take over Capsule Corp.

They'd be able to tell each other (and their parents) that they had tried. It was strange to imagine them plotting a course back to Earth. At first, he had been incandescent that they'd stalked him all the way out here. The claustrophobia of it had made him want to run to the other end of the universe. And their arrogance and presumption had made him want to smack someone. But now the idea of them giving up on him and turning around was like swallowing a lead ball. He pushed the thought away. It rolled back insistently.

He slept at last and when he woke, swearing, it was with the sense memory of the smell of the grass at Mt Paozu at the edge of the garden where it met the forest behind, fresh and cool against his face in the height of summer. Springy moss underfoot. The breeze trying its utmost to tug the curtains into the flowerbeds outside the window. Clouds of fragrant steam from the chimney: a sure sign that his mother was in the kitchen working magic with a spatula. After the richness of the dream the stillness of his bedroom here felt wrong, a dead space — the only sensation was the silent, soft flow of air from the cooling systems. The only noise in his quarters was whatever he himself generated, because every set of rooms here was soundproofed, hermetically sealed from the others. And nothing ever smelled of anything, because it was all carbon-filtered flatness and automated cleaning.

He listened for a moment, till the quiet threatened to drill a hole in his skull. Then he lifted his tablet and accepted the first mission on the screen. It was time to get out of here before he lost his mind.

Missions offered diversion and distraction. Wasn't that how he'd ended up here in the first place? Dressed in the soft brown practical shipsuit that was Planacorp standard issue, he prepared to board the trading ship he was supposed to inspect. He glanced at the manifest. It was a straightforward task, the kind of thing that would have normally been beneath him. He would be 'taking back' some supplies from a merchant vessel. A solo mission, luckily, which would give him more time to think about his next steps. And it seemed worth checking out the trader's ship to see whether he'd be better off stealing that in place of the Planacorp shuttle he was currently on.

The doors of the merchant ship slid open, bringing him face to face with someone who, for the briefest of moments, he mistook for Piccolo. Then his eyes adjusted and he saw this person was older, broader around the middle, less muscular than Piccolo. Goten tried to regain his composure, hoping the shock was not plain on his face.

The ship was full of plant life, with long trailing vines stretching across every surface and climbing every wall. The air was humid, sweet-smelling, cool and inviting. He could smell fresh soil and growing things. His ears caught a faint, background buzz. Insect life, perhaps.

There was a very long pause while the Namek regarded him, the ships' engines whirring around them, the sound of standby, of nothing happening. His eyes slid down Goten's motionless form to the Planacorp logo on his chest, and back up to his face.

"You resemble the one they call Goku, but you aren't him," the Namek observed finally.

A week ago, Goten thought, he would have turned and walked away from this conversation — perhaps even shoved the Namek and told him to go — No, surely not. Surely he would never have laid hands on any Namek. He felt motion-sick as he struggled internally, wrestling with another version of himself. Could it really be true that he might have hurt or killed this Namek if he'd encountered him last week?

The spinning sensation grew. He wanted to put a hand on the wall next to him, but he was worried about how it would look.

"I'm not him," Goten said simply.

They eyed one another. What were they going to do now? They both knew why he had boarded the ship. There was another long, pregnant pause. Some kind of automated watering apparatus went off. A fine mist descended gently from above their heads. Goten felt it touch the back of his neck, soft and cool. A butterfly made its way past, leisurely, unperturbed by the events around it.

The Namek turned his face upwards and closed his eyes, as if to enjoy the brief, artificial rain. Then he gazed at the floor, as if deep in thought.

"You will need time to recover your spirit," he said at last. He spoke as if continuing a casual conversation, perhaps even answering a request for advice, and not as if he was piercing the most excruciating silence of Goten's life with an unsolicited evaluation.

"What?" Goten was thrown.

"Your spirit. It's been harmed by your bitterness, and your misdeeds. But it will heal. Like anything in nature, it can recover, given time."

Now Goten did put his hand out, and touched the wall lightly to stay upright. "You know who I am?"

"No." The Namek spread his hands and shrugged. "I only describe the situation I see. Your soul is damaged. But not irreparably. And I see signs of improvement already. New shoots, if you will."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Goten replied spikily. But something inside him was swelling as the Namek spoke. He had the sensation of a tide rising up, breaking its banks. He stepped backwards.

The Namek smiled, slowly, with certainty. "But you want to."

"I'm going to go now," Goten said.

"I think that's best."

He made for the doors, then turned. "You should … switch off your backup comms until you're through sector 85. That's how Planacorp tracked you."

The Namek looked surprised. "Despite the ciphering?"

"The AI cracked it almost immediately." He was turning away. It was taking everything in him not to break into a run. He couldn't remember the last time he had run from anyone or anything, and now here he was, about to sprint back onto the shuttle in terror from an elderly Namek who'd could not and would not have ever threatened him.

"Take care. Nurture those shoots," the Namek said, as the doors closed between them.

"Nearest station," Goten instructed.

"Setting course to 77653," the computer replied coolly.

"Oh gods, not 77653."

"Would you prefer a different destination?"

"Yes, anything but one of those giant shiny nightmares. Nearest station of under … five million?"

"The nearest station meeting set conditions is 88751."

"Great."

"88751 has limited facilities and is generally considered an undesirable location," the AI drawled.

"Sounding better by the second."

The computer did not dignify this with a response.

"And reject all comms link attempts," Goten said.

The comms screen turned a soft shade of red.

He had begun to receive calls. He hadn't arrived with the expected cargo (rare plants from Namek, he now realized) at the appointed time. Planacorp was now having to keep an irritated client at bay. They were trying to find out what was delaying him.

It was time to disappear. He would leave the ship on the delightfully undesirable 88751 and steal something less identifiable. It was hard to truly vanish in space unless you were willing to go live in the wilderness for a few decades, but it was possible to make yourself very inconvenient to follow. He would hop around until he was satisfied that he didn't need to look over his shoulder every waking moment.

Planacorp would be angry, but if he got far away enough he knew they'd be glad to have an excuse to leave him alone. In truth, they'd be hesitant to send anyone after him even if he moved in next door to one of the bases — they knew better than anyone what he was capable of. Hadn't they made him this way?

Yes, he thought, they'd punish him if the opportunity arose, but they'd probably prefer to lose track of him. Tarlow would naturally argue that they needed to crush him as an example to others, but that was old guard stuff — rebranded Frieza Force thinking. The managers nowadays wanted to be rich. They didn't mind being feared, but it wasn't an end in itself. And if it wasn't going to make them money they didn't understand it. Sending soldiers halfway across the universe on a fruitless and possibly embarrassing suicide mission would not appeal to them.

As the image of the higher ups debating his existence — arguing over whether he was even worth going after to make an example of — became clearer in his mind, the urge to kick Planacorp one more time grew in him. He would log back in, take one last look at the available missions, quickly leak a few more of them, make his docking request, and then shut down the comms for good.

That had sounded like a good plan in his head. Straightforward and pragmatic. And had he not opened the tablet to see a priority mission that involved hunting down his niece and delivering her to Tarlow's homeworld for trial, he might even have followed it.

Instead, he reopened a line to Marron.