by Loki Renard
“I mean,” I look around, knowing what I am about to say will destroy her sense of safety in this place, but what’s the point of feeling safe if you’re not actually safe? She’s an animal being farmed, and I have to tell her. “I mean, this isn’t real. This city. It’s a prison. You’re all part of an alien colony…”
She lets out a high pitched laugh that doesn’t indicate any kind of amusement. She doesn’t believe me. Of course she doesn’t. I have to prove the limitations of the alien simulation to her.
“Oh my god. I’m going to call the doctor for you.”
“No! Don’t call anyone! No doctors, no police, just promise me. Please. It’s important.”
She gives me the kind of look people who think they are sane give people who think they are crazy, half-scared and half-pitying. “It’s going to be okay, Fortuna," she says. “You just need to sleep it off, or see someone who can bring you down safely.”
“I’m not high. I’m not crazy. I’m telling you that I woke up in another place and I was rescued by these aliens called scythkin. They’re like super tall dudes but they have sharp blades all over them. They’re really violent and their eyes look like fire. And…”
I stop talking because my poor roommate is starting to look like she’s going to crack under the strain of pretending to believe me.
“Maybe I did take something,” I say. Standing here in this room where normality runs supreme I am wondering if maybe I have just imagined everything over the last few weeks. Maybe I didn’t wake up in a sideshow. Maybe I wasn’t beaten and starved and drugged and hurt. Maybe I didn’t watch a scythkin destroy my captors and sweep me into his arms. Maybe…
THUMP THUMP THUMP
“Don’t get that!”
It’s too late. She’s scooted across to the door as fast as she can, glad for the interruption.
“Fortuna! There’s a guy here for you!”
Tarkan has found me.
He comes charging in, his human hair hanging into his eyes in a dark shaggy fall. They have given him a handsome human suit, but I want to see his real face. The one where the sharp fangs dominate his visage, bright red burning eyes searing into my soul - though the earthly brown ones are doing a similarly good job right now. He seems annoyed.
I’m so happy to see him, I ignore the scowl on his face and throw myself into his arms. He hugs me very, very briefly before swinging me away from him and waving a long finger in my face.
“BAD GIRL!” He growls. I’m shocked when his big palm swings through the air and finds my ass with a sharp slap which should remind me of the pain I endured in captivity, but doesn’t. Maybe it’s because this time, I kind of deserve it. Running naked through the simulation was never part of the plan, and neither was turning the human traitor who acted as our guide into a snack. Maybe I like the way the sting feels flashing across my flesh.
Maybe I’m just fucking horny. I like seeing him in the human suit, but I like seeing his true form even more, feeling that thick alien hardness punishing my soft sex, knowing I’ve been naughty but it doesn’t matter because I have this big, mean alien to protect me.
My roomie is looking at me with a kind of interested confusion, and suddenly I know what we have to do. I’ll get Tarkan to show his true form and that will demonstrate to these people more than my words ever could what is being done to them every day of their lives. They think they’re free, making decisions for themselves, choosing what to do with their lives. But what choice are they begin given really? They work and they sleep and that is all. There is no point to their existence, there are no grand adventures to be had, because the confines of the simulation do not allow for any real living. Until now.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” He snarls the words at me.
“Take your suit off.”
He stares at me. “What?”
“Take your suit off and show this girl what you really are.”
“42, I don’t have time for this. We have to go. We need to evacuate and try to get out of this system before we are destroyed.”
“Her name is Fortuna, not 42,” my roomie interrupts.
“Her name is For Tuna? Like the fish?”
“No, Fortuna, like the song.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to go.” He wraps his hand around my wrist and gives me a light tug. “Come on.”
“If we evacuate, we need to take this one with us,” I point to my new old best friend.
“This one?” Roomie complains. “Like I don’t have a name.”
Tarkan shakes his head. “We can’t take anyone. They’re all Galactor property.”
“This makes no sense. I’m going to call the police,” Roomie says.
Tarkan turns to her with a forced smile. I can’t believe he’s still inside that human suit. It must be cramping him up so painfully.
“Sorry,” he says. “I’m Bob. Robert. Bob Robert.”
“You’re… Bob Robert,” she says, raising her brows.
“Yes, and you are?”
“Seven,” she says, extending her hand to shake his.
“Seven, huh?” He looks over at me. “The number names are really popular right now.”
“She doesn’t have a number name. Her name is Fortuna,” Seven points out. “I’m original.”
“Cool,” Tarkan says. “Anywho, we have to go. Now.” He waggles his human brows at me in a way that is probably supposed to indicate intensity, but all it does is make one side of his face suit sort of stick weirdly.
“Oh my god. He’s having a stroke! He’s sick!” Seven cries out. “I’ll call the doctor.”
She’s obsessed with calling people.
“No, I’m Bob Robert,” Tarkan replies, half his face still hitched weirdly high. “You’re Seven. She’s 42. Nobody is Six.”
I cover my face with my hands. Tarkan is making this worse. He knows just enough about humans to come across as super weird. Seven is already going for the corded device on the wall. She’s going to call the authorities down on us.
“Stop her!” I call out. Tarkan is closer, so he stops her. I meant for him to grab the phone, or maybe cut the line or something. But he chooses a scythkin way of handling the situation. He tackles her to the ground like a football player and pins her down.
“OW FUCK!” Seven swears. “What the FUCK!?”
I stare at Tarkan. It’s a damn good question. What the fuck.
“What now?”
“What now is, I tie her up and we leave.”
“If you’re gonna tie me up, it better be for good reason,” Seven smirks suggestively. Great. Now she’s hitting on Tarkan.
“We can’t leave her here,” I say. “She’s my friend. I owe her something.”
“You owe me like three months rent,” she says. “And you borrowed my favorite skirt and ripped it. So you owe me a new one of those.”
She’s taking this strangeness very much in stride. I think it must be what the simulation does. It keeps everyone confused and off-balance all the time, so strange things don’t seem as concerning. She’s lived this period of history many times over. So have I. That’s a scary thought, to know that I’ve been reset like a wind up toy, used and put on display and otherwise commodified. I hate the idea of leaving anyone to that fate. I want to save at least one of them.
“I’m going to get off you,” Tarkan says. She makes a faintly disappointed sound as he lifts off her.
“That was the most action I’ve gotten in years,” she smirks as she stands up.
“Seven,” I say, grabbing her. “This is serious. I am serious. The world you’re living in isn’t real. We’re captives.”
A gleam of recognition in her eye gives me some hope I might be getting through to her.
“I know. We’re like, slaves to the system, right!”
She only half gets it. She lives in a sea of memes, cynical misdirection designed to keep her from ever seeing what is really wrong with the world.
“This isn’t real!”
“I know. It’s like, everything is so artificial. That’s it. I’m buying organic fruit next time I go to the grocery store.”
“There’s nothing organic to buy! There’s nothing to buy! Buying isn’t real. None of this is real!”
Her eyes glaze over. It’s like I just hit some kind of thought kill-switch. For a second, I’m worried I’ve addled her brain, but a moment later she grins at me.
“Do you want a lunchable? They’re new! They’re so good!”
Tarkan reaches for me and gently pulls me off her. “She’s not going to understand,” he says. “She hasn’t been outside this place, and she can’t be taken out. The shock of it might destroy her mind. It’s kinder to leave her here.”
I do not agree with that, but I let him pull me to the side, away from Seven. It’s clear to me that she’s not understanding what I’m trying to say. Every time I think I’m getting through to her, there’s another layer of bullshit programming blocking me. She literally cannot understand what she’s hearing.
“Here’s what I’m going to guess,” he says in a low voice. “You fought this control. You escaped it. But most people don’t, and you know what? Most people probably don’t want to. Look at the life she has. It’s comfortable.”
“So good!” Seven smirks as she rips open another snack pack, unintentionally reinforcing his argument.
“People want to be free,” I tell him.
Tarkan reaches out and pushes my hair out of my eyes. “Sweetheart, they don’t. They want to be happy, safe, and comfortable. And these people are.”
I stare at him, feeling a deep sense of outrage and betrayal growing in me. “So… you… think this is okay?”
“It’s not right,” he says. “But it's okay.”
I open my mouth to tell him what I think of that, but a louder voice that isn't mine interrupts me.
“CRIMINAL SCUM! WE HAVE THE BUILDING SURROUNDED. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
“Are they talking to us?”
“Probably,” Tarkan says with an irritated sigh.
We lean out of the window and find the building surrounded by police people, cars parked with flashing lights making the buildings glow red and blue.
“They’re humans,” Tarkan says.
“Uhm, of course they're human,” my roommate pipes up.
“We can’t hurt them,” Tarkan says. “So we’re going to go along with this. No fighting. No resisting. Just be a good girl.”
“They’re going to handcuff us. Restrain us. You won’t like that.”
“Probably not,” Tarkan says. “But if things get truly bad, I will get us both out of this. So try to relax, okay? And be good. Or else.”
I tingle at the or else part of the threat.
“Fine,” I sigh. “But if they hurt me…”
“If they so much as mess a hair on your head, I’ll come bursting out of this suit and eat their brains,” he promises me solemnly.
“I guess we’re turning ourselves in then. See you roomie.”
“Bye, Fortuna?”
My last memory of her will be her face twisted in confusion. I want to save her so badly. I want to save them all. But how am I ever going to break through the conditioning which holds her prisoner even more completely than my chains kept me captive?
Chapter Nine- Justice
“Where are you taking us?” I ask the question as I let myself be taken into custody alongside Tarkan in his human suit. I have no idea where Reaper and One went. I hope they're okay.
“You’re going to see the judiciar,” the police officer says. “He will decide what to do with you.”
They take us to a building inside the simulation. I don’t know why, it is pretty obvious that they know we don’t belong inside it. They think Tarkan is a murketeer, but I guess they think I’m human. Wait. I am human. It’s getting so confusing trying to remember what species is what these days.
We end up in a court room, arranged behind some tables in a way which makes us somehow look guilty just by being there. I stand next to Tarkan, feeling safe in spite of the strangeness, knowing that in seconds he could turn this place into a blended meat convention.
“Are you mad at me for the Andrew thing?” I look nervously up at him. I know he’s not happy about the running away part of events, but to be fair, I was spooked. I had just eaten a man for the first time. It wasn’t easy.
“Proud of you.”
I smile broadly, just as a man throws back his head and shrieks:
SILENCE IN THE COURT!
The judiciar steps out from a big door behind a big chair and gives me a severe look - the kind of look you can only receive from someone who already knows you, and all the shit you’ve gotten up to.
He is a curious creature, outwardly human in appearance, square jawed, heavy browed, the sort of physique you’d find on a man who has spent a lifetime picking up buildings and putting them back down again. He’s wearing dark robes and a yellow arm band with the words GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING scrawled on the side in pink. He sees us looking at it and gives a broad shouldered shrug.
“My daughter made it,” he explains.
Aw. He seems like a nice guy. I bet he will take pity on us.
“Oh, Fortuna,” he says. “I didn’t expect to see you here again so soon.”
Maybe not. That tone does not inspire any kind of confidence in me. He sounds stern and annoyed and very judgey.
“You were picked up dressed as a dog.”
“No, I was dressed as a dog before I was picked up,” I explain.
Tarkan is silent beside me. I think he’s trying not to turn every human here into raw meat with a single wild gesture.
“And you were dressed up as a dog to avoid detection.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“Police report indicates you may have slain one of our guides in cold blood on the street, in full view of a crowd before running away. Is that correct?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Well,” the judiciar says, shuffling some papers, “he was kind of a dick.”
I look over at Tarkan, confused. This is not what I expected. At all.
“Ah fuck it,” Tarkan says, stretching out. Two layers of two different suits peel away from his massive form like a really fucked up banana. The judiciar watches with what I’d call detached interest as Tarkan’s true scythkin form emerges right there in the court room. I expect screaming. I expect drama. I expect someone to bang something hard and shout ORDER. But that’s not what happens.
The judiciar smirks, stands up, and stretches. His head hinges back and what emerges from the square jawed human judge man is something even more exceptionally alien. It’s not anything I’ve seen before. It’s not a short little elbublian, a wide mouthed, branded murketeer, it’s not a dangerous scythkin.
It’s something else. Maybe something worse.
It has tentacles instead of fingers. It is so tall the top of what I guess is its head reaches almost all the way to the top of the chamber. It seems to be made of living stone and it has the kind of dark eyes which threaten to swallow your soul.
“So much more comfortable,” the judiciar intones in words which land like gravestones in the space between us. “So, scythkin. I see you found our banished human.”
“Who are you?”
“I am the judiciar. I have full authority over life and death.”
Tarkan smirks. When a scythkin smirks, there’s a lot of sharp fang action and horn twisting which really adds to the expression. It does not please the judiciar, who scowls fiercely. His face is a series of hard planes which are shaped in such a way as to create what might be the sternest expression in the universe. I start to feel guilty, even though I’m not sure what I’ve done wrong aside from killing Andrew, which everyone seems to be totally fine with.
“This human was banished,” the judiciar intones. “And that which is banished, may not return.”
“Why was I banished?”
The judic
iar looks at me with cold eyes. He is not frightening in the same way the scythkin are. He is not covered in blades, there is nothing outwardly physically menacing about him - aside from the fact that he is an unknowable number of feet tall and appears to be made from solid stone tentacles. I do not believe that blood runs in veins beneath the hard exterior of his shining skin.
“You are a mistake we have already tried to correct several times.”
His gravelly voice threatens to bring back memories, but as much as I can feel them bubbling up inside my mind, they burst before they can reach the surface and become real.
Tarkan looks down at me. I wonder if he is disappointed. I wonder if he wishes he had left me behind in that tent and just sailed off into the stars with that other human girl who never does anything wrong ever. One was supposed to be the only human in existence. She was definitely the only human in their existence.
He nudges me and flickers a little wink, encouraging me even though I’m the one who got us caught.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Whatever you did, it wasn’t that bad.”
“Wrong," the judiciar says. “What she did was so bad it almost wiped out the human race. Again.”
“What did she do?”
“First, she escaped the simulation.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
“Anything is possible over a long enough period of time,” the judiciar says. “Every now and then, humans escape. They are usually found, treated with an amnesiac agent, and returned to captivity. But the dose didn’t work on this one. And that’s when she committed her second crime.”
“Which was?”
The judiciar is cold and unfeeling as he answers. I don’t get the impression my crimes anger him. I get the feeling he follows the law to the letter because it is the law, and that is what matters to him.
“She told people the truth. She broke with protocol and announced to the captive humans that they were slaves being kept in a simulation for profit. She told them that their memories weren’t actually real, that they were being implanted every few years. The aftermath was brutal. We lost twenty percent of the population within a week.”