by Foxx Ballard
Contents
Part I: In the Beginning, there was Jack
Rusty was confused
His name was Jack… Hammer
Rusty woke inside a white oval container
The beauty of the beach
Rusty changed his loincloth
His name was Jack…Hammer
“I bet ya ten credits I can hit their drives,”
Synth-E-Uh checked the ship’s sensors
Lais gazed at Angel as she slept
Angel could feel Lais’s fingers
It was quiet in the merchant square
Part II: When a plan comes together
A loud boom up in the sky woke him up
What came over the rise, shocked Rusty
Rusty was thankful when he woke
Mogul woke with the female's rocky fist gripping
The sleds were parked a short distance out
They’d been floating above the clouds for days.
Rusty was suddenly aware of being in the open
Lais stood at the bow of the ship
When Rusty woke, all he could smell was cinnamon
Part III: The Fall ...not the season
Damn Rusty is fast
It seemed like he was falling for hours
This couldn’t be happening
Angel shifted her body within the claws
Lais let the tears flow because
Rusty looked up at Angel
Lais thudded to the sand
“We’re not going to stop until we find them,”
Rusty didn’t feel like he had rested at all
The cave mouth was lit with sunlight
Part IV: Discovery
There was a dull roar in the sky
“Where the hell are they?!”
I think I’ve determined where we are
“YES!”
And just like that, they were left alone
Chais had grown tired
It was nice to be reunited again
It was hopeless
“Take us down!”
Normally Rusty let his nose guide him
Lais caught the blue-woman easily
Rusty watched the ground rapidly approaching
With one last glance back, Rusty ran further into the forest
The flat deck of the airship
Captain Leucantis stayed seated as she listened to the briefing
Rusty was thankful
RUSTY INCARCERATED
by Foxx Ballard
Published by Foxx Ballard Entertainment
Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, Earth, Sol System, Milky Way Galaxy
No reproduction or transmission of this material is permitted without written permission by Foxx Ballard Entertainment, including but not limited to: Ramogran slap-speech, Tigran sub-sonic growling, Vesuvian mind implantation, robotic wireless (that includes androids and Technoids), Valkyrie telepathy, and Ripper warbling. Sonic vibration via speech is permitted, but not if retransmitted through anything other then audial orifices with the intent of recording in brain matter or neural networks (nanite-replaced brain matter permitted).
The materials contained within this object/document are completely fictional, and any resemblance to anyone or anything real is not intended. For example, when there is a reference to Earth, this is not the Earth you are thinking of. How do I know? Because I said it’s not. It is a pretend Earth with pretend people. I could have used the name Blearth. But I didn’t like it.
Cover designed by MiblArt.
Copyright © 2020 Foxx Ballard
All rights reserved.
MEMORY DUMP:
Jack Hammer here, ever-helpful ad-bot with the following Chronicles list of the year 3420 so you know what you are doing:
LAIS Incarcerated - Book I
Rusty Incarcerated - Book II
[Error: Name Unknown] - Book III - In progress
Error: Unknown
Error: Unknown
I cannot be held responsible for damages caused by reading the chronicles in the incorrect order. Or the correct order.
And I apologize now for any mistakes in them as my memory chips are degrading. There are no mistakes, they are deliberate.
The information for the following chronicles was painstakingly—oh please, if you’ve already read the first book, you know all this, and the expertise with which I narrate a chronicle; so lifelike you almost wouldn’t think I was doing anything at all…
The chronicles, regardless of the format that you received them in; physical or digital, holographic or live-actor re-enactment, pillow talk, flash crystal, or random black-hole emissions; are a recounting of the lives that led to the changes in the Milky Way Galaxy, in or about the year 3420. Other galaxies being affected is pure speculation.
We’ve learned that embellishing a story to achieve adult status is unnecessary, therefore, it’s rated PG. If you’re not watching this as a movie, just imagine you are in a dark theater, and someone two rows down is talking to their girlfriend on the phone and your feet are sticking to the floor because someone spilled their pop there, and don’t reach under your seat…
Now that I’ve set the appropriate mood…[robotic life forms please turn your Pleasure Center up to 115%]…I will bore you with a disclaimer…
Being as almost all the information was gathered anecdotally and may have been very slightly embellished for the sake of interest, I can not be held accountable for this chronicle’s validity and all of it may be considered fiction. Although it shouldn’t be.
I may or may not have changed the names of all those involved to keep their anonymity. I probably didn’t. And hopefully I used the same names for the same people as last time. It would be confusing for you if I didn’t. Any confusion can be considered intentional.
Occasionally I pretend to be a human, mostly for marketing purposes, so if needing to contact me to tell me where I can kindly put these chronicles, I have created the following aliases:
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @FoxxBallard
01001101 01100001 01110010 01110011 00100000 01001101 01100001 01101001 01101100 00100000 01000100 01100101 01110000 01101111 01110100 00111010 00100000 01010000 01001111 00100000 01000010 01101111 01111000 00100000 00110011 00110100 00110010 00110000
The following universally recognized life forms, though they died over 1300 years ago, assisted my retelling of the chronicles with their inspiring lives:
Darrin Root, whose 34 billion ginger-haired descendants now inhabit their own planet
Amy Yendall, for receiving the most Most-Patient-Spouse awards in a 4 month period
Challen Gladman, whose literary accomplishments are so vast they are labeled by the pile rather than individually
Katrin Kole, whose literary accomplishments are so vast they were mislabeled as being Challen Gladman’s
Ryan Reynolds, for proving that despite being a Canadian you can still have a lucrative career (truly inspiring)
Please note, if you don’t wish to know about the year 3420, please don’t proceed any further. I’d hate for you to be informed against your will.
Part I: In the Beginning, there was Jack
CHAPTER ONE
Rusty: Galaxybucks Coffee House on 3rd, Vancouver
Rusty sniffed the man in front of him for that acrid urine smell Humans made when they were nervous, but he could only detect Thuboss, which was a dusty ash scent. And the man’s cologne, Armani Code Blue. His toothpaste, Crestgate 3000. Deodorant, Super Speed Stick No More Ocean… and a bit of foot fungus. He found it easy to separate the man’s individual identifying odor despite the potent presence of the other scents. The myriad of aromas from the streets he ignored.
A different person always
gave the orders, and they never gave their names, but Rusty knew them all by scent anyway. And Thuboss, his particular scent through his goons, not through direct contact.
He wished sometimes he couldn’t smell so well, but his damned wide, over-sized skull was mostly head-butting-bone and nasal passages. And sharp teeth that grew directly out of the skull, not like Human teeth which fell out when you head-butted them. Rusty’s eyes were large and black. Humans had little beady eyes, and they fixated on bright colors, sometimes enhancing them with colored contacts to the point of glowing, like their eyes weren’t good enough on their own. Rusty couldn’t imagine sticking something in his eye just to enhance the color, he teared up just thinking about it. They typically had bronze skin too, of varying shades, but Rusty preferred the healthy dusky greenish-gray of his people.
“The Boss said to put the Inhibitor Chip in slot ten of server Four Thousand Twenty One. Only has to be for a second or two, Goblin.”
Rusty’s people had been called Goblins in the human language. Pointed ears and the wide-fanged grin and diminutive stature no higher than a human’s waist had probably helped in coming up with that name. Rusty was insulted when he found out that the word Goblin usually meant a small, ugly, mischievous creature. Maybe that’s why Thuboss had picked him for this job. Ooh, sneaky Thuboss, assuming Rusty was willing to participate in immoral acts.
His mother had named him him for the single tuft of copper-colored wiry hair that sprouted from the top of his head, Rousty-floufta. The humans had laughed when they first heard it. Thankfully, they preferred shorter names, so had called him Rusty. Russ’tee in his language meant death-by-flurry-of-claw, so he didn’t mind it so much. Better than the name his mother had given him.
His mind was wandering. Humans tended to think slowly so he could have five of his own thoughts for every one of theirs.
They were seated at an outside street cafe. Well, the human was seated. Rusty had to stand on his chair and lean his elbows on the table in order to look over it. Two large Galaxybuck’s coffees sat steaming through the holes in their lids. Rusty loved the scent of the coffee more than the flavor, so he never drank the stuff, but he could sit and take in the aroma all day.
“Me tech supe, Hurly, he be watching,” Rusty told the man across from him as he inhaled another intoxicating breath of coffee aroma. “How me s’posed to move chip?” Rusty had a great mind, but language didn’t come so easily. The humans preferred to think of him as simple-minded, anyway. Insulting, but to his advantage.
“One of the fiber cables is cracked in a server above the one with the Inhibitor Chips. Hurly will fix that, and while he is working on it, he’ll require you to move an Inhibitor Chip. The Boss just wants you to accidentally put it in the wrong slot for a second or two.”
“Show me family. They still good, I do what you say.”
The man sighed and fished in his trench coat for his holophone and plunked it on the table. “Hey, AI-Overlord, show me Rusty’s family.”
A pleasant woman’s voice from the holophone answered him. “Did you mean the erotic film Rushti’s Spanking? I can restart it if you like. You only made it five minutes in the last time. Or the new contact Rusty and streaming holo-video of his family?”
“The latter,” the man growled at his phone on the table as his cheeks turned a mild shade of red.
A hologram of the inside of a clay-walled hut appeared above the table, daylight streaming in through the windows, revealing the simple wicker furnishings. In the center of the room knelt a green-skinned Goblin woman with a wreath of flowers in her hair. She was wearing a white dress and was holding out a black and white furred kitten to a round-eyed Goblin toddler with a wide smile on his face.
“For me?!” he said excitedly, holding his gangly arms out expectantly.
The mom nodded and let the toddler take the kitten into his hands. He popped it in his mouth and chewed a few times.
“More?”
“Just one a day,” his mother said and head-butted him gently. His brow bone hadn’t fully formed yet.
The man snatched the phone off the table and shoved it back into his trench coat.
Rusty wiped a tear that had escaped from one round black eye and nodded. “Okay, me does as Thuboss ask. When me get back to family?”
“Soon,” was all the man gave him in return.
“Always say soon,” Rusty muttered under his breath and he hopped down from the chair and walked away, leaving his coffee on the table.
Rusty thought through the sequence of events that had put him in this position as the taxi-drone carried him back to the office. His break was over. He would be back with Hurly in a few minutes. The buzzing of the drone’s heli-blades wasn’t distracting but the scent of the previous ten people, as a mix, was quite disgusting, despite the covering ozone smell of the built-in ionizer that always failed to clean everything.
When Rusty had first arrived with his family on this planet, they were immigrants making a new start. The humans were strip-mining their planet, but had offered new and better jobs on Earth, providing access to training and technology that didn’t exist on Rusty’s homeworld. It had seemed like an exciting opportunity, but it hadn’t gone as expected. Housing was impossible to afford without a good-paying job, and though Rusty had quickly risen through the human ranks—Walt-Mart Greeter, Lemonade Stand Manager, Professional Panhandler—he hadn’t made enough to support his family. While they slowly approached starvation, he resorted to rummaging through waste bins before they could be recycled, until one day the Social Worker AI had come through for him: Tool-Holder for Systems Technician, Hurly. He would be a Systems Technician trainee. It didn’t pay much, but it was better than his other jobs, and at least they could survive now.
Not long after he got the position, he was approached by men from Thuboss that would pay not just Earth dollars, but Galactic Credits, for minor jobs he could perform for them on the side. Knock out a security console here, a camera there. Now he could pay rent and utilities, buy food and furniture, and even the odd cat for his new son. Life was good. He smiled a little as he recalled the memories.
And then he frowned, remembering how it had gone bad. The first time he was asked to erase digital footage of a murder, he refused and lost control of it all. They separated him from his family, telling them he was dead, and threatened if he ever tried to contact them or the authorities, they would be killed. Him included. Rusty could support them, but never see them, and would still have to do the jobs he was ordered to do.
He was still trying to think of ways to get out of it when the drone arrived at the door-dock on the fifty-first floor of the Center for Justice building, the technician’s entrance. The automatic door slid open and the magnetic straps that held him in place released. The second he had stepped out of it, the drone took off and another appeared within a few seconds, this one containing his supervisor, Hurly.
“So, Rusty, are you ready to go fix that server?” Hurly asked as he stepped from his drone. Hurly was a balding human with dark straight hair circling his head, all but the top half, which merely had a few strands that Hurly obviously didn’t want to shave off. A pair of ancient glasses teetered on his nose, like they were going to fall off at any time, and he was always fiddling with them. He was holding out a tool belt, so Rusty reached up and took it from him. Though his limbs were wiry, Rusty took pride that Goblins were stronger than they looked.
A simple nod from Rusty got a smile from Hurly, and they headed off to the server room.
Hurly bent low and whispered to Rusty. “And keep it to yourself, you’re not really qualified to be here, but I want you to see the server room and how things run around here. One day you’ll be doing this too and will have your own trainee.”
Rusty liked Hurly. The man treated him with a level of respect the other humans didn’t. Which made sabotaging the man’s work morally repugnant, but it was that or his family.
Hurly unconsciously brushed off imagined lint from his
lab coat, and adjusted his glasses on his nose before approaching the door labeled Authorized Personnel Only, that led to the building’s servers. He leaned forward for the retinal scanner, which took only a moment before the door slid open.
Hurly pulled out his holopad and stepped through the door, urging Rusty in quickly before it closed. They were standing in a small plain white room with another door facing them. The floor was a grate, and the ceiling had vents in it. A blast of air from above and below blew any dust off of them and then the door in front of them slid open. Rusty noted how clean the room was, very few smells, besides himself and Hurly. And the bitter smell of overcharged capacitors common to any computer room.
They walked passed rows of endless racks of computer servers until Hurly stopped at one rack, confirming with his holotablet he was at the correct one. There was dim light in the room provided by the blinking multi-colored lights on the servers, but Rusty had large round eyes that worked like a cat’s. He had no difficulty in seeing so long as there was the tiniest bit of light. He noted server four thousand twenty-one in front of him.
Hurly started changing a wire on the server above Rusty, but he must have glanced down while he was working.
“What are you doing?! I told you to always plug the inhibitor into slot seven, not ten. Do you know what you have done?!”
Rusty still had his fingers resting on the inhibitor chip in the wrong slot. Quickly he pulled it out and plugged it into the correct slot, giving Hurly what he hoped was an innocent smile. The tech sighed and did some quick finger punching on his holo-pad.