Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  "We're on a moon," Jeremy said flatly. "Around Jupiter. Now I see why you came in here with swords swinging. A story like that... it's more than ridiculous. It's preposterous." Jeremy shook his head. "I'm disappointed in you, Ari. You can do better than this."

  He lifted the insect back to Tanner's mouth—

  "Wait!" she said. "Please. Don't do this. You'll kill him."

  "I know that," Jeremy said.

  The insect was so close now that it perceived Tanner's lips, and it started flexing its stinger toward him, anticipating the contact, perhaps believing that by stinging him it would know freedom.

  She closed her eyes. She couldn't watch. This was her fault. She should've followed the plan, and now, because of her rashness, she'd have to watch her friend die. Tanner had grown on her these past three days on the Inside. It was too soon to lose him. She'd just lost her father. Hadn't she lost enough already?

  "You were right Jeremy," Ari said, swallowing the last of her pride. "You win. I care about him. Please don't do this. You win. I'll do whatever you want."

  Jeremy paused. The insect was a fingersbreadth from Tanner's lips. Then he nodded to himself. "Very well. I will grant you this one favor. For what you and I once had."

  He swung about and in two quicks steps covered the distance to Marks. One of the Direwalkers forced Marks' mouth wide.

  "Jeremy no!" she said, but inside she was relieved.

  And she hated herself for it.

  Jeremy opened the forceps and dropped the ant inside.

  The Direwalker clamped Marks' mouth shut with those corded arms, and squeezed tight so that he couldn't chew.

  Marks struggled a few moments, the pain apparently not registering. And then his eyes widened. He began shaking violently all over. Frantic, muffled yelps emerged from his sealed lips.

  Faint faint please faint, Ari thought.

  But Marks didn't faint. Froth formed at the corners of his mouth, and the flesh all around the lower part of his face puffed up.

  "Release him," Jeremy said.

  Marks fell forward and spat the ant on the floor. The insect was crimped, and quivered sickly. Marks lay there for a few moments, shuddering like the insect, eyes closed, his breath coming in deep, painful-sounding wheezes. His swollen tongue puffed from his lips.

  His lids shot open and he let out a bloodcurdling, muffled scream. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with madness. He scrambled to his feet. His body trembled wildly. His head shook from side to side. He hooted deliriously and dashed from the room.

  Two of the Direwalkers made to follow him.

  Jeremy raised a hand. "Leave him."

  Outside the room, Marks' hooting changed pitch suddenly, and Ari heard a sickening splat, just as if he'd stumbled over the balcony and fallen headfirst to the marble below.

  "What have I done?" she said.

  Jeremy smiled sadly. "Killed your friend."

  "He was only eighteen."

  "Looked older to me." Jeremy strode to the table and set the forceps among the other instruments of torture. "I have some good news. I've decided what I'm going to do with you and your lover." He smiled lifelessly. "I'm going to be kind. Somehow you've become a gol. I'm happy being human, but I very much want to know how you accomplished this neat little trick. Without the lies, mind you. You said you would do whatever I want? You will indeed."

  He waltzed over to Ari and tightly gripped her chin in his gloved palm, just as if he were examining a goat or cow for the slaughter. She could feel his fingers pressing into the bone. "Gols can be revised just like any human. It doesn't work on the mentally damaged ones of course. But for the rest, it's fabulous. I've turned gol executioners into seamstresses, gol whores into assassins. The symbol on the chest remains the same. It's great for hoodwinking people. Anyway, the good news is, I'm going to revise you. Again! Yes, I thought you'd be delighted. I'm going to suck out all your memories so I can view them at my leisure. I'll learn how you became a gol soon enough.

  "And those empty memories will be replaced with, well, something fun! You and your lover are going to be my personal fellators. Every day when I wake up, you'll take turns. You'll follow me around my house all day, naked, begging to fulfill me. But you won't be allowed until the next morning. You'll live only to pleasure me, and my pleasure will be your greatest reward. You'll be so debased, so degenerate, no one will recognize you as anything even remotely resembling a woman. And the sad part is, you'll be loving every minute of it." He glanced at the Direwalkers. "Take them to the revision chamber."

  "You can't do this," Ari said as the Direwalkers hauled her to her feet. "You can't destroy us like this. You wouldn't."

  "I can. I would. And I will." Jeremy walked to the door. "I look forward to many mornings of mulled wine, my dearest Ari, the daily crier in my hands, your head between my legs, your mouth right where it belongs. Ta-ta."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Memories.

  Was Ari truly just the sum of her memories? Or was she something more? Something that experience couldn't change. Something that amnesia, or circumstance, could never wipe away. And if she were wiped and rewritten, her memories replaced by a lifetime in a whorehouse, would she still retain the dauntless spirit that had kept her going all these long years? The love of humanity that she'd held in her heart through it all? Sure, she'd grown crabby, and maybe a bit cynical in her later years, but she still loved the world and its people. That love was sorely tested at times, especially recently, but it was a love she'd retained despite everything, a love that allowed her to fight for humanity. Would she lose that love? Or would it remain deep inside her, hidden away by revision, out of reach but still present, like vitra beneath the collar?

  The collar. The bronze bitch was a hiccup in the program, according to Tanner. A rule inherited from the days when the world was based on what he called an immersive video game.

  "We will have a world uncollared," Tanner had told her. "A world where every man can freely use the spark inside him without aging." She had once thought him a pessimist, but she was wrong. He was more a romantic. Much like she'd been when the Users had first inducted her. Maybe that's why she'd grown to like Tanner so much.

  "But it will be a false world," she said, taking over the role of pessimist. "A fake one."

  "But isn't the world that the eyes see, the ears hear, and the senses feel, the only reality there is? Isn't what we taste and smell, real? Bits of light called photons shine from the sun and reflect from surfaces onto our eyes, and our mind puts them back together to form an image. Would the world be any less real if we didn't have eyes and sent out waves of sound instead, and those waves returned to us and were interpreted the same way our minds interpreted photons? Or if we had some device plugged into our bellies that tapped into the wires implanted in our spinal cords, and fed images and sounds and data for all five senses to our heads? Aren't all three cases the same? Isn't what feeds our minds real?"

  "You really buy into this reality-is-what-feeds-the-mind crap, don't you?"

  "I buy into the truth, Ari," Tanner said. "And the truth is, what feeds the mind is reality. No matter who or what is doing the feeding. The eyes. A wire. The mind itself."

  As the grim-faced revisor strapped Ari into the revision chair, she understood the truth of Tanner's words more than ever. She would be rewritten again, her greatest fear. She'd forget all she knew of the Outside. Her reality would become a living hell.

  She'd failed in her mission. She'd failed Hoodwink. She'd failed herself.

  It was a small consolation, knowing her air would run out in the real world two days from now. Only three weeks on the Inside, living this hell, then she'd die without warning. Just another victim of The Drop.

  Her wrists were clamped in an iron vise. There was a handhold beneath her palms, so that she had something to grip "when the pain comes," as the revisor told her. She was strapped to an iron chair, and two prongs had been folded down from above to touch her temples. Was it the prongs
that would reshape her?

  Though she'd been revised before, she remembered none of this.

  For the first time since she left the house in this new body, she felt cold.

  Tanner was strapped into a revision chair opposite her. Behind him, the headrest contained radial bars of light, each a different shade of purple, the hues changing in sequential intensity so that the bars appeared to rotate. Similar light bars lay behind her own head. She knew because she could see the different tones of purple reflecting on her arms.

  Who would be first, she wondered. Tanner or her? Who would have to sit and watch as the mind of the other was rewritten? Would the last image she'd have of this life, this personality, be of Tanner howling and writhing and vomiting through the pain of revision? Or would she go first and be spared the anguish of seeing him destroyed?

  Maybe the machines would revise them at the same time. But why did it matter? Neither of them would remember when it was done. Everything they knew would be wiped away in an instant. All to massage the ego of the man who once named her wife.

  She gave Tanner her bravest smile, but he didn't return it. His eyes seemed full of regret for the future that could have been. At least his eyes weren't accusing. She didn't think she could handle that.

  "Power's been low the past few days," the revisor said, wiping its nose with a sniff. "Battery problems." The revisor wore a long white coat with the image of a human brain on it. "Welp, nothing for it then. Have to do you one at a time. Start with you, little lady, I suppose."

  "Thank you," she said, and meant it. She wouldn't have to watch Tanner's revision.

  The revisor looked at her strangely. "You're thanking me for doing this? You krub are an odd lot. An odd, odd lot."

  "I'm a gol, like you."

  The revisor glanced down at her chest, and lowered the telescopic monocle that was secured to a band around its head. "And so you are. A high ranking one at that. Too bad for you." The gol pressed a button on the pad beside the chair.

  The machine turned on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Ari stood on a tiny island of sand. There was a palm tree beside her, with a single coconut hanging from the branches. Around her the ocean seethed and boiled, though the massive waves never touched her island. Directly above, the sky was clear, sunny. A few miles off, the horizons on all sides were devoured by swirling, black clouds.

  In the storm she saw her existing memories. They fought and grappled with one another for a chance to bubble to the surface, if only fleetingly. New, foreign memories competed with the old, becoming stronger and more frequent with each moment, so that as she watched, the seething mass of clouds became a potpourri of sights and sounds, tastes and smells, touches and emotions.

  Old memories of triumph, friendship, and ascension. Of service to humankind.

  New memories of loss, beatings, and captivity. Of service to Jeremy.

  Pain spasmed through her body. The pulses of agony originated at her temples, and resounded through the core of her being like the hammer blows of a smith at the forge, refashioning her into a shape designed by another. All that she was, all that she was meant to be, destroyed and changed by a thousand electrical pulses fired into her mind.

  She dropped to her hands and knees in the sand, and then collapsed entirely. Through vision gone red with pain, she gazed at the dwindling portion of open sky directly above, a sky hemmed by ever tightening storm clouds. The palm tree swayed in the wind.

  The palm tree.

  Her eyes fastened on the brown husk nestled in the fan-shaped leaves.

  A coconut.

  Somehow, she knew that hard shell protected the part of her which could never be changed. If she could just reach that coconut...

  She dragged herself across the island. Lift one hand. The other. Haul the knees forward. Again. Pace by tiny pace. The base of the tree seemed so very far away. Sand got into her fingernails. Strings of mucus dripped onto her lips. The sand got into those strings too, and smeared her face with a line of grit. Her head pounded.

  She reached the palm tree and looked up. The trunk had grown, and the coconut was higher now. She was running out of time. Had to climb. Couldn't wait. Around her, the eye of the hurricane shrank, and the waters roiled with increasing ferocity, eager to drown her being.

  The pain became too much then, and her body betrayed her. She convulsed in sheer agony, involuntarily slamming her knees into her chin. She shuddered, howling like a madwoman.

  The wave of pain passed.

  She regained control.

  She put her hands on the scab-like rinds of the trunk and began to climb.

  But the tree transformed into a wall of stone. A wall that reached the sky.

  The Forever Gate.

  She climbed that wall, and the ocean waves fought her, hurling into her body. She had to hold her breath sometimes when the water submersed her. The rocky surface became slippery, precarious, but she forced herself onward, digging within herself to find an endurance and intensity of focus she didn't think she had. The mind controls its own reality, wasn't that what someone close to her had once said?

  The slap of a giant wave nearly tore her from the wall.

  Somehow, she held on.

  But it was hopeless. The coconut kept sliding farther and farther up along the wall, the wall that ran to forever. Her unchangeable essence, all that she was, impossibly out of reach.

  Dad...

  Another wave struck and she was swept from the wall.

  She opened her eyes. Her cheeks were wet, as if she'd been crying. Her throat burned, as if she'd been yelling. Her clothes felt damp, as if she'd been splashed.

  She sat in a strange seat. There was a strange man opposite her, tied to an equally strange chair. Strange bars of light rotated around his head. He had strange prongs attached to his forehead, and his wrists were clamped in strange bracelets. Like hers.

  Ah, she recognized him now. It was Max! Good old Max.

  A kindly man came over, and she looked at him shyly. He was dressed all in white, and had a bronze tube over his left eye, a tube with glass at the tip.

  "Welp, nice to see you made it back." The man held up a small stick of metal. "Keep your head still and look to the left." She obeyed instantly, and he shone a light into her eye from the stick. It made her blink.

  "What's your name?" the kindly man said.

  "Maggie."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  She smiled timidly at the man.

  "Good." The kindly man pulled the lightstick away. "Looks like the revision took nicely."

  "You're so nice," she said to the kindly man, feeling bashful.

  He gave her a pat on the head.

  "Your name's not Maggie," Max said across from her. His voice seemed stern.

  "Who are you talking to, Max?" she said. Max was the only one she was allowed to directly question. "I'm Maggie."

  "No. You're not." She saw the cords in Max's neck stand out, as if he struggled against the binds that held him. Which made no sense. Obviously Master Jeremy had placed the binds there. Why would Max fight against something Master Jeremy wanted?

  The kindly man unlocked her binds. "Welp, on your feet Maggie."

  She hopped to it.

  "You're going to make such a good whore." The kindly man smiled.

  She felt her heart swell. It felt so good to please.

  Images of Master Jeremy surged into her mind, and she instantly felt bad. The kindly man wasn't the one she should be pleasing. She lived only to service one man, a man who had been so nice to her, it was heartbreaking. She wanted to make sure he was happy. How she loved having him happy. Master Jeremy Jeremy Jeremy I love you I love you I want you.

  But then the kindly man did something that distracted her. He pressed something on the desk near Max, and the chair that her only friend was tied to began to hum. The bars of light behind Max's head pulsed faster and faster. Max clenched his teeth, and his knuckles turned white.

  The
kindly man was hurting him.

  "What are you—" she stopped herself. She was only allowed to question Max and no one else. Especially not the kindly man who was no longer kindly.

  Max's eyes seemed to cloud over, his tongue lolled from his mouth, and a stream of spittle oozed from his lips. The skin around his temples bunched up as the dead weight of his head pressed into the prongs. A quiet moan escaped his throat, a moan that slowly rose in volume until it was an all-out scream.

  "Please," she said to the bad man, but she couldn't hear her own voice above that scream.

  Max Max Max no no no! Her only friend, the only other person who adored Master Jeremy as much as she did, was dying. And there was nothing she could do about it.

  As she stood there watching the bad man torture Max, a lock broke inside her, and a doorway flung open to the part of her mind that memory and personality couldn't overwrite. The part of her mind that wouldn't allow someone she cared about to suffer. No matter what.

  Without really knowing what she was doing, she went to the bad man, and he looked at her in surprise. She slammed her palm into the bronze tube that covered his left eye. The tube plunged into his skull, and the bad man crumpled to the floor.

  Max's yell had faded to a gurgle. She struggled to lift the prongs from his forehead, but they wouldn't move, the ends jammed into the back of the chair. Those bars of light behind Max's head switched colors faster than ever.

  She went to the pad where she'd seen the bad man work at the desk, and she touched a bunch of different words and pictures. The pad lit up beneath her fingers, and sometimes the contents changed. She recognized a few words on it, but most of them meant nothing to her. Regress. Extract. Resume. Cancel.

  Pressing Cancel did it.

  The hum faded. The lights behind Max's head went out. His gurgling stopped.

  She tried those prongs again, and this time they gave. The metal slid up his temples, and because all his weight was on them, she etched long red marks across his forehead. When she'd finally lifted the prongs free, his head slumped forward, startling her.