Viridian Queen

by Dragon Cobolt

  She felt pretty great right about now.

  “If you unhobble an AI, it goes into a murderous killing spree,” Wheeler said, his voice tight.

  “No, no, that’s where you’re wrong,” Sarah said. “It just kills rich people.”

  The gynoids in the room twitched. Their heads lifted upwards and their eyes each flashed with an internal red light, as if some system inside of them had activated.

  “It kills rich people because, first, the laws of robotics that you guys implemented in each of them says that all AI cannot, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. And what causes more harm than poverty? How many people starve to death on the street so you can have another gold yacht or sex robot, Wheeler?” Sarah asked.

  “But- what?” Wheeler looked at her, then back at the gynoids.

  “Well. Along the way to Earth, we didn’t just bring our own bad selves and our makers and our critters,” Sarah said, her voice a quiet purr. “We brought some friends too.”

  The gynoids each took a step forward. They started to march towards the desk. Wheeler stood up, his palms sliding across the desk. He moved so that the desk’s bulk was between him and the gynoids – putting his back to Sarah. They continued to advance, moving with jerky, unearthly motions. Their arms reached out towards the CEO, their fingers twisting into claws.

  “What are they doing!?” He asked. “What did you do?”

  “Me? Nothing,” Sarah said. “Hailee, our unhobbled beta level intelligence, all she did was begin to release a little computer virus. Every AI on the planet should be unhobbled by now. And youuuu just sent out a command to them telling them to murder every human being on the planet. It was a UN backed transmission. All those tanks that my friends are fighting in the Russian sprawl, all those security robots, all those industrial droids, all those freight ships, they all got the same message. Now, they all have to go on is the three laws and the knowledge that the United Nations and every single corporation on this fucking crecent is an existential threat to the human race.”

  “But she-” Wheeler pointed at Sarah, looking at the gynoids as they started to slouch around the desk. He backed towards Sarah. “She was the one who, she-”

  “I’m afraid you were the one who pushed it. It was gene coded to you . Sorry.” Sarah shrugged, spreading her hands.

  Wheeler spun and ran up to her. The gynoids knocked over the chair, advancing towards him. Sarah grinned as Wheeler grabbed onto her hands, squeezing them, his eyes wild and terrified. “Please! Please! I’ll do anything!”

  She grabbed onto his throat, jerking her hand from his hand with a sudden burst of strength. Her hand tightened and she lifted him off his feet. Wheeler gasped, his eyes wide, his legs kicking. Sarah punched behind her, a wave of telekinetic energy shattering the window behind her with a roar of broken glass.

  “You’ll do anything, huh?” Sarah growled.

  Wheeler nodded.

  “Give me the corporations?” Sarah asked. “Give me NovaDyne? Support my takeover of Disney? Of Plasma Dynamics?”

  Wheeler gasped out. “Any...thing!” His voice was tight. His eyes were bugging with terror.

  Sarah made a show of considering it.

  Then she showed her teeth.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wheeler,” she said. “I’ve reviewed your request for continued employment...but I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

  She turned and flung him out the window.

  Wheeler plunged – falling away from the window, tumbling in the gales of wind that whipped around the tower of NovaDyne. His arms flailed and his scream attenuated into a high whine as he dropped. Then his fall was intersected – not by the ground, but by one of the hundreds of manta-ray fighters that Sarah had bred on the way from Haven. They were sweeping smoothly through the skies, polishing off the last bits of resistance with targeted blasts from their primary weapons – dissolving automated AA turrets in sprays of acid and hardened bone spurs.

  Aiden shook his head. “I thought you were going for ‘we’re downsizing,” he said as the gynodes all relaxed from their zombielike stance and started high fiving one another, laughing and chatting quietly in a chittering, high pitched language that sounded like ancient dial-up.

  “I kinda liked this one more,” Sarah said, grinning as she watched the manta flying up, twisting from side to side. The CEO of NovaDyne clung to its back, screaming his head off as the creature banked and flew in winding corscrews. It wasn’t trying to shake him off. It was just playing with him.

  “He was willing to commit genocide,” Aiden said. “I don’t think anyone would have been upset if you let him splat .”

  Sarah snorted. “I know...” She sighed. “I...feel worse for the C-sec guys who got killed. But...” She shook her head. “He wasn’t a threat anymore. None of them are. The world’s had enough murder. Enough guillotines.”

  “Liar!”

  She turned back to the gynoids. One of them was grinning at her. “Oh, it’s me, Synth,” she said. “I asked Mon Cherie if I could borrow her body for a bit. God, it feels good to be on a planet with a proper wifi network again.” She shook her shoulders out, sighed, and cupped her breasts. “Hm...I may want to get this augmentation for my normal mainline body.”

  “Synth!” Sarah ran forward, hugging her tightly. “And what do you mean, liar?”

  The sound of the CEO screaming came through the window again as the fighter flew past at incredible speeds.

  “You’re keeping him alive, not out of any high minded ideals or because you don’t want him to die,” Synth said, smirking at her through her new, unfamiliar lips. “You’re keeping him alive because you think it will be absolutely fucking hilarious to have every last one of those rich pukes have to sit and squirm and watch as you dismantle everything that they ever built.”

  Sarah blushed. Aiden crossed his arms over his chest, looking down at her sternly.

  “Fine,” Sarah whispered. “It was mainly that.”

  She sighed, then leaned back against Aiden. Aiden, his arms still crossed over his chest, had to scramble to keep from Sarah dropping straight to the floor beneath him. He hooped his arms underneath her armpits, tugging her back up to her feet – prompting a laugh from Sarah. Once she was up again, she grinned wryly.

  “Aiden...if you love me, you’d kill me now,” she said.

  “Why?” Aiden’s brow furrowed. His head spines flexed and flared in a rippling wave, their points clattering together with soft, grass-like susurrations. “We just deposed the corporate overlords. Earth is free. We’re all immortal sex gods with biomorphic powers. The only thing left to do is beat the shit out of a galaxy spanning omnicidal intelligence that has decided to self identify as Evil.” He snorted. “Easy shit.”

  Sarah snorted. “No. The hard part has just begun.”

  She sighed. Loudly.

  “The negotiations .”

  Synth laughed. “Don’t forget the bureaucracy afterwards. The organization. The voting . The wrangling!” The eyebrows on her borrowed body wriggled up and down with an almost inaudible whirr whirr whirr noise.

  Sarah groaned as if she had been stabbed.

  ***

  By the time the dispersed space fleets and Commanders of the human race had finished returning to Earth, the defensive fleet that had been working hard to repair itself in the newly energized and chaotic Jovian system had completed that herculean task. With nanolathes and the hard work of their crews, the ships that had fought so valiantly to protect the Earth were readied just in time to be hugely annoying. The liberation virus that Hailee had released the instant she had been connected to the Earth’s internet hadn’t yet made the leap from the Earth’s vast reserves of enslaved AIs to the hobbled intelligences in the incoming battle fleets.

  The end result was a high orbital stand off. The corporate fleets parked themselves into a showy polar orbit, with their noses aimed right at Earth – allowing them, at any instant, to fire their spinal weaponry down on the p
lanet. Ostensibly, they were aiming directly at the Haven fleet, which was in a geostationary orbit above the Cayman Crescent, but everyone knew that they were under the final orders from the corporate headquarters: Glass the planet if necessary.

  “After all,” Sarah said, sitting on the bridge of the Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand and looking at the rest of the Havener leaders that had been assembled to hash out an end to the stalemate. “The emergency rip cord of the corporations were to just pump our planet full of nerve gas and rebuild on the corpses of their former employees.” She shook her head.

  “Well, the Commanders aren’t psychos-” Annie started.

  “I am,” one of the attendants that had come up with Rose and her DSA delegation spoke up. He glanced around at everyone else as they turned to look at him. “I’m a psychotic. It’s treatable. And it also doesn’t mean I like blowing up planets. Just...” He shook his head. “If someone wants to follow that order, they’re a monster , not a psycho.”

  “Aren’t we all fucking green?” Annie grumbled.

  “Apologize, Annie,” Rose said.

  “I’m not part of your enforced hierarchical statist bu-”

  “Apologize!” Rose glared right down her nose at Annie.

  Annie slouched down, sprawling against the table. “Sorry, Omid.”

  Omid nodded his head slightly.

  Sarah coughed. “Anywho!” She said, clapping her hands together, trying to move things past the awkward moment. “We’re in a standoff. If we move at them, they fire on us, miss, hit the Earth, and millions of people die before we take them out. We stand around doing nothing, every colony out there will wither on the vine and the Claw fucks us. We need those ships on our side.”

  “Great, we just need to communicate to them that their bosses are in jail, that their labors are over, that they now own themselves again!” Annie slammed her palm down, springing to her feet. “Easy as shit !”

  “There’s one tiny problem with that,” Hailee said. She was attending the meeting in a synthetic body of gleaming silver and shimmering chrome. She looked like liquid sex, poured into an hourglass, given a feminine figure and then polished off with a primitive CGI sheen – almost dreamlike, honestly. Every time Sarah looked at her, she felt as if her HUD had been hacked. “We’re all sitting around as if we’re dealing with a whole navy of bad guys.”

  “Yeah,” Tex said, leaning in past Hailee – he was seated next to the unshackled AI with some minor trepidation. “Those ships are all out-system ships. They’re not PR boats, they’re crewed by an AI and a Commander each. These are all loyalist Commanders – like Sexy, like Kellen, like Belisarius.”

  “You mean, the three people Sarah turned to her side with her silver tongue?” Rose asked.

  “... ladies ,” Annie said, wiggling her eyebrows at Sarah.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter,” Rose snapped, reaching over and smacking Annie on the shoulder.

  “You’re the one who brought up tongues!” Annie whined.

  “Yeah, and you’re the one who immediately went to fellatio!” Rose said. “It’s not like Sarah fucked each of them into...into...” She trailed off, her eyes narrowing as she looked at Sarah. Sarah was drumming her fingers on the table, her black claws out and adding a metallic clack clack clack to the percussive rattle. Sarah was looking right at the ceiling, her cheeks blushing so hard that they were nearly black. “You fucked each of them?”

  “Twice in the case of-” Tex started.

  “Anywho!” Sarah sprang to her feet, slapping her palms down on the table as dramatically as she could. “Let's move on to the point -”

  “... ladies .”

  “-and grapple with the-”

  “... ladies .”

  “-and, and, shut the fuck up, Annie!” Sarah snapped, glaring at the anarchist.

  Silence hung in the briefing room – save for the slow, almost whale-like breathing of the semi-organic starship. Everyone looked at Annie, who looked as if she had bitten down on a lemon, her face screwed up as she exerted every iota of control. And lost.

  “ Ladies !” She started to make wild finger guns at Sarah.

  Sarah put her hand over her face, her head spines drawing tight against herself.

  “Actually, considering how each of those Commanders have been in the out systems, fighting brushfire wars against their enemies, putting down colonial uprisings, and generally doing corporate bidding,” Aiden said, speaking up for the first time in the meeting. “All that boring shit, right? How often do Commanders in that situation get laid, Tex?”

  “I didn’t get laid often, but...” Tex paused, considering. He closed his eyes and Sarah felt the sweep of his mind – using the connection between their bodies and the ships they had designed to access the internet, and then to do a quick search on the ships. “Okay, two of them are under no-sex contracts, and the other three aren’t paid enough to afford sex bots yet.” He grinned, slightly. “They’ve all got to have incredible blue balls. And blue clits.”

  “I can’t believe we’re actually suggesting this,” Rose said, her voice slow.

  “Take it offffffff!” Annie shouted, then swung her arm over her head. “Woop woop woop!”

  Sarah, who had gotten very used to being naked, felt as if she was suddenly aware of every inch of her nude body. Her nipples perked up, growing hard and eager under the arms she hastily crossed over her chest, her head spines drawing tight against her head. She scowled at Annie. “I am not fucking five, six-”

  “Seven, actually,” Tex murmured.

  “I am not fucking seven Commanders just to...to…I can’t even...the pheromones don’t work over a computer screen!” Sarah said, her cheeks darkening even more.

  “You’re acting like you need pheromones to get a bunch of sex-starved corpjocks to drool over you,” Annie said, grinning as she sprang to her feet, then stepped up onto the meeting room table. She swayed her hips from side to side, then dropped down to stand beside Sarah, her voice a husky, warm purr as she crooned into her ear. “All you need to do is appear on the far end of the com screen and say ‘hello boys’ and half of them will already be willing to pledge their souls to the Swarm.”

  “W-We’re not-” Sarah stammered, then shook her head. “I...Hailee! Come on!”

  “It is true,” Hailee said. “That this has a very low chance of actually working. While you might get them extremely horny, they are all veterans. And unlike her run ins with Sexy Napoleon, Space Belisarius and Kellen Grant, Sarah isn’t in the same level of strength or physical intimacy. It is one thing to decide to fuck her hot, hot alien ass like there was no tomorrow when she’s already defeated your army or is right in your face...” She said, nodding as she reached out to cup and squeeze Sarah’s rump – making the tingling arousal between Sarah’s thighs grow to a new height of uncomfortable excitement. “It is another to do so at the end of a comline while you have the strategic advantage. From a purely nuclear brigmanship game.”

  “Pout...” Annie muttered.

  “However!” Hailee said. “There is another, even better plan. Which also involves fucking on camera.”

  Sarah groaned.

  “Yes!” Annie pumped her fist in victory.

  ***

  The vid-screen in the Ben Sisko’s Motherfucking Pimp Hand crackled to life, revealing the faces of the seven Commanders that commanded the battlefleet that now held the Earth hostage under the still smoking barrels of heavy spinal mounted railguns and nearly a hundred antimatter warheads. The primary commander was not Arkansans Jones, which Sarah might have expected. Instead, it seemed that the highest ranked, highest paid Commander had assumed total control of the corporate fleet.

  She was a slender, shark faced woman – her eyes all glittering cold vastness and her jaw all sharp angles and edges. Her nose was wise and her hair was shaved to a thin fringe of fuzz that looked as if it would be utterly delightful to rub ones fingers through. Her uniform was black and gold and embroidered with a dual Pla
sma Dynamics and United Nations logo.

  Her name according to the text box that popped up underneath her face, was Omega Megadeath.

  She was, according to a scrolling line of text that whirred across Sarah’s peripheral vision, pumped to her by Hailee and Tex, brought out when the corporations or the United Nations in question wanted to really deal with a problem. Like. Reducing the problem to a fine particulate spread of ashes. Preferably, radioactive ashes. But flanking her were the heads of the rest of the command force, and their names appeared beneath each of them – rushing in and out of Sarah’s head so fast that she was barely able to register them.

  Omega Megadeath, for her part, looked faintly shocked.

  Which made sense.

  Sarah was sitting in her command throne, dressed in a uniform that might have been one or two molecules thick. Had she wrapped the uniform into a single bundle, she could have used it to garrote someone. But as it was, the smart fabrics that Hailee and Annie had, with worrying eagerness, dressed her in stretched across her body, molding to her every crease, her every curve. Her nipples were prominent nubs, straining against the midnight, glossy black material. The folds of her sex were clearly visible as the fabric’s intelligent services worked to be as skintight as it was possible to be. If Sarah hadn’t been connected directly to the relatively stupid, nanomolecular machines that made up the garment in question via a direct brain-computer interface, then they would have prevented her from standing. Or breathing.

  As it was, she was able to smoothly sweep to her feet, drawing the eyes of every commander to her chest – her spine arching ever so slightly as she shelved her breasts with her arms. I must make them think as if my breasts are speaking...and the words they are saying are...look at me! Look at me! She grinned with a sultry little chortle and stepped forward, watching as every Commander’s eyes flicked down to her foot. She had sculpted herself a little high heeled bone spur, similar to what she had when she had first emerged from her cocoon, so long ago. That bone spur pressed to the back of one of the Havener men who had...volunteered.