PALADIN GLITCH

ONE

As Vera wrenched forward gasping for air, she wondered why. She knew she had died many times, but she still fought to remain, to hold on to this state’s experiences in memory that death wiped before Prime reprinted her. Experiences felt all the richer in each new state, she just knew this. The bindings dug into her wrists and ankles. Another shot to the chest from the De-Ox gun and she might lose consciousness. Good, let them quiver in their boots at the idea they may have pushed her too far. They would retrieve nothing if they destroyed her. She could feel the heat in her ears, nose and lips swelling from repeated beatings of the charged baton and she felt the dampness of blood all over.

"You must be some kind of masochist to have dragged this out so long. We grubbis are sadists by instinct. We are aroused by our partner’s pain during copulation." The fat grubbis leaned in only centimeters from her face, drool forming in the corners of his huge lips. "I’m flattered by your foreplay." The other grubbis in the room giggled at this.

"We are born to the ranks of serving the Prime. Let no other paths lead us into false sanctuary. We live to..." Vera was silenced by the shock of the baton zapping her jaw from another blow to the face. Spasms and lightning pain shot down her neck and spine. It felt like more than a minute had passed before she could voluntarily close her own mouth.

"Stop your stupid clan gibberish! I am sick of it! If you will not tell us who sent you, we can easily find out with a mind prod!" After the fat grubbis said this, a line of spittle fell from his mouth.

Vera thought they sounded like dogs vomiting when they spoke. She had already slaughtered a dozen of their henchmen on her way in this place before she’d had a clumsy moment and dove into a flying round of takki tranquilizer. She could still feel the glue from the splattered bullet on her cheek. That was one thing she was kind of thankful for. That side of her face was still numb, and the baton shocks didn’t feel so bad there.

"Do it," Vera said. She spat a blood-filled string of phlegm on the creature’s three-toed feet. "I dare you!"

The fat grubbis crossed his arms and made a strange hiccuping sound that must have been a laugh. "I told you, female. I’m a sadist, and I’m not done having my fun. I get so bored here on this lonely planet. You infiltrated our compound, murdered my good soldiers. I am thinking more of killing you than anything else, but you’ve earned a shred of respect by surviving without a single scrape." The creature waved his claw around indicating all directions. "All this killing, by yourself no less. Yet you made one mistake. It only takes one mistake and you fall."

Vera raised her head and did her best to grin. "You think I made a mistake? I just... needed to rest a bit," she said. "And now... that I’ve rested... I’ve been thinking about grubbis. A lot."

The fat grubbis made a confused expression and tilted its head.

"Do you know what a dog is?" Vera asked. She felt her strength coming back so much that she was able to speak without pausing. "Do you have any four-legged animals here you keep as pets?"

The fat grubbis glanced back to the open doorway where a silhouette of another taller grubbis with a rifle stood. The tall grubbis just shrugged.

"Well, anyways, on my planet we have these animals we keep as pets. Lower life forms you might say because they aren’t as smart as the advanced primates and they have some habits we can’t seem to come to grips with sometimes. I mean they can be pretty disgusting creatures. On occasion, they will actually eat their own shit." Vera chuckled. "Can you believe that?"

The fat grubbis grunted and narrowed its small eyelids.

"Wait...," Vera added then. "Don’t your grubbis mothers lick the excrement from your asses when you’re infants? I mean, what I was trying to figure out was. . . whose pets are you?"

Both grubbises looked to one another.

Vera shifted in her chair. Her ankles throbbed where the bindings felt like they were sawing their way into her flesh.

The baton slammed across Vera’s face on the side that hurt the most. "What was your target? Why were you sent, female?"

Vera cringed, her lips quivering from electroshock, then managed to reply, "By the way. I have a fucking name."

"Let’s see if you enjoy level two interrogations," said the fat grubbis. The creature pulled a wide curved knife from his belt and grabbed Vera’s right wrist and pressed the blade down over the top of her hand just below the four knuckles of her fingers. The front half of Vera’s hand fell to the floor, fingers twitching.

A hot pain jolted up her arm and she screamed. Blood squirted across the room from her severed stump.

The fat grubbis laughed. "Don’t worry, female. We won’t let you bleed to death." It motioned a clawed hand back to the grubbis by the door. "Set your weapon to torch."

The taller grubbis approached, his rifle sporting a forearm’s length blue cutting torch flame.

"Wait, stop!" The fat grubbis shoved his clawed hand in front of the taller one. "It’s a bio-print. Not natural flesh. Look." It pointed at Vera’s severed hand. "Her wound has closed itself already. Only lab engineered flesh does that. She’s printed in a lab. Made for killing. We must destroy it completely! Incinerate it in the furnaces!"

Vera threw back her head and exhaled toxic fumes into the air. Just as the gas curled out from her lips, she heard them coughing and then the ringing of steel. The last thing she remembered then was seeing the room spin floor over ceiling as her severed head spun through the air.

TWO

"What makes this print so extraordinary? Why do you care so much about this model, great one? Isn’t it just cannon fodder like the others?" asked his right hand, Administer Harkked.

He loved the respect, but he didn’t like it when they called him ’great one’ though he understood why. If only his father were still alive to hear it, that would be something to put a smile on for. Little made him smile anymore.

THREE

She opened her eyes. There was a bluish bright light. Her thoughts hazy, Vera sat up, shivered. She realized she was naked. She had been lying on a steel platform and confined to a thick glass chamber with nothing else. Outside the glass, figures in lab coats stared at digital holograms of human organs. These were her organs. She didn’t know how she knew this.

"Take it easy, print," came a friendly male voice over some hidden speaker. "Don’t get up too quickly. Your muscles haven’t been used, yet."

Vera glanced around in confusion as to the source of the voice and lifted one leg and rotated her foot, working her calf muscle. She winced. Prickles bloomed down her leg as blood flow increased. "What the fuck is this? Where am I?"

"Still spunky, aren’t we?" said the voice. "I’m not surprised to hear one of the first signs of your residual memories to be your potty mouth." The voice chuckled. "I guess that one is just too deep to erase from reprints."

"Reprints?" Vera peered hard out the thick glass, still looking for a source. A blip appeared to the top margin of her visual field, then a blue cursor blinked. The words –SEARCH ENABLED- scrolled out from the cursor. She jumped ever so slightly, startled. "Who are you?" she asked, anger emerging in her voice. Then a red target beacon appeared over a figure seated to her left idly using a stylus to tap points in a hologram of her brain.

"I’m George," said the voice. "You’re experiencing reprint awakening. Don’t worry it wears off in a few hours. You are safe here with us."

"Here?"

"This is the Trysonia Labs in the city of Romantha in the Prime Union of planet Copa, your origin world."

"Origin?" Vera said. "I was born here?"

"Well, I’m not sure really, but I can assure you that you were first printed here. Some bioprints do have residual memory implants that are from human origins, but they never tell us for certain where the background memories were developed. Some are created by concept designers who work on VR games. Some of them get their sources from actual people who lived and a few even download the memories of their dead relatives. We just never know. You could’ve been the president in a past life." George said the last with added enthusiasm.

"I don’t feel presidential, not even a little," Vera said. "I feel like I’ve the fucking hangover of a hooker with denial issues and a dangerous addiction or two that I may be detoxing from." She looked down at her chest and nodded to herself. No scars or blemishes. The rest of her body looked physically capable, even a bit muscular. "I’m printed?"

"Entirely. You are a 3D printed, cyber-enhanced bipedal homo-sapien, which gives you some pretty remarkable abilities."

"Sounds so sexy the way you put it." She rolled her eyes. "Anyways, I’m naked here and my tits are about to freeze off, whether or not you might reprint them for me is beside the point that I still feel cold and some clothes would be nice. You perverts out there can keep this picture in your VR units and jerk off to me later if you like, I don’t give a fuck."

Another male voice said, "Who is this one? You sure she’s not from the black hats slush cache?"

George replied, "Yup, her file says keep and reprint, highly effective variable tangents. Whatever that means. Some quantum evolution crap."

Vera’s sense of smell was suddenly apparent to her. The scent of bleach was inescapable. Her nostrils burned, and she felt her tear ducts filling up. "Okay, people. It smells awful in here."

She stood still for several minutes. When she had the thought of all the time passing she noticed a digital readout of the time appear in her right corner vision area.

19:45 hrs.

George appeared at the left wall and pressed his thumb on a tiny module. The glass disappeared on that side. He held an armful of what looked like a yellow uniform and a pair of black heavy treaded boots. He placed them on the steel platform. "Glad to see you are so eager to get to work, female. We’ll have a mission uploaded for you by morning. Get dressed, and we can feed you your first meal."

"My name is Vera," she said, though she was starving and thankful for the offer of food.

"Oh is it now?" said George. "Another one of those memory stains. Okay, Vera, then. We usually let prints pick their first names anyway. We have a number assigned to you in our databanks already. That’s how we keep track of you here in the lab. Any chance you could remember your last name as well?"

She couldn’t, oddly enough.

"No."

It seemed like she did have one though, but no matter how hard she tried to conjure it, nothing popped up. She wondered briefly if that cursor in her eyes might have a search engine. Unfortunately, nothing showed up to assist her thoughts.

"I figured as much," George said. He grinned and dug his right hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a small wrapped candy. "It’s cherry? Won’t hurt those super genetic teeth of yours. You know how much we genetically modified you to perfection? You might as well be a superhero!" He grinned wide this time showing what Vera considered enormous teeth, still stained from cherry candy, but perfectly even all the same.

She grabbed the candy and devoured it, nearly before she could get the wrapper off. She tossed it on the floor.

"You know," she said with the cherry candy poking out her cheek, ’I have a feeling I- Whoa! This is absolutely fucking delicious!" It was like she had never tasted candy before, but she remembered everything about it as if the taste and experience had been explained to her for her entire life but never having it flood her senses.

"A feeling?" George asked.

"Uh, yeah. I don’t know if I should trust you people. I mean, How do I know any of this is even real?"

"You don’t, but you will find it a hard thing to wake up from unless of course you are killed. You’re practically immortal otherwise. No possibility of disease or viral infections. No aging."

She began dressing, frowning at the lack of an undershirt or any kind of bra. "So, are you saying I’m some kind of android or robot or something?"

"No, not at all. You’re an entirely new biological primate made of biologically improved genetics with cybernetic hardware implanted throughout your body, all entirely printed by top of the line 3D printers. If anything, you’re a cyborg, but everyone’s a cyborg these days, nothing too thrilling there. However, your cyber ware is a bit more elite than the commoners with military modifications."

"Military?" Vera stopped lacing her boots for a second at that. "I’m a soldier? Is that what you people do with... my type?"

"In a sense, yes, you are the property of the Prime Union. You protect the interest and security of the people of Copa and those under the blanket of the Prime Union. Otherwise, we would not have all this just to babysit you." George held his arms out, indicating the entire room and all the workers seated around them. "Your soldier instincts, training... probably are still loading. You will discover you have motives and interests that serve those of Prime more as you interact with reality."

Vera counted eleven besides George. "I’m property?" She crossed her arms. "What if I just want to be a stripper? What if I don’t want to do the soldier stuff!"

George took out another piece of cherry candy, rolled it out of its wrapper prison and plopped it into his mouth. "Oh, but you will, Vera. Very much so. We gave you memories. That very identity you are experiencing right now is the result of edited and refined years of a near perfect killing machine. We put up with the attitude for a reason. It seems to be part of the payoff in a personality that is best at doing the jobs we require. "

Vera glanced up at the plain white ceiling, searching for some kind of remark to snap back with, but found only the pull of truth in his words. "Okay, so yeah, I’ll play for a while. Until I have something better to do. Right now, I can’t remember anything much more about myself."

George waved for her to follow him as he left the chamber. "Come on. I will take you to a more comfortable room and someone will bring you a nice bloody steak with a side of fries and a salad just like you like it. All printed of course, except for the salad. We have a greenhouse garden out behind the facility."

She hesitated to follow him. One thing did seem to send her nerves a tingle of anxiety. "George."

"Yes, Vera?"

"How many times have you given me this talk?" Vera heard the tremble in her voice and tightened her jaw.

He sighed and smiled. "You? This is the third time I have given it."

"So, I’ve been around before you or this consciousness of mine has?"

"A form of it, yes. The core of it per say. Each print is a little different from the last in personality, but aren’t we all after a few years?" George giggled to himself. "I mean to say most mortal humans born naturally are never the same consciousness. Our personality and cells rewrite themselves in time until we are a re-imagined version of our old selves. Think of your existence that way. It’s not a bad gig really." He headed for a hallway leading out of the lab area then, waving her to follow.

She did. She noticed his trail left another smell of familiarity: tropical hand lotion. "Soft hands," she mouthed the words where no one heard. That’s what she used to call the scientists here in the white coats. It had originated with George. He was obsessed with manicuring and moisturizing his hands.

Not long after George had brought her to her living quarters he brought her the meal promised. She devoured it. It indeed tasted and felt like something she would call her favorite.

Her room wasn’t spectacular. Simple bed, closet, drawers recessed into the wall, personal bathroom with shower and jetstream bathtub, coffee pot. What really made her uneasy about it was that her previous self had left it untidy. And she had no memory of it, but oddly it seemed like how she would’ve left it: the bed unmade, half a cup of coffee left on the bedside table, a sketch pad with an abandoned drawing on the floor, and the bathroom was kind of a mess. George had offered no explanation why they gave her a room without a cleanup from the previous occupant, and she knew why she shouldn’t ask that question. This was her room, and that was her mess, at least some version of her. It was one she did recognize, but why couldn’t she remember? She realized then as well that she didn’t remember dying at all. Did they erase that from her memory? Why would it be necessary?

Feeling tired again from having eaten, she grabbed one of the pillows from her bed and threw it between her knees and let her thoughts take her to sleep. She would have more questions tomorrow. Her last thought before sleep took her was that she never checked to see if they had locked the door from the outside.

FOUR

Vera awoke. A sound rang in her ears and she felt tingling throughout her legs and arms. She could see, even before opening her eyes, a flashing 0:600 HRS in her vision. She opened her eyes and it disappeared. Well, that’s handy, I suppose, she thought, but not if I can’t turn it off or change it. Who the fuck gets up at 600 hours? Oh, me I guess.

After she got up and dressed in a yellow jumper outfit and boots, she made coffee without even realizing it and was drinking a fresh cup when another message infiltrated her vision.

YOU WILL GO TO THE BLACK EYE GALAXY TO THE MSHEUYDAH SYSTEM. THERE YOU WILL FIND THE MOON KRAKKO-9 AND TARGET THE HEAD OFFICER OF LAW THERE, HIGHGUN GALT NINISSTORN. NO OTHER CASUALTIES PERMITTED. PREPARE TO LEAVE AT ONCE.

"Oh?" she said out loud. "So, this is what’s up?" she said then to the walls around her, hoping they were listening somewhere out there in their lab coats. "I guess I have to play along."

She finished off her coffee and approached the door. Before she could reach out and try to access what seemed to be the panel, she stopped herself, memories drizzling up to her like tiny bubbles in a glass of soda. She smiled as the door slid open.

Later, after they escorted her through the building and outside to a landing platform, she strapped herself into the cockpit of Nancy, the name she had given her combat ready cruiser ship. Its curvaceous outer hull was a bit dirty and scraped up, but it gave her a good vibe to see it.

She found herself going through the motions for liftoff, readouts flying across the glass cockpit window in front of her. She raised a brow, noting the empty seat next to her.

"Gian," she said.

As if that was the means to summon him, a middle-aged man in a pilot’s uniform materialized in the empty seat next to her. "Greetings, madam. It is a pleasure to work with you again." Gian had an ancient French earth accent. She had made him that way because she liked to hear it. He was a hologram co-pilot but also her only true friend.

"Well, the great," she held up her fingers to gesture for quotes, "’Protectors’ have another seemingly pointless thing for us to do," Vera said. As usual I’m not entirely sure why but it requires killing and not as much as I might like. They want me to be neat about it this time, ’NO OTHER CASUALTIES PERMITTED’ I’m sure as you’re logged into Nancy’s computer that you know the where."

"I’m sure you will handle it fine, madam. Your failure rating is the lowest in the Prime," said Gian. His face was a comforting one, and she liked his little thin mustache flecked with silver. This thought alone made her smile at him.

Then something gave her a blank face. Gian noted it and frowned at her questioningly.

"I don’t know, Gian. It seems I can’t remember something very fucking important to me. It’s like an itch I can’t scratch."

Gian laughed. "I didn’t know you itched."

Nancy climbed through the atmosphere of Copa like a bullet and fireworks flashed for several minutes in a halo around the cockpit window in Vera’s view. She felt the blood sink down her body and she nearly passed out but didn’t throw up escaping Copa’s gravity. Once in space, everything went silent and she felt submerged in a strange kind of peace. She always loved the moment of entering space. It felt like rising to meet the air from a long swim underwater.

She glanced down at the beautiful greenish blues of the Great Ocean of Copa below and the light tan deserts of the pear-shaped continent below flecked with dark green jungle foliage. Images came to her and she knew most worlds she visited hadn’t been able to preserve this kind of scenery. She was more acquainted with steel, plastiphene and granite.

Nancy shot towards the jump-gate near the outer rim of the solar system, a colossal ringed structure of immense power creating a wormhole that would send them to the Black Eye Galaxy.

Vera couldn’t help staring when it appeared. A spiral of coalescing hues pulsed like a beating heart, all rimmed by a dazzling mosaic of light.

"Off we go," said Gian.

The center mass surged forward and grabbed Nancy like the tongue of a toad snatching a fly. As it pulled them in at unimaginable speeds, the inertia did make Vera pass out for seconds.

She awoke inside space-time perfectly encased in the bubble created by Nancy to protect the ship and its occupants from the warping of their current physical state. This place always made her feel vulnerable and she was.

"Fuck this shit!" Her voice sounded low to her and as if it were distant in a long metal pipe.

She could also hear a faint whirring sound, an alarm going off in the ship. Gian’s form was blurring and fading in and out.

Something happened then that should not happen in folded space. Nancy jolted and shook like a large object had slammed into her side.

"We’re followed!" Vera shouted. The computer started scrolling jumbled messages over the glass in front of her. She remembered why they were vulnerable here. Prime could not communicate with her in folded space. That allowed opportunities for enemies to ambush them. It was possible those who would disagree with the motives of the Prime Union had jolted them off course. This would only be possible if a small undetected cloaked ship had slipped into the jump-gate simultaneously with them. A collision inside folded space could easily send them to an unknown destination.

The journey ended abruptly. Nancy vibrated before exiting the other end of a jump-gate or wormhole somewhere unknown. Vera recognized a ship floating nearby. It was the Terramon Rover. It was a small colony ship with oscillating rings large enough to sustain occupancy and ecology for around two thousand bi-pedals. She remembered it was home to a secret friend and she suddenly felt compelled to speak with him immediately.

"Where are we, madam? I don’t think this is the Msheuydah System," said Gian.

Vera found the manual switch that turned Gian off and flipped it. He disappeared.

"No, it’s not," she said then to herself. "We’re taking a little detour, I guess."

She still wasn’t sure why, but she knew this felt familiar. She opened a communication channel and searched for the nearest active frequencies.

"Vera, you there?" a raspy male voice crackled over Nancy’s speaker system. "You all right? I’m right outside your docking bay about to de-cloak."

She hesitated. "Yeah. Fine."

"Great! We haven’t much time."

Then a smaller passenger ship shimmered into view on her left-wing video feed.

She recognized it and pulled back the docking control levers on the cockpit floor.

"Come aboard!"

She hoped a familiar face would bring back some memories. She hurried to the cargo bay to meet him.

He was a tall thin human aged to his early first century it appeared with little if no anti-aging enhancements. He had a white bushy beard and thinning uncombed hair. His smile was what made the name bubble up to her lips. "Hugo! It’s good to see you!"

"Aye? Glad, you recognize me. For a second there you looked as if you were seeing a ghost!" Hugo held out his arms to offer an embrace.

She hugged him and said in mid-hug, "Everything has been fucked up like that for me since yesterday. Although, I’m starting the think I’m the one who’s the ghost."

Hugo took a worried look at her then. "You’ve been reprinted, I ’m guessing. Whoa, this is not good for our mission. There’s no telling what they erased. There’s no telling what they added. Are you sure you remember me?"

She nodded. "I remember that you are very important to me and that... I think I’m keeping a secret for you."

"Well, not exactly. I’m keeping one for you. That’s why we’re here. I nudged you from the wormhole at precisely the right spot. I work for the Unbound Shadows." At that, he took a step back and pulled out a plasma pistol. "Don’t take offense, my dear. Just a precaution. I’ve never met you reprinted. I can’t say for certain they’ve implanted something into your neurons telling you to kill me."

She held up her open hands. "I totally get it, Hugo. But I don’t think so, or else would I have already tried something, wouldn’t I?"

"Probably." He still had skepticism in his voice. "Then how come they didn’t erase me from your memory?"

"Maybe you didn’t seem important. Or maybe you seemed like just a dream. Also, I meet a lot of people and become acquainted with them for fuck’s sake. You could be anybody."

Hugo put away his weapon. "Okay. That makes sense. So you don’t remember your last mission? The grubbis? Apparently, you made a huge bloody mess of their outpost in the Black Eye. You nearly killed the whole regime."

"What?" It sounded wrong. Grubbis, though they disgusted her, were the protectors of the jump-gates as far as she knew. They worked for the Prime Union. "Why would I do that? Don’t I keep their asses safe?"

Hugo stepped back again, his face relaxed with empathy. "Dear Vera, you don’t work for them. You’re their slave. Don’t you remember? You discovered that on your own. I am only helping you. It’s what we do in the Unbound Shadows. You were human once. That part of you lives on firing around inside that printed brain. They can’t seem to print an assassin with a success rate as high as yours without it. Vera was a real woman who yearns to be free. Your consciousness is in a prison of murdering for the whim of the tyrannical Prime Union. Your ambush on the grubbis outpost was in an effort to free your mind from their leash. As long as you are in any system where Prime controls the jump-gates, you are being controlled and watched by their directors."

Vera looked away from him. "I know. What you say rings true to whatever is left of my memories. But what can I do now? I obviously failed the last time. I don’t know where to begin this time." She crossed her arms and starting pacing. "Fuck! I’ve got to get to the mission! What am I even doing here? They’ll figure out I’m missing soon enough?"

"There is about a four to eight-hour window of time discrepancy when passing through a jump-gate. You can still be in the Black Eye before they ever knew what happened. They can’t see you here. The gate here is not under their districts. It’s actually run by the Unbound. The Terramon Rover out there and most of this system of highly uninhabitable planets is home to the Unbound and overseen by our people. We’re safe here for now."

"Why did you bring me here? Just to tell me all this?"

Hugo smiled at her then in a way that had a hidden micro expression usually given to people you’ve known for many years. "That... and to give you something." Hugo pulled a rolled bit of paper out from his leg pocket and offered it to her. Red wax sealed it like an ancient scroll. "This way the contents are safe from all digital prying."

She took it.

"Don’t open it! Not until you finish doing what they sent you to do in the Black Eye. It’s in that system you will need what’s on that scroll to find your freedom. If you open it now, the information could leak into their monitoring. When you do open it, make sure you’re ready to haul ass. They’ll come for you quickly."

Next Chapter: Part 2: Freefalling