TWENTY-ONE

Prime General Glyssin stood on the bridge of the Earthquaker, a class four planet-bomber, surveying the planet Gneezex from orbit. He exhaled loudly through his hooked nose and asked the navigation officer, “Have you scanned the deserts?”

“The deserts, sir?” the officers asked with skepticism.

“Yes. There are many unmapped caves in the deserts of this planet. Find them and scan them for settlements. We will find the Vera print and erase what’s left of her permanently.”

“Should we be bombing unknown settlements?”

Glyssin pinched at his sharp chin and considered it. “No. We will land and send in a ground force. I want the disintegration of her remains recorded for the Sovereign Governor.”

“Sir?” the officer said.

“Yes.”

“How will we know if the Vera print is hiding in any settlements we discover?”

“Prints are equipped with retrieval trace beacons in their spines. They give off a unique frequency. Once you discover a settlement, you need only to search for her frequency. Prime labs sent it to us through the jump-gate. Find her and eliminate her before she commits any further treason. There are pirates known to be operating on Gneezex. They are likely to have mistaken her for an android. You will find her being traded as merchandise.”

“We are to engage with pirates?” The officer raised a brow.

“If they resist our scans or become hostile, yes. Prime sees them as mere clutter to a peaceful society.”

TWENTY-TWO

Vera awoke her thoughts foggy and disjointed. She felt drugged, but she was immune to narcotics. Cold drafts snaked between her thighs and around her back and chest. She was naked. She moved her leg to take a step and a restraint seized her arms and ankles. Through blurred vision, a dim light plumed above her.

She tried to access her current vital signs on her neural network and got no response. “Rip out her cyberware.” That was what she had heard last, before they grabbed her, and she went unconscious. Had they done it? It would’ve killed her or should’ve. Though mostly synthetic biology, her brain was all cybernetic. Why couldn’t she access her neural computer? None of her vision enhancements or advanced senses were working.

She jerked in her restraints when the gravelly drawl came at her again, “Mary had a little lamb… So, you’re not human… it’s fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that Mary went… What a nice surprise… the lamb was sure to… sure to go.” An erratic clicking sound followed, like the noise of an ancient camera aperture focusing.

“What?” she recognized the old earth poem.

“EVERYWHERE MARY WENT!” he shouted. “You’re not human! I don’t know why you’re here, nothing we recovered from your synthetic brain gives my doctors a clue. Hickory dickory dock! But you’re worth a lot of money, so now you are inventory of the Scarred. The mouse ran up the clock!” A powerful, nearly fecal tobacco smell assaulted her nostrils.

Her vision focused. He loomed about three meters tall in front of her. A second shorter figure stood aside him. The towering man who had spoken in broken poetry sentences had a glowing face that was a hologram mask of black and white face paint in the style of mimes. The projection device in the mask was the source the erratic clicking. The hologram itself filtered sporadically revealing flashes of a severely damaged face beneath. It was too quick to see it clearly, but just looking at the spectacle gave her extreme discomfort. This was obviously the intent.

“No wonder the crystals of Motherland have not affected you. You’re one step away from a plastic. Great work Prime does these days. The clock struck twelve the mouse ran down… You fooled all of my android identification scanners placed throughout Motherland. You are a marvel of modern science.” He puffed on the smelly cigar, a holographic tongue reached out from the painted mask image like a tentacle and spiraled around the rolled tobacco and his throat rattled when he inhaled the smoke. “Call me Wu-jinn… Hickory dickory dock…, I’m the boss of Motherland.” He shook his head left to right three times, then once backwards.

It was obvious to her now. He had some kind of neurological tick. That’s what the nursery rhymes were about and the head shaking behavior. How ironic it was, as was the mask. Was it an injury he refused to have healed?

“Mary had a little lamb… What’s so funny? Do you want to die instead?” he quipped. “Try it… fleece as white as snow!”

An overwhelming feeling of unease bloomed inside her, so sudden she struggled to comprehend it. She trembled. It was fear. Real human fear, the way real humans described it. Before now, she only remembered having a sense of urgency in times of stressful predicaments. This was a deeper sort of trauma, a psychosis that disoriented her train of thought. Something had been short-circuited inside her. Wu-jinn had turned off what had before allowed her to change behavioral algorithms in threatening situations.

“Yes, try it! Keep laughing at me… lamb was sure to go… baa, baa black sheep… see what happens to you. You already know that I’ve shut down your enhanced senses and blocked off your neural network but don’t think I won’t destroy you completely or keep you for my own personal entertainment.” His sharp black teeth snapped like a carnivorous fish when he spoke, a grotesque holographic creep show. He puffed on his cigar, pulling it away to ash it on the ground when he did this, she noticed long, sharpened steel claws extending from his fingers and thumb.

Vera swallowed. As nightmarish as this Wu-jinn appeared, she would not let him see her discomfort on her face. This was what it meant to be brave like a human. “Fuck you,” she said.

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary… no, it is you who is fucked, darling.” He shook his head left to right three times, then once backward. “You see I like to refurbish my merchandise before I sell it, to make sure my customers are getting a satisfactory product… how does your garden grow… in which you will be I promise.” He shook his head left to right three times again, once backward, then waved a bladed pinky at her. “Jumbet! Leash her up and bring her to my chair,” he said to the shorter man. Afterward, Wu-jinn turned and headed several steps away from her and spun to land in an elaborately ornate throne made of dark ancient wood.

The shorter man called Jumbet wore a shimmering blue robe, looking young and muscular with an artful lattice of scarification over his forearms and slightly exposed hairless chest bowed and approached with something small and circular pinched between his thumb and index finger. He slapped it on the side of her neck and she winced from the sting.

“What was that? What are you people doing with me? Why have you disabled my enhancements?”

Jumbet narrowed his eyes. He bent over and began unfastening the restraints on her legs. “Do not attempt to flee or attack. You will be discouraged… firmly.” He stressed the last word, his voice otherwise smooth and hypnotic.

As soon as she had an arm free she decided she would twirl kick him and drop him right here. That was the plan, maybe not a good one, but she no longer had access to probabilities in her neural processor. Was this how humans experienced instinct? How had they evolved and survived this way?

“Oh, and if you try to remove the leash tag on your neck, it will react by sending an extremely painful electro-nerve pulse throughout your body and I don’t think your bio-manufactured cells will protect you much from that.” Jumbet sounded nonchalant and uninterested in the intel he had given her.

Once Jumbet had removed all of her restraints, Vera opted to stand still and wait. “I came to this place to find my ship. The Scarred stole it from me. If that’s you, then you stole it from me and I want it back.”

Jumbet looked her in the eyes with his own sparkling blue irises for seconds. “Likely, but I wouldn’t fuss about it any further if I were you.”

“You’re not me,” she said. “Clearly,” she added, noticing scars on his face then. “Looks like you’ve endured more than I would’ve had patience for.”

“It is a cleansing of the soul,” Jumbet said.

“Oh, the soul, yeah. I see.”

“You don’t think you have one? Being A.I.?”

“The mechanics of nature have not suggested physics for such mythic concepts.”

“You might find superstition hides in places that you do not expect, even artificially engineered consciousness.”

“You are clearly mind-fucked by this place,” she said. “Wu-jinn has poisoned your ability to reason, or those crystals out there have.”

“My reasoning works just fine. Life is about making a difference. I make a difference by serving Wu-jinn so that he can make better lives for all of us in Motherland.”

“If you say so.” She reached for the leash tag on her neck and he snatched her by the forearm.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

She jerked her arm away reached to inspect the thing on her neck with her fingers. As soon as her fingertip touched the small round disk, a massive wave of lightning shot throughout her bio-synthetic nervous system and exploded behind her eyes. She dropped to her knees in agony, pressing both hands firmly on the sides of her head and let out a scream through clenched teeth.

Jumbet stared down at her giggling under a subtle grin. “I did warn you. Now get up and follow me. We must prepare you for your formal orientation to Motherland, where Wu-jinn will decide where you will be most useful to the Scarred.”

The pain faded, but her knees and shoulders still spasmed. She took a deep breath and stood up. “Okay then.” She would wait for her moment of opportunity. They always came. It would just be more difficult to decide which and when was the best without her mental enhancements to guide her.

TWENTY-THREE

By the time she had been prepared or sponged off by disinfectant and stripped down to nothing but a loincloth, Jumbet escorted Vera into a sultry lounge room with a vaulted ceiling. She noted there were no skylights here to let in the crystal light, only dim orange kerosene lamplight. Henchmen stood about the room with relaxed hands on rifles hanging from their shoulders. Most stared at the nude women draped about Wu-jinn’s ancient oaken throne, ornate with some ancient earth mythical faces. Wu-jinn laid back with one leg over an armrest, cigar in claw bladed hand.

“Ding Dong bell, pussy’s in the well!” Wu-jinn shook his head left to right three times and back once. “Look at you! So clean and smooth. I can’t wait to make a deep new groove in your printed brain… what a naughty boy was that… Come hither! To drown poor pussy cat who never did him any harm. Killed mice in his father’s barn!” Wu-jinn motioned her towards him with his bladed fingers, rolling them back like a collapsing fan.

Vera stared at him right in his gaping red holographic eyes and walked up in front of him, her head held high. “I would like my ship back,” she said.

“Fetch a pail of water… You don’t own a ship. You don’t own anything…Jack fell down… You’re my property and I’m very interested in seeing how a print takes to the cleansing… broke his crown.” Wu-jinn performed his head shaking tick again, left to right three times and backward.

“Actually, I’m the property of Prime and so is my ship and they will be looking for both of us. I assure you. It won’t be pretty for your drugged-up community here if you don’t let me go to report back soon.” It was true, and she felt a compulsive loyalty and guilt just then. Prime had given her existence; how could she have betrayed them to this end? She had a lot to answer for now. Prime might have her brain wiped and reloaded after a defective escapade of this degree.

Wu-jinn laughed, and it echoed throughout the lounge. “We have a deal with Prime and many other systems. They do not trespass on our outposts, and they do not even know Motherland exists, much less its location… Mary had a little lamb… Why are you here? Did you get lost? We know Azec let you in… fleece as white as snow… Why does an elite Prime assassin print lose her ship and bother to look for it? Everywhere that Mary went… Wouldn’t your mighty Prime come to rescue their merchandise? The lamb was sure to go.” Head left to right three times and backward.

She stared off into space for a moment before she said, “I abandoned my mission.”

“Oh? Little boy blue… Very intriguing! How delightful! Blow your horn…” Wu-jinn’s holographic mask face grinned flashing a glistening row of blackened pointed teeth, then once again head left to right three times and backward. “I love a good disobedience story… sheep’s in the meadow… Especially one where Prime is the parent… cow’s in the corn.” He took a puff from his cigar, the fat cherry glowing bright and excreting slithering snakes of smoke.

The three nude women snickered amongst one another. At closer proximity, she could see they were young, all three hardly the age of conception for female humans. Cross-hatched tiny scars covered their naked skin. The darker skinned of the three smiled up at Vera then smacked the upraised bottom of the other two with her hand. The spanked girl cooed.

Vera rolled her eyes. “Where is Azec, may I ask?”

“The junk man?” Wu-jinn laughed. The three nude girls joined him with repulsive. falsetto giggling. “There was a crooked man… Who knows. He comes and goes as he pleases… went a crooked mile… Mostly, he comes back with junk, but this time he brought me something interesting… found a crooked sixpence…” His holographic mask flickered out for more than a second or two, clicking erratically, and Vera thought she saw a third eyeball on his left cheek.

“How am I worth anything since you damaged my enhancements? I don’t know how you were able to suspend my cellular self-repair, But I won’t be very useful to any potential buyers like this.”

“Mary, Mary quite contrary… You have no idea! The market for android or human slaves is wane. You are unique! Unique like an original oil painting. Differentness is highly sought by the big spenders… How does your garden grow… Who knows, I may just keep you for myself!” Wu-jinn snatched her by the neck then and pulled her close. She could feel his hot, rotten tobacco breath on her neck when he spoke into her ear. “I’d like to keep you in a mode of operation that is useful to me, but I can make permanent improvements.” He sliced open the back of her head and extracted her neural storage drive, an oblong cylindrical worm-like organ and tossed it on the floor.

An explosion of lightning pain bloomed over her skull. She dropped to her knees. She heard the nude girls giggling again, and then his voice. “Jack fell down, broke his crown… Take her. Mend that hole in her head. Now, maybe she will understand our relationship better… Jill came tumbling after.”

Next Chapter: Part 8: Gray Sight