Twenty-Four

“You know I’ve always liked you, Vera. You’re… I dunno… real. You’re just real,” said Lindy. “I mean, no one is real anymore.” Lindy threw her backpack over her shoulder as they both trotted down the steps from the AP Physics building.

Vera smiled. “Well, my realness gets me into trouble.” She glanced upward in contemplation. “More often than not, I think. I can’t help it, though, you know? My Granny says it’s because I’m a truth-seeker. I’m not even sure what she means by that. Mr. Mahaffey in Psych says I’m an INFJ, very rare type who seeks genuineness. But, doesn’t everyone want to know the truth?” She felt sticky under her training bra and tugged on it to let a little air in. A silver-fox snow-cone sounded so good right now. She would make Lindy stop with her at the snow-cone trailer on the way home.

“I get it,” Lindy said. “I see it, too. Yeah, everyone assumes they want to know the truth, but they really don’t. They just want a truth that sounds good enough to make them feel good and they stop with that. You don’t, Vera. You never have. You always keep pushing for the ugly truths. Most people just wanna be told nice lies.”

Vera smirked. “Yeah, I guess… Lies just feel slimy to me, even the nice ones. Hey, wanna get some snow-cones?”

“Hell, yeah!” Lindy skipped in excitement. “Snow-cone dance!” She did a left to right choo-choo train fist-pump then twirled around and flourished with a booty twerk.

Vera rolled her eyes, smiling. “Where the hell did you get that fat thing, white girl?”

Lindy shrugged. “You know me, Linda-wooty-booty!”

“I think you have grown to like that nickname a bit too much.”

As they walked together on the sidewalk, zombie out on their phones, flipping through the latest flash-clips of their friends and showing each other the silly ones for a laugh, Vera glanced up to find a small crowd of after-school teens gathered in an empty grass lot about halfway up the block.

The crowd shouted and howled at some kind of activity happening within their huddled midst. Vera hurried towards the scene as did Lindy.

“A fight! A fight!” Lindy cried, dropping the remnants of her snow-cone and tucking her phone in her back pocket.

Indeed, it had to be a fight. When Vera got there, close enough to peek over about seven or eight rows of teenagers and their little siblings, something else was going on. Not exactly a fight. Not at all.

Theresa Harmon, the sixteen-year-old ninth grade bully who happened to be an amazon at six foot two and even more broad shouldered than the biggest junior high football player, was straddling frail little Misty Eskapowski, a seventh grader who wore a hearing aid and had a speech impediment. Everyone knew Misty was a bit slow, but she was the sweetest girl Vera ever knew. Right now, Misty cried and wailed, “Peas… Peas… at..ma…go! Peas… PEAS!”

“Shut up you deaf whore, or I’ll smack you again!” Theresa shouted through her nasally low voice.

No, it was not a fight. It was just cruelty.

A slap came then, like the sound of feet stamping into shallow water followed by a long bawling scream that made gooseflesh on Vera’s arms.

“You shouldn’t have fuckin’ snitched on me bitch!” Theresa again.

So many phones held out recording the scene, but the crowd did nothing more. Most, Vera knew, were scared of Theresa. Scared to even run and tell on her now. It was quite obvious what would happen to them if they did.

“You gettin’ all this, bitches?” Theresa shouted back at those with phones pointed at her. “Get it real good! Show everybody what a dumb cunt bitch Misty is!”

Vera wedged her way in to get a better view of Misty Eskapowski’s face. Her lips bled, her teeth stained with blood spittle. Both sides of her face glowed as red as a severe sunburn. The beating had swollen her eyes shut.

Vera couldn’t help biting her own lower lip. The visual humiliation alone made her heartbeat triple its pace. She stared almost hypnotically at Theresa’s face then. If Theresa only knew the rage surging in her direction at that moment.

Theresa slapped Misty again, a much louder whack this time.

Without thinking, Vera raised her left knee and used it as a launching weight to leap kick Theresa Harmon in the chin with her hiking booted right foot with every bit of the muster she used when sending the red-orange kickball sailing well beyond second base so high that people had to shield their eyes with their hands to find the red-orange dot in the sky as she ran casually around the bases to home plate.

Theresa’s head slung back along with a brief second where her long, greasy blond hair rooster-tailed its way over her head, and then she collapsed on top of Misty, knocked unconscious.

The crowd of teenagers stared at Vera, mouths syncing agape. After seconds, they all turned their phones onto Vera.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Vera!” said a younger blond curly-haired boy who had been hiding behind his older blonde curly-haired sister until now.

“Holy cunt powers, Vera!” Lindy shouted.

A bombardment of pats assaulted Vera’s back along with short one-armed hugs. She heard quips of, “Way to go!” and “That was amazing!” also “Awesome!”

Soon, Misty shuffled out from under the giant form of Theresa, wiggling like a tadpole, and said, “She ought ded, isshe?”

Vera reached down and felt or Theresa’s pulse on her neck. “No, Misty. She’s not dead. Just resting. You go home, Misty, okay? Run home before she wakes up!”

Misty wiped bloody drool from her chin and eyes. “Okay, Ver. . . Oow! My ero! Eresa… She…” Misty paused and tilted her head back before she said, “Bitch!”

Everyone started laughing then and hugged Misty one by one. A large part of the group all walked with Misty to escort her home. Theresa lay abandoned on the sidewalk like a slain monster.

Twenty-Five

Vera opened her eyes slowly and the world looked dark and cold. She felt the icy chill of stainless steel on her bare back. She lifted herself up only to knock her forehead on a steel toilet bolted onto the floor. She sat up completely then, rubbing her forehead. She sat in a cell of flat barren steel all around her except for stainless steel bars on the entrance wall. She reached to touch the place behind her ear to find a row of fresh stitches. “How barbaric!” she said aloud. She stood in a panic, remembering, and understanding. “No!” She realized her flesh had not mended itself. That’s why there were stitches there. Her enhanced healing and regeneration would’ve closed the wound within minutes. This was more than just cutting out her neural storage drive. How was it even possible? Would she even heal at all now, even then, slowly like a human? She didn’t think Prime Labs could remove her regenerative abilities without splicing her artificial DNA from scratch and reprinting her. She mentally went to check the data in her neural drive that was not there. She blinked a few times, trying again still ending up with nothing, blankness. It was as if she were just an average human with zero enhancements or implants, except that she wasn’t.

She walked over to the bars on the front side of the cell and grabbed the door and shook it. It rattled, the sound echoing down the cell block.

“They’re stoned on the crystals but not stupid,” came a synthesized voice from the cell across.

She couldn’t identify the species of the voice. Whoever it was remained hidden in the back of the cell.

“Who are you?” she said.

“You wouldn’t be able to pronounce my name with your vocal chords. Just call me… Phaser. Doesn’t that sound neat? I like saying that word, rolls off the tongue, so to speak. Ph-a-a-a-s-e-r!”

“That’s really fucking stupid!” Vera said. She sighed and relaxed her grip on the bars.

“Is it? I just like to say it. The sound in the middle is soothing to me.” Phaser paused to make the sound, trying it out for his own amusement it seemed. “It’s good you are here, maybe not for you but for me. I have someone I can converse with now. Do you like conversing?”

“No,” Vera said.

“Well, you might like to with me. I am very knowledgeable about thousands of topics.”

“Good for you. Why don’t we converse our way out of here then?” Vera tried to make her annoyance show in her tone.

“Why! That’s an excellent idea!” Phaser said, an erratic shuffling sound followed from his direction.

“Oh, fuck,” she said. “Just shut up.”

“What? You don’t want to know all the ways to escape these cells?”

“No.”

“So, you feel an obligation to serve Wu-jinn, then?”

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” she said. “Besides if you were able to bust out of here, why the fucking hell are you still in this psycho bungalow?”

“I didn’t say I could do it, just that I could tell you all the ways I know. Maybe you can do it where I have failed.”

Vera tightened her grip on the cell bars again. “I’m listening.”

“You are a female human or a likeness of one no less. Wu-jinn is very keen on keeping female humanoids as slaves for his fetishes. He will send his henchmen for you again soon to bring you to him to sate his needs, no doubt, or perhaps to showcase you to a buyer. If you can somehow manage to break away from them there is an entrance to a tunnel in the armory down the hall from his lounge chamber. This tunnel, burrowed under the entirety of Motherland and safe from the shine of the crystals, leads to an exit to the desert above. No one else is aware of it. Use it to get away.”

“No one else is aware of it?” Vera narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”

“I made it. I dug that tunnel to the armory,” Phaser said then stepped forward revealing his alien anatomy in the light shining into his cell. He moved about on hundreds of anthropoid-like insect legs. His torso gyrated and swiveled in a way that reminded Vera of gears in a complex mechanism writhing within a sack of skin. Phaser watched with two bulbous black eyes, blinking with triple eyelids. He tugged on two of the bars of his cell with odd three-fingered appendages covered in stubby tortoise-like spikes. That explained the tunneling skills.

“It’s not polite to stare, you know. At least humans say that,” Phaser said.

“Shit! How the fuck do you speak basic English with that mouth?” It was more or less just a maw of gums studded with teeth.

“I’m Gilakrak. Gneezex is my native planet. Gilakrak have a significant evolutionary design in our sound reproducing organ that very accurately mimics the tones of other species. Our memories are also quite impressive. We learn languages rapidly. I’ve been studying this tongue from the VR channel the guards have been jacking into down the hall for three weeks now. I’ve mastered most of it, I think. Do you agree?”

Vera chuckled. “No. You haven’t said ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’ one time. Those are the best words.” She rested her chin on her thumb. “So, why are you interested in helping me? How did I get so lucky? I’m here to get my ship back primarily, but if I used that tunnel to get out, how would you escape?”

“They will not come for me for a long time, and when they do, they will force me to use my unique senses and tunneling claws to search for more underground crystal caverns like this? one. You have a better opportunity for escape, and besides, I know you will come back for me. You have agency about you.”

Vera glanced around at the ceiling just outside their cells. “How do we know they aren’t listening to us right now? This is a prison block after all?”

“There is a camera down the hall by the cell-block entrance. They also have a three-dimensional heat signature scanner on at all times. However, I do not believe they are interested in our every second of activity. Perhaps they are overconfident in their security team. I’ve not found them to be very competent.”

“Strange that that would be the case. They have someone who is very competent at biological cybernetics. They were able to remove my Prime engineered cyber-ware without destroying my organic functions. I thought that was impossible.”

“You are not human? Interesting,” Phaser said. “I had not deduced that. This is why you seem immune to the effects of the crystal light. Yet you are not android. Your behavioral manner is indistinguishable of that from an evolved organism.”

“And why do you give a shit?” Vera said.

“Because I’m analytical. And I enjoy conversing, as I said. This is new and exciting information I’ve not encountered. Rare is it that I get to enjoy unique information.”

Vera closed her eyes and pressed her finger and thumb into the bridge of her nose. “Well, let’s move the conversation over to getting the fuck out of here and finding my ship, shall we?”

“Then what?” Phaser said.

“Well, I’m…” Vera paused. She hadn’t verbalized it yet. “I’m on a personal quest. I’ve abandoned my Prime mission which means I’m probably already on their termination list and no doubt my profile and DNA coding deleted from their data banks.”

Phaser tilted his head, his large triple-eyelids blinking in cascades. “You defected? Intriguing! I wonder whom your creators blame, you or the designer?”

“I’m not given accountability. I’m a military weapon. If I fail, I’m destroyed and redesigned. But I’ve been having dreams about things, possibly my memory implant is buggy, I don’t know, but I’m driven to find out…” She rolled her eyes and waved her hand. “…things. A man met with me named Gian, he seemed to know me and my past printed states. He gave me a scroll. I’ve never gotten to open it. The scroll is still on my ship. I believe there are answers for me within it.”

“A sense of purpose beyond your directives, too! You are a gem! I’m so glad to have met your acquaintance,” Phaser said. “I can’t say I trust that you will come back for me but I have a good feeling about you, Vera.”

Vera smirked. What did he even mean by that? A good feeling. Many alien species had evolved irrational empathetic notions. Something she did not understand surfaced in her motivations. She told herself not be irrational, not to follow illogical whims. Had she already done so? The thought made her take a deep breath.

Several hours went by. She would sleep, something unnecessary with her once enhanced cell structure, but that was no longer a perk of her existence. She didn’t find it that difficult. Soon, she drifted off on the cold steel floor.

She awoke later to the sound of voices growing louder as a group of figures approached her cell from down the hall.

A younger energetic male voice said, “Another extraction, fuck I hate that we’re told so late in the day, I got shit to do besides dissect orphaned androids. Doctor, this has gotta be way below your pay level. I’m sure you’ve rather be in the lab.”

An older nasally voice said, “Well, I’ve heard this one is a special model and I’m excited about samples for myself. I think it might have artificial DNA. If I could clone it, imagine the profits!”

The older nasally voiced man appeared first in her line of sight. She could see he was bald and carrying a sleek steel briefcase. He shook his head in mild frustration whilst glancing back at his escorts, three of Wu-jinn’s armed guards. Nasally bald man also wore a pair of safety glasses. He wore a long white apron that flapped at his knees. She squeezed on the bars. This looked like it was gonna be unpleasant.

When the group made it to her cell, one of the guards held up a control card, pointed it at her and pressed on it with his thumb.

A surge of lightning pain dropped her to her knees. The leash tag on her neck seemed to be working.

The guards pushed her down flat on her back and pinned her with their hands and knees. One grabbed her head with both hands where she couldn’t shift or turn to the side. She wondered how Wu-jinn planned to sell her as damaged merchandise.

“Please,” she said, almost without emotion. She didn’t want to beg for mercy but she didn’t see any other way. She had no neural network or algorithm to give her the best possible way to escape this scenario. “Don’t do this, please,” she said. Her eyes. She knew this bald nasally voiced harvester would take her eyes. “How will Wu-jinn sell me with no eyes?” she asked.

Nasally voiced bald man hovered over her with a large spoon that had a slot cut into it. “You’ll get some eyes. Just not these tricked out gems you have here. I’m not a monster, just a businessman. You’re lucky the boss said I could only harvest one enhancement from you. Mind you, I’m taking two, but eyes come in pairs do they not?” He chuckled at himself.

Vera struggled. She jerked her arms free and grabbed the guard on her right by the throat. He choked and rasped. The other two guards quickly overcome her attack, wrestling her grasp away from the one on her right’s throat. They soon had her pinned again.

“Keep her head still,” said the nasally voiced bald man. “This will be quick. I don’t want to waste tranquilizers if I don’t have to.”

Vera watched wide-eyed as the extractor spoon lowered toward her right eye then felt the cold steel slipping beneath her eyelid then twist around her eyeball in her skull. She tried to shut down her pain nerve endings in her eyes to no avail. It was an instinctive reaction of her programming. She screamed then. She could hold back no longer. It pinched every nerve in her brain until she truly wished for her own destruction. Chilled air rushed into her eye sockets, then in an instant, she fell into welcome darkness.

Twenty-Five

Vera smelled vomit. By the dampness of her chest, she guessed it was her own vomit. She opened her eyes to see the world in a blur around her. She was spinning very fast, strapped into a space flight G-training centrifuge chair. She vomited again on herself, feeling like she might pass out very soon, but she grit her teeth and forced herself to hold it together. This would be over soon. It was her last day of spaceflight training. She had good marks, probably the top of her class. A white display in her G-suit visor counted off the G-forces as they increased. She was at six G’s just before everything went gray, the loss of blood in her eyeballs robbing her of visual colors. Soon after, she would see the black mass closing in around her until she was completely blind. She had never remained conscious passed nine G’s, but that was still better than anyone in her training class. Harlan Phelps, a cocky jar-head if she had ever met one, had made it to eight G’s, but only because he was nearly as much a stubborn asshole as she was.

The darkness appeared at the rim of her vision. She barely glimpsed the visor display flash ‘9’. Only a few more seconds as she began to slip away and the centrifuge gravity machine would be shut down before her brain suffocated from lack of oxygen. An instant of euphoria, like so many near death experience claims she had heard about swept over her.

It was time to stop the machine, but it wasn’t slowing down at all.

“Are you ready to stop, my dear?” The voice startled her. She knew it immediately. She could only shake her head in her angered reaction, realizing too late that was an answer to the jar-head asshole’s question. How did he get in the centrifuge control room? She wanted to tell him to stop it, stop the spinning. She was slipping away. She may never wake up again. She felt herself speeding up again and heard the voice again one last time as she surrendered to the cloudy caress of unconsciousness.

“How about we see how great you really are space cadet?” said Harlan.

Then she was somewhere else. Falling again. Why? She grappled for sense, a reality, like reaching for handholds as she fell down through layers upon layers of floors with trap doors. How did Harlan Phelps, her class nemesis, get into the control room? However he had done it, she supposed it made sense. He was jealous of her achievements from day one and had attempted at every turn to drive her down. Now that the spaceflight training program was winding down, he had done the unthinkable. He wanted her to die and for it to look like an accident. Then he would graduate at the front of the class. He would get placement on one of the most elite vessels in the Prime Naval Fleet.

Her angered stirred her from distant darkness and she bolted upright and screamed with rage, “NOOO!”

Next Chapter: Part 9: The Attack