Soul Cycle

by Erik Hyrkas

  “Set him down,” the guard said.

  Hunter stirred.

  The guard smiled. “Five days of solitary confinement in the dark will leave you blind and insane, but it will send a clear message to others. Respect must be shown for the Lord and his servants.”

  Brit knew the guard was right. Five hundred Earth years in that dark room would drive anybody insane and likely leave them blind as well.

  “Fuck off,” Hunter said.

  The guard smiled. “Go ahead and talk all you like. Nobody can hear you. Maybe that’s why we sometimes forget people in here. Incidentally, you may feel perpetually hungry and thirsty, but don’t worry, you won’t starve or die of thirst. However, many of the people who do come out of solitary confinement are missing their fingers.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I suspect they gnawed them off.”

  He shut the door on Hunter and Brit felt a wave of anguish wash over her as if she had watched somebody be killed in a horrible way. This fate was worse than death. Hunter might live forever in that box with nobody to talk to and nothing to do in the dark and silence, feeling only hunger and thirst. He had once saved Michael, and despite not liking him, she couldn’t bear to see this happen to him.

  “You four are being transferred to a retail distribution center,” the guard said. “Follow me.”

  Brit froze. She had found a way to Jax, and now she was being transferred from the mines. If she left, she may never return to the same mine, or any mine, and never see Jax again. She had vague hopes that, if she could get to Jax, maybe they could escape to the caves and come up with a plan to help Hunter and Marcy. Every passing hour she harbored the fear that Jax might forget who she was, and now she felt certain she would never see him again.

  The guard glanced over his shoulder after taking a few steps. “Do you wish to become another example of what happens to a slave who does not follow commands?”

  She did not look at the guard as she unrooted herself and followed. As they left the hallway, she looked once more back at the door that Hunter was now trapped behind. If he was in there screaming, she couldn’t hear him.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Brit sorted disks that lay flat on a table. Each glowed a different color and she needed to place them into the bucket of a similar color. It was tricky at times because some disks would be a bluish-green or yellowish-orange and there wasn’t a bucket of precisely that color. Her job was to find the closest match and then place it into that bucket. These “souls,” as they had been called, were then carried off by other slaves to new stations. She had been sorting for so long that she couldn’t guess how many Earth days, months, or even years had passed. The other slaves never spoke, and she began to wonder if she could even speak at all. So she resumed singing her favorite retro 80s tunes to herself when no other slave was near.

  She thought of Jax and the cave that had brought her so close to him, and she thought of Hunter and Marcy who were suffering their own terrible fates. There seemed to be no way to help any of them.

  “Human,” a guard said.

  She looked in his direction, but not at his face, and knelt, as she had become accustomed to doing.

  “I did not expect to find you here,” he said.

  “I am where the Lord commanded me to be,” she said in little more than a hoarse whisper, fearing that she might be punished for doing what she had been told to do long ago.

  “No, no,” he said. “I mean, I thought you had found…a place.”

  She dared a glance at his face. He seemed vaguely familiar. He was not as tall as the other enkelis, but he was still strong like the others.

  “Do you not recognize me?” he asked.

  “No, master,” Brit replied. She had not had a conversation this long in many Earth years.

  “I am Lieutenant Adriel,” he said, and recognition came to Brit. “I am one of the enkelis who found you initially.”

  She nodded but continued to avoid looking directly at him.

  “When you found the cave, I was sure it would only take a few more trips before you found your way to the other human,” he said.

  She looked up at him. “Did you leave the full bin of vaalia?”

  He gave her a sad smile. “Maybe Captain Raguel noticed,” he said. “Maybe that is why you were sent so far away to this distribution center.”

  A slave walked in to collect a bin of red-orange souls, and Brit immediately scrambled to sort more.

  When the slave had walked out of earshot, Adriel continued, “I cannot override Captain Raguel’s command, as he is my superior. However, maybe you could run a brief errand for me.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” she said.

  “One of our wealthiest customers has purchased a large order of souls and will be arriving in a few hours,” he said. “Her name is Kauppias, and if she were to see a human female, she would certainly wish to purchase the slave. Our Lord would not wish for you to ever leave here, for in you are many memories that might undermine him, but he would not want to disappoint this customer. He would find a way to trade you. Kauppias is kind and her slaves live more freely than even the humans of Earth.”

  “What about my husband and my friends?” she said.

  “I have my own duties, and there are hundreds of thousands of slaves. That I have seen you more than once is largely coincidence,” he said. “Even if I wanted to risk my own freedom to save them, it would be a futile task lasting centuries and ending in failure.”

  A new slave entered and grabbed a yellow-green bin of souls. Brit resumed sorting until he left.

  “What do the lords do with souls?” she asked.

  “In the place you come from, they have movies and television shows that humans spend endless hours watching. The lords live forever, he said. They like to be entertained. Each soul has an entire lifespan of memories preserved, and with the assistance of an artificial intellect, those memories can be stitched together in such a way that they play back the relevant portion to make a story. Often the most popular stories are tragic. Some will only revolve around one or two souls, but others may include a full collection.” He pointed at the bins. “Each of these souls knew each other in life,” he said. “That is why there are in this room. The artificial intellect sorts those together that make a potential story that a Muse has requested. Most of these souls will be unusable in any story of interest and so they will be destroyed.”

  “Would Kauppias take me off this world?” Brit asked.

  “Yes,” Adriel said. “She has her own worlds. I have only seen one, when I once brought a message to her from our Lord. It was beautiful beyond any world I’ve seen.”

  “Master,” Brit said, unsure of how to address the enkeli. “I cannot leave Jax.”

  Adriel sighed. “Jax is one of the other humans, I presume.”

  “My husband,” she said.

  “I admit that I find the bonds humans create fascinating, and maybe this is why the lords also like watching them so much,” he said. “You make sacrifices that are irrational and pointless for the sake of mates, even when your society has become advanced enough to genetically engineer more of your species without wasting so much time on mating.”

  “It is unethical to engineer a human,” she said.

  “What do you think the enkelis are?” he asked. “Our Lord made us in the image of humans. We are our Lord’s vision of a perfect human.”

  “Each enkeli I’ve seen looks slightly different,” she said. “Why is that?”

  “It is due to the human portion of our genetics, and one of the reasons we are never as perfect as our Lord desires,” he said. “Only a few have ever been perfect enough to serve the Lord directly. Captain Raguel was once one of those, until he received a scar on his face during battle.”

  “Who was he fighting?” Brit asked, now curious why one of the Lord’s perfect enkelis had been in a fight.

  “Some lords are not content with immortality,” he said. “There are lords who wish to extend their domai
ns and acquire more worlds, something interesting to see and do that they have yet to see or do. Our Lord and creator sells souls to help quell the boredom of the other immortals, and he isn’t the only one; but there are certainly those who prefer to take a more active role in entertaining themselves, stories not good enough.”

  Another slave entered, this time taking a half-full bin of purple souls.

  “I will send a slave in a few hours to take your place sorting,” he said. “If you wish to remain here, then simply tell him that you will continue your sorting and that he may do the delivery of the jade souls. Remember though, this may be your only chance to have anything resembling freedom again.”

  She nodded. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  He left, and Brit continued sorting souls as she pondered what answer she might give. Freedom and being away from the repetition of slavery sounded amazing, but she knew she couldn’t leave Jax. At the same time, staying in the same place would never help her free her husband either. How long had she been in the exact same room? The futility of staying weighed heavily on her. The passage she had dug toward her husband in a cave seemed like another lifetime.

  Brit made up her mind then and there what she would do, then returned to sorting souls. Hours passed, and each slave that came into the room grabbed a bin of souls and left. Brit wondered whether something was preventing Adriel from keeping his promise, but there was no sense in worrying about it. A few hours one way or another wouldn’t matter at all.

  Finally, after Brit was certain that nobody was coming to replace her, a slave entered and walked to the side of the table she stood on.

  “I am to relieve you from this duty and you are to take the green souls to captain Adriel,” he said.

  Brit’s heart raced as she said what she promised she would. “Captain Adriel had said that I may remain if I choose, and I choose to remain.”

  The slave nodded, as if this was a response that he had been warned was possible, then grabbed the green souls and walked out of the room. The moment he left, Brit felt the urge to run after him, to scream that she had changed her mind, to even beg him to take her place. Instead, she broke down in tears.

  Despite the sense of despair that washed over her, she had the presence of mind to continue sorting. Time lost meaning after a while, and days or weeks or possibly years passed, but she clung to one hope: she would find her way back to that cave, back to Jax. She softly sung power ballads from the 80s so that she remembered words she might use when she saw her husband again.

  Her childhood was in the 90s, but her parents had incessantly played 80s music, and she felt more in tune with the music of that decade than she did the music that other people her age had listened to. Being so far from home, thinking of music that reminded her of her mother and father gave her something to cling to for the sake of her sanity. Her parents would be older now for she had been in this place for years, but they were probably still alive and would miss her. They probably wondered where she had gone. Maybe they had even held a funeral for her. She hoped that they had found peace.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The lights in the small room went out. Peter stood and turned on his own light. When the supplied light ceased, he knew he was not being monitored. This light was not for any humane reason but so the camera could show the despair of the imprisoned for the purpose of warning others of a like fate should they fail to be obedient. For this reason, Peter never showed anything but tranquil happiness when the room light was on. Now that he was without an audience, he let the facade drop.

  He tapped the computer embedded in the thigh of his pants. A holographic display appeared in front of him. With a few casual swipes, he set a timer on his computer to alert him of the next time the monitor would turn on the lights and the video feed to his cell again.

  It had taken a few short Earth years, but he was pleased that he had negotiated an escape with Raguel. Like most bounty collectors, Raguel spoke the language of credits and freedom. Peter had promised him two things: he would pay Raguel a hundred thousand credits, enough to live on for many long days on Aeternum, and Peter would help Raguel reach Kauppias’s domain and establish citizenship. This was the trickier part of his promise. He had no real say in whether Kauppias would accept him or not, but he didn’t need to know that.

  Peter manipulated the holographic images in front of him to instruct his computer to record to his journal. Here he selected the glyphs to write his latest journal entry, a message to his husband, Thomas, back in Kauppias’s realm. He had no way to send this message, but he wrote them each day and hoped to someday be able to give them to him.

  Thomas would not be worried yet, Peter knew. After all, Peter had been gone for much longer stretches in the past. Part of being a bounty collector was taking the time to earn a living, and that required long journeys to the planets with the most interesting things happening. The current big bounties were for human souls. Tragedy was the current hot commodity, and Earth was full of tragedy.

  When he was moments from finishing his journal entry, his alert announced that the lights and video feed would soon return. He disabled his computer’s holographic display and returned to his serene sitting position.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A slave entered, and Brit paid him no notice as she continued to sort and sing. Any attempts to hide singing were long forgotten. She was startled when the slave walked to her side of the table and tapped her on the shoulder.

  She looked up and saw a face she had nearly forgotten. The slave was a woman. She didn’t speak and Brit knew why. Brit instantly threw her arms around the other woman and they hugged furiously.

  “Marcy,” she whispered.

  The woman nodded and they slowly pulled away, but each kept a hand on the other as if afraid their long-lost companion might vanish. Marcy’s clothing was torn and had lost any resemblance to the original design or pattern, and her skin was more pale than Brit remembered. But then Brit realized that her own skin was probably pale after being in this room for so long, and her own clothing was an unrecognizable collection of tattered gray fabric.

  Marcy pointed at a bin of golden souls, then pointed at the passage that led away.

  “Do you need to take those?” Brit asked. She quickly pushed a few more souls with golden tint into that bin and then held it out to Marcy.

  Marcy shook her head, not taking the bin, and pointed to the passage.

  “I am to leave?” Brit asked.

  Marcy nodded and gave her another hug.

  “I think I found a way out,” Brit whispered. “Not back to Earth, but to a safe place.”

  She didn’t know why she was telling Marcy this. There was almost no hope that Brit would ever find her way back to that cave, and even less hope that she could help her friends get to that place. Still, she felt she had to share this secret with somebody.

  Marcy gestured more vigorously at the passage, and Brit nodded.

  “I will be back for you,” Brit said.

  Brit wasn’t sure why she had made this empty promise, maybe so Marcy had the same hope that Brit was now realizing she harbored. That hope, infinitesimal and entombed in thick layers of fear and doubt, kept her going. She tried to instill some of that hope into Marcy with a hug.

  Marcy gave her a sad wave and then began sorting souls into bins. She didn’t look up as Brit walked out of the sorting room and into the passage that Adriel had once told her led to a sales room.

  The hall was not long before it came to stairs that spiraled upward. There were no adjoining passages, rooms, or other directions she might go, and so she followed the glossy, plain white walls and stairs upward.

  When she reached a landing, she saw daylight for the first time in many Earth years. She squinted. The sun was high in the sky, slightly past its highest point, and she realized, given the slow traverse of this planet’s sun across the sky, that roughly three decades had passed since her arrival now. Her parents would be retired, and she wondered if they
were happy. She thought desperately what she might give to see them again one last time, but then realized that she had nothing to give that hadn’t been taken.

  The passage had led her to the top of one of the low buildings in the city. An aircraft was sitting on a dark blue square of the otherwise white roof, and a pair of enkelis knelt before a pair of creatures she did not recognize. They looked completely alien — nothing like she had imagined any alien might look, either. Their skin was cobalt blue and translucent, bordering on transparent. She could see their organs beneath their skin, and they wore no clothing, which only made their pulsing, undulating internals more readily visible. The creatures were vaguely humanoid in shape, but their shape shifted as they moved and they had no apparent skeletal structure. She kept her gaze low and approached steadily, despite the fact that she wanted to run away.

  When she was a few feet behind the enkelis, she knelt with the bin in front of her.

  “Is this a human?” one of the creatures asked in a high-pitched rasp.

  After looking at Brit with a mixture of confusion and anger crossing his face, the enkeli directly in front of her answered, “Yes, my Lord.” He gave a long glare at the other enkeli.

  “I want one,” the same creature said.

  “We can find one suitable for you, Lord.”

  “I want that one,” the creature said.

  Brit fought an internal struggle. She wanted to run, to bolt away and find her cave now, but knowing that moving would mean her death, the logical side of her—or maybe the terrified side—pinned her knees to that place.

  “This one is a slave and we are not permitted to sell it for any price,” the enkeli said.

  There was a flash of intense blue light and the smell of burnt fajitas and the enkeli was gone. Brit was so shocked she inadvertently looked up at the cobalt being. As she watched, a small metal disk implanted within the surface of the creature’s skin migrated inward to rest somewhere amidst the jumble of organs.

  “I am not to be refused,” the creature said.