by Welch, David
“Basics, yeah. Private pain doesn’t need to be tossed around like gossip,” Rex continued.
“As you wish,” Lucius acquiesced. He looked to the screen. In the dead center of it sat a scroll of text.
“What is this?” asked Lucius.
“Ethics of a Free Man. Joseph Davidson. He was a philosopher four centuries ago. Use to do reports on him in college. Drove my professors nuts. Buncha’ crazy leftists,” Rex said.
“‘…it is beyond doubt that liberty and freedom are, by nature, gifts of the individual soul. Nothing beyond the One can be said to be alive as all groups are mere abstractions containing numerous component individuals, each with their own mind, thoughts, and will. The very idea of a group as a thing exists only in the minds of men, and then only to help them conceptualize the multitudes of individual persons surrounding them…’” Lucius read.
He paused, thinking it over. Rex shifted in his seat and spoke.
“This woman, ‘Second,’ she got me thinking. She keeps saying she served the Master’s will, that now she serves my will. She wasn’t even using first person pronouns until I ordered her to. It got me thinking back to this stuff.”
“Should we speak of her when she’s sitting right behind us?” Lucius asked.
Rex rolled his eyes and turned in his chair to face Second.
“Second, do you mind that we’re talking about you?” Rex asked.
Her head tilted mechanically toward Rex.
“I do not understand,” she replied.
“See?” Rex said, glancing over at Lucius. “Second, will you tell anybody what we’ve said about you?”
“Do you wish that I tell somebody?” she asked.
“No,” Rex replied.
“Then I will not,” she answered.
“Your name is really ‘Second?’” Lucius asked.
“This servant’s designation is Second,” she replied.
“I told you to use pronouns,” Rex pointed out.
“I was not speaking with you, Master. Is it your will that this servant refer to itself with pronouns while speaking to others?” she asked, her voice disturbingly innocent.
“Yes,” Rex replied. Itself?
Second looked straight at Lucius and said, “Then I will do so.”
They spun back forward, leaving her to sit motionless in place.
“It is as if she does not have a will of her own,” Lucius observed.
“Yeah. Get more personality out of the computer. Isn’t that right?”
“I am incapable of personality,” the computer replied.
“It bothers me,” Rex said, with a troubled breath. “Even a slave has an inner world, has something that’s theirs. In their own heads, ya’ know? But how do you strip a human being of humanity?”
“I do not know,” Lucius replied with a shrug.
Rex nodded to himself, saying, “We should find out.”
He got up, pacing out of the bridge. Second followed without a word. Lucius hurried to catch up, following Rex down the main corridor. They descended the steps into the common area, spotting Chakrika in the kitchen area preparing something.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Usually,” Rex replied sarcastically and turned into the sick bay.
Once inside, he ordered Second to the free bed. She sat down. He walked over to the other. The medical scanner had descended, resting a mere foot from the corpse of the ambassador. Plastiglass doors had emerged from the scanner, slotting into grooves on the floor and wall, creating an air-tight seal around the body.
“Is the scan finished?” Rex asked.
“Yes,” the computer replied, “Abnormalities are present.”
“Abnormalities?” Lucius asked, pulling up beside Rex.
“Physiological abnormalities abound. I will require a DNA sample to further analyze.”
“Open it up then,” Rex ordered. The plastic glass slid back into the scanner, which retracted back to the ceiling. Rex fiddled in a cabinet under the computer terminal on the rear wall, retrieving a pair of scissors and a syringe. He handed the scissors to Lucius.
“Cut his clothes off,” Rex ordered.
Lucius went to work while Rex drew blood. He filled a syringe and deposited it in the medical console. A faint hum filled the room as it was removed and analyzed.
“DNA inconsistent with homo sapiens sapiens,” the machine replied.
“He’s not a neanderthal, just look at him,” Rex spoke.
“DNA is also inconsistent with homo sapiens neanderthalensis,” said the computer.
“Wait, neanderthals? Weren’t they primitive men? Before God formed modern humans?” Lucius asked.
“Some fool on Earth illegally cloned them a few centuries ago. There’s a few million scattered throughout the Commonwealth. And don’t ever call one primitive, they get pretty mad when you do that,” Rex explained.
“You’ve interacted with them?!” Lucius exclaimed.
“Hell, I had one as a cadet. Bob Montreaux, great pilot,” Rex spoke, “Could drink like a fish…”
“Unfathomable,” Lucius said with a disbelieving shake, cutting up the corpse’s pant. “How can you—”
His voice stopped dead. Rex turned at the sudden pause. Lucius’s eyes had gone bug-wide, fixed on the ambassador’s groin.
“You going bi on me? Cause that’s not my thing,” Rex spoke.
“Your computer is correct,” Lucius spoke, pointing.
Rex moved a bit to see. Sure enough, between the ambassador’s legs lay a six-inch-long, flaccid penis. His generous endowment hadn’t been the source of Lucius’s shock, though. Just behind the penis was a fully formed vagina.
“Is that—” Rex began.
“Yes,” Lucius replied.
Rex turned to Second, who sat motionlessly on the bed.
“What is this?” he asked.
She got up and moved to see what her new “Master” was motioning at.
“This body was designed to have both male and female genetalia with heightened nerve density to increase the Master’s sexual pleasure,” she informed him.
“Designed?” Lucius spoke, “As in, this man was engineered genetically?”
She said nothing.
“Answer his questions when asked, answer all of my crew’s questions when asked,” Rex said with a sigh.
“This body was genetically engineered,” she replied.
“The ambassador’s body, not yours,” Rex spoke, trying to clarify.
“His body was truly engineered. Mine was given only minor modifications,” she spoke.
“Why was your body given minor modifications?” Rex asked.
“To facilitate interaction with primitives. I was made as close to their image as deemed acceptable by the Masters,” she informed.
“You don’t have a penis, do you?” Rex spoke.
“No. Female forms are more useful when dealing with diplomats, who are generally male,” Second spoke.
“So what is different about you?” asked Lucius.
“My language and memory centers are improved to facilitate communications,” she replied.
Rex turned back to the ambassador’s corpse.
“Computer, what else is different about him?”
“Muscle density at three times human normal. Bone density at five times human normal. Nodes not present in a human brain are present within. A reflecting membrane is present on the backs of his eyes. His blood type matches no known type. At least two hearts are present; both larger than human normal and more densely muscled. Fifteen feet of additional small intestine are present. Several tissues and organs of unknown purpose are present.”
“Compare the genome to human normal, isolate the differences. Reseal the body,” Rex spoke. He looked at the body. He could have sworn he remembered seeing a rib poking out at an odd angle, nearly puncturing the skin. Shaking it off as a trick of the mind, he turned to Second.
“Lie down on the bed,” he ordered.
“Computer, scan Second,” Rex said. As the machine lowered, he found another syringe and took a sample of her blood. He dropped it into one of the computer console’s slots and turned back to Lucius.
“I’d ask if your government had anything to do with this, but they have troubles mastering missile guidance,” he remarked.
“Former government,” Lucius stressed. “And no. I heard of nothing like this in Europa, or from anywhere in the Quarter.”
“Guess ‘they’ have good reason to be so secretive,” Rex said, staring at the corpse.
“What the hell are you?”
* * *
“She was telling the truth…” Rex said to the empty bridge.
“Who was? The strange girl?” Chakrika asked.
He turned. She was carrying a tray steaming with food. Rex extended a tray table from the right armrest of his chair. Chakrika slid the tray onto it. A half-dozen pieces of cube steak, cut small to be crammed into a can, and a large pile of noodles in a brown sauce awaited him.
“Yeah, Strange Girl. Look,” he said, pointing to the projection sphere. Instead of tracking surrounding objects, the computer broadcasted images from the scan. A cut-away view of Second’s brain floated steadily before them.
“Scan says most of her brain is normal, except this part down here,” he said, pointing.
A small bulge rested near the base of her brain, between the spine and the muscles of the neck, where the neck joined the skull.
“According to the computer, it’s connected by a dozen nerve fibers,” Rex explained.
“That part isn’t normal?” Chakrika asked.
“According to the computer, no. But I’m no doctor,” he replied.
“That growth is not present on any human known to Commonwealth medical science,” the computer spoke.
“Whatever this thing is, has turned what should be a normal woman with a gift for languages into a biological computer, basically,” he explained.
“She’s a computer?”
“Might as well be,” Rex said. “She has no will of her own, acts only on directives. She’s a person turned into a machine and has absolutely no idea that it’s wrong or abnormal.”
“So she’s a slave,” Chakrika said darkly.
“Yeah,” Rex sighed, “She is the perfect slave.”
“Can you fix it?” Chakrika asked.
“No,” he replied, frustrated. “I can’t. Maybe a neurosurgeon could, but I can’t, and the computer doesn’t do surgery.”
“When we get her back to the Commonwealth, could they fix her?” she asked hopefully.
“Maybe, if they would. I work for intelligence, Chaki. Some of them might see her as a thing. She’ll tell me anything. They could take her and interrogate her endlessly to learn about wherever it is she came from,” he spoke.
“You said your people value freedom. Why would they do that to a person if they had the chance to free her?” Chakrika asked.
“Most of my people wouldn’t hesitate. But spies and intelligence people, they never follow the same rules as the rest of society. Doesn’t matter what nation you go to.”
“Then you have to make sure she’s fixed,” Chakrika spoke firmly, her voice leaving no room to question. “Before we reach your nation.”
“I’m supposed to be working for these people,” Rex spoke. “If I could get her to fake being a person long enough…I-I don’t know.”
“Find a way,” Chakrika seethed, her fingers grasping and digging into the back of his chair.
“Yeah,” Rex said, uncertain. “Well, first thing we have to do is find some place to patch up the armor. You want to learn how to jump the ship?”
“Do I have a choice?” she asked.
“Yes. But I’ll keep bugging you if you don’t,” he replied.
She sighed, moving next to him.
“See that little box on the console screen?” Rex asked.
She looked between the two control levers, to the small computer screen. A tiny red field with the word “JUMP” sat in the upper left corner.
“Tap it please.”
She struck it with her fingertips. Rex felt the familiar fuzzy feeling in his shoulders and chest. The stars before them shifted, a new pattern emerging in a heart-beat.
“Jump complete. According to charts acquired from Cordelia’s servers we are now in the Ceredigion System.”
Rex smiled at Chakrika.
“That’s all there is to it. You’re picking this up very quickly.”
She laughed and walked out of the room. Rex poked at his noodles with a fork, wondering what in the world she had made the sauce out of.
* * *
Wreckage drifted above Cordelia, a twisted, jagged, blackened mess of slaver ships and local fighters. Control had just been regained when the newcomer appeared.
It didn’t resemble any vessel seen in Explored Space. It looked like the unholy offspring of a whale and a crab. Its massive hull stretched nearly a thousand feet in length. Its bulging front was cylindrical, three hundred feet in diameter. It tapered as it stretched back toward its engines. The entire thing was covered in a carapace of material that looked like a metalized form of chitin. Claw-like protrusions extended perpendicularly, before bending forward at a ninety-degree angle. The ends of the “claws” were covered in round protrusions, orifices of some sort. Nothing about it looked mechanical. It looked organic, like something grown.
The ship stayed out of the atmosphere, pulling above the smoldering city of Khors. Small, clam-like objects detached from the vessel, plunging into the atmosphere. An hour passed, local vessels hailing the ship to no avail. It did not answer. It had no intention of answering.
Inside of it, Blair stood within a control pod. Its warm walls cocooned around his naked flesh, supporting his weight so he would not need to stand. Stringy white tendrils attached to his eyes, connecting him with the War-beast’s ocular membranes. He saw nothing but the green world below and the mechanical monstrosities that flew around his ship like so many annoying insects. How a man, even a primitive animal like homo sapiens, could work within such a cold, hard environment was beyond him.
“Magnify on the ambassador’s settlement,” he ordered.
The ocular organs contracted, zooming in on the city local primitives called “Khors.” Half of the city was rubble, marked by pockets of fire and a heavy, dark haze of smoke. The message from the jump-beast had stated that the ambassador’s settlement was under attack. Blair cared little for the corpses littering the rubble. He focused on the settlement’s spaceport.
His Warriors hulked across it. Eleven feet tall, their muscular, bipedal frames were covered in dark hair. Chitinous plates bulged under their skin, pressing the hair out at odd angles while protecting the muscle within. One effortlessly carried a local primitive in clawed hands. The man flailed wildly, but could not break the beast’s grasp.
He focused on the man’s clothing. So backward, they cannot even regulate their body temperature! He had seen primitives in clothing before. They had been trespassers, brought before him for judgment. He had examined their bodies for days before sending them off to be hunted, fascinated by the crudeness of evolution’s design and the awkwardness they felt over nudity. He’d passed it off as trying to protect the only body they would ever have, but it still unsettled him. He could only imagine how the Ambassador Cody must have felt, being forced to wear clothing day in and day out so as not to upset the natives.
But Cody had always been a strange person. Blair had met him several times and always found him too fascinated with mechanical technology and the outdated species that infested far too much of space. He supposed those skills had made him ideal for tolerating life amongst the primitives, but he still felt little respect for it. And while he’d never particularly liked Cody, the situation demanded a response. Death was unthinkable, even for an eccentric fool like the ambassador. Death at the hands of these throw-backs? That could not be tolerated u
nder any circumstance.
His landing-beasts loaded up the last of his Warriors. They metabolized their fuel into a bluish flame, rising through the planet’s atmosphere. As they docked with the War-beast, Blair pulled the connections from his eyes. They retracted back into the spongy tissue of the control pod. The pod, itself a creature, opened when he turned. He stepped into a corridor. Massive arching bones rose, holding up the writhing pink muscle of the ship. That muscle felt warm under his feet as he waited.
A minute or two passed before Flynn appeared. A Master like Blair, Flynn had chosen an externally female body for this mission. It was a pale-skinned form with firm breasts and gently curving hips. A long phallus hung between his tapered thighs, concealing more feminine parts behind it. It was pleasant to gaze upon, amongst other things.
Blair had always liked Flynn. On the trip out, he had been a willing lover, both giving and accepting. Nights curled around him and the slight body he’d chosen had made this voyage into the wilderness bearable. More importantly, Flynn followed orders. Unlike most Masters he didn’t grumble about being a subordinate when the situation called for it.
Flynn led a procession of a half-dozen Warriors. One Warrior carried a primitive man over his shoulder. Blair nodded and moved down another hallway. The others followed. It twisted past blood vessels, coming to a large cavity. An open pit, an acid sack built to dispose of aging tissues and worn-out servants, dominated the room. Its corrosive contents swirled in a slow whirlpool, wafting a pungent odor throughout the chamber.
The Warriors grunted angrily, and one dropped the captive primitive man on the floor near the pit. Blair couldn’t blame the Warriors for their frustration. They were engineered to kill males on sight. The only orders that overrode that were those from a Master. Following Flynn’s orders not to kill the primitive must have been hell on the hulking bipeds.
“This one has a device,” Flynn said. “Like an eye. It records things.”
The Cordelian man staggered to his feet. He was covered in blood, his face puffy and swollen. Blair noticed that Flynn was holding a mechanical object. He couldn’t imagine what that must be like. Masters should not touch such things directly. It was bad enough that buried deep within the tissues of this ship, mechanical jump drives, engines, rail-guns, and gravity generators were at work. No effort of biological manipulation had allowed them to replicate these technologies with living tissue, so the mechanical aberrations remained, out of necessity only. The Crimeans had built them for his people, a skeleton onto which the War-beast would graft and grow.
