by Renard, Loki
Krave
She’s a pretty little thing. A spectacular piece of work, and quite unique, even for a species which is well known for its uniqueness.
“And who are you?” I extend the question as a courtesy.
“I’m Seven,” she says, as if a name is an answer. I know if I were to press her further, I would get nothing but confusion from her. She doesn’t know who she is. She thinks she does, but she’s wrong. I looked over her file while she was being delivered. It was an interesting read. She is actually one of the older humans in the simulation, though she appears to be in her early twenties. She is #777, designated name, Seven. In her current life strand she is an aspiring artist, enjoys recreational drugs - or what she believes to be recreational drugs, and she thinks she is twenty three years old. Her actual age is far closer to a hundred years old, still a baby compared to my nearly four hundred years of age.
The simulation these humans live in has freed them from aging. Their telomeres no longer degrade with every replication. They are able to maintain youth, health, and beauty almost indefinitely. They, of course, are not aware of this. The threat of mortality is the only reason humans aren’t completely uncontrollable.
When I reviewed her file, I discovered that Seven has been reset no fewer than fifteen times, officially. Most of those times were short loops in which her memories were ghosted and her new reality was reset to her very early twenties. Early on, she was reset to infancy a couple of times, when the simulation was very new and there were teething problems. Galactor, the previous owners of the colony, were excellent record keepers.
Scythkin spread from star to star, planet to planet, destroying existing life and using the newly acquired resources to set up brood sites where we spawn great clutches of eggs. Galactor spread from planet to planet, system to system, setting up outlet stores and instituting economic tyranny. It is a hotly debated question as to which one of us is worse. Scythkin are a species fighting for survival, whereas Galactor is nothing but a soulless collective.
Seven shifts on the ground, looking as if she’s considering getting up. I let her rise from the floor, but the second she stands on her own two feet, I am out of my throne and pushing her back down until her knees meet the ground.
“Humans must kneel,” I growl.
Now that I am close, she cannot help her terror. It makes her eyes wide and watery, her muscles locking to make her completely still. She’s frozen, just like every good piece of prey. I stare into her eyes, and wonder what lurks inside that pretty blue expression of horror.
Seven
His hands are on my shoulders, each one of them far larger than the shoulder it touches. I can feel the sharp bladed surfaces of his claws on my back, and I can feel his breath on my face, hot and intense.
“Kneel.” He intones the word again with enough gravitas to make my knees buckle when I even attempt to get up. It is not possible to push up against his grip which is firm and impossibly strong.
I draw in a deep breath and try not to cry.
He holds me in position, and looks at me. He says nothing, but allows the humiliation of my situation sink in. I must kneel, because I will be made to if I refuse. Everything I have been through, my resistance, my bravery, my survival, it means nothing because it terminates here next to the sharp legs of this monstrous creature who will not allow me to rebel.
That thought makes something tighten inside me. How many humans warrant personal attention from the head alien-daemon? How many other people has he pushed down to the ground, their faces perilously close to that displayed rod of dominant desire? I look away from it, not wanting to react with lust. Desire in this moment would be nothing but weakness, a biological attempt to distract myself from the disaster which looms so close to me I know I am mere milliseconds away from a gruesome end if this entity desires it.
I look down, expecting the sharp shanks which cover the front of his shins to be perilously close to my body, but I find that they are gone, retracted into the raised portion of his leg. He’s keeping me safe from the danger he presents. He’s not risking so much as scratching me. I wonder why. What plans does he have for me that involve keeping me intact? He’s already said I’m not going back home.
Krave pulls his hands away from my shoulders slowly and lifts a finger in front of my face, the silent implication being that he wishes for me to remain kneeling for him.
And I do.
I stay there, on my knees, as he slides back into the throne from which he came and regards me from above.
“So you are capable of obedience,” he drawls. “Just not to signs, or the insistence of your peers, or the horror of the soul-whip. You require a personal touch.”
I do not know how to respond to that, so I do not. I stay there, in place, hoping that I will get some reprieve. Perhaps, if I obey him, he will lose interest and return me… but I know he can’t. If I tell people what is under the world…
They won’t believe me. I’ll sound absolutely insane.
“How?” I whisper the question.
“How what?”
“How long have you been down here?”
“Time is a tricky thing to pin down,” he says. “Especially where you are concerned.”
I don’t understand what he means. “It is?”
“Oh, yes, very complicated,” he drawls. “I can’t say I fully understand it myself. It was never my problem. We leave that to the temporal engineers.”
I am lost in confusion, but it is the kind of confusion I don’t think can be explained to me. Nothing about this situation makes sense. I am clearly a captive. My entire species is. But we’re not aware of it - even though, really, we should be. How could we not notice the strangeness of the command to kneel every day? Why do we never question it?”
“How are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“All this?”
“That’s complicated too.” He leans forward. “All you need to know, Seven, is that you are mine.”
Seven. The way he says my name sends a shiver of twisted delight running down my spine. I like the way my moniker sounds on his lips. It feels right, even though it has to be wrong. That word, my name, it is like a spell, a sound of connection. I immediately want to hear him say it again.
“Yours?”
“You’re all mine,” he says, dashing a hope I didn’t know I had. “All hundred and forty thousand or so of you, my little human worms.”
“Worms!?”
He lets out a chuckle. “Compared to our species, yours is very simple.”
“Compared to my species, yours is clearly made up of arrogant assholes.”
He smirks.
Krave
I shouldn’t be getting a rise out of her, but I like the way her skin heats and her eyes sparkle when she is outraged. What I said just now could actually not be further from the truth. Scythkin do not see humans as worms. We revere the species. It is the one kind of life we have all collectively agreed not to destroy on sight. Humanity is a protected class of life, because in all the universe, humanity is unique. These little fleshy beasts molded the spark of sentience into consciousness and became the progenitors of all intelligent life everywhere. Time lashed forwards and backwards, curled up on itself and twisted around, but they were immune to its effects. They were solid little things, always trying to make cars that went faster, and aging that went slower. I want to tell Seven about the latter part, but I will save that for another time. Finding out that she is functionally immortal will be far too much for her. She already gets ahead of herself, and clearly has a strong tendency to rebellion.
“We are not worms,” she hisses. “We are…”
“What?”
“People.”
“Oh, very good,” I smirk. “People could be another word for worm and it would make no difference.”
I see her struggling with herself. She wants to explode in temper, but she isn’t sure what she can get away with where I am concerned. Fear kee
ps her somewhat polite.
“If we are worms, then why are you bothering with us? Does that make you a worm farmer? Where I come from, that would make you either simple, or a child.”
Touché.
“Or someone who likes to catch fish,” I point out.
Double touché.
We both know she is terrified, no matter how much her mouth might be running. The next thing she says proves it.
“What are you going to do with me?” The question comes in a light little whisper.
That is a very good question.
The simulation in which she lives is the last human stronghold. Not so much a stronghold, I suppose, because they’re unable to defend it and they don’t know they’re in it. They believe that they live on Earth sometime in the 1980’s, or perhaps the 1990’s, or some combination of the two. When I went over the Galactor notes, it was mentioned that they had tried replicating different eras in human history and had eventually settled on the pre-modern times, around the birth of what humans called the Internet. Humans were most impressed with themselves at that point and also much more inclined to follow anything technological. Galactor were using the simulation to make profit. They were allowing the humans to be visited and touched by all manner of alien life. It was a travesty against the species which spawned all sentience, and we scythkin put an immediate stop to it with fire and flame.
This little human, defiant as she is, is important.
She is precious.
But I must maintain order. The simulation runs smoothly enough when it has time to settle in and attain a comfortable rut of existence and routine, but there has been great upheaval lately. The war with Galactor was short, but it utterly obliterated the humans’ sense of being on Earth. It brought chaos and terror to the streets, and the physical damage to the simulation meant that many humans were displaced and some were badly injured. So we did what Galactor had done many times before. We used the personal confusers the humans love so much and we performed a hard reset of every brain linked up to the network. Maybe we missed this girl somehow. Perhaps she somehow avoided her personal confuser for an extended period of time and missed the flash coded updates. That’s something I’ll have to get Technical to look into. We can’t have some humans walking around with pre-reset coding in their little meat brains. That could crash the whole society, but not before it introduced a series of bugs which would cause increasing chaos and anarchy.
Order is more than important. It is essential.
This situation should have a simple fix. I should just reset the human. It would be easy enough to put her in one of the chambers Galactor manufactured for recalcitrant humans and have her flashed into submission, then return her to the world above without her having any memory of the devil below.
But something is stopping me from issuing that order. And I know what it is. Technologically dominating humans holds no joy for me, but holding her down on her knees, that gave me a physical jolt of excitement and pleasure like none I have had since agreeing to take this important, but utterly tedious post. Her argumentativeness is also exciting. I like the way she tries to defend herself with words, as if a sound can stop a tonne of scythkin warrior from doing what he pleases with her. She is brave, and I admire that trait greatly.
The question is, if I don’t return her to the simulation, then what do I do with her? I know what I want to do. I want to touch that soft human skin. I want to feel her submit to me with every part of her being. I want to watch the rebelliousness slide from her as she relaxes into a deep state of pure submission and gives herself to me without question or limitation. But that is not something that will happen easily, not if I don’t use the personal confuser on her - which feels like cheating.
What I do know is that I have to frame this in a context she understands. She thinks I am a daemon.
“Where do you think you are, Seven?”
She shivers a little at my voice. “I don’t know, I guess… hell?”
“But you’re alive. Hell is a place for the dead.”
“Am I? And is it? I don’t know anything anymore,” she says. Her words could be pathetic or plaintive, but there is no weakness in them. She speaks her truth simply.
“Those little aliens with the big teeth hurt me,” she adds.
“So they are aliens. Aliens in hell?”
I am amusing myself now by drawing out her confused understanding of this world she finds herself in. It is like putting a mirror in front of a small dog and watching it try to look around it to find the puppy on the other side.
Her eyes narrow as that obvious tendency to temper flares. “You know where we are. Why don’t you just tell me?”
“The truth would seem less believable than anything you could concoct in your mind, little human.”
Seven
Little human. That phrase sends another bolt of excitement through me. I don’t know where I am or what is happening to me. I do know everything I thought was true and real was a lie and fake. But it doesn’t matter when he speaks to me in that deep gravel and makes my nervous system come alight with need. Whatever he is, he has some direct line to the very core of me. He can make me feel the sort of things no man ever made me feel, not without drinking a lot.
“Then don’t tell me the truth,” I say, daring to look up at him. “Just… please…”
My words fail me as he beckons me closer.
I shuffle forward, not wanting to earn his anger, but also afraid of what might befall me when I am close. He is so exquisitely dangerous. He is the incarnation of every predator I ever had any concept of, combined into one. And he is fiercely intelligent. He is bigger, stronger, better than me in every evolutionary way.
He reaches down, the claws at the end of his fingers pulling back to make them safer for my skin. He takes hold of me under my shoulders and he pulls me up from the ground to sit me on his lap.
I let out a nervous blip of laughter.
“What is it, human?”
“This feels like the time I sat on Santa’s knee at the mall,” I confess.
“Oh?” He smirks, clearly aware of what Santa is. “And what did you ask the jolly man with the big white beard?”
“I think I asked him for cosmetics,” I say. “But that’s not what I’d ask you for.”
“What would you ask me for?”
“Freedom,” I whisper the word, lowering my eyes.
“Oh I don’t think that’s what you want,” he says, tipping my face back up toward his with one strong finger. “I don’t think that’s even close to what you want.”
I draw in an unsettled breath. He is all around me. I can feel his massive, hard, ridged body against mine. I don’t know why, but I expected him to feel cold. He doesn’t. He’s slightly hot to the touch, and the hardness of the ridges and plates of his body are not as uncomfortable to press against as I would have thought either. He feels hard and unyielding, but also frighteningly comfortable. I have a flash of feeling of belonging right here, sitting on this monstrous lap, and that scares me more than being here does. Why does this feel so natural?
Krave drifts a claw lightly up and down my back in a slow caress. The energy has shifted. First he showed me that he could make me do what he wanted me to do. Now he is cradling me on his lap, one big hand sliding over my inner thigh to hold me by the leg, another finger stroking the sensitive skin which runs in a path of tenderness all the way to the little spot at the core of me, the same spot which is throbbing with need I’d much rather not feel right now.
“You are beautiful,” he murmurs, the compliment catching me off guard.
I make a small sound, not knowing what to say. His claws are moving over me in light scratching motions, sending ripples of relaxation and thrills of carnal excitement rushing through my body in alternate waves.
His big hand moves up my leg, his finger extends and the very tip of his claw runs down the seam of the denim over my slit. It is deeply intimate touch, one that produces immediate erotic res
ponse. I feel my pussy clench beneath my clothes, the soft core of me knowing that it has been found out by this massive predator who is able to lure my desire forth with artful touches and soft caresses and the huge bulk of his form which keeps me in place in his lap.
The hand which was stroking along my back lifts and clasps my throat from behind. His hand is large enough that it covers me from collarbone to chin as he pulls me lightly backward, tilting my head back, opening my body to him, my thighs spreading by the same urging.
Laying back over his legs, I look up into his burning gaze as he uses the rough surface of his clawed hands to tenderly toy with my sex, keeping his touch over the denim which snugs against my pussy, holding me securely until he deploys that claw in a different way. One moment I am squirming lightly, my hips dancing against his legs, the next, the sharp tip of that same claw is rending the material, cutting through the layers which separate him from me.
I still myself, not wanting to be caught by that sharp blade, but he does not even so much as scratch me. He is as adept with those claws as any surgeon might be with a scalpel, and now they are retracting as he dips two fingers into the hole he made in the cloth of what used to be my clothing and touches me right between my legs, finding a pool of wetness between my blonde furred lips.
“This is the part where a human male might exclaim how wet you are,” he rumbles, speaking for the first time since his touch intensified and became erotic. “But I knew you were wet already. I could smell it. I could hear it. The way these lips were sliding against one another every time you rolled your hips…” he breaks off and begins to move the pads of his fingers against the very entrance of my body, toying with the wetness, spreading it up and down the tender slit of my captive sex.
