by JA Huss
She is… broken.
I sit there with her, just staring at her ashen face. Feeling helpless. Knowing that I’m wasting time. Luck is expecting me back on Harem with a solution to the shit show the rebellion has turned into. Everyone down on the lower levels wants to kill Serpint. Tray and Brigit are either dead or missing. Asshole and Booty too. Draden might be alive, but if he is then what is he? Delphi is hiding secrets, and she’s still not Jimmy’s true soulmate. The Baby wants to leave, Succubus is… well, I have no clue what that AI is up to at all. Crux is the walking dead and longing for Corla. And Corla might be awake at this very moment. Sending messages to God knows who.
And Nyleena is pregnant.
I feel sick just thinking about that. Will this happen to her too? Will Luck be here in my position, watching his soulmate waste away, in a matter of weeks if we can’t get Nyleena to Earth? Will going to Earth save her from this fate? Or is it just a myth?
“Why is this happening to us?” I mutter.
“ALCOR,” Veila whispers back.
I look over at her, surprised that she’s awake. But her eyes are still closed and she has not moved since she crawled onto the couch hours ago.
“It’s not just ALCOR,” I whisper back. “You have to know that, right? ALCOR didn’t make me and my brothers. ALCOR didn’t get you pregnant. ALCOR didn’t do any of the shit that’s happened since Serpint brought Corla here. So it’s not ALCOR.”
She opens her eyes and I almost wish she hadn’t. They are the color of… well. The only word that accurately describes the color of Veila’s eyes is death.
She is dying.
Her legs move and then she’s lifting herself up. Propped up on both hands. I scoot across the couch to help her and this time she lets me.
She is dying.
She leans into the back of the couch, feebly pulls the blanket up her bare legs, and then sighs. Like this took every bit of energy she has left inside her. “Can you get me some juice?”
I make to get up but the bot is already there, hovering next to her with a glass of bright pink tushberry juice in his grippy hand.
Veila takes it and drinks it down in one long gulp with her eyes closed. And when she opens them again, they are just a tiny bit more alive. At least there’s some pink in there. “More,” she whispers, then closes her eyes and leans back again.
The bot retreats and comes back with a tray of fruit and a whole decanter of juice. He pours her another glass and she drinks it, then sets the glass down on the tray perched on the couch and reaches for a berry.
She comes alive again as she eats this berry. Her skin begins to glow a little. And it’s a true pink glow. Her hair lightens up and the listlessness in her body strengthens before my eyes.
Finally, after many minutes, she looks at me. “Why are you still here? Why didn’t you kill me and go back to your station?”
I take a moment to think about her questions. They’re good ones, for sure. But there is only one answer that makes sense. “Soulmates,” I say. And then I shrug. “I can’t leave. I don’t want to stay. I feel like a traitor for staying with everything that’s happening on Harem right now. And everything you did to me, and Jimmy, and Tray and Brigit. Not to mention all those Akeelian boys on your Lair Station. I should want to kill you, but…”
“Soulmates,” she says, her voice stronger now.
“Who are you?” I ask.
She smiles. Or almost smiles. “I wish I knew.”
“What happened?” I ask.
Her eyes dart over her shoulder to the open door of the medical bay.
“No,” I say. “Not that. I get it. You were… and now you’re not. I mean what happened to you? Why are you like this? Why did you do all those terrible things?”
A small huff of incredulous air puffs out her pink lips. “You wouldn’t even believe me, Valor. And it’s not a story I like to tell, so I’m not going to bother explaining my actions to you.”
“They’re going to kill you,” I say. “And I might not understand what’s happening to you right now, but I get it. You’re not… her. You have no power, do you? They’re going to kill you, Veila. So you can hide away in this ship all you want. But eventually they will break in. They will mow down all your cyborgs and find their way through that forest garden out there, and then they will find you here and they will end your life. And there’s no way out of this. The gates are locked. You came to hide from the outside world but this world in here is just as dangerous. So you can keep your secrets to yourself all you want. It’s not going to make a bit of difference now.”
She takes a long breath and holds it in. Then lets it out very slowly. “And if I tell you my story? What then? You’ll save me from them?”
I shrug. “I dunno, Veila. I’m not sure you’re actually salvageable.”
“Nice word choice.”
“Yeah. Well. Technical term, I guess.”
“Soul Stealer.”
“We never stole any souls. Your books are stupid.”
“Huh.” She laughs. “They are. But you know what the most surprising thing about those comic books turned out to be?” She studies me for a moment. “They’re all true.”
“How do you figure? I’m telling you, the parts we took were from dead stations.”
“Dead?” Her chin juts backwards. “Can stations die?”
I don’t answer her. Because honestly, I don’t know. I just assumed.
“Do you even know what this station is?”
“What do you mean?”
“All those parts you brought back. What did ALCOR do with them?”
“He… used them. I guess. Replacement parts.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Uh… no. I guess not. I mean, I’m not pretending to be an expert on ALCOR’s motives, that’s for sure. But do you have another explanation? And if so, would you care to enlighten me?”
“Care to enlighten you?” She chuckles. “Why are you so polite, Valor? Don’t you ever get angry?”
“Well, sure. I guess. When I have to. But my father was an angry guy and I never…” I stop because at the mention of my father her eyes squint down into slits.
“You never what?”
“I never wanted to be like him. I wanted his job, though. I did want to command warships like he did. Mostly because I’m not really a thinker. I… I’m good at following directions most of the time. I don’t like to make waves. I just want a simple life and my father—” Again she squints at me, a ferocious anger lurking underneath when I mention my father. “His life seemed simple even though he was mean.”
She nods. “He was mean. He still is mean. I’m glad you got away. I truly am, Valor. Because of all the brothers on Harem, you are the only one with a kindness inside him. Built in, you know?”
“That’s not true,” I say, ignoring the fact that she just alluded to knowing my father in the present tense for a moment. “Maybe Serpint and Luck are both assholes. And Tray isn’t even human. But Jimmy and Crux are both decent people and Draden was downright innocent if you ask me.” I shrug. “Four out of seven is a pretty good split.”
She stares at me for a moment, lips slightly pursed.
“Why are you pink?”
“Why didn’t you ask me how I know your father?”
“I asked my question first.”
“Fine,” she says, reaching for another berry and popping it in her mouth. The xenon-laced fruit and juice has done wonders for her complexion. There is no trace of ashy gray. Her skin is almost the glow of health I saw earlier when she drank that juice back in my quarters. “I’m pink because the silver only works when I’m pregnant.”
I blink at her as all the pieces begin to fall into place.
“That’s right. The pregnancy makes me silver. And as you know, I’m not pregnant anymore. So I’m pink again. It’s the silver version of me that did all those terrible things you ticked off that list. She did that. Not me. The pregnancy makes me…” She turns her h
ead away and sighs.
“Evil?”
She nods, but doesn’t look at me again. “And you would think that after all this time, I would hate being pregnant. But—” Her eyes flit up to mine for a moment, then look down again. “But I don’t. And not because it makes me silver. Every time—even though I know better—I hope, Valor. I still have hope that it might work and all this will be over. And in the end I will have… babies.”
“Oh,” I sigh, getting it. Maybe. Kinda. I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman and carry babies. But I can take a good guess. “What will happen to Nyleena if she gets pregnant?” I ask.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how many times she’s been pregnant before.”
“Never,” I say.
Veila laughs. And this laugh sends a chill up my spine. “You know that’s not true. There is only one reason they let the silvers leave the Cygnian System. They use them up, Valor. They keep them pregnant continuously from the age of maturity onward.” She looks back at me. “You saw what happened to me. I guarantee that has happened to Nyleena dozens of times.”
“But… what if she gets to Earth? Like you said? And brings the babies to term?”
“No one but Corla knows the answer to that. But I would assume she would pop out a little Delphi and Tycho.”
“And they would be these… weapons?”
Veila nods. “It’s horrible. We all know it’s horrible. But we still want those babies.” She looks me in the eyes. Hers are bright pink now. “It’s been bred into us. Every princess down there on the lower levels wants the same thing I do. It makes them crazy.” She pauses to look at me. “This desire… it drives us crazy. And the silvers are the worst. Being pink is not pretty either, but that desire isn’t as consuming.”
“You’re not really silver though.”
“No, I’m not.” She inhales deeply as she plays with the edge of her blanket. “That’s why I’m OK now. The pregnancy has been… terminated and I’m pink again. But if I were out there?” She nods her head to the window. “They would come get me and start the whole thing over again. And then I’d be silver for nine weeks and I would do their bidding. Happily. Because the silver inside me takes over and I can’t control it. And then this would happen.” She pans her hand down her body. “The pregnancy would terminate and then they’d do it again. And again. And again. Until I died.”
I let all that sink in. Try to imagine what her life has been like. This day on repeat. Only right now she knows it’s not going to happen again. At least not today.
“I didn’t ask about my father because I don’t want to know.”
“That’s very evolved of you, Valor. But we’re in the middle of a truth-telling, right? So you’re not going to get off that easy, I’m afraid.”
“It was him, wasn’t it? He’s the one doing this to you?”
She shakes her head, then nods, contradicting herself. “He’s the one who always captured me after the termination. Then he took me back to Wayward Station and when I leave, I am silver again. But he didn’t do the actual implantation procedure. That was Tray’s father.”
“Tray,” I whisper. “Fuck. Did he know?”
“I doubt it.”
“And Crux’s father?”
“He’s the head of the whole project. Jimmy’s father? He’s the one who came up with the idea. Luck’s father ran the cages. Serpint is your brother.”
“I suspected.”
“Draden is Crux’s brother.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“By the time they got done with Tray they stopped trying to raise you boys as sons. At that point it was clear their breeding plan worked so they just bred them like animals after that. Serpint and Draden were allowed into your little group because they didn’t have the new cage program fully implemented when they were born. Lucky them. Because everyone who came after was just left in the breeding cages.”
Everyone who came after.
I let that sink in for a moment.
But eventually I have to ask the obvious questions. “How many are there?”
She turns her face to mine and frowns. “The Cygnian princess breeding program might be a failure, but…” She shakes her head. “The Akeelian one was a huge success.”
PART TWO - INTERLUDE
In the days after arriving at Mighty Minions Station ALCOR was getting used to his new warborg body while keeping a close eye on Draden. He was not thinking about what his life had been like thousands of years ago. Mostly because thousands of years was a long time and many things had happened between then and now.
It is a common assumption that artificially intelligent beings remember everything. It’s true, up to a point. But the size of the data core necessary to contain thousands of years of memories would take up the surface area of many terrestrial planets.
ALCOR did have data core storage hidden on several faraway planets, not to mention hundreds of hidden vaults on various asteroids, a few dozen out-of-the-way moons, and at least a handful of abandoned stations. Very few of his memories were stored in the ALCOR Sector near Harem Station for two reasons.
One. There were no planets there to hide things. There were no moons. There were many small asteroids, but no large ones.
And two. His time trapped in the ALCOR Sector before the boys came along and let him out had been just a tiny fraction of his total lifetime.
But the key word here is storage. None of these memories were directly accessible to him.
Every decade or so ALCOR had to decide which memories to discard and which to keep. Then the discarded ones were packed up and shipped to the appropriate storage facility.
He kept meticulous records of these memories. Folders, and sub-folders, and even sub-sub-folders. He had an impeccable filing system.
Not only that, ALCOR had spent considerable time on his search function. Each stored memory had a detailed summary that could be accessed via the search function. So if, for instance, ALCOR stumbled into a scenario where he was stuck in a warborg body and away from his station, he could run a search in his onboard memory and find any other times this particular scenario had happened to him. He could read the summary and then, if he needed extra information, he could collect the memories and get the full account.
ALCOR had been unable to do any collection of memories while he’d been locked behind the gates of the ALCOR Sector before the boys came. So he hadn’t bothered. But after the boys came and Tray set up a neutrino wave network that would give ALCOR access to the entire galaxy, he did gather up some of the more pertinent accounts in his past. Mostly those having to do with Angels in the early days and how he’d brought them down.
But there was never a time during the recent twenty years where he’d been interested in any memories of being in a warborg body. He did his due diligence now and ran the cursory search of his onboard memory banks for such a scenario, but he came up empty. ALCOR didn’t recall a single time, before this time here on Mighty Minions, where this had actually happened before.
But it had.
It would be easy for people in the future to fault him for this. To blame him for what had happened because of this lapse in memory. But to be fair, he was on Mighty Minions and he felt safe.
A collective of AIs, like the one running Mighty Minions Resort, had been done before. Many times in the distant past. And the proper name for this collective was an ‘entanglement’.
The entanglement running Mighty Minions was formidable. They had been working together for several millennia by the time this whole ALCOR situation presented itself. They had never been locked behind gates and cut off from the galaxy, and their memory storage facilities were not hidden in places, but rather tucked inside the very fabric of spacetime surrounding the vacation sector. So they had near-immediate access to anything in their past they could want.
But while they had heard of ALCOR and his doings, they had not ever met him before. So they had no knowled
ge of his previous predicament when his mind was last locked up inside a warborg body.
There are several very obvious cons when a mind like ALCOR’s is contained inside a borg body. For one, it’s contained.
When ALCOR runs a station his mind is also contained. But that containment facility is large. And his mind is in control of many, many things. Things like life support, and water, and every power circuit for every piece of that station. The mind is also in control of weapons systems, surveillance, docking, and non-sentient ships. He also has access to, in a limited fashion, the minds of other artificial intelligences like bots, and borgs, and sentient ships.
When ALCOR runs a station his influence is wide.
Inside a borg body… not so much.
Another con for an AI locked inside a borg body is, obviously, the borg can be killed. Rather easily, actually. The mind inside cannot be killed like that. But a mind does not have to be killed to be ineffective.
It only needs to be disabled.
And killing the containment vessel of the mind is the number one way to do this.
Mighty Minions knew this. They could’ve given ALCOR a ship as a containment vessel. But did they really trust this guy?
No.
They wanted him in that warborg body. At least for now. When and if he needed to leave Mighty Minions Resort, well… they’d have that discussion when the time came. But for now it was safest for everyone involved that ALCOR, and his—twin? Copy? Whatever Asshole was—remain inside bodies that kept their influence small.
They were not at all interested in letting ALCOR take control of their formidable weapons systems or the air supply for the station.
Especially after ALCOR deactivated the gravity drive and killed tourists—tourists, for fuck’s sake!—to simply make the point that he could.
But the real downside in locking up a large mind in a small body is that they go insane. Not even a sentient ship like Booty can be locked up in a body for any real length of time. Even her mind is far too big for that.
