Criminal Core

by Nick Broad

  “Certainly, Warden! Activating closed-circuit scanners!”

  The right half of the screen turned into a live feed of the tether I’d pointed at it. Up close, it was a long, rigid tube just about wide enough for three people to walk through side-by-side without feeling cramped. The three people in bright red jumpsuits weren’t skipping with their arms linked, though - they were sprinting.

  And they were carrying wicked-looking rifles.

  They looked human, or at least human-ish. The one in front was definitely the leader. One of his eyes was covered with a black eyepatch, which confused the hell out of me. I would have assumed we could fix things like that in the future.

  “What is this? Specifically, I mean.” I was grasping at straws, looking for anything I could use to my advantage.

  “You’re looking at a live feed of the tether connecting Beta Spire to Alpha Spire, Warden! There is an estimated two minutes and thirty-five seconds until hostiles enter Alpha Spire!”

  “Great,” I said, shaking my head. I couldn’t run down there. I couldn’t seem to do anything. What was the use of a control center if you didn’t control anything?

  The camera swiveled along with the prisoners, and I caught sight of something that gave me an idea.

  “Computer, lock those doors!” I cried, pointing at the doorway that connected the tether to the station. “Then lock the other side of the tether, too! Let’s trap them in there for a bit.”

  If they were stuck in there, it would give me time to figure out what to do. Not to mention get Shay in here where she could actually do some good.

  “Locking doors!” the maniacally-cheerful voice informed me. “Doors locked!”

  The three figures slowed to a halt as they reached the end of the tether. The doors swung shut, locking them out of both sections of the ship simultaneously. Now they were just floating in a big tube, trapped out in space until I opened one end or the other.

  “Gotcha!” I cried, pumping a fist in the air. “Nice work, Computer...”

  My smile died on my face. The guy in the lead stepped forward and grabbed hold of a panel in the door, shoving it to the side. It slid open like it was on wheels. All three of the prisoners started to laugh.

  “What the fuck?” I asked. “Computer, I told you to lock it-”

  “I’m very sorry, Warden!” Even when she was apologizing, the computer sounded like she was about to announce to an audience that they were about to win a new car. “Locking mechanisms were engaged, but there was insufficient energy credits to keep the tether portals closed!”

  I scoffed. Energy credits? “It doesn’t cost money to close doors!” I complained.

  “Correct, Warden,” the computer replied. “It costs money to keep them closed.”

  I sighed and ran a hand over my forehead. “What the fuck-”

  “Hostiles have entered Alpha Spire!” the computer trilled. “Would you like me to send the Alpha Spire countermeasures to your local terminal?”

  “Countermeasures? Now we’re getting somewhere!” I clapped my hands together, rubbing them, then leaned over the terminal. “Yeah, gimme those, Computer!”

  There was a low electronic noise, and my console came to life. There were dozens upon dozens of different tabs, each one keyed to its own small section of the ship. As the three prisoners passed the vestibule, the tab the console had selected changed automatically to match their location.

  “Holy shit,” I said excitedly. They were walking right into a trap.

  They’d entered the central portion of the station’s waist: that long, winding tube that ran all the way around it. According to my sensors, there was a recession in a wall a hundred feet or so away from them with something called a Mk. II Combat Droid hidden inside of it.

  I didn’t have time to call up the specs - it looked vicious enough. I only hoped it had enough firepower to neutralize all three of them.

  “That’s right,” I said, leaning forward excitedly. I watched them through the cameras as they cut through the station, getting closer and closer to the hidden droid. “Come closer. Get right where I want you...”

  My heart jumped in my chest. A few feet from the concealment, they actually stopped. One of them consulted a handheld device while the leader stared up and down the hallway, gun at the ready.

  They must be looking for the escape pods, I realized. But what they’re gonna get is a whole lot of trouble...

  I hit the button marked “Activate Droid” on the touchscreen and waited, already picturing the carnage.

  Nothing happened.

  Frowning, I hit it again. And again. My hand became a blur as I mashed the button, until the tip of my finger started to ache.

  “Come on!” I screamed, watching the trio move past the hidden droid. “Activate, you stupid piece of crap!”

  “I’m sorry, Warden,” the cheerful voice informed me. “Activating a Mk. II Battle Droid requires 125 free energy credits. Our station account is insufficient.”

  If the terminal had been a video game controller, I’d have tossed it against the wall in frustration. I couldn’t do anything! This station was loaded with traps and defense mechanisms, and not a single one of them worked. They didn’t have enough energy to run, whatever that meant.

  “Well what the fuck CAN I do? They’re almost at the escape pods!”

  With a burst of static, the camera shifted. The final approach to the escape pods was a large, upward-sloped chamber that resembled a high school gymnasium tipped over on one side. At the bottom were rows of empty cells, some set against the slope like they were intended to contain things that didn’t need to touch the ground. The row of escape pods were at the top.

  Also at the top were a half-dozen gun emplacements.

  “How do I select those?” I asked, flipping from tab to tab on my terminal. I moved past the right one accidentally and discovered with frustration that I had to go all the way through to get back to it. “Here, here - the guns! Computer, use the guns!”

  “Should I select bullets, non-lethal rounds, or electro-magnetic pulses?” the computer asked excitedly.

  For a moment I considered just letting her rip, but I wasn’t that kind of person. This station was my responsibility, and so were those prisoners. “Non-lethal.”

  “Rubber rounds or tranquilizers?”

  My hands slammed down on the terminal. “Why does this have to be so complicated!? I don’t care! Just knock them out before they reach those escape pods! We can’t let them get away!”

  “Loading now,” the computer said, entering an even more manic phase than usual.

  “Finally,” I said with a sigh, turning my attention to the screen. “Aim for the guy in front. He’s definitely the most dangerous-”

  “Insufficient energy credits,” the computer said.

  “Oh come on!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Just shoot them already! Please!”

  But the guns stayed silent. I watched, helpless, as the three prisoners climbed into an escape pod. The man with the eyepatch was last, scoping the final chamber as if he expected one last nasty surprise. Then he climbed into the pod and sealed the door behind him.

  “Escape pod launching,” the computer said, a hint of sadness cutting through its joie de vivre.

  That door thing caught him off-guard, I thought mournfully. He wasn’t expecting that. Because he wasn’t expecting ANYTHING, was he?

  Nothing around here worked.

  Nothing around here had enough energy to work.

  I was the warden of a big, floating junk pile. Basically.

  A hiss of air made me turn around. The door to the bridge opened, and Shay stood in the doorway. She looked like she’d just gotten up. Her hair was in a messy bun and she was wearing a plush white bathrobe which ended at mid-thigh. She had a cup of coffee held in both hands, a plume of steam wafting off it.

  She sized up the situation in moments, a twinkle entering her eyes. “So, new guy,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. �
�How’d it go? You stop the bad guys?”

  Five: The Worst Prison In The Galaxy

  I was so angry I couldn’t speak.

  “Hey, I told you to knock yourself out,” Shay said, sauntering into the room. Her ass moved with that same seductive sway she’d used on me on the way to her chambers. If I wasn’t so upset, I might have given it a spank.

  She leaned forward, squinting as she scrutinized the screen. “Oooh, three of the Red Tigers,” she said, slurping her coffee noisily. “Yeah, they’re never fun. Chirrup, how many pods we got in storage?”

  The computer chimed in. “The drones are replacing the missing one now,” she said crisply. “Storage Unit Seven’s stash of escape pods stands at forty percent-”

  “More than enough,” Shay said, cutting the computer off. She walked forward and plopped down in the control center’s only seat, sighing with relief. Unlike me, she apparently had no hangups about taking the captain’s chair. “Everything’s good.”

  “Good!?” I growled through gritted teeth. “Three people just escaped from this station!”

  Shay gave me a pained look. “I know, you did a great job. First-time jitters are a bitch. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it-”

  “That...that woman,” I said, pointing towards the ceiling, “refused to do anything! I tried to lock the doors, I tried to send a drone after the prisoners - I even told her to shoot them before they made to the escape pods...”

  Shay held up a finger. “Okay, first? Chirrup did not refuse anything. She literally can’t say no to you. It’s her whole purpose for existing, so don’t be mean to her. The station refused to do those things. And with good reason.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “What possible reason is there to let prisoners escape from this prison!?”

  Shay regarded me evenly for a long moment, then sighed.

  “Chirrup, take a hike for a bit, alright?” Shay looked up at the ceiling as she spoke. “I’ve got to explain a few things to the new guy.”

  “Yes, Mistress!” the computer trilled happily. After that, it went silent.

  “Mistress?” I asked, cocking an accusatory eyebrow.

  “That’s Chirrup,” Shay said without acknowledging me. “She’s one of my daemons - an AI subroutine who helps run things around here for me. She’s perfectly nice, as long as you can stomach her constant enthusiasm. Which, in the mornings, I cannot.”

  She wordlessly sipped her coffee, waiting for me to say something. I wondered what had happened to the woman who’d begged to jump my bones last night, and why this angry girl who looked just like her had taken her place.

  Finally I’d had enough. “Okay,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “Chirrup. Nice British AI lady. That’s one of about a billion things I need you to explain to me right now.”

  Shay’s lips formed a tight little line. “You want some coffee?” she asked, holding up her cup. “I love coffee. It’s my lifeblood. Literally - my circuits are like, thirty percent java. Can I get some for you?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I muttered. Truth be told, hers did smell absolutely delicious.

  “Stay here,” she said, rising from her chair. She left, and came back a few minutes later with an identical, steaming mug.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a sip. It was the most delicious cup of coffee I’d ever drank. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, I have the good shit,” Shay said with a little grin, settling in her chair. “In many categories.”

  A flush rose to my face as I remembered the feel of her naked body in my arms.

  “Alright,” she said, a pleased expression on her face. “So. The Black Oubliette. You’re looking at it, right?”

  Indeed I was. Shay’s hands worked expertly at the controls, transforming the viewscreen from a wireframe blueprint to a live feed of the station. It rotated slowly, in orbit around that bizarrely-colored planet I’d seen earlier.

  “The Black Oubliette is comprised of three superstructures, or ‘spires’,” Shay explained, rotating the display this way and that. “The central one, Alpha Spire, is almost entirely given over to the maintenance of the other two. Over here we have crew quarters, the docking bay that allows deliveries to and from the station, and the 3D printers that fabricate all the stuff we don’t get delivered. All the way at the bottom is the reactor core.”

  With a gesture, she highlighted the lowermost tip of the station. “It’s down there - and so are we.”

  I felt my eyebrows draw together. “We’re right here,” I protested. “Chirrup even highlighted this room for me on the map.”

  She gave me an intense look. “Our bodies are here,” she said, nodding at the screen. “These bodies are little more than shells we’re wearing, Noah. Yours was built based off of your residual self-image - with a few aesthetic changes. You might have noticed.”

  “I’m a little more handsome and muscular than I used to be,” I said, glancing down at myself.

  “And your dick’s bigger,” Shay added with a wry smile, watching me blush. “The changes aren’t extreme, because changing you too much would mess with your whole mind-slash-body-slash-sense-of-self thing, and your connectome is already pushing it with the ‘stable and sane’ thing. Wouldn’t want to make you so good-looking you turn into an absolute sociopath!”

  I nodded my agreement. In my personal experience, the best-looking people always did turn out to be the most narcissistic monsters.

  “So your body is right here next to me,” Shay said, putting a hand on my chest. “But that’s not really you. You’re a Core.”

  That brought me up short. “A Core?”

  “A being of pure light and energy, harnessed to the reactor core of this station,” Shay said with another slurp of her coffee. “Cores are very expensive to maintain, because unlike an AI helper, they actually have souls. “You’re real, Noah. Real in a way that Chirrup and I are not.”

  She actually seemed sad. “You feel pretty real to me,” I growled, putting an arm protectively around her waist.

  “You would think that,” she said. A little sigh of pleasure left her lips as she pressed her body against mine. “My point is, your body is just a tool you experience and filter reality through. You use it to see and hear and have lots and lots of awesome orgasms, but you’re really a Core. You need to remember that if anything else around here is going to make sense.”

  “Got it,” I said. To be honest, the thought of it was more than a little unsettling. I pictured my actual self pressed up against the reactor core, a ball of glowing light suspended in air. I decided it didn’t matter. I felt like a person, and Shay damn sure felt like a real human person with her curves against me. I was going to treat her like one.

  “The other two wings of the station are connected to us by tethers,” Shay said, still hugging me. “I think you probably already have a little bit of experience with those.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my lips twisting at the memory of those prisoners escaping. Shay had called them Red Tigers. I made a mental note to look them up later. “Tons.”

  She flashed a sympathetic look and moved on. “These two structures - we call them Beta and Gamma Spire - are where the prisoners are housed.” She pressed her fingers together to zoom in, the outside view of the other spires replaced with an interior cross-section of Beta. “They’re divided into cell blocks, like pretty much any other prison. They also contain several libraries, gyms, and cafeterias. There aren’t a lot of defense countermeasures or heavy weaponry in Beta or Gamma - since that’s where the prisoners are supposed to be. The station is mostly focused on keeping them there.” She zoomed back out with a sigh. “Of course, most of those cells are empty right now.”

  I gave the screen a good, hard look. “Because prisoners keep escaping. I realized when I was trying to stop the Red Tigers - they know escaping is easy. Why is it so easy, Shay?”

  She pulled a face. “Everything on this station requires energy to run,” she said flatly. “You, me, the machine that made this c
offee - all of it. And we don’t have enough of it to go around.”

  I’d expected something like this. I’d been bracing myself for it. “It’s because of me, isn’t it?”

  Shay looked up at me, shocked. “What, you? No, of course not!”

  “Really?”

  A slow smile spread across her face. “Summoning a Core has a big up-front cost,” she explained breezily, “but your upkeep is hardly a burden. It’s not much more than mine, to tell the truth.” She stared at the zoomed-out view of the station, her happy expression melting away. “We don’t have a problem with spending. I’ve cut everything to the bone already.”

  “Then what?”

  She sighed, then highlighted the bottom parts of Alpha, Beta and Gamma. “There are supposed to be three reactors,” she said wearily. “The ones for Beta and Gamma take care of all the energy needs for the prisoners - food, security, life support. That takes the heat off of Alpha to produce power to run all our gadgets and gizmos. But Beta overheated a hundred years ago, and Gamma...well, I try not to think too much about Gamma.”

  As she spoke, I noticed a small information box had appeared in the corner of the viewscreen. It spit a few helpful factoids at us both:

  Current Energy from Alpha Reactor: 1200 credits per month

  Current Energy from Beta Reactor: 0 credits per month

  Current Energy from Gamma Reactor: 0 credits per month

  Current Energy from Solar Sail: 0 credits per month

  Current Energy Expenditures: 1,195 credits per month

  Current Balance: +5 energy credits per month

  NOTE: This level of production is hazardous to the safety of the station. Please bring auxiliary energy sources online as soon as possible.

  “Five credits a month,” I groaned, shaking my head. “Chirrup wanted fifty just to activate a combat droid.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how much you cost,” Shay said with a snort. “Literal years of saving up, Noah.”