Prison Princess

by Huss, JA

  Just black empty panic. Like I was adrift in the deep dark of space and death was coming for me any moment.

  Then one day I heard a voice.

  His voice.

  I smile at him in my ‘now’.

  I heard talking. Mumbling, mostly. Tray has always been a mumbler. I knew time passed. Time always passes, even if it’s unreliable. It goes on.

  So I don’t know how long exactly it took for me to find my way to his world and, after I did that, I have no idea how long it took for the new me to coalesce into… this.

  Me. Now.

  I fear it’s been a very long time.

  I fear that when I get out—if I get out—I will be an old woman.

  I fear that I will never get out. I will never get the opportunity for that disappointment.

  I try my best to live in the here and now. It’s a very nice place. And there are a ton of people here with me. I have a whole group of friends. It’s actually quite perfect. There’s no war. There’s no shortage of food or water. Or air, since this place was made as a virtual planet. There are vacations to take, and places to see, and people to meet. Tray’s imagination is wild and ripe. He has made me the most perfect world to live in.

  But none of it is real.

  And there’s this part of me—some secret inner part of me—that craves conflict and destruction. I want to go out there. I want to be a part of the real world. I want to live.

  And by live I mean… die.

  I miss that black, empty panic. I miss drifting in the deep dark of space, trying to outrun death.

  I want to do things that force me to face my own mortality.

  Because there is no death here, either. There is no end. At least not for me. And how can one get excited about a perfect world if it can never be disrupted?

  What is there to fight for?

  I need to fight for something.

  “Soon,” I whisper. “Soon he will wake up and we will leave here. And I will wake up and I will be there. And then… then my real life can start.”

  I want that conflict so bad.

  This need comes from my Akeelian genes. The real ones.

  Our race is confrontational and combative. We are inherently aggressive, like the Cygnians.

  I want out. I want out of this place like nothing I’ve ever wanted before.

  I want to own ships, and have credits, and borgs and bots at my beck and call. I want to have goals.

  Like Veila.

  That’s why he sleeps.

  Everything he does while he sleeps is for me.

  So one day I can be like Veila.

  When I first appeared in Tray’s world everything was gray and pixelated. Like it wasn’t really there. He was there and I was there, but there was nothing else.

  He described what was beyond the space I lived in. Worlds of places. Virtual places. He was very upfront about that little fact. The fact that this is all fake. He never tried to hide it. Never pretended that I was real or lied to me about my situation.

  Several times I’ve prodded him to tell me more about his reality. Not his virtual, which he talks about freely, but his real home, which he protects with a vengeance. He will not tell me about his reality. Not one bit of it. He won’t even tell me why he’s so set on this. Just flat-out refuses to talk about it and gently reminds me that it doesn’t matter right now. Just that one day I will know and understand everything.

  With other things he is free and open. We have talked for lifetimes inside his Pleasure Prison.

  He wanted to know everything about me. Who I was, where I came from, how I got there.

  I know my name, of course. Brigit. So I could tell him that. And the other vague memories I had within me.

  But that’s it. Everything else had faded away, so for a long time I imagined that I’d been in here for so long that maybe I wasn’t even alive out there anymore?

  Like… how would I know?

  Maybe I’m not real? Maybe I’ve never been real?

  I don’t believe those things anymore. But I did.

  Tray explained to me how time works inside a virtual. Hundreds of years or even a millennium could pass inside while days or months pass on the outside.

  Obviously Tray does not really live here. He comes and goes. He tells me that he spends most of his day inside here with me. But there are things he has to do in his real life that require him to leave the Pleasure Prison. And when he’s gone—like he is now—he’s gone for what seems like forever.

  Days, and weeks, and months, and years go by before he returns.

  Once, it was nearly a century.

  Eighty-seven years I was all alone. I learned six languages, I wrote a book, learned three instruments, made seventy-five new fake friends. I even traveled. I had a pet, it lived, it died its virtual form of death, I mourned it.

  I had a boyfriend.

  Though I won’t admit to that if he asks. He never has, but still. I will not admit it.

  He wouldn’t be mad because the people here aren’t real. They’re constructs. Not AIs, either. Just… constructs.

  And they die. They age, they wind down, they die.

  Not real death like on the outside. They just disappear after some pre-determined time elapses.

  Tray has programed them to not question my… sameness. So they don’t notice my eternal youth. They don’t really notice anything.

  I figured he’d forgotten about me that time he left for eighty-seven years. That he was never coming back. Maybe he found a real girl to love? Maybe he died? Though he says he can’t die. I’m not sure I believe him.

  But he did come back. Obviously. And he told me he had to go on an overnight trip. Just one night for him turned into several decades for me.

  After that I kinda lost my mind for a little bit. When I think too hard about things it drives me crazy.

  I want to scream sometimes. I want to look up at my virtual sky and just scream.

  But he told me that during this final phase we’re in—the one where he breaks me out of this prison and sets me free—he will be gone a very long time.

  It has already been three years since he crawled into that bed and shut his eyes.

  Three years of my time since he left me alone in here.

  And it could be three thousand more before he comes back.

  CHAPTER THREE - TRAY

  “OK, listen to me, Tray.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You’re not listening,” Valor insists.

  “I am. I’m just tired of repeating myself. We’re doing this, Valor. We’re here. And you know how we got here.”

  “ALCOR gave you the coordinates,” he says. Because I’ve told him this hundreds of times.

  “That’s right.”

  Actually, it’s not right. But close enough. When my brothers and I first came to ALCOR Station we each were given a message by Princess Corla. Some garbled jumble of words that none of us understood. Not even me.

  Those messages were spin-node time and place coordinates and one of them, the one that came from me, actually, was this place.

  This long-abandoned station with the ship.

  So really, I gave ALCOR this plan and then I stole it back from him after he left with Serpint and the others to save Nyleena and then got himself ‘blown up’.

  My other brothers have a lower opinion of Crux and me because we almost never leave the station. We don’t go fight for bots and borgs, we don’t go steal princesses, we don’t brave dead stations and planets looking for parts.

  But we do other things. And one of the things Crux and I have been doing since ALCOR Station became Harem was talk about how none of the shit ALCOR was selling us made sense.

  We knew he was lying about things. So when everyone left to go save Nyleena Crux and I planned our own mission called Steal Back What Was Ours to Begin With.

  i.e. The messages we gave ALCOR that very first day we arrived as boys.

  One of the messages was coordinates for this
station and another was for Brigit. I’m sure of it. I’m so fucking sure of this, I’ve risked everything to prove it and set her free.

  “Valor,” I say. Because he’s gone quiet while I was thinking.

  “What?” He’s looking at the gate-mapping screen, trying to plot a course that will take us back to Harem.

  There is no course. I’ve told him this. He’s just having a hard time accepting it.

  “Did I mention that Beauty is still alive?”

  He hangs his head for a moment. I can’t see his eyes, but I suspect they’re closed.

  “No,” he finally says. “You didn’t.”

  “Why would ALCOR save himself and not save her?”

  “Fucking hate you,” he mumbles, then looks over his shoulder at me. “You don’t know. Why are you telling me this when you don’t know?”

  “I have a hunch,” I say. “And my hunches are worth something.”

  “A hunch,” he says.

  I smile at him.

  He presses his lips together and goes back to pointless course plotting.

  “We’ll have enough fuel pellets to leave tomorrow,” I say.

  “Great,” he growls.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll still make it in time.”

  He mumbles curses under his breath as he stabs the screen with a finger. “In time for what?” he finally asks.

  “To save Veila.”

  He grips the navigation console with both hands. I know he wants to beat the shit out of me. He wants to take those meaty fists of his and slam them right into my eyes.

  But he can’t. Because I’m his way out of this mess.

  “There’s still hope for her. And time, you know. It doesn’t matter. When we go backwards, we… literally go backwards.”

  He spins around in his chair and stands, puts up a hand and says, “I don’t want to hear anymore. Just… fucking get us out of here.”

  He goes down below to his quarters and I stand at the edge of the opening in the floor. Waiting. Listening. Until I finally hear the swoosh of his cabin door opening and closing.

  Then I take the drive out of my pocket and hold it in my hand.

  My world is in this drive.

  Brigit is in this drive.

  And I want nothing more than to go down into the medical bay, insert this drive into a cryopod, get in, and get lost in my other life.

  But the job isn’t done and if I go in I’ll just have to come back out.

  I don’t think I could. As close as we are to finally freeing Brigit from the virtual prison Veila locked her away in, I don’t think I could leave again.

  I told her I was coming back, but it was a lie. I’m never going back in there. The next time I see her, it will be in the real.

  “Soon,” I say, making a promise to the drive. “This will all be over soon.”

  I walk back over to Valor’s station and sit in his chair, my fingers tapping out coordinates and bringing up maps.

  There is another spin node somewhere in this galaxy. I know there is. I haven’t looked yet because there was no point in finding it until we had enough fuel. But we’re ready now.

  I go inside myself. Hook into the non-sentient AI that runs this ship. It is a very simple, Type II, limited-memory artificial intelligence. Meaning it knows things, can make decisions, but they are very primitive.

  Nothing like Booty, or Dicker, or Lady Luck. Certainly nothing even remotely close to ALCOR.

  Or me. But I am the brain of this ship now.

  So I go inside and start looking for the node. I am in deep, the outside world nearly gone, when I hear—

  “You lying little fucker.”

  —from behind me.

  I pull out, the effect dizzying and disorienting, and turn in my chair to face Valor.

  “You lying little motherfucking fucker.”

  “What did I lie about?”

  “Where the hell are we?” he demands.

  I glance up at the screening, realize it’s been mapping my little search.

  OK. Change of plan. He can take it. He’s Valor, for sun’s sake. He’s been through some shit I can’t even imagine. He’s fought things, and done things, and saw things no one else but Luck, and Beauty, and Lady ever fought, or did, or saw.

  And he’s been helping me all these months. Willingly. Totally on board with my secret version of reality inside the Pleasure Prison.

  He can take it.

  “We’re in…” I huff. “Well, it’s got a stupid name. And I’m not exactly sure how to—”

  “Try,” he growls.

  “The Milky Way.”

  He squints his eyes at me. “What?”

  “It’s a where. Not a what. The galaxy we’re in. That’s what it’s called. I didn’t name it, for fuck’s sake. It’s not my fault it’s called something stupid.”

  Valor cocks his head at me. But it’s not one of those looks a confused bot throws at you when what you’re telling it doesn’t compute. It’s the kind an Akeelian male throws at you when they’re picturing what your body would look like without a head. “I’ve never heard of this place. And I’ve seen maps of the entire fucking universe.”

  “It’s hidden, that’s all.”

  Valor laughs. “You can’t hide a fucking galaxy.”

  “And yet… someone did.”

  “Tray,” he growls. “This has gone on for long enough. I did everything you asked me to. I helped fix this fucking ship. I got the air, and the water, and the fucking autocook working. I got the fuel generator spun up inside that sun-forsaken station. What the hell is going on?”

  I sigh. It’s a little early in the plan to give up this much information, but I’d have to tell him something tomorrow, anyway. Maybe, if this was Luck, I could lie my way past taking this ship through a spin node.

  But Valor isn’t Luck.

  “Fine. ALCOR hid it. The gates he protects that go to the Seven Sisters are the only way to reach this galaxy.”

  “No,” Valor says. “I mean, OK. Fine. Maybe that’s true. But that can’t hide a galaxy, Tray. Someone can find it.”

  “This whole station is inside a spin node, Valor. Right now we’re living in some alternate spacetime. Remember when I first explained the Pleasure Prison to you back when we were kids?”

  He looks at me with narrowed eyes.

  “When I first got it running Serpint and Draden were totally on board. Ready and willing to try new things without question. Jimmy and Crux had no interest at all. Luck went in alone.” Alone. I have to shake my head at that. Fucking Luck. “But you wanted all kinds of explanations. You wanted me to draw you a goddamned map! Remember that?”

  “OK,” Valor says, but he’s smiling a little at that memory.

  “And you were so worried about the time differential. You thought you’d get lost. And stuck. So I explained it to you and that eased your mind. Do you remember?”

  He inhales deeply as he thinks. “You said… it’s just like a dream. Where all things happen at once and on the other side of the dream—in the spacetime that’s happening to your actual body--no time is really passing at all.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I mean, I used better words to describe it back then. His recollection is rather simplified, but I’m not going to get technical. He’s got the main idea. “Imagine that the spin node is a dream, OK? It’s not. But it’s got a lot of common variables. No one can get inside your dreams because they don’t exist to anyone but you because you’re inside some deep sleep state that alters your reality. This is what a spin node does. And this Milky Way galaxy lives inside this spin node we’re inside right now.

  “It’s hidden, like a dream. But it’s not a dream. It’s real enough to the people inside that galaxy. They don’t know they’re living inside this spin node. They have no fucking clue. Their time passes in a way that’s normal to them. It’s not normal to us, but they don’t care because they don’t even know we exist.”

  I pause to give him a moment to digest this and ask question
s. But he just looks at me and nods.

  So I continue. “Earth lives in this galaxy. We could go there right now. We could see that place for real if we wanted. Those messages that Corla gave us twenty years ago to give to ALCOR when we arrived on his station were all just spin node coordinates that point to different places in the Milky Way. One of them was for Earth, I’m sure of it. Probably the one Jimmy burbled out and that’s why he’s so obsessed with this planet.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Jimmy this?” Valor asks.

  “Believe me, Jimmy is the last person I’d tell this secret to. He has no clue why he’s drawn to the idea of Earth. And I don’t have time to explain this shit to him. Hell, I don’t give two sun- fucks about Jimmy and his quest.” Valor opens his mouth to say something, but I hold up a hand. “Before you get pissed off at me for that, ask yourself this. Do you think Jimmy gives two sun-fucks about my quest?”

  “What is your quest, Tray?” He practically snarls my name. “Because we’re supposed to be saving ALCOR. Right now we’re supposed to be meeting up with Booty and Asshole to go save our fucking—”

  “Our fucking what?” I snarl back. “What do you think ALCOR is to us, Valor? A father?” I laugh. Loud. “He’s not. OK? He’s not what you think.”

  “What is your quest?”

  “My quest is...“ I picture Brigit inside her prison. I didn’t put her there, but I built it. I imagine all the ways I could explain this to Valor. And all the things he’d say in response.

  I would choose this girl over them? Over us? That’s what he would ask.

  And then I run the possibilities in my calculating mind. What would he do with that information? Help me? Or sabotage me?

  It’s not time yet. I can’t tell him. He won’t understand. He’s still convinced that we’re better off with ALCOR. So I say... “That’s need-to-know information. And you don’t need to know yet. “

  And then I turn back to the navigation panel and continue searching for the spin node gate that will take us back to our own galaxy.

  I wait for him to react. A hand on my shoulder. Spin me around, maybe? Punch me in the face?

  There is no doubt in either of our minds that Valor could kick my ass. We both know this. Valor and Luck have always been the most physical of us. The ones who resort to violence the quickest. With the jobs ALCOR sends them on, they had to be that way. It’s a matter of self-preservation.