“I’m absolutely going to play up my role in all of this,” Treasure said, accepting a glass once it was filled. “I’m silver-tongued and charismatic, boasting arcane knowledge of all things Earthling. I’ve charmed the Coke recipe from a tree, a Volkswagen Beetle from a cult of crabs and the pants right off the greatest starship captain I’ve ever known. Obviously, I can’t tell people that overtly. I’ll have to weave it in as subtext while I’m talking about your exploits.”
“The evidence of your womanly wiles is clearly demonstrated by the state I’m in.” Electra clinked her glass against Treasure’s and they both drank.
“Yet you don’t seem like you’re celebrating, not really,” Treasure said. “You’re going through the motions and all, but you’re not actually happy. Why is that?”
“Destroying a lien enforcement bot is kind of a big deal,” Electra said. “A criminally big deal. Not to mention the pirates… They’re getting closer to catching us with all the practice we’re giving them.”
“I honestly kind of thought you were exaggerating about the pirates, since I could only kind of tell what was going on during the wormhole chase,” Treasure said. “I mean, alien space pirates? It seemed silly. I have to admit that I’m bummed I didn’t get to see you in action, talking your way out of the situation and tricking the two sides into fighting each other. I was a little preoccupied trying not to be eaten by a robotic refrigerator. Hopefully, next time I’ll have a better view of your heroics.”
“Heroically running away. Remember how you asked me about the lawbreaking after we ran the scam to get the Coca-Cola?” Electra asked.
“Yeah.”
“We hadn’t committed crimes then. I don’t think. Maybe some light charity fraud,” Electra said. “I definitely committed several today—the kind people will come looking for me about. Dangerous, powerful people, worse than the pirates by far.”
“Okay, no more joking. You’re worried,” Treasure said. “Count me in on team worried. Let’s talk next step. We need to get out of the system. We’re doing that. Lie low and let the heat die down. That’s what we need to do.” Treasure set aside her glass and placed her hands on Electra’s shoulders, massaging them lightly while they spoke.
Electra didn’t know that many places, and all the places she was familiar with were known haunts of hers that could easily be staked out. Both the collections agency and probably Sempa would have people watching Station 51. Her old apartment on Authrillia was no good, for a bunch of reasons—last known address, not really hers anymore, bad part of town, all her furniture had been incinerated, etc. If she stayed anywhere near a wormhole spawn, they ran the risk of being spotted by a random patrol, other treasure hunters or mercenaries passing through and obviously Sempa’s bounty was far more effective than Electra had originally given it credit for.
“Transition Island,” Electra finally said. It was the only place she knew that wasn’t attached to her name. She hadn’t become Electra Rex until after living there more than a year. Before that, she’d been Sami Boyle, and Sami Boyle didn’t exist anymore.
Chapter Fifteen
From a distance, Janis 10 looked like a nondescript gray orb floating on the farthest reaches of a twin blue giant star system. The clouds from passing storms and the gray of the oceans that covered better than ninety-nine percent of the surface were within one or two shades of each other. Only after they slipped through the atmosphere did specific features become obvious. The planet was dotted with millions of little black islands in completely irregular patterns. Without knowing which specific dot of land in which hemisphere, it would take years to search them all for a fugitive.
Electra guided the Cadillux to the only familiar island of the bunch, the one where she’d become a woman in so many ways. Among its occupants, of whom none remained, it had once been known as ‘Transition Island’, although the maps and scientists simply referred to it by its designation of SW230.
A light drizzle pelted the ship on approach to the slightly overgrown landing pad set in a jungle of wide-leafed blue ferns. Electra double-checked the scopes to make sure the planet was still habitable. Everything was as she remembered—soft and gentle. Janis 10 had been selected for its mild climate, complete lack of anything dangerous and its remote location. It wasn’t beautiful or exotic or even interesting, but it was pleasant and nurturing—the perfect place for young people from multiple species to transition from one lifecycle to another in complete safety.
Electra walked down the gangplank to return to her former home—and it did feel like home, more than anywhere else she could remember. Treasure followed close behind. The rain that fell on her face and into the lush surrounding jungle was the purest water in the galaxy. That was what the scientists had claimed. It brought out the single note of wet, volcanic sand.
“Is there anything we should look out for?” Treasure asked. “Snakes or spiders or jungle cats or something?”
“We’re the only animals on the entire planet,” Electra said. “Every plant you see is edible and all the water is drinkable. We’re in a place completely at peace with itself.”
They headed into the facility. The collection of modular rectangles connected to form a pattern of a small, irregular ring. They were painted a gray similar to the sky and water, probably so as not to offend the serenity of the planet’s muted palette. In the years since Electra had left, the jungle had done little to reclaim the land cleared for the facility. Aside from being empty, the facility was exactly how Electra remembered it—clean, quiet and blank.
Windows and skylights provided ample light. The electronics even turned on when they arrived, still functional and fed by the geothermal power source that had been sunk into the island before the facility had been built. Any evidence of the former inhabitants had been scrubbed. Electra stopped at a blank space on the wall, only noteworthy because of the four screw holes used to hold the display containing pictures and bios of the transitioning occupants so they could get to know one another if they wanted to. She remembered stopping there often, unhappy with the picture they’d used for her, since it had looked like Sami and she hadn’t wanted to be Sami. After each stage of the transition, the scientists had updated the pictures and slowly Sami had faded away to be replaced by Electra.
Fourteen other residents had been there when she’d arrived and a different fourteen when she’d left. Fifteen wasn’t the max capacity of the facility, not even close. She’d always wondered why the scientists had kept that number as a constant. They’d probably scrubbed that information from the computers before leaving.
“Who built this place?” Treasure asked.
“An advanced form of artificial intelligence, the last remnant of a dead society from somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy,” Electra said. “They used holograms specific to each species to interact with us. We just called them ‘the scientists’.”
“They were experimenting on you?”
“Observing, asking questions, measuring sometimes,” Electra said. “Helping… They did a lot of helping.”
“What were they trying to learn?”
Electra shrugged. “No clue. They apparently learned it and moved on, though.”
“This wasn’t a Chamber project?”
“Nah, this was some side thing from a strange collective of electronic memories that wanted to better understand organic life forms,” Electra said. “They took a deposit from each participant, I guess to make sure we were serious. Then they gave it back when we left. I’m not sure where they got their actual funding, but it probably wasn’t the Chamber. The Chamber usually prints their name all over everything they even tacitly support. It makes them seem omniscient or proactive or something.”
“If you ever figure out who they are, let me know. I’d like to know where to send the thank you card for doing such a good job,” Treasure said. “You became a remarkable woman.”
“Thank you,” Electra said. “I got the feeling I wasn’t the easiest transition to complete
. Most of the other species had some natural instincts or societal patterns they followed. All the stuff on transitioning humans was old and sometimes contradictory.” Electra smiled. “I never got the feeling the scientists were upset or frustrated by it, though. They even gave me my name.”
“You didn’t pick it?”
“I didn’t think that’s how it should work. Most people don’t pick their own names. You’re born, your parents name you and you get used to the idea. After I mentioned that in a therapy session, they offered to name me and I agreed. I guess they thought Electra Rex sounded quintessentially human,” Electra said.
“Is it? Quintessential for Embarker humans, I mean?”
“No, I’ve never even heard of any humans having either name, let alone both. And I even knew that at the time, but it sounded cool, so I went with it,” Electra said. “Want to see my old room?”
They walked upstairs to one of the dormitories overhanging an expansive beach of black volcanic sand. Small waves lapped gently against the shore. The outer wall of the room was glass. The rest was three blank, gray walls, a low, domed ceiling with a skylight at the pinnacle and a somewhat spongy floor.
“I love what you’ve failed to do with the place,” Treasure said of the blank room.
“It all slides out of the walls, funny girl.” Electra pressed her palm against the scanner beside the door. Nothing happened. She walked around the room and manually tapped the sensors to extend the bed, desk and closet. “My settings must have been scrubbed.”
Treasure sat on the edge of the bed and looked out of the window. “Were you the only human?”
“Yep, but I wasn’t the only sex-transitioning resident,” Electra said. “I’m glad my transition was largely accomplished with hormone implants and a couple of surgeries. There were several species here that changed their entire anatomies during different life cycles, and it looked rough.”
“A bunch of teenagers, zoomed up on transitioning hormones… I’ll bet you all got to know each other pretty well,” Treasure said, waggling her eyebrows. “Did you have a sweetheart one room over?”
Treasure had been poking around Electra’s sexual history some, seemingly out of curiosity for what kind of lurid and emotional attachments a human could find among the stars. For the most part, Electra didn’t mind divulging, since she wasn’t big on feeling shame and didn’t have much to tell beyond sexual dalliances. There was something Electra had held back and it seemed to be the only thing Treasure really wanted to know.
“Her name was Essala,” Electra said. “She was a Whippomorph.” Electra leaned back against the edge of the desk and stuffed her hands into her pockets. It wasn’t an explosive story, simply a sad one.
“Tell me about her,” Treasure said, “if you’re up for it.”
“She got here about a year after me,” Electra said. “Whippomorphs have five life cycles. She was going from the second to the third and the third to the fourth here. I guess it’s dangerous to do it on her home planet, so her parents saved up to send her here, which was my story too. We bonded over that immediately. Most of the other species had no trouble coming up with the units for the deposit, but not us. We were practically charity cases. When she got here, she looked a lot like a little green fish in a fish tank. I didn’t talk to her during that first transition from second to third phase. She spent all her time in the aquatic section with the other liquid-breathing species.”
Electra looked down and smiled faintly. “Things were different when she emerged from the tanks. We’d only seen each other once before that, when she’d first arrived. She remembered it vividly. In her third life cycle, she was pretty close to human-looking. Her skin was blue, she had webbed fingers and toes, perfectly white eyes and soft fins instead of hair, but she was very human in every other respect. I only later learned Whippomorphs select their third phase based on a mating impression formed in the second phase.”
Treasure gasped and smiled. “She changed her whole body just to be with you?”
“It’s not consciously done, but, yeah, she did,” Electra said. “We started spending all our time together swimming, walking in the jungle, talking about space travel, then we started fooling around, and naturally we moved into what the scientists called ‘nearly constant copulation, followed by extended periods of physical contact.’ Seriously, that description of our activities was repeated to us every day—not as an accusation, simply as a question. They wanted to know if intense lovemaking followed by lengthy cuddle sessions was normal for our species during transition.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I had no idea if it was normal for humans. Essala said it was normal and expected for her species, essential even,” Electra said. “I think I was in love, pumped full of hormones and wildly attracted to someone. Having that pattern repeated with you makes me think it had nothing to do with transitioning. If I knew where the scientists went, I’d send them a galactic net message to let them know it wasn’t part of the change. It was all part of how humans fall in love. Falling in love isn’t something Embarkers spend much time thinking or talking about, so it was new and strange to me.”
“What happened? How did it end?”
“She was supposed to get genetic material from me for future reproductive use in other life cycles,” Electra said. “That didn’t work out.”
“Why not? You produce plenty in my experience.”
“She morphed to match me in every way,” Electra said. “I found that insanely attractive. I guess that’s one of the upsides to the morphing. She could almost sense on a genetic level what form might be most alluring. It worked perfectly to entice me to mate, but there’s an obvious problem with collecting genetic material when the inner workings don’t have any sort of place to store it.”
“What happened when she figured that out?”
“She got mad—not at me or even herself, just mad in general,” Electra said. “Mostly she directed her disappointment at the scientists, not that they had any control over any of it. They were simply watching while her body did what it was naturally supposed to do—a hiccup of genetics and evolution that hadn’t been expressed before because her kind had never encountered someone like me. She would never have children and it was in some way my fault.”
“But you didn’t know…”
“She didn’t blame me and I’ve tried not to blame myself,” Electra said. “She left after completing her transition to the fourth phase and we never spoke again.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
Electra shook her head. “The fourth Whippomorph phase is spacefaring. In the bluntest of terms…right now she’s a very large dolphin, flying through nebulas, eating star dust.”
“Wow, and I thought the story of my first love had a sad ending.”
“What happened to your first love?”
“He moved to Winnipeg,” Treasure said. “Winnipeg was crazy cold and their hockey team wasn’t very good. It seemed worse when I was thirteen.”
Electra smiled and tried to force a laugh. “Essala was always going to move to Winnipeg, so to speak. I’m only sorry she didn’t get to take a piece of me with her the way she’d hoped.”
“It sounds like you took a piece of her with you,” Treasure said. “Not literally in that way, but I am a little curious if you did give her something in a way. What I mean to say is she had an important impact on your life. I’m sure you had a similar influence on her.”
“Thanks, I hope so. Or maybe not. Fond memories being a poor substitute and all.”
Silence hung between them for a time, only occasionally interrupted by a breeze blowing raindrops against the window. Eventually a strange smile played over Treasure’s lips.
“But did you…you know…both ways with her since she morphed to be like you?” Treasure asked.
“Yes.” Electra rolled her eyes.
“That’s hot.” Treasure squirmed and giggled a little at the thought.
Chapter Sixteen
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Electra and Treasure frolicked on the beach, swam naked in the tepid freshwater oceans and wandered around the facility a little more to see if anything of interest was left behind. The scientists had done an extremely thorough job of clearing everything of value, information especially, but had left the buildings in good enough working order that they could quickly return to do research again if they decided to make use of the grounds for another round of transitions or some other project. The sunset was drab, grayish-blue and over entirely too quickly. It was nearly dark and another rainstorm rolled across the island before they returned to the ship.
Treasure decided to take some time in the Spatronic while Electra headed up to the cockpit to see if her spy probes had picked up anything interesting near the system’s lone wormhole spawn. The little dark matter orbiting bots could go stealth, self-destruct and relay information at a moment’s notice. Electra hoped the three little bots hadn’t had to do anything. They were expensive to print and stood as her last line of warning to run again. Losing even one of them would be a blow. The bots gave the all-clear. Not a bad day, considering my life has gone completely off the rails.
Ivy offered one of Treasure’s new mixtures…Cherry Coke. Electra didn’t know what a cherry was, but Treasure hadn’t steered her wrong yet. She accepted the drink and took a sip. A cherry was apparently a fruit or a chemical or a fruit-flavored chemical.
She paced the cockpit with her drink, reviewing the options on her datapad. She’d seriously damaged a lien enforcement bot. Aside from stealing the ship in the first place, that was the most significant crime she’d ever committed. There would be hefty fines, significant prison time and some other unpleasantness if she were caught. Since she was a known fugitive, the Bi-MARP project couldn’t take goods from her anymore, and nor could any other Chamber project. She couldn’t work as a professional party guest again without exposing herself and Treasure to massive amounts of risk, both from the pirates and the lien enforcers. They could live on Transition Island indefinitely, although that would be a lonely, exceedingly boring way to spend the next hundred years or so.
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