Lady Luck

by K. C. Cross

  “Out where?” Delphi asks.

  “Wherever. Listen. Luck told me that Tray and Valor told him that they are working on something to do with information repackaging inside the Pleasure Prison. I mean… he said a lot of big words most of which I only half understand. But it kinda made me think they’re searching for data. To recollect it somehow. What if they’re really trying to recollect ALCOR? Real ALCOR?”

  Jimmy squints his eyes at me.

  “It took a lot of gates to get to Bull Station, right?”

  “So?” Jimmy says.

  “So there’s this theory about data collecting on the edge of black holes. Like anything that falls into it is actually only a copy because data can’t be destroyed. So… it collects there. All this data. Nothing is lost. And there’s another theory that says gates do the same thing.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Jimmy says.

  “OK, that’s not important now. We can have a mastermind on where lost data goes some other time. I have more to tell you right now. I only told you parts one, two, and three. Delphi and Tycho are…” I glance at her and give her a sympathetic shrug. “Something we don’t understand yet. And Earth is real and we have a way to get there. And the Succubus is probably working with the Baby and that could get a lot worse, real fast, if we don’t do something about it quick. Part four… I need your help with something. I need to know what Veila told you, Jimmy. So I can answer Valor’s questions. Specifically… is Veila your true one?”

  “Yes,” Delphi says. “I saw it. They connected.”

  “Jimmy,” I say, ignoring Delphi. “Is she?”

  “I don’t know,” he says with a sigh. Then he sits down on the edge of a bench and leans over, head in hands.

  “What do you mean?” Delphi asks. “Of course she is. Because if she’s not… then…”

  “Who is Jimmy’s true one?” I finish for her. “Because it’s not you, Delphi. I’m not trying to be mean here, it’s just not you.”

  “I was taking a DNA signature scrambler,” Jimmy says. He lifts his head to look at me. “All these years. I would go to this biogenetics lab out on the Outer Highway and get injections. Veila knew I was doing that. She told me.”

  “So she used that new signature scrambler to make herself a complimentary one,” I say.

  “Maybe,” he admits.

  “OK. Then that’s all I need to know.”

  “Why?” Delphi asks.

  “Because now I know why Valor is so obsessed with Veila.”

  “Oh, shit,” Jimmy says.

  “Oh, shit,” I echo. “She belongs to him.”

  And I just got the next answer in my scavenger hunt.

  I’m just turning around to leave when Delphi says, “Nyleena?”

  I turn back and look at her. She’s very sad right now. It’s one thing to know the man you love has been fated to love someone else when it’s your creepy evil aunt a generation removed. It’s quite another to know that it’s not. And his true one could be… anyone. A good person. Someone he’ll want to fall in love with.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “There’s more.”

  I deflate. Because I don’t know how much more I can take. This scavenger hunt started out as a game. A way to gain my freedom. But right now it feels like these answers contain the weight of the universe.

  “I know what I am,” she whispers. “I have always known. That’s why they gave me Flicka when I was a small child. She was supposed to keep me under control. And if I ever found myself out of control, she was supposed to… take care of it.”

  Jimmy looks at her. And he looks tired. Beaten. Worn out.

  “I am a monster,” she says. Then she looks at Jimmy. Walks over to him and takes his hand. Glows a little. “And so is Tycho. But we’re harmless when we’re apart. I swear it. We are. We have to be together to… initiate. That’s why I needed him back.”

  “So you could… initiate?” I ask.

  Holy mother of suns. Delphi has an evil streak in her.

  But then again… so do I.

  “Delphi,” Jimmy says.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, her eyes welling up with tears. “I’m really sorry.”

  He reaches for her. Takes her hand and pulls her towards him. Right into his lap.

  And he hugs her.

  I nod at Dicker and take that as my cue to leave.

  Because I have a lot more secrets to dole out.

  I go to Valor next.

  And find Luck waiting for me outside the Pleasure Prison control room.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN - LUCK

  I believe in her.

  I’d just like to reinforce that point.

  Does she need me? Not really. But come on… what princess can’t use some help?

  I see her coming. She gets off the escalator closest to the Pleasure Prison control room entrance and spots me immediately.

  I know what she’s gonna say. She needs to do this herself. She’s got it covered. She can handle it.

  And like I said, I believe in her.

  But what kind of soulmate would I be if I didn’t at least try to make her let me come along for the ride?

  So I wave. Tentatively. As she walks towards me. Ready for the argument that I should just let her do her thing.

  But when she reaches me she puts her arms around my waist and leans into my chest.

  “You OK?” I ask, surprised by her affection.

  “Maybe,” she says, a little bit breathless. Then she pulls back so she can see my face. “I will be. I think.”

  “Where you headed?” I ask. I mean, I kinda know already. She’s obviously headed to the control room. But it’s better not to assume.

  “To rip Valor’s world apart.” She sighs. “Jimmy admitted that he doesn’t think Veila is his true one.”

  “OK,” I say.

  “So now I’m gonna tell Valor. Because that’s what he wanted in exchange for asking Tray to get me inside the Pleasure Prison. And that’s what I’m supposed to do next, I guess. To get that info that Crux needs. But… I don’t know, Luck. Maybe I should just butt out, ya know? I’m not doing this for some ship anymore. I don’t even want a ship. Why do I need a ship?”

  She locks eyes with me.

  “I mean,” she continues. “I have a ship.” Pause. “Don’t I?”

  I smile. I cannot help it. “You do,” I say. “And one day we’re gonna go do some awesome shit on that ship.”

  “I know,” she says. “I know that. I see it so clearly now. I belong with you. And Lady and Cha-Cha. And we’re gonna go hunt down cool AI parts and ancient secrets and…” Another pause.

  “And?”

  “Is this really my job?”

  “Which job?” I ask.

  “To set all this in motion? Because that’s what’s gonna happen when I go inside that Pleasure Prison. This isn’t about what Crux wants to know. I’d be very surprised if he doesn’t have those answers already.”

  “Me too,” I admit.

  “So… I’m a trigger. But what am I triggering?”

  “I guess we’ll find out.”

  “But should we find out?”

  “Look, Nyleena,” I say. “We’re going down a road, ya know? We’re moving forward and we’ve got ourselves a velocity here. We can’t stop. We could slow down a little, maybe. But we can’t stop it. Too much has changed in the last year. Too many moving parts.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “That’s how I feel too. So many parts. But…”

  “Hey,” I say, taking her hand and a step back at the same time. “You got a minute for me?”

  “What?”

  “You know.” I nod my head towards the control room doors. “Can that wait a little bit? Because I’d like to take you somewhere first.”

  “Not through the spin node,” she whispers, looking around anxiously to make sure there’s no one close enough to hear her.

  “No.” I laugh. “I have a super-secret garden I want to show you before we
blow everything up. You wanna go see a garden with me before the apocalypse starts?”

  She swallows. Smiles. Then nods her head. “Sure. Yeah. I’d like to see your super-secret garden.”

  “Good.” I sigh. I have to admit, I wasn’t sure she’d say yes. Because the old Nyleena would be dead set on completing her mission. And I think we had a moment back there in the museum in front of that spin node galaxy. A sort of turning point that changes everything and everyone, but you never know.

  I only know what I feel. What other people think will always remain a mystery.

  She follows me when I move forward. I keep hold of her hand and lead her to a waiting lift bot. We get on and I say, “Don’t worry. No one can follow us.”

  She frowns. “Should I be worried about that?”

  “No,” I say. Because here’s something I never told anyone before. I have a personal disruptor field. The museum has one too. That’s why no one can send or receive messages in there. But I have one just for me. A powerful one that shuts out anything and everything.

  ALCOR gave it to me a long, long time ago. Didn’t use it much. In fact, other than triggering it a few times for fun back when I was hiding from ALCOR as a teenager, I’ve hardly used it at all.

  But I activated it just before I saw Nyleena come up the escalator.

  I see what’s happening. I think we all see what’s happening.

  Harem Station is no longer safe.

  Maybe hasn’t been in a very long time. Not really sure about that. But I have a theory I’m working on. And every one of us is a moving part in a machine that was turned on a very long time ago.

  So… yeah. We need a break. My personal disruptor field might not do much as far as big-picture endings go and maybe we can’t stop what’s coming, but we can slow it down.

  Rewind it, maybe. Just a little. If we’re lucky.

  Not enough to change what’s gonna happen next, but that’s out of my hands now. All I know is that this is the part Nyleena and I are playing.

  Who comes next… what they do, or don’t do, and what that leads to… I have no idea.

  But I’m gonna take a moment for us.

  I lead her down a bunch of escalators, paying attention to the cameras as we pass them. They all have a little indicator light. Green, they’re on and spying. Which is all the time. That’s standard operating procedure.

  But they are all red now.

  All of them.

  Some people notice. I catch them looking up at the cameras and making faces of confusion. But most don’t. They probably came to terms with the fact that there’s no real privacy here on Harem a long time ago and stopped checking.

  ALCOR told me that this was a worst-case scenario kind of solution.

  “If something goes wrong with me, Luck,” he said, all those years ago, “turn on the disruption field and I won’t be able to track anyone.”

  It’s not good when ALCOR can’t track us.

  Unless it’s ALCOR we’re hiding from.

  Eventually we reach level seventy-one. A very nondescript level. A residential level. Almost no restaurants here. No shooting galleries, or arcades, or brothels, or bars. Just an ordinary level.

  Unless you know where to look.

  “Where are we going?” Nyleena asks.

  I just smile at her and keep walking until I get to an apartment door that has the number 71-5a on it.

  “Who lives here?” Nyleena asks.

  I don’t answer her. Just press the mechanical buttons on the analog door lock. All the apartments on this level have them. Always have. Ever since I could remember level seventy-one has been where we put the unsanctioned visitors on Harem. They get no perks. No digital anything in these units. Air screens don’t even work on this level. Autocooks don’t deliver anything but water. No autoshoppers at all. The floors aren’t even obsidian. Just bare concrete. And they come with utilitarian furniture. Uncomfortable couches with no auto-mold. Hard-backed chairs. No entertainment screens. Bunk beds. We stuff them four or sometimes even six to a unit.

  No one wants to live here.

  And I guess that was the point, maybe?

  You want off this level as quick as you can manage it.

  Which is good. Because then no one notices that the corridor that holds unit 71-5a has no other residents.

  Living on seventy-one makes people want to work. Makes them appreciate the units they get once they agree to follow their path to citizenship that much more.

  I told ALCOR it was risky. Putting this in a place filled with the worst of the worst.

  But he disagreed and I guess he was right. They never noticed that this level makes no sense. They never noticed that the units are all super-small and narrow. They never noticed that there’s not that many people around here.

  The mechanism inside the lock clicks when I turn the handle and then I look up and down the hallway, just to be sure, and usher Nyleena inside.

  There’s nothing to see here. So she lets out a breath. Like she was holding it in with high expectations.

  “OK,” she says. “What’s this?”

  “Just follow me,” I say.

  I lead her through a bunch of corridors. Because obviously, this place isn’t a housing unit. It goes on and on and has a maze of apparently random hallways. If you didn’t know where you were going you could spend days lost in this unit.

  I haven’t been here in several years because the whole thing went self-sufficient almost a decade ago. So I have no idea what it will look like when I turn that last corner and come face to face with—

  “Holy fucking shit,” Nyleena whispers.

  —a forest. But not just any secret garden forest.

  “Are those…?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Fully mature space orchids.”

  The room is huge on a massive scale. It’s so big, and so long, and so tall that the top of the trees curves off into the distance with the shape of the station. There used to be lots of trails in here. Little footpaths that would weave around the younger treelings and take you somewhere unexpected.

  But that’s all overgrown now. You can still tell that the trees on the outer edges are older than the ones in the middle by their height. But whatever is underneath them now, who knows.

  “You wanna go down?” I ask her. Because we’re standing on a balcony overlooking the forest. It’s covered in the climbing vines these trees are famous for. And tiny flowers.

  So many tiny flowers. Every shade of pink, and silver, and purple. Millions upon millions of flowers in this forest.

  “Yes,” she whispers.

  I lead her over to the stairs and look down, then change my mind about that because it’s so overgrown with vines, you can’t even see the steps. So I turn back to a control panel and summon a lift bot from the nearest maintenance room.

  “What is it though?” Nyleena asks as we wait.

  “It’s… well, I thought it was just a bunch of illegal drugs, to be honest.”

  She laughs.

  “I’m serious. These flowers are potent hallucinogens.”

  “Did ALCOR sell them?”

  “No,” I say. Just as the lift bot appears.

  “What do you do with them?”

  I lead her over to the lift bot and hold her hand tight as she steps on. There’s a railing on this one because it’s a workhorse. It’s big, and round and the perimeter has one bench and a bunch of potting planters for holding seedlings and storage bins for holding tools. All of which are empty now.

  “I just… grow them,” I say.

  “But why?”

  I sigh at this. “I don't know, Nyleena. It was just my job when I was younger. And every station needs a biosphere. I guess I never thought about this stuff too much until you came along.”

  I look at her as the lift bot moves away from the terrace and we hover forward. Moving along the tops of the younger trees.

  “ALCOR told me to do it,” I say. “Just like he told me to go scour the galaxy for
AI parts and walk through that spin node. And maybe it’s naive of me, of all of us, to trust that guy. But…”

  I look her in the eyes. They’re lit up just a little. It’s really hard to get a light reaction from Nyleena. It’s like she guards it. Keep that light close. So this little glow makes me happy.

  “But I loved him,” I say. “Even if it turns out he didn’t love us. Even if he was setting us all up this whole time, I don’t care. I loved him. And without ALCOR… well, I don’t want to imagine my life without ALCOR.”

  She pouts a little. Nodding. Like she understands. “Do you know what these flowers are used for? Aside from hallucinations?”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, I do. Because Booty told me. They use them to get us pregnant.”

  “Who?”

  “Us,” she says. “Princesses.”

  And then she tells me more about what she was doing earlier. About the Baby, and Booty, and Draden.

  “So you were only asking me about Draden because you knew the Baby was listening?”

  “Yeah,” she says. Then she turns to stare off in the distance. We’re not going very fast. It’s a leisurely pace. But it’s very clear that this forest goes on for a long time. “Where does it end?” she finally asks.

  “The forest?” I ask. Because I’m not sure we’re still talking about the forest. “It doesn’t,” I answer anyway. Because that applies no matter what she’s asking about. “It’s a circle, Nyleena. A ring inside the ring. We could ride this lift bot until it runs out of charge and never find the end. Because eventually the ending just goes back to the beginning.”

  “So how do we know when to stop?” She turns to me. Stares up into my eyes.

  “We just… get off, I guess.”

  “I want to get off,” she says.

  I nod. “Me too.”

  The bot responds when I ask it to and slowly we descend into the hazy light below the canopy until we reach the floor, where there are no longer any smaller treelings or shrubs, or even grass. Because there’s not enough light down here to grow anything. The giants all around us suck it all up for their own nourishment.

  So it’s dirt. Just soft dirt.