Shayna Rande tears were every bit as salty as the ones that she shed when her womb mother had died, some ten years before.
The rain was falling lightly, but there was nothing light in her and her family situation.
Their first daughter, Pam, had been a regular affair.
Shayna's wifesband, Rita, had been the womb-mother, and there had been no complications. Rita had brought Pam to the end, and just six months after her birth, she was back at work.
Shayna and her wifesband had no problems, sharing the care of the little redhead like all good married couples do.
When it had been time for Shayna to carry the couple's second daughter, they hitched a snafu - or, rather, three of them.
Louise, Dominique and Sally, the triplets had been a much unexpected turn of events for the family, a great source of joy - and problems.
Three as they were, they meant that Rita and Shayna had to decide, and one of them had to act as a stay-at-home mom.
Rita was the better paid of the two and, also, the one that enjoyed her work more.
Shayna took the mantle of the housebound, though she had always thought that - some day - she would have dusted her skills, get an update and gone back on the job market.
In the end, favourable conditions never came around.
The very technological branch she was trained for, analogic signal processing, had virtually disappeared in the fourteen years after the birth of the kids.
They had grown up enough that they did not need 24/7 care, now, and Shayna had just begun a re-training program, on the installation of industrial implants electric systems.
Another year or so, and she would have been gone back to work, and aided Rita paying the bills - what was the saying, "tell Gods your plans"? Shayna was a devout Xhristian but, at times, she thought that the Noxonians had it right. They didn't call their God with any capital letter. "Advanced Alien" that it was, though, it was honest... it only kept the world from stop spinning on itself, and some other obscure activities.
The kids were all crying, at her left, watching the coffin of their first mother being lowered into the ground.
Amidst the pain of the loss of her life companion, Shayna felt the sting of impending financial catastrophe.
There was no way that she could manage to complete her re-training course and secure a new job - not before their landlady could throw them in the street. Her lover was dead, her life felt like it was nearly over, and her four daughters were going to be separated by the social services.
That night, she watched herself in the mirror.
Shayna wasn't a great beauty, just an average woman, one like there were thousands. At 44 it was absolutely unlikely that she could snatch some sugar mama - she couldn't have managed it even when she was 22, and her tits had the freshness of just bloomed adultness. She simply was not al that gorgeous.
Before going to sleep, she prayed her God - whichever god that was out there, really - to show her a way, any way out of her situation.
She indeed received a divine answer, but not the one that she expected, and not from any god that she cared to contact.
The dream was calm and cosy - it took a while, before she even realized that it was a dream... she felt no anxiety, and this was not normal for her.
Her dreams were filled of that sentiment, ever since she finished high-school, being usually horror loops of her trying to find an exit from the place, doors shut and rocket boots that couldn't fly her above the damn stupid building.
This place was not the abominating vocational high where her hard-mom - the late Louise the elder - had forced her to go.
It looked like a leisure hotel on some tropical island, almost exactly like the one Shayna and Rita went for their honeymoon. The thought flashed her mind, and filled her with a bout of pain at remembrance of the smile of Rita.
"What's up your mind, Tiger Lily?" - the voice gave her shivers, crawling up her back.
It was human, but so grave - graver than even men's voices, in "Modern Geographic's" documentaries on the Manserrails.
The monster - she could not call it any other way - looked like a man, a seven feet tall black man, and one that seemed mentally capable.
The men in the menserrails didn't look much human, given that their brains were systematically addled in their intrauterine environments - males were kept as a failsafe, in case the sophisticated technology used to create para-sperm was lost or became unsustainable, but no woman on the planet was any eager to see their gender resurrect and overpower them, as it used to do on Earth Prime (or whatever the rest of the galaxy calls that shitty planet now).
This "Man" seemed a person, a functional human male - something no woman on the planet had ever witnessed.
It was very strange, with that thing on the front - something called, if Shayna remembered well, penis - and those very excessive muscular fascias all over the body.
- "So, tell me, what are you looking for, woman?"
- "Are you... God?"
- "Kind of" - Shayna had never considered the Noxonian mythology with anything less than contempt, or she'd already recognized the cocky black bastard as one of the most infamous avatars of their 'god' (small caps and apostrophes strictly required by just mentioned mythos).
Given her strict Xhristian observance - "thou shall not have other other God but the one true God, and that's me, or else..." - this was to be expected.
Other religions were much more open to syncretism - the Noxonians being a most egregious case, its credo being a maddening "worship who do you want, I do not care; I am going to be necessary anyway, so one way or the other I will have my stream of fresh flesh", and the Shinto were very hot on their trail with their audacious "any God you may worship has a spot in our pantheon" concept - and tolerated that their believers got contacts with other credos, but that was not the case for Shayna's.
Xhristianity was a relatively new variant of an old religion from the original planet, that the Prophet Stian had discovered, hidden in the colony database. and that she liberated with the help of Xri, the martyr.
- "Are you the devil?"
- "Shaitan, the adversary? No... but, in a way, I am in the market of souls - indirectly, that is."
- "So, do you want my soul?"
- "Indirectly. So, why are you so desperate that my world-wide mind filters can pick your screams, in the middle of all the clutter?"
- "I am not desperate - we are just having some small issues."
- "Ending in the street, destitute, you and your family? Social services splitting up the five of you? No reason to be desperate, no."
- "The church will help me."
- "Indeed, they will, but you know the local government, how it works - first they will split the girls, distributing them among wealthy, childless couples, then you can get back on your feet, and try to appeal to their decisions for the rest of your life... or till the kids grown to legal age. I have a more immediate proposal."
- "Riches and safe haven for my family, in exchange for my soul?"
- "Eh, almost" - the man oscillated his big hand in front of her, in a gesture that she did not really recognize as it used to mean "more or less", way before the FTL probe that colonized the planet departed from their original civilization.
A gesture that had not been included in the programming of the robot-nurses that raised the first generation of kids spawned by the probe, and had -thus - independently resurfaced in only about a third of the world's cultures.
- "Not much riches, but plenty of haven."
- "For my soul?"
- "For your bodacious dedication, your family will have three meals a day, an adequate shelter and complete non-interference from the local agency of children disservices."
- "Is this a dream?"
- "Are your dreams always so business-like?" - The black 'god' grinned, very much un-business-like.
- "So, what should I do?" - Shayna was more playing along than anything else.
- "Go at this address,..." - the huge black handed her a piece of paper, with something scribbled on - "..., describe them this dream, listen to what they have to say, and decide. But I am confident that you will choose for the best of everybody."
Shayna looked at the address on the paper, and recognized that it was somewhat familiar, though she couldn't really focus on it - "Offers Garden Plaza, number 12".
She immediately awoke, and reached to squeeze her eyes, as often when she woke up, and almost stabbed her right eye with the piece of paper squeezed in her hand. She threw it away, as if it was a snake.
The huge wall went on for almost a hundred meters, in both directions. Shayna understood why the address was familiar - this was the enclosed botanic garden that the Church of Noxon used to have in the outskirts of the city.
When the city expanded, it ended becoming a near-centre town feature, and taxes on it skyrocketed during the Atheists reign, so the Noxonians hadbto sell it and build a new one in Akeron (creating the neo-town, really).
Of the vast complex of condos, facing inward to the garden, only a small section was now property of the church, and likely not for more.
However, the Bursar office for the local Noxon Chapter was still in the last building owned by the church, which was really no surprise, as most of the economics of the church revolved around cable television rights nowadays, being the Noxon ceremonies still the pinnacle of televised S&M for the Great Frakka land. Having the office where all producer companies also had theirs made quite a bit of sense.
Shayna trembled, when she pushed the button - a life of facing the stern mugs of Xhristian nuns, from kindergarten to the end of middle school, had left her vulnerable to those scary old women, and any other kind of monastic woman.
She took her courage with both hands, tossed her heart above the fence, and rung the old buzzer.
- "Hi, who are you?"
The "Nun" - Shayna had problems remembering that this was not a nun but, rather, a Noxon priestess... colour and simplified cut of the robe apart, the pudgy, short woman looked every bit a nun as any of those that she ever met at her Xhrystian schools - looked at her through a couple of glasses.
The clergywoman was clearly way younger than her, something quite unexpected, as Noxonian clergy was composed almost entirely by retired "Officiants" - all women forty and beyond, usually quite bit beyond.
- "I... I had a dream" - Shayna felt stupid, saying it, but the - uh, non-nun - simply opened her eyes a slight more, to pose more attention.
- "Yes. What Kind of dream?"
In a bungle of nervousness, Shayna started answering, while looking in her purse for the scrap of paper.
- "There was this huge, black man, that gave me this address"
- "A man? Those Modern Geographic Society documentaries are an hassle. A black man that gave you this address?" - The priestess sound a bit sarcastic, but not nearly as much as Shayna expected. Then, the middle aged mom finally found the piece of paper, and offered it to the priestess, adding "In the dream, he gave me this".
- "Did he? Let's see." - the younger woman took the message in hand, and started reading the unintelligible scribbles below the address, one of her eyebrows raising up irresistibly.
Whatever was written on the scrap, she could read it - then, with sudden urgency, she invited Shayna in, and started walking through the corridors of the building, driving the flabbergasted blonde through a few offices occupied by older, more stereotypical Noxon priestesses.
Then they went up a stair, till they reached an ample office, with a big, bright, arched window.
- "Wait, while I fetch my superior"
Rayna sat on the old, comfortably born guest chair. She waited for some minutes, before feeling
he bite of curiosity, and she took in hand one of the photographic books that were on the shelf, on the visitor's side of the office.
She started flipping its pages, then she hastily laid it back on the shelf.
It was an yearbook of Noxon Officiants, names, ages, their photos in the white, flowing vest that they dress on the route to the ziggurats, and then photos from the services, naked, battered, trembling, and smiling.
She dared not to look at more than those few, initial pages... she went on sitting, thinking about what the hell was she doing in that heathen place. It had been, she was more and more sure, a pretty stupid mistake.
Whatever solution her situation may have, it was out there, surely not here.
Yet, running away, seemed rude...
- "Hi. How do you do?" - this woman looked every bit as old as everybody would expect a senior Noxonian priestess to be. Late seventies or early eighties, every bit as dignified as a Xhrystian abbess.
In many ways, their jobs were very similar.
- "It was such a long time since I saw the last dream-sheet."
Shayna inferred that the wrinkled old lady was talking about the mysterious piece of paper, that had apparently crossed the divide between dreams and reality -. or had been composed by one Mrs. Rande, while asleep..
- "Ah, yes - I recognise the alphabet." - the priest's smile grew wider again - "it is a fun trick, really."
- "Trick?"
- "Yes - the alphabet is pre-colonization hiragana, but the words are not Japanese, and there are spaces - the language is Common Elish."
- "And what was written?"
- "A most Noxonian message" - the old woman giggled uncontrollably - "Am I right, thinking that you are in some existential pinch?"
-"I, ehm... my wifesband, Rita, has died and left me with four daughters, no job, an open debt with our landlady and a bank account in deep red."
- "Oh... four girls. Age?"
- "Sixteen, the older, 14 the triplets".
- "I see... our God, Noxon, has gently decided to offer you asylum."
- "Really?"
- "Of course, our Church is not as rich as most people believes, so what we can really offer, to you and your children, is a flat inside the officiant's complex in Akeron."
- "A flat inside?... do you want me to become one of your 'officiants'?"
- "Do you want to become one of them?"
- "No, I am a Xhrystian!"
- "That would not be an issue - Noxon does not care whether the officiants believe or not in its divine nature, or do participate to our church activities for any mystic reason."
- "I beg your pardon?"
- "If you believe that Noxon is just some kind of sufficiently advanced alien that faps over images of beautiful women undergoing" - the old woman waved her hand, to signify t
hat she was not going to specify what both knew happened in the Noxon rites - "and, in exchange, stabilize the rotations of our planet, then participate does not represente worshipping a god different from your own."
- "What are you saying?"
- "If you do not want to become an officiant, there are plenty of organizational jobs that must be covered, and that you can take to contribute to our organization survival. If perchance you fancy become an officiant, there is no reason why you could not, simply accepting its basic nature as a toil that someone must do to keep our world alive."
- "No worship required?"
- "None whatsoever - Noxon does not care, whichever god the women sacrificed to its pleasure may really worship."
- "So, we can have a flat? Gratis?"
- "Great is its clemency, and such is its offer. Unfortunately, you must realize that the Akeron Officiant House is, literally, a closed community. You daughters will probably find it an excessively sanitized environment, as no alcohol nor drugs are allowed in."
- "And I do not have to worship your god, in any way?"
- "No reason to - after all, it is not a God. At most, it is some god-like entity that has accompanied the very colonization of our world in the last five thousand years."
- "I will think about it"
- "The offer is open-ended, but I think that it would be better if your belongings were out of your landlady's reach as soon as possible. Here, this is my visit card - if you decide to accept our lord's hospitality, call me, and I will arrange everything."
By the end of the week, a the last job hope that Shayna had had disappeared, and she found herself composing the number of the bursar.
By the end of the month, her and the kids were living inside the Officiant's house, where she soon found herself employed as a cook assistant, with an initially meagre pay that allowed her to continue pursuing her re-training courses.
Noxon had been vewry generous, indeed.
Of course, it would have taken a while, for Shayna to realize that she had never been the true target behind its offer.
Showing posts with label the bastard 'god'. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the bastard 'god'. Show all posts
Friday, 30 December 2016
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
Nine is a famiy.
Xanthippe Xeyos arrived in her office the usual way - she flew in from the west window.
As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?
She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.
The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.
- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."
The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.
Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.
- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"
- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office hours.
Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.
Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12, if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.
That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.
In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.
They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.
Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless".
- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.
- "My name is Dana."
- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."
- "Dana, call me Dana."
The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.
- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"
The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.
- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.
The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.
The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.
At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.
- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"
Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.
- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"
- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""
- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No", while cleaning her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face
- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"
The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded
- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."
The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.
However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.
Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly.
As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.
The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .
Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.
- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".
- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me - I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."
So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.
She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."
Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.
- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"
- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."
Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.
As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.
- "Why were you in my office?"
- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.
An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family... but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.
She was not the original Molly, either.
Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.
All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.
It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat.
That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.
The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.
But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.
Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.
To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.
- "Do you want to meet her?"
- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."
- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".
- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency, the..."
Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.
- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."
- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"
Not exact, but almost.
Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.
Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.
It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity, but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".
What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.
If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.
A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.
- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"
-·"Yes."
- "It is not going to work."
- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."
- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."
- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"
- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."
- "No, don't say it"
- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."
- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.
- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"
- "Count on it."
And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.
- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child whisper in a storm five km away.
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.
Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.
Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented, but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable.
The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.
- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.
- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.
- "It wasn't so bad a joke."
- "I am not used to people joking around me."
"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.
Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.
Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".
Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.
- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"
Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 - fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.
- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"
- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.
- "What is he, for you to care?"
- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."
- "You still have feelings for him?"
The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".
They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.
They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.
The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space, "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.
- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.
Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.
The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.
She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.
Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.
----
For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.
She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.
Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".
"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.
So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.
Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.
The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?
In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.
- "Let me pass"
- "You know that I can't."
- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"
- "It seems a good idea"
- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"
- "What do you mean?"
- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"
- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.
- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor.
The punch was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the reinforced concrete wall of the pool.
For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.
When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies, only to see a somewhat odd scene.
Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.
That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.
With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.
She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.
- "Do you know these women?"
- "Kind of, dear."
Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.
Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.
As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.
Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.
Then, she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.
- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?" - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.
- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"
- "12746, as of last week"
- "So, you do know"
- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."
If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.
- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"
- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry. Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.
- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."
Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.
- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."
Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.
The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.
Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy.
Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.
The unknown sister arrived, with a strange jar that she left to razor, and went on to Molly
- "We gotta change you out of this"
Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.
Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm. The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.
-"Psychic powers?"
- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." - Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."
- "I am sorry"
- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"
Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.
- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "
- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"
Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.
- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of us."
- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"
- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."
The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".
So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.
Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.
Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was.
As always when it was raining along her flightpath, she was wearing her hood with rotor-glasses. No normal human would ever use something like those, but the Woman of Titanium was not really normal, wasn't she?
She had felt the presence of the intruder from half a km away - however, the building security system was also aware of this visitor, too, which meant that this girl was likely not moved by bad intentions, or completely ineffectual.
The girl - now looking at a glass close full of starships models - was a Molly, one of an unknown number of clone-sisters among whom was Xanthippe's lover, The First Molly.
- "I hope that you have no problem, finding my office, Molly."
The short woman turned around, her face flushed bright red.
Xanthippe's mind registered the dance of the muscles below the brownish skin - this was Molly, all right, as she would be if her favoured past-time was running under the Sun with weights on wrists and ankles and not lying on a sofa, reading some old book. Xanthippe felt a wave of attraction for this "improved" lookalike of her lover - whatever this girl was, she didn't let out the same subliminal, homicidal tension of some of her brethren.
- "Uh, yes. When I entered the building, some nice woman asked me if I was here to see you, and guided me to this place"
- "I suppose you only heard the voice of this woman." - on friday afternoon, Xanthippe was usually the only one to be in the office, as local Earthlings had problems getting the 25 hours a week Anipos' Legation working schedule, and many so-called entrepreneurs kept getting angry when they couldn't reach the Legation secretary/liaison officer for Earthbound affairs in old plain office hours.
Xanthippe had tried to explain - plenty of times - that Anipos Prime functioned under a strict 16 hours/week maximum allowed workload law - working more than that was considered "job hoarding", an offense punished with three months of jail for every supernumerary hour/week worked, and with the requisition of all "ill-gotten" wealth.
Of course, 16 hours/week was already more than the planet ecosystem could safely support, and should have already been reduced to 12, if not for the fear that people would turn to hobbies even more resources-wasting than work, out of sheer boredom.
That being the case, Anipos workers were encouraged to slack off as much as possible... with scarce results. "Giving you best at work" was widely considered the best remedy to depression and existential ennuis, so the Anipos tended to assault their sixteen hours jobs like they were in a marathon.
In a galaxy full of long established civilizations that had to learn that there was no practical way to relieve ecological pressures through other-worlds expansion, the Anipos' choice wasn't even the worst scenario.
They still managed to keep their 600 millions inhabitants reasonably happy and busy.
Other worlds had simply written off whole underclasses and social strata - often, several billions citizens of them - through the institution of severely demanding policies for the release of reproduction permits.
Not as much "kill the poor" as "let them die off, childless".
- "It was the building's automation control, Molly." - Xanthippe managed to keep any sarcasm out of her voice... the other Molly may be sophisticated players in "the Game", but this one was possibly made of a different material. Xanthippe shared her bed with another "different Molly", so she knew that it was entirely possible.
- "My name is Dana."
- "I thought that it was Molly, like your sisters."
- "Dana, call me Dana."
The young woman seemed distressed, in a very human way - nothing tingled on Xanthippe super-human senses.
- "So, who are you? A spy? An enforcer? An assassin? Don't tell me, an existentialist poet?"
The banterous question irritated the girl, which was fine - Xanthippe and the building still didn't perceive the host of odd forces and sensor probes that surrounded all of Molly's sisters. This one was either human, or had better self-control than any of her sisters.
- "I... this was a mistake." - And like this, she ran away - at less than 30 km/h. A speed that wasn't even worth the "paltry" adjective, for Xanthippe standards.
The Betan woman considered it for a couple of seconds, then stepped out from the window.
The black haired kid took some seconds more to come out of the Legation office building - she was fast, for a normal human, and continued half-walking, half-running, till the Legation building was well out of sight.
At which point, she bent against a wall and started crying.
- "So, you are not a poet, What do you do?"
Dana, startled, looked up, tears running her mascara and a question written in her stare - how the hell Xanthippe was there? Xanthi found her almost irresistible - a Molly with some deeper feelings? Oh, my.
- "I am much slower than your sisters, but so are you. So, who are you, and what do you do?"
- "I am an acrobat with the "Cirque Orferes""
- "Can you fly?" - the little woman shook her head - "No", while cleaning her tears with a hand, making even more of a mess of her face
- "OK, I can walk, and I'd like to walk you to The Bretwitch Canteen, two blocks from here. Would you accept to dine with me?"
The Molly looked at her, incredulous, then nodded
- "Good - and we will discuss what disturbs you so much."
The Bretwitch was a much younger institution than it stated in the logo - it started as a Kosher Deli takeaway right before the middle of 21st century, and it wasn't the best place to dine in town.
However it was affordable, the cuisine was decent and it also had a great anti-paparazzi policy.
Most of the clients were mobsters, not above disappearing the photographer that took the wrong photo. Other clients were way worse, and didn't leave corpses for the families to mourn. Arguably, Xanthippe was among said others, profile-wise, even if she did not kill people directly.
As in a badly written book, Dana's acrobat lover, a certain Simon, had fallen ill.
The illness was genetic, incurable and fatal - one of those 6000 or so ailments that were so rare that hardly anybody studied them, and virtually no money was invested in a cure. Unfortunately, a great number of these illnesses resulted from genetic mutations intervened after the lost of hyper-travel had fragmented the human Galaxy in its current form, some 50000 years before - no cures could be found on other worlds, as the rest of humanities didn't share the relevant mutations. .
Simon was the guy for whom Dana had bailed out of "The Other" organization.
- "Really? You simply took, said 'To hell with this', and walked out?" - Xanthippe was amazed - "No repercussions?".
- "I couldn't fly any more, or remember half of the days from before I left the group." - Dana looked out of the window, probably to hide the pain in her own eyes from the inquisitive alien - "It took me months, to learn how to move with only my muscles. 'It' had no reasons to kill me - I was a good example of what happened when one left its service."
So, "it" didn't broke her knees... simply because it would have been redundant.
She fixed her glare on Xanthippe, suddenly - "I think that I would have killed me, if not for Simon."
Her eyes took on a liquid light, as if she was just one step from openly crying - which she probably was.
- "And he took you as a partner in the acrobatic act, too?"
- "Turns out, the `pale shadow of what I was is still good enough to learn to walk on a rope. I am small, but strong, and my reflexes are still good."
Xanthippe didn't vouch his ideas on this last detail - the tune-ups that made Dana's brain able to perform at "hyper-high speed" were the kind of biological machinery that couldn't really be removed, at least not without converting someone into a vegetal.
As such, while her body could have been downgraded to be only human (maybe), her reflexes were still - probably - very fast, bordering on absurdly rapid.
- "Why were you in my office?"
- "I have seen a gossip article in a magazine, you with your... last lover. The first of us" - the "real" Molly... Xanthippe had realized, at the very beginning , that none of the clones realized that "her" Molly, too, was a clone - possibly, one from a `previous batch.
An unmodified one, with no cybernetic black-boxes stuffed inside, who had been allowed to grow on her own terms in an adoptive family... but the methylation markers, the telomeres shortening and other indices were there.
She was not the original Molly, either.
Most likely, the last one in a "control group" of "naturals" that had been dispersed and used - as base reference - to steer the development of the "souped-up" versions.
All of them, clones of the same girl, that likely was 11 when her material was sampled, some moment half the first quarter of the previous century.
It was, possibly, also the reason why they all had roughly the same age - the bio-techs had found no indices that they were rapid-grown in a vat.
That was a trick nobody, in the whole galaxy, had ever managed to pull satisfactorily - at least, not without extensive genetic modifications, liable to wreak systemic havocs down the poor kid.
The "Mollys" really were, all, sisters - twins.
But the "supers", for some reason, had convinced themselves that their "known" normal sister was, really, the source.
Xanthippe suspected that this shaped a lot of their existential narrative - in fact, "the Assassin" had hinted, in one of her late night incursions, about what could happen if ever Xanthippe made Molly cry.
To be honest, the Woman of Titanium slept badly for a week or so, after that... her relationship with the unsuspecting girl was a trilling, double edged challenge.
- "Do you want to meet her?"
- "No, I want to let my... former employer know that I am available to come back, if he can cure Simon."
- "Why coming to me? Just send a phone call to " - Xanthippe paused, while she reflected on it - "my office. I am pretty sure that 'it' wiretapped any cable in and out of it, the very moment that they were laid down".
- "So did the US Government, and the NSSSR, the United Nations Intelligence Directorate, the three Republics of China, Japan, South Korea, the EU Global Intelligence Agency, the..."
Dana may have lost half of what made her whatever she was, before her escape to freedom, but apparently she still understood enough of "the game" to avoid the most obvious blunders.
- "Stop, I get it. Publicizing your former nature as an affiliate of the 'Greatest World Terroristic Network', among the fine listeners of my channel, would not improve your friend's health. Whereas, human intelligence around the legation is virtually nil, given the building's AI bad habits."
- "Nowadays, Intelligence agencies seldom invest more than a tiny percentage of their budget in 'foot soldiers'. So, entering the building was safer than calling on the phone, no?"
Not exact, but almost.
Xanthippe couldn't help but think that this was because most "global threats" surrounding the Legation, as perceived by the various nation-states, were not humans in nature.
Yet, it was a mistake... the 'bots in the space kept almost all their point-to-point links well away from the Earth space, but those of them that had longer maintained an android avatar on Earth did met through them, at a couple of bars, and chatted about work.
It costed her a lot to discover this, and the old Russian operatives that stalked the two bars since she had pinned down their locations were her most conspicuous infraction to the Legation budget integrity, but it was also the way she got most of her useful information on the "hidden alien threats operating on the planet".
What her chief then really did with her reports, Xanthippe had some clue, and she gladly ignored it.
If the boss preferred printed reports as toilet paper, it was not her fault.
A sudden, low buzz caught her attention. She recognized the ultrasound feed, from quite a few of her most worrying recent moments. "Razor", the most murderous of the "sisters", was near.
- "So, you hope that I pass the message to one of them? That you are ready to come back to the fold, in exchange for saving Simon?"
-·"Yes."
- "It is not going to work."
- "Why? ... I am sure that they already know that I contacted you."
- "I am sure that they already knew everything about Simon. I do not think that your 'Boss' can do anything for him."
- "What? No. It can do everything it want! It does everything it wants!"
- "Reprogramming a broken genetic code in an adult body is much more difficult than assembling a cyborg on a developing foetus, or embryonic genetic engineering. It almost never works as intended..."
- "No, don't say it"
- "... I think that, if 'it' had a cure, you'd already received an offer. He can't - Godlike may it appear, but it still has limits."
- "I said you to shut up!" - by the look of it, Dana would likely have beaten Xanthi's ass on the spot. Knowing her sisters, if she was still "amped up", she would had a good shot at it, too... somehow, the thought that she could not, not any more at least, saddened Xanthippe.
- "Thanks for your time. Will you pass my message, when you can?"
- "Count on it."
And with that, the little half-Asian was out, with her athletic step as enticing as "Xanthippe's Molly" lazy stroll was.
- "If you care to join me, the veal is marvellous, here." - The words were spoken plainly - after all, "Razor" probably had the same kind of hearing that Xanthippe had, able to listen a child whisper in a storm five km away.
The new arrived moved the chair to sit, and Xanthippe looked up and stopped. This was "razor" - Xanthippe had decided to call this most murderous of the "Mollys" with that name, because she often had a bloody sword on her shoulders - but the girl gave out no hint of her usual, "I shall slay you viciously" energy.
Without it, Xanthippe realized that she was younger, way younger than Molly, as this later was probably from a prototype batch.
Xanthippe suspected that fine-tuning the growth of a super-powered child so that she became useful, crazy enough to do what was commanded to her independently of the horror it represented, but sane enough to not lose control and start killing on her own, was an art that required attention and luck. The second meaning that, for each sisters she had met many, many other had likely been slaughtered when they proved too unstable.
The waitress appeared, to take a restaurant order, an eyebrow raised at the newcomer.
- "I have a penchant for twin sisters" - Xanthippe had long since learned that, on this planet, one could survive any embarrassing situation, as long as she was the first making fun of it.
- "Who doesn't? The difficult is getting them in bed together." - The waitress took their order, while "razor" continued to be flabbergasted.
- "It wasn't so bad a joke."
- "I am not used to people joking around me."
"Because you usually look like considering the fastest way to disembowel them, girl" - the thought didn't reach Xanthippe's lips.
Then, the leather-clad alien vixen considered the air that her potential assassin sported at the moment, and sighed.
Why the Hell even this had to be a clueless, naïve girl at heart? Xanthippe lived much better when she could simply file her under "crazy assassin bitch".
Xanthippe blurted - "Today you look much prettier than usual" - and it was true.
- " Do you really think that we can't help - what's his name?- Simon?"
Xanthippe attacked the veal - 450 calories that would take ten days to consume, with her absurd metabolism, or eight round trips to the North Pole at Mach 3 - fully conscious that her thighs didn't really need any more fat, if she wanted to be able to slid inside her "leather" armour suit.
- "Do tell me, wouldn't your people already have offered that barter, if 'It' could fix the man?"
- "He is going to die" - "Razor" looked at least as shocked as her sister, which most definitely surprised the alien.
- "What is he, for you to care?"
- "He is someone that made my beloved sister happy - that made me happy, for a while, before I conceded defeat to Dana."
- "You still have feelings for him?"
The subsequent, prolonged silence eloquently answered "yes".
They finished the meal, exchanging barely a word, then walked out of the restaurant, together - the short, black-haired "potentiated" girl still lost in her thoughts.
They took the causeway across the main road, to the old Mulry Square.
The place, as always, was semi-desert. Near the centre of the triangular space, "Razor" stopped, forcing Xanthippe to look back - the girl had a sad, sweet expression.
- "Simon, Dana - I love them both, dearly." - and with this, she jumped out at the ludicrous acceleration rate that was the hallmark of the "suppa-girls", being well on a suborbital path by the time Xanthippe lost her.
Xanthippe looked around - if anybody saw the scene, his or her brain hardly registered it.
The alien, whose take off were considerably slower - her maximum acceleration was about a tenth of the 500G or so that Razor and her sisters used habitually - repressed a bout of envy.
She considered the fastidious spectacle of the humans around the square, pointing fingers at her when SHE would take off, and decided to go back to the legation office the hard way. Walking.
Which would burn about 1 pico-calories of fat , in her stupid matter-energy converting muscles.
----
For some months, Xanthippe had no reasons to linger on the other "normal" Molly, her lover and their tragic history.
She decided to not mobilise any official resource, to check what it was of the two.
Apparently, the only result of the encounter was that, now, the "mob-style" menaces were delivered by the first Molly that she ever met, the stealthy young girl that Xanthippe nicknamed "Insider".
"Razor" was much better at it, probably being a fan of "Goodfellas", "the Goodfater", "Lucky Luciano" and "Life and deaths of Pasquale Barra" - Insider simply didn't emanate the right danger. Yet, "Razor" was, probably, simply unwilling to meet again someone who had seen all her vulnerability.
So, in her obliviousness, Xanthippe did not know that Simon Oersteheld, a famous acrobat, had died aged 32, because of a debilitating illness, and did not prepare for the apparition of any grief-stricken, crazed acrobat female entering her suburban villa.
Like a remorseful thought, Dana appeared by the border of their big pool, scaring the hell out of the Betan, who didn't really want her beloved girlfriend to discover the whole clones business any more than any other of the involved.
The exception, it appeared, was Dana - was she there to shatter Molly's life? To punish her sisterhood, for not helping her lover?
In less than a second, Xanthippe was in front of the diminutive girl, realizing at the same time that she couldn't really force herself to hurt the poor woman.
- "Let me pass"
- "You know that I can't."
- "Why? So she can continue believing that she is the one and only Molly, an that there is nothing odd in her life?"
- "It seems a good idea"
- "Apart sharing her bed with the only accredited superwoman in the world?"
- "What do you mean?"
- "You got to her because you were tracking down one of us, no? Would she be happy, to know that she is just a replacement for the real deal?"
- "it is not like this" - A small part of Xanthippe, though, was telling her that it was exactly like that, which is why the super-strong woman lost control, for one of the very few times in her life. She gripped the trespasser's forearm, and squeezed a little too much, forgetting that this was NOT one of the much tougher than steel sisters of her lover. The sound of the acrobat's radio breaking filled Xanthippe's heart with horror.
- "Oh, my Gods, I didn't mean it. I " - she never managed to complete the phrase, as something emerged from the shadows and punched her away, with the kind of blow that would dwarf one from Mjolnir, the fabled hammer of the Norse god of Thunder, Thor.
The punch was an hook from high-down, given by a flying, much enraged Razor - Xanthippe landed in the pool, blowing half of the water against the house front, like a localized tsunami, while the super-resistant woman stopped the flight a good meter into the ground, after having broken through the reinforced concrete wall of the pool.
For the first time in her life, Xanthippe lost consciousness without being in a Dojo with nullifying fields.
When she get back in herself - maybe fifteen seconds later - she steamed toward her enemies, only to see a somewhat odd scene.
Two Mollys - one looked like "Insider", the other was a yet unknown sister - were keeping Razor from finishing her job. Dana was apathetic, her broken arm twisted in an odd way - a sight that immediately sobered up Xanthippe.
That was her doing .- a poor girl, bereft for the loss of her life's love, had made a mistake and Xanthi had lost it, and hurt someone that did not merit being harmed, just because that someone may had stepped onto a truth.
With her clarity back, Xanthi realized that the quartet was being illuminated, by a handheld torch of some kind. Their expressions were very much the ones of a bunch of deers crossing a highway, in Montana, in the middle of the Hunting season.
She turned back, slowly, and smiled at "her" Molly, that did not look very amused.
- "Do you know these women?"
- "Kind of, dear."
Xanthippe suddenly felt like some male protagonist of one of the old movies that Molly insisted on watching together, when caught by his wife with a host of scantly dressed girls, out of some ungodly coincidence.
Apart the details that they were all women, dressed up from neck to toe - it was a chilly April evening, and "supers" may survive skinny dip in liquid nitrogen, but they do feel cold like anybody else - that it was no coincidence that they were all together and that there was no sex involved, Xanthi was exactly on the mark.
As any of those fictional husbands, she was in deep trouble.
Molly darted back and forth the lamplight, on each of her doubles and on her wife, and back.
Then, she switched to the house - the water wall had broken inside, trashing the ground floor. Molly herself was dripping wet, which kind of prompted a secondary but intriguing question.
- "Uh,Molly, have you ever had... that?" - the torch was, in fact, attached to the barrel of a pretty menacing gun. Not that it could hurt anybody there, apart Molly. And Dana.
- "Woman, do you have an idea of how many ass-holes send me messages, to tell me that they are going to convert me back to Earth cocks, ever since we started going out?"
- "12746, as of last week"
- "So, you do know"
- "Yes. Would you mind put it down? The only non-bullet-proof in this mess is that girl - she has suffered enough and I do not think that she is any danger."
If seeing Dana's broken arm calmed down Xanthippe, seeing a dripping Molly had the same effect on Razor.
- "May I suggest that we take the discussion to a more comfortable place?"
- "That's a nice idea, but, as you can see, our home is a bit in disarray." - The voice of Molly was pretty dry. Xanthippe wondered what her wife was thinking, seeing four sisters she knew nothing about, yet were familiar with her life-partner.
- "We have a safe house, down the road. It is big enough for everybody. And it is warm - we love warmth."
Molly looked interrogatively at Xanthippe, who shrugged.
- "Me, I am not sure, but they would never, ever harm you, dear, believe me."
Molly shook her head - "I should really have listen to my room-mate" - lowered her gun, and the whole group went to the safe house - flying.
The safe house was big, and it was warm. Very warm.
Razor distended Dana on the central sofa - that looked every bit as comfortable as much as expensive - and took her arm, pulled, and managed to compose the fracture., while Insider laid her hands on the sides of the acrobat's head. Probably the shock hadn't wore off yet, and the ex-super kept looking vaguely giddy.
Xanthippe imagined that the "amped-up" girl could see the bones under the skin every bit as well as she did. When the black-haired girl continued her manipulations, till she managed to put back in place a solitary splinter, the Betan was sure of it.
The unknown sister arrived, with a strange jar that she left to razor, and went on to Molly
- "We gotta change you out of this"
Molly went away, more than a bit surprised, pulled by the enthusiastic little woman.
Razor took the content of the jar - seemingly, a greenish slime - with her hand, and laid it against her sister's arm. The slime soon ran up and down the arm, and meld itself in the shape of a cast.
Razor made a sign to Insider and, in a matter of seconds, Dana was sleeping.
-"Psychic powers?"
- "Nope - we simply have the codes to reactivate her dormant implants, and command them specific actions." - Insider was almost cheerful - "so, sleepy sleepy and pain locked out, while the nanos fix her bones. In a couple of days she will be as good as new."
- "I am sorry"
- "It happens - I have broken far too many bones not to know it"
Razor led herself fall in he second, unoccupied of the three sofas.
- "Sorry for my punch - you didn't completely earn it. She was looking for a fight, though she was right. "
- "Molly has seen you guys. What do we tell her?"
Razor looked Xanthippe for some seconds, raised her eyebrows, looking at once more childish and adult.
- "The truth, what else? Ignorance isn't going to protect her. After all, YOU jumped on her because of us."
- "What if she decides that I really was using her to get insights on you people? What if she leaves me?"
- "I finally get to kill you, my dear, like you richly deserved."
The day after, much explanation was given -Xanthi managed to convince Molly of her innocence. Molly was intrigued by these unknown sisters, and decided to learn as much as possible, possibly from the most independent source, the "Sleeping beauty".
So, she decided to "haunt" the safe house for a while.
Of course, as any choice in life, it was bound to have consequences.
Like meeting her other five "sisters", and decide that she loved them all... at which point, Xanthippe finally knew in how much of a deep shit she really was.
Tuesday, 15 November 2016
The Sphere
Prisoner 753 stared at the place from whom, she hoped, the food was going to come.
Over time, she had understood the geometry of her cell... it was a white sphere, internally coated with Teflon, rotating over bidirectional rollers, about five meters in diameter.
It was completely white, with led lighting inside its mass.
It looked like an infinite white space, and she couldn't find its limits in any way, as the sphere moved with her. Whatever she did, she was always at the bottom, in an apparently infinite white space.
Every now and then questions came from the walls. She answered all of them, as well as she could.
In a way, she felt that she earned to be a prisoner - her memory was full of atrocious things that she had done, any of which was punished with years of jail, life imprisonment or death, in most of Earth's countries.
From any legal point of view, however, her detention was arbitrary, and it was really violating the very laws of the USA and the 2056 U.N. convention on human rights - not that the U.S. had deigned to sign it.
Agent Harmon was looking at the big show - as he called the special detention centre - with badly hidden disgust. In many ways, what he was seeing was the incarnation of the very reasons why he had joined the FBI - to catch who did this kind of things to others.
In a year, nothing had changed inside the cell... the woman known as Keisha Lawson hadn't tried to escape, had always been collaborative - as much as she could, Harmon noted drily - and she had never lost her mind.
- "And that is the most worrying factor, the very reason why we cannot release her."
Pedro Morales, PhD., M.D. concluded, before realizing that he had to delve more into the details.
- "Every precedent test subject had suffered a psychotic crisis, by the third day of solitary confinement inside the sphere. There are no clues, in her behaviour that suggest, that she is any less stable than she was when we placed her inside. Her body may be only mildly modified, but her mind is definitely not human."
Harmon looked at the scientist, with the cordiality of a mongoose meeting a cobra.
- "So, she's a though nut to crack, and you want to keep her there till she cracks, because as long as she does not crack and goes nut, she proves that she is not a she?"
- "If she is not human, she has no rights and her detention is entirely legal, Special Agent Harmon."
Harmon suspected that an entire galaxy of slightly different human forms, many arguably much more different from the human baseline than their prisoner, would probably object to this syllogism.
Unfortunately,USA and aliens had a contentious relationship ever since the times of president Trump, way before the galaxy gave the word its current context.
Harmon was here only to visit the girl, before going on to make his final report and recommendations to the Attorney General Office - he was not there to pick a fight with someone that had mastered the difficult combo of being a scientist and a bigot.
Everybody was free to spend their free time as they prefer, but Harmon was pretty sure that the mess had an ulterior purpose. The chiefs of Lawson, of whom she could really say very little, had led her to fall in the USA Government's hands.
As for why... the thing that made more sense was that, now they knew what it was going to be their likely treatment, their other operatives would disregard completely any suggested defection.
It was so obvious, that Harmon had difficulty believing that any of his superiors could fall for it, yet here she was, long after it had been virtually proven that she had nothing more to say.
Still imprisoned, without trial or even any intention of indicting her, as it could reveal the existence of yet another foreign secret agency, operating on the US soil, well beyond the control of the US government.
Which, of course, was a bad idea, in a day and age where the American public was already questioning the value of a federal government that couldn't rein in the Alien invaders of Earth ,or their robotic puppets.
Let said public know that there was not one, but two more powers- even more aliens than the E.T.- that operated virtually freely on US territory,would probably result in yet another tumultuous season of unleashed populist nationalism, that the country could hardly afford.
Even if the fact that said agencies had none of the qualms, in using violence, as the Anipos and their robots probably justified the panic.
A new right wing government would hardly change anything, of course... the scientists were adamant in their evaluations, two hundred years to close the technical gap with the Anipos technology - the one seen during the war, and embodied in the 'bots - maybe less, if the social environment changed and the talents that today went into programming social media - and stock market automatic tools - could be lured back to much needed, but low-income, activities like basic technological development and theoretical physics.
Until then, whatever the leaning of the President in charge, the US Government had to play ball. Like almost every country on Earth had to do with the US, after the fall of the Soviets, for about seventy years.
Harmon stopped at the sobering thought - this was how the operatives of half a century of rogue states had probably felt, angry and impotent at openly pursuing the real interests of their nations, because these infringed those of the world only hiperpower.
Forced to use crappy and unreliable surrogates, like financing terrorists or pursuing soft power approaches, financing cultural institutions.
He picked the microphone, and started interrogating the prisoner.
At the end of that day, its frustration was as hard and headache-inducing as it was the first time that he met her, her lapses infuriating for both.
He turned in his report, and was happy that, for other four weeks, he would be spared that pain.
One week later, his task group operated a sting, to catch an elusive network selling stim-records of what could only be called snuff-actions.
The technology was alien in origin, and allowed to memorize a subject's experience from his or her point of view. Two US senators had died of an heart attack, when they had switched from the assassin's to the victim's stimuli feed.
The technology hadn't been forbidden yet, though its near-narcotic and addictive characteristics were quite obvious, because of a powerful lobbying from the Hi-Tech transnational that had commercialized it.
The political implications of the deaths being complex enough, the best course of action was infiltrating the ring and RICO its components for the crimes committed producing the stim-records - the violation, brutal beating and final dismemberment if two young women.
Interpreting a wily snake of a would-be smuggler, Harmon was intimately happy, back at delivering to justice people that richly deserved to be arrested and charged for their crimes.
If the American dream had died with the middle class in the 4th industrial revolution, there was still truth, justice and the Apple Pie, worth fighting for.
His inner happiness died when he met the producer of the material.
- "Chief Special Agent Harmon, I suppose."
In front of him, stood an older and much colder Keisha Lawson - a sister, if the prisoner ever had one.
- "Clone?"
- "We all are. How does my sister go?"
Harmon reviewed all of it, under the light of this revelation...
- "Don't you know?" - he asked,his tone strongly implying incredulity.
- "Yes, I know, but I'd like a second point of view."
- "She is holding up all too well, considering."
- "They are ever going to free her?"
Harmon realized something that chilled him to his bones
- "Has she ever done something?"
- "Fifteen years as kindergarten teacher, then your marines killed our pacifist princess, and she was swamped by a flux of someone else's memories."
- "Kindergarten teacher?"
- "Yes, then, a technical glitch, and she believes to be an amnesiac operative... and some part of us wanted to see how things would turn out. It is proving... illuminating."
- "Are you going to kill me?"
- "Why? - You clearly believe in your work, you will try to get the poor innocent girl free. You will become an embarrassment for your superiors, that need that woman to be the most dangerous terrorist on Earth."
- "She is associated with your organization."
- "Associated by being born a slave. Nothing more."
- "Why? Why the cloning, the modifications, for a teacher?"
- "Genetics makes for just a rough sketch, then life refinishes it with large strokes of hazard. She proved incapable of suitable levels of violence, in-utilizable as an operative, so her black boxes were removed, leaving only what was needed to keep her under surveillance. A mistake, as it left her open to the glitch that sent her to Washington."
- "I am going to arrest you, and your colleagues." - Harmon meant it, with all his heart.
- "These records are made completely of simulated material, the two models are alive and well and ready to appear, if called to witness before a jury. The technology is perfectly legal, and I think it will stay legal for a long time, its potential for social disruption notwithstanding. Those two senators accepted to assume their risks, when the change point of view menu was prompted. The worst I can risk is some fine, and being sued by the families, if they do not mind exposing their beloved relatives as perverts that died, for the pleasure of experiencing the brutal killings of two teenaged girls."
- "Not to mention, Marine - the last time a battalion of you met one of us that knew you were coming, it almost lost its battle flag."
The black woman started scribbling, on a small bloc that she took out of her purse. She continued for about a minute, before handing a sheet covered with minute scripts to the petrified - controlling its rage - Harmon.
- "These are the true identification data of the woman in that fish bowl. It should be easy for you, to demonstrate that she is, indeed, Kira Lawson of Canterbury , Connecticut, and that she has spent all her life as a teacher, there, with only one fine for entering a city centre on a bike - pedalling - as her rap sheet."
- "She was a green nut, never used a personal powered vehicle. Well, none of us does, really - but that's because we go by matter-energy direct conversion. Nuclear is underpowered, by that standard."
- "Why do you give me this?"
- "I thought that you needed some help self-destroying your career."
And, as that, she was gone. The memory of his hidden recorder was blank, and Harmon looked at the little paper with very mixed feelings.
He read, and re-read it over the next few days, than he asked a meeting with his director.
It was not going to be the end of his career, but sure it was going to be one long hassle.
At the same time, knowing that his worst enemy thought that he would do the right thing, no matter what... if this was to be the end of his career, it was a good enough epitaph.
Over time, she had understood the geometry of her cell... it was a white sphere, internally coated with Teflon, rotating over bidirectional rollers, about five meters in diameter.
It was completely white, with led lighting inside its mass.
It looked like an infinite white space, and she couldn't find its limits in any way, as the sphere moved with her. Whatever she did, she was always at the bottom, in an apparently infinite white space.
Every now and then questions came from the walls. She answered all of them, as well as she could.
In a way, she felt that she earned to be a prisoner - her memory was full of atrocious things that she had done, any of which was punished with years of jail, life imprisonment or death, in most of Earth's countries.
From any legal point of view, however, her detention was arbitrary, and it was really violating the very laws of the USA and the 2056 U.N. convention on human rights - not that the U.S. had deigned to sign it.
Agent Harmon was looking at the big show - as he called the special detention centre - with badly hidden disgust. In many ways, what he was seeing was the incarnation of the very reasons why he had joined the FBI - to catch who did this kind of things to others.
In a year, nothing had changed inside the cell... the woman known as Keisha Lawson hadn't tried to escape, had always been collaborative - as much as she could, Harmon noted drily - and she had never lost her mind.
- "And that is the most worrying factor, the very reason why we cannot release her."
Pedro Morales, PhD., M.D. concluded, before realizing that he had to delve more into the details.
- "Every precedent test subject had suffered a psychotic crisis, by the third day of solitary confinement inside the sphere. There are no clues, in her behaviour that suggest, that she is any less stable than she was when we placed her inside. Her body may be only mildly modified, but her mind is definitely not human."
Harmon looked at the scientist, with the cordiality of a mongoose meeting a cobra.
- "So, she's a though nut to crack, and you want to keep her there till she cracks, because as long as she does not crack and goes nut, she proves that she is not a she?"
- "If she is not human, she has no rights and her detention is entirely legal, Special Agent Harmon."
Harmon suspected that an entire galaxy of slightly different human forms, many arguably much more different from the human baseline than their prisoner, would probably object to this syllogism.
Unfortunately,USA and aliens had a contentious relationship ever since the times of president Trump, way before the galaxy gave the word its current context.
Harmon was here only to visit the girl, before going on to make his final report and recommendations to the Attorney General Office - he was not there to pick a fight with someone that had mastered the difficult combo of being a scientist and a bigot.
Everybody was free to spend their free time as they prefer, but Harmon was pretty sure that the mess had an ulterior purpose. The chiefs of Lawson, of whom she could really say very little, had led her to fall in the USA Government's hands.
As for why... the thing that made more sense was that, now they knew what it was going to be their likely treatment, their other operatives would disregard completely any suggested defection.
It was so obvious, that Harmon had difficulty believing that any of his superiors could fall for it, yet here she was, long after it had been virtually proven that she had nothing more to say.
Still imprisoned, without trial or even any intention of indicting her, as it could reveal the existence of yet another foreign secret agency, operating on the US soil, well beyond the control of the US government.
Which, of course, was a bad idea, in a day and age where the American public was already questioning the value of a federal government that couldn't rein in the Alien invaders of Earth ,or their robotic puppets.
Let said public know that there was not one, but two more powers- even more aliens than the E.T.- that operated virtually freely on US territory,would probably result in yet another tumultuous season of unleashed populist nationalism, that the country could hardly afford.
Even if the fact that said agencies had none of the qualms, in using violence, as the Anipos and their robots probably justified the panic.
A new right wing government would hardly change anything, of course... the scientists were adamant in their evaluations, two hundred years to close the technical gap with the Anipos technology - the one seen during the war, and embodied in the 'bots - maybe less, if the social environment changed and the talents that today went into programming social media - and stock market automatic tools - could be lured back to much needed, but low-income, activities like basic technological development and theoretical physics.
Until then, whatever the leaning of the President in charge, the US Government had to play ball. Like almost every country on Earth had to do with the US, after the fall of the Soviets, for about seventy years.
Harmon stopped at the sobering thought - this was how the operatives of half a century of rogue states had probably felt, angry and impotent at openly pursuing the real interests of their nations, because these infringed those of the world only hiperpower.
Forced to use crappy and unreliable surrogates, like financing terrorists or pursuing soft power approaches, financing cultural institutions.
He picked the microphone, and started interrogating the prisoner.
At the end of that day, its frustration was as hard and headache-inducing as it was the first time that he met her, her lapses infuriating for both.
He turned in his report, and was happy that, for other four weeks, he would be spared that pain.
One week later, his task group operated a sting, to catch an elusive network selling stim-records of what could only be called snuff-actions.
The technology was alien in origin, and allowed to memorize a subject's experience from his or her point of view. Two US senators had died of an heart attack, when they had switched from the assassin's to the victim's stimuli feed.
The technology hadn't been forbidden yet, though its near-narcotic and addictive characteristics were quite obvious, because of a powerful lobbying from the Hi-Tech transnational that had commercialized it.
The political implications of the deaths being complex enough, the best course of action was infiltrating the ring and RICO its components for the crimes committed producing the stim-records - the violation, brutal beating and final dismemberment if two young women.
Interpreting a wily snake of a would-be smuggler, Harmon was intimately happy, back at delivering to justice people that richly deserved to be arrested and charged for their crimes.
If the American dream had died with the middle class in the 4th industrial revolution, there was still truth, justice and the Apple Pie, worth fighting for.
His inner happiness died when he met the producer of the material.
- "Chief Special Agent Harmon, I suppose."
In front of him, stood an older and much colder Keisha Lawson - a sister, if the prisoner ever had one.
- "Clone?"
- "We all are. How does my sister go?"
Harmon reviewed all of it, under the light of this revelation...
- "Don't you know?" - he asked,his tone strongly implying incredulity.
- "Yes, I know, but I'd like a second point of view."
- "She is holding up all too well, considering."
- "They are ever going to free her?"
Harmon realized something that chilled him to his bones
- "Has she ever done something?"
- "Fifteen years as kindergarten teacher, then your marines killed our pacifist princess, and she was swamped by a flux of someone else's memories."
- "Kindergarten teacher?"
- "Yes, then, a technical glitch, and she believes to be an amnesiac operative... and some part of us wanted to see how things would turn out. It is proving... illuminating."
- "Are you going to kill me?"
- "Why? - You clearly believe in your work, you will try to get the poor innocent girl free. You will become an embarrassment for your superiors, that need that woman to be the most dangerous terrorist on Earth."
- "She is associated with your organization."
- "Associated by being born a slave. Nothing more."
- "Why? Why the cloning, the modifications, for a teacher?"
- "Genetics makes for just a rough sketch, then life refinishes it with large strokes of hazard. She proved incapable of suitable levels of violence, in-utilizable as an operative, so her black boxes were removed, leaving only what was needed to keep her under surveillance. A mistake, as it left her open to the glitch that sent her to Washington."
- "I am going to arrest you, and your colleagues." - Harmon meant it, with all his heart.
- "These records are made completely of simulated material, the two models are alive and well and ready to appear, if called to witness before a jury. The technology is perfectly legal, and I think it will stay legal for a long time, its potential for social disruption notwithstanding. Those two senators accepted to assume their risks, when the change point of view menu was prompted. The worst I can risk is some fine, and being sued by the families, if they do not mind exposing their beloved relatives as perverts that died, for the pleasure of experiencing the brutal killings of two teenaged girls."
- "Not to mention, Marine - the last time a battalion of you met one of us that knew you were coming, it almost lost its battle flag."
The black woman started scribbling, on a small bloc that she took out of her purse. She continued for about a minute, before handing a sheet covered with minute scripts to the petrified - controlling its rage - Harmon.
- "These are the true identification data of the woman in that fish bowl. It should be easy for you, to demonstrate that she is, indeed, Kira Lawson of Canterbury , Connecticut, and that she has spent all her life as a teacher, there, with only one fine for entering a city centre on a bike - pedalling - as her rap sheet."
- "She was a green nut, never used a personal powered vehicle. Well, none of us does, really - but that's because we go by matter-energy direct conversion. Nuclear is underpowered, by that standard."
- "Why do you give me this?"
- "I thought that you needed some help self-destroying your career."
And, as that, she was gone. The memory of his hidden recorder was blank, and Harmon looked at the little paper with very mixed feelings.
He read, and re-read it over the next few days, than he asked a meeting with his director.
It was not going to be the end of his career, but sure it was going to be one long hassle.
At the same time, knowing that his worst enemy thought that he would do the right thing, no matter what... if this was to be the end of his career, it was a good enough epitaph.
Monday, 7 November 2016
In The Name of Noxon (Part 8)
The dream arrived, right when Emily thought that she had finally figured out what to do with her life.
Granny A. could go on, extolling the incredible virtues of the Service of the God Noxon, but Emily knew better - law school, a degree with top marks, internship at "Gordanova&Daughters", then being a regular in the study for about ten years, till they made her a partner and she'll make a ton of money and have a trophy wife - maybe one of those Extra-gorgeous Daughters of Noxon - with whom to have a bunch of trophy kids.
That night, the dream had started pleasantly enough... she was in a great villa, in some place in the planet narrow tropical band, a white-cream sand beach in sight.
The kind of place she wants to buy, whence she will become a successful politician, after the career in legals.
The girl came in, 18 years old, crispy as Protasian can be when they spend their days under the sun - too young to be a presentable trophy wife, but surely one to become a great womb-mother, in another couple of years.
The girl had a sweet expression, that Emily had trouble accepting - every woman so endowed by genetics had her way to exploit her beauty, and many a calculus behind their smile.
She knew it far too well, as she was one of them - grand daughter of two officiants and daughter of a black guard - and SHE was coldly counting in her good look,s as much as on her hard work, to prop her future career.
Yet she could not feel it in the young girl - she seems like she really did not care that she was stunning, which was even more stunning, but in another way.
Truly innocent beauties were the stuff of legend, of fairy tales or pub evenings. Nobody ever saw one in real life; this should have tipped Emily about the fact that she was in a dream.
The kid brought her on a great terrace with an enormous pool.
From there, Emily saw the sea, not distant and some twenty metres below her feet, she then turned to look at the house... it seemed an Alva Äalta design, executed far more flawlessly and with better material than most and replicated two or three times.
White birds, similar to big swallows, flew over the steep stairs that descended to the sea shore.
Evidently this was a hotel, as not even the most fabulously corrupt politician could get that rich without catching the eyes of law enforcement... so, this was a vacation? A pity.
If Emily was being too rational and analytical for a dream, she didn't care.
She just enjoyed the sun, the peace, the luxury of the place, savouring the moment when she would be able to afford it in real life. T
he girl - a waitress? maybe... usually, the ones in the youth hostels and cheap B&B that she had seen were not so impressively humble - came back, and announced
- "The master will meet you shortly. He is eager to confer with you, on matters of the uttermost importance."
Emily cringed at the archaisms, and to the use of a male pronoun for someone who could speak with her.
It was not uncommon, for very obnoxious women ,to usurp the ancient word, even if they were not one of the couple of hundred humans that still had an y chromosome.
Of course, those unhappy soul never left their preserves in the planet's two man-serrails.
The only males on the planet were animals, like their house large k-cat - the only one able to beat Emily at chess.
Smarts as some of them were, they couldn't confer with her... maybe; she always wondered why nobody tried to teach to k-cat to use a keyboard.
The beauty pageant lowered her eyes - really? - as she started introducing their arriving host:
- "His Grace, Lord of Nothing and Master of the Orbital Mechanics, Commander of The Officiants, Defender of the Biosphere, Designer of our Humanity and Culture, Original Colonizer of our World, Noxon the 'god' "
- "Oh, crap, no!" - the words escaped Emily's mouth before she managed to get a grip on herself. T
he enormous, black... male? - man, masn was the word, smirked.
Emily wondered how many thousands women had that very same reaction, in five thousands years - more or less than a hundred?
- "Is this, A Call?" - Emily's voice creaked.
If it was, her life projects were over - famously, one was not compelled by secular forces, to follow the path chosen by the 'god'.... it simply kept badgering her till it drove the poor woman, literally, crazy.
Once in the Service, her legal career would become impossible.
Powerful as they may be, ex`Twenty-Years Officiants tended to keep a behind-the-curtains profile, as having a suspected prophet as an attorney or - worse - a lawmaker seemed, to many and not just outside churches, an affront to the integrity of the churches-state separation, one of the tenets that kept the world from spiralling into never-ending, wasteful wars.
The huge black smiled - perfect teeth and sparkling eyes, for the first time in her life Emily wondered whether had it been a mistake, for her culture, to segregate away the males.
- "Yes, it is."
Emily awoke screaming, ran out of her - and her twins - room, down the hall and up the causeway, to Granny A bungalow, whose door she banged with all her might, till Granny and Aunt Cezanne opened it.
Emily told them of her dream, hoping that the two ancient women would reassure her, telling her that it was just a simple dream brought on by self-suggestion.
At a point, Cezanne asked Emily to describe the birds that she saw, and the young girl did it, very vividly.
The old Officiant smiled sadly - she remembered those same odd frigates from her own Call. If Emily was hoping that this was just a dream, she was probably wrong and, in a couple of days, a pair of Priestesses would arrive from Sassa, to bring little atheist Emily to her fate.
She and A exchanged meaningful glances, and Cezanne lied through her teeth to reassure the girl that they loved so much - Emily needed to sleep well that night, if she had to endure the kind of crash training that often followed these extempore Calls.
Granny A managed to escort the little one back to her bed, and kept her company for a while, till an exhausted Emily fell asleep.
On her way back, she was a bit surprised to see the light still on in their little house .- she expected Cezanne to go back to sleep.
It was not so unusual for their kids to dream the Black Bastard, when she started to re-tell her service tales.
Cezanne had always maintained that the best thing was sleeping over the fuss, and see things calmly in the morning ,after a good breakfast.To date, she had been right and none of the calls had been a real one; after all, she was herself a "Called", so she knew what she was talking about.
- "I didn't think that my tales were having this effect on this generation resident sceptic - dreaming to be called"
- "It wasn't your tales, or a dream." - Cezanne said it plainly, as if it was an obvious fact.
Granny A felt her legs suddenly weak - she had never thought that Emily, of all "her" kids, would enter the Officiant Service - not unless Granny really moved wheels and got her drafted in the Five Years levy.
A Call... Noxon was one sarcastic bitch.
- "Are you sure?"
- "I remember those birds, I have looked for them, as a clue to. where the 'god' has his Villa. They are from a small, uninhabited archipelago in the middle of the Medium Sea."
- "You know where Noxon lives?" - A. couldn't keep the surprise out of her voice.
- "No, only where he goes for holidays, and where the abducted Officiants reside. I do not think that it lives, really."
- "So, is it true? It didn't sound as any Call I heard of - no swooping three days orgy, no whips, rotating dildos, incredibly tasty food, no promise of Earthly and un-Earthly delights, nothing!"
Cezanne eyebrows furrowed, in that way that A, a century after meeting her, still felt endearing.
- "No, it was a Business Call"
A. found the concept preposterous - "Business? From the 'god of practical pranks'?" - she had heard of these, but they were nothing more than another of the legends in the service.
- "Yes. I do not think that it will be a couple of priestesses, to show up to bring her to the 'god', tomorrow."
They went to bed, but neither of them could sleep, and continued arguing about what to do till dawn.
The day after, the new arrived had the looks of an officiant from the Green Island - auburn hairs, tanned skin with dimples, green eyes, perfect white teeth with in a mouth with plumpy and pout lips - and the muscles of a black guard, but surely not the age of a priestess.
More troubling, as she was talking to them and explaining that she was there to take in charge Emily, her feet wandered off the ground.. and refused to go back and touch it, for at least five minutes.
In the Noxon's mythology, there was only one category of the 'god's servants who could fly - "The Messengers".
They were to be dreaded as much as they were, usually, beautiful.
Cezanne and Granny A. were the strongest humans in town, easily as strong as twenty normal women - a Messenger was, to them, what they were to the general population.
Her presence was terrible -the hyper-human could only be there because Noxon wanted Emily to become a Messenger herself, and Messengers... Messengers, the legend was, killed people, and a lot of.
Usually, in accidents - having 500 times the strength of a person, all but their most controlled exertions broke bones, ripped arms out of sockets, crashed windpipes, tore ligaments.
It was suspected that allowing the Messengers to have meaningful, yet safe, human interactions was the real reason why Noxon abducted - and enhanced - some of the officiants, making them much stronger and incredibly more resilient than base humans.
Once she was one of them, Emily could never come back to the broader society.
The messenger took Emily's hand - with extreme care, like it was fas ragile as crystal, realized Cezanne - and, looking the young girl in her eyes, drove her into a small dance, inebriating and apparently careless.
She continued till she hold completely the attention of the short brunette, and then they were twenty metres up, in the air.
- "We are flying!" _ The scream came, terrorized, then the Messenger started flying around, and the screams soon turned into laughs and giggles, and then, into THAT kind of giggles.
On the ground, Granny A. squeezed hard Cezanne's shoulder, in a fit of spite.
- "Emily is going to follow that bitch!"
- "At her age, had someone offered you to fly, would you have said no?"
The Messenger came back, and Emily was on the ground again, in a complete state of exuberant enthusiasm.
She could not stop herself from running around, then went to Granny A. and to her womb-mother, that had finally managed to get back from work.
- "Have you seen? Have you seen? She flies! She can fly, and she say"s I can, too!"
- "If so you chose." - The voice of the messenger came in, hovering in some creepy space between matter-of-fact briskness and velveted suavity.
Mary, Emily's womb-mother, started crying, because she knew that Emily would soon go with the beautiful - monstrous - stranger, and be gone for decades.
The young girl hugged her mother but then, when the Messenger called - "I have to go. Do you want to come with me?", she kissed her, Granny A and Cezanne, said goodbye to her twin, and then ran into the beautiful flyer's arms.
And, finally, she was gone.
_______________________________________________
Emily stood in the middle of what used to be the house's back garden.
Fifteen year before, when she was a head shorter, she had left this place in the arms of a beautiful woman, that would soon become her companion.
The house was still standing then, and her mother and grand-mothers were crying her departure.
She was crying too, today... the One True God militant soldiers from the generational ship "Great Revenge" had stormed the place, used their electro-mag rifles to kill her grannies, and then raped her sisters, mothers and nieces - like only men can do.
It was all her fault, because she was the one that had suggested Noxon to let the new colonizers reach the planet - there was space enough for another half million of persons.
She had not understood how would their patriarchy react to the fate of men on the planet, or that they would refute so adamantly to adopt the techniques of reproduction engineering that could have allowed to painlessly reduce their numbers to an acceptable level in a couple of generations.
Nor had she realized that they would attack the fully pacifist planet, with a military might that had been designed to subdue war-crazy tribes and an almost psychotic hate.
Finally, she never thought that they would exterminate, in the most atrocious possible ways - after all, those women loved pain, no? - as many Officiants as they could lay their hands on.
The death toll on the planet surface had surpassed the million, when Emily - and the other messengers - convinced Noxon to take a more active role. The entity had never interfered in the civil wars and political upheavals on the planet, not once, in all its millenary history. Church is church and state is state.
For a second, in the night's sky, a bright star showed were the Generational Ship was orbiting.
A pellet of fifty kilograms of anti-uranium, a sphere of some 17 cm of diameter with absolutely no active energy sources and as cold as the outer space, impacted on the Generational ship anti-meteorite shield, fragmented and continued its travel... as an anti-matter plasma jet
It annihilated its way inside the two billion tonnes spaceship external anti-radiation shield, converting other fifty kilograms of normal matter into about 9 exajoules of energy - 2,15 Gigatons of TNT.
It wasn't enough to destroy the massive ship, but it damaged its aft defences, so that the successive, one tonne brick of anti-matter passed undetected by the now non-operational "big asteroids" active defence system.
Ten minutes after, a new star appeared - far more brilliant - and, this time, the 43 Gigatons explosion managed to completely rupture the hull.
It also converted enough, of the ship mass, into hot gasses that it changed its orbital dynamics.
Emily knew that many of her space-worthy brethren were up there, saving women and child girls from the wrecked ships internal shelters, while enormous thrusters would come in, from beyond the ship original defensive perimeter, to tow the wreck out of the planetary orbit and into the sun.
As for the men and boys of the ship... she looked around her, at the ruins of what used to be her home, and thought about what hey had done on the planet in the last six weeks.
She couldn't care less about them.
It was all her fault - she thought, for a second.
- "Don't be stupid. I should have just ignored your recommendation, woman. It's my fault."
The voice sounded inside her head - for five thousand years, Noxon had never used the full extent of its communication capabilities, with the women under his command.
Now, all of the Messengers, the surviving Enhanced Officiants and many, many volunteers were all connected inside a mind network, with the shifting conscience of the alien 'god' at the centre.
This was giving the resistance army the same kind of tactical advantages that the invaders had, at the beginning, with their body armour gears and fully integrated headsets.
The same microscopic robots that were responsible of restructuring a small portion of their brains to allow them access to the common mind-space, and to handle the kind of dual-tasking that it required, were also "enhancing" the bodies of most volunteers.
Some of them already approached the strength levels of the "abducted", and were a match for a male in powered armour, in strength, but much faster.
Tactically, the invasion force was hopeless, now that the ship was destroyed.
- "Sung-Tzu: if you want an enemy to surrender, you must give him an alternative to fighting to death."
- "Who cares?" - The answer resonated from inside a hundred thousand female skulls.
Emily took out of the pockets of her "tactical suit" the ceramic knife that she had come to love, and went down the hill, where the rest of her platoon was rounding what was left of the company that had invaded her home-town.
The surviving inhabitants of the city had gathered , and started carrying away the bodies of the citizen that the soldiers had violated and killed.
She looked at the defiant men - soon, they could not call themselves "man" any more.
She reached the first, grabbed his manhood inside the trousers and cut it away, the subtly powered knife requiring only a fraction of her inhuman strength to go through the fabric and the human tissues.
By the end of the month, of the fifty thousand soldiers that had descended on the planet, no man survived.
Granny A. could go on, extolling the incredible virtues of the Service of the God Noxon, but Emily knew better - law school, a degree with top marks, internship at "Gordanova&Daughters", then being a regular in the study for about ten years, till they made her a partner and she'll make a ton of money and have a trophy wife - maybe one of those Extra-gorgeous Daughters of Noxon - with whom to have a bunch of trophy kids.
That night, the dream had started pleasantly enough... she was in a great villa, in some place in the planet narrow tropical band, a white-cream sand beach in sight.
The kind of place she wants to buy, whence she will become a successful politician, after the career in legals.
The girl came in, 18 years old, crispy as Protasian can be when they spend their days under the sun - too young to be a presentable trophy wife, but surely one to become a great womb-mother, in another couple of years.
The girl had a sweet expression, that Emily had trouble accepting - every woman so endowed by genetics had her way to exploit her beauty, and many a calculus behind their smile.
She knew it far too well, as she was one of them - grand daughter of two officiants and daughter of a black guard - and SHE was coldly counting in her good look,s as much as on her hard work, to prop her future career.
Yet she could not feel it in the young girl - she seems like she really did not care that she was stunning, which was even more stunning, but in another way.
Truly innocent beauties were the stuff of legend, of fairy tales or pub evenings. Nobody ever saw one in real life; this should have tipped Emily about the fact that she was in a dream.
The kid brought her on a great terrace with an enormous pool.
From there, Emily saw the sea, not distant and some twenty metres below her feet, she then turned to look at the house... it seemed an Alva Äalta design, executed far more flawlessly and with better material than most and replicated two or three times.
White birds, similar to big swallows, flew over the steep stairs that descended to the sea shore.
Evidently this was a hotel, as not even the most fabulously corrupt politician could get that rich without catching the eyes of law enforcement... so, this was a vacation? A pity.
If Emily was being too rational and analytical for a dream, she didn't care.
She just enjoyed the sun, the peace, the luxury of the place, savouring the moment when she would be able to afford it in real life. T
he girl - a waitress? maybe... usually, the ones in the youth hostels and cheap B&B that she had seen were not so impressively humble - came back, and announced
- "The master will meet you shortly. He is eager to confer with you, on matters of the uttermost importance."
Emily cringed at the archaisms, and to the use of a male pronoun for someone who could speak with her.
It was not uncommon, for very obnoxious women ,to usurp the ancient word, even if they were not one of the couple of hundred humans that still had an y chromosome.
Of course, those unhappy soul never left their preserves in the planet's two man-serrails.
The only males on the planet were animals, like their house large k-cat - the only one able to beat Emily at chess.
Smarts as some of them were, they couldn't confer with her... maybe; she always wondered why nobody tried to teach to k-cat to use a keyboard.
The beauty pageant lowered her eyes - really? - as she started introducing their arriving host:
- "His Grace, Lord of Nothing and Master of the Orbital Mechanics, Commander of The Officiants, Defender of the Biosphere, Designer of our Humanity and Culture, Original Colonizer of our World, Noxon the 'god' "
- "Oh, crap, no!" - the words escaped Emily's mouth before she managed to get a grip on herself. T
he enormous, black... male? - man, masn was the word, smirked.
Emily wondered how many thousands women had that very same reaction, in five thousands years - more or less than a hundred?
- "Is this, A Call?" - Emily's voice creaked.
If it was, her life projects were over - famously, one was not compelled by secular forces, to follow the path chosen by the 'god'.... it simply kept badgering her till it drove the poor woman, literally, crazy.
Once in the Service, her legal career would become impossible.
Powerful as they may be, ex`Twenty-Years Officiants tended to keep a behind-the-curtains profile, as having a suspected prophet as an attorney or - worse - a lawmaker seemed, to many and not just outside churches, an affront to the integrity of the churches-state separation, one of the tenets that kept the world from spiralling into never-ending, wasteful wars.
The huge black smiled - perfect teeth and sparkling eyes, for the first time in her life Emily wondered whether had it been a mistake, for her culture, to segregate away the males.
- "Yes, it is."
Emily awoke screaming, ran out of her - and her twins - room, down the hall and up the causeway, to Granny A bungalow, whose door she banged with all her might, till Granny and Aunt Cezanne opened it.
Emily told them of her dream, hoping that the two ancient women would reassure her, telling her that it was just a simple dream brought on by self-suggestion.
At a point, Cezanne asked Emily to describe the birds that she saw, and the young girl did it, very vividly.
The old Officiant smiled sadly - she remembered those same odd frigates from her own Call. If Emily was hoping that this was just a dream, she was probably wrong and, in a couple of days, a pair of Priestesses would arrive from Sassa, to bring little atheist Emily to her fate.
She and A exchanged meaningful glances, and Cezanne lied through her teeth to reassure the girl that they loved so much - Emily needed to sleep well that night, if she had to endure the kind of crash training that often followed these extempore Calls.
Granny A managed to escort the little one back to her bed, and kept her company for a while, till an exhausted Emily fell asleep.
On her way back, she was a bit surprised to see the light still on in their little house .- she expected Cezanne to go back to sleep.
It was not so unusual for their kids to dream the Black Bastard, when she started to re-tell her service tales.
Cezanne had always maintained that the best thing was sleeping over the fuss, and see things calmly in the morning ,after a good breakfast.To date, she had been right and none of the calls had been a real one; after all, she was herself a "Called", so she knew what she was talking about.
- "I didn't think that my tales were having this effect on this generation resident sceptic - dreaming to be called"
- "It wasn't your tales, or a dream." - Cezanne said it plainly, as if it was an obvious fact.
Granny A felt her legs suddenly weak - she had never thought that Emily, of all "her" kids, would enter the Officiant Service - not unless Granny really moved wheels and got her drafted in the Five Years levy.
A Call... Noxon was one sarcastic bitch.
- "Are you sure?"
- "I remember those birds, I have looked for them, as a clue to. where the 'god' has his Villa. They are from a small, uninhabited archipelago in the middle of the Medium Sea."
- "You know where Noxon lives?" - A. couldn't keep the surprise out of her voice.
- "No, only where he goes for holidays, and where the abducted Officiants reside. I do not think that it lives, really."
- "So, is it true? It didn't sound as any Call I heard of - no swooping three days orgy, no whips, rotating dildos, incredibly tasty food, no promise of Earthly and un-Earthly delights, nothing!"
Cezanne eyebrows furrowed, in that way that A, a century after meeting her, still felt endearing.
- "No, it was a Business Call"
A. found the concept preposterous - "Business? From the 'god of practical pranks'?" - she had heard of these, but they were nothing more than another of the legends in the service.
- "Yes. I do not think that it will be a couple of priestesses, to show up to bring her to the 'god', tomorrow."
They went to bed, but neither of them could sleep, and continued arguing about what to do till dawn.
The day after, the new arrived had the looks of an officiant from the Green Island - auburn hairs, tanned skin with dimples, green eyes, perfect white teeth with in a mouth with plumpy and pout lips - and the muscles of a black guard, but surely not the age of a priestess.
More troubling, as she was talking to them and explaining that she was there to take in charge Emily, her feet wandered off the ground.. and refused to go back and touch it, for at least five minutes.
In the Noxon's mythology, there was only one category of the 'god's servants who could fly - "The Messengers".
They were to be dreaded as much as they were, usually, beautiful.
Cezanne and Granny A. were the strongest humans in town, easily as strong as twenty normal women - a Messenger was, to them, what they were to the general population.
Her presence was terrible -the hyper-human could only be there because Noxon wanted Emily to become a Messenger herself, and Messengers... Messengers, the legend was, killed people, and a lot of.
Usually, in accidents - having 500 times the strength of a person, all but their most controlled exertions broke bones, ripped arms out of sockets, crashed windpipes, tore ligaments.
It was suspected that allowing the Messengers to have meaningful, yet safe, human interactions was the real reason why Noxon abducted - and enhanced - some of the officiants, making them much stronger and incredibly more resilient than base humans.
Once she was one of them, Emily could never come back to the broader society.
The messenger took Emily's hand - with extreme care, like it was fas ragile as crystal, realized Cezanne - and, looking the young girl in her eyes, drove her into a small dance, inebriating and apparently careless.
She continued till she hold completely the attention of the short brunette, and then they were twenty metres up, in the air.
- "We are flying!" _ The scream came, terrorized, then the Messenger started flying around, and the screams soon turned into laughs and giggles, and then, into THAT kind of giggles.
On the ground, Granny A. squeezed hard Cezanne's shoulder, in a fit of spite.
- "Emily is going to follow that bitch!"
- "At her age, had someone offered you to fly, would you have said no?"
The Messenger came back, and Emily was on the ground again, in a complete state of exuberant enthusiasm.
She could not stop herself from running around, then went to Granny A. and to her womb-mother, that had finally managed to get back from work.
- "Have you seen? Have you seen? She flies! She can fly, and she say"s I can, too!"
- "If so you chose." - The voice of the messenger came in, hovering in some creepy space between matter-of-fact briskness and velveted suavity.
Mary, Emily's womb-mother, started crying, because she knew that Emily would soon go with the beautiful - monstrous - stranger, and be gone for decades.
The young girl hugged her mother but then, when the Messenger called - "I have to go. Do you want to come with me?", she kissed her, Granny A and Cezanne, said goodbye to her twin, and then ran into the beautiful flyer's arms.
And, finally, she was gone.
_______________________________________________
Emily stood in the middle of what used to be the house's back garden.
Fifteen year before, when she was a head shorter, she had left this place in the arms of a beautiful woman, that would soon become her companion.
The house was still standing then, and her mother and grand-mothers were crying her departure.
She was crying too, today... the One True God militant soldiers from the generational ship "Great Revenge" had stormed the place, used their electro-mag rifles to kill her grannies, and then raped her sisters, mothers and nieces - like only men can do.
It was all her fault, because she was the one that had suggested Noxon to let the new colonizers reach the planet - there was space enough for another half million of persons.
She had not understood how would their patriarchy react to the fate of men on the planet, or that they would refute so adamantly to adopt the techniques of reproduction engineering that could have allowed to painlessly reduce their numbers to an acceptable level in a couple of generations.
Nor had she realized that they would attack the fully pacifist planet, with a military might that had been designed to subdue war-crazy tribes and an almost psychotic hate.
Finally, she never thought that they would exterminate, in the most atrocious possible ways - after all, those women loved pain, no? - as many Officiants as they could lay their hands on.
The death toll on the planet surface had surpassed the million, when Emily - and the other messengers - convinced Noxon to take a more active role. The entity had never interfered in the civil wars and political upheavals on the planet, not once, in all its millenary history. Church is church and state is state.
For a second, in the night's sky, a bright star showed were the Generational Ship was orbiting.
A pellet of fifty kilograms of anti-uranium, a sphere of some 17 cm of diameter with absolutely no active energy sources and as cold as the outer space, impacted on the Generational ship anti-meteorite shield, fragmented and continued its travel... as an anti-matter plasma jet
It annihilated its way inside the two billion tonnes spaceship external anti-radiation shield, converting other fifty kilograms of normal matter into about 9 exajoules of energy - 2,15 Gigatons of TNT.
It wasn't enough to destroy the massive ship, but it damaged its aft defences, so that the successive, one tonne brick of anti-matter passed undetected by the now non-operational "big asteroids" active defence system.
Ten minutes after, a new star appeared - far more brilliant - and, this time, the 43 Gigatons explosion managed to completely rupture the hull.
It also converted enough, of the ship mass, into hot gasses that it changed its orbital dynamics.
Emily knew that many of her space-worthy brethren were up there, saving women and child girls from the wrecked ships internal shelters, while enormous thrusters would come in, from beyond the ship original defensive perimeter, to tow the wreck out of the planetary orbit and into the sun.
As for the men and boys of the ship... she looked around her, at the ruins of what used to be her home, and thought about what hey had done on the planet in the last six weeks.
She couldn't care less about them.
It was all her fault - she thought, for a second.
- "Don't be stupid. I should have just ignored your recommendation, woman. It's my fault."
The voice sounded inside her head - for five thousand years, Noxon had never used the full extent of its communication capabilities, with the women under his command.
Now, all of the Messengers, the surviving Enhanced Officiants and many, many volunteers were all connected inside a mind network, with the shifting conscience of the alien 'god' at the centre.
This was giving the resistance army the same kind of tactical advantages that the invaders had, at the beginning, with their body armour gears and fully integrated headsets.
The same microscopic robots that were responsible of restructuring a small portion of their brains to allow them access to the common mind-space, and to handle the kind of dual-tasking that it required, were also "enhancing" the bodies of most volunteers.
Some of them already approached the strength levels of the "abducted", and were a match for a male in powered armour, in strength, but much faster.
Tactically, the invasion force was hopeless, now that the ship was destroyed.
- "Sung-Tzu: if you want an enemy to surrender, you must give him an alternative to fighting to death."
- "Who cares?" - The answer resonated from inside a hundred thousand female skulls.
Emily took out of the pockets of her "tactical suit" the ceramic knife that she had come to love, and went down the hill, where the rest of her platoon was rounding what was left of the company that had invaded her home-town.
The surviving inhabitants of the city had gathered , and started carrying away the bodies of the citizen that the soldiers had violated and killed.
She looked at the defiant men - soon, they could not call themselves "man" any more.
She reached the first, grabbed his manhood inside the trousers and cut it away, the subtly powered knife requiring only a fraction of her inhuman strength to go through the fabric and the human tissues.
By the end of the month, of the fifty thousand soldiers that had descended on the planet, no man survived.
Friday, 4 November 2016
36 Seconds
The Anipos Battle Robots Congress was notified by its brethren in the Earth sphere of an enormous explosion of magnetic energy on the surface of the Moon, through their internal hyperlink network.
The Congress issued a general warning, while it pulled the down-clocks to 0 and all the 'bots in the Anipos Army started operating at full computational speed, in a subjective time that was thousands of times slower than for humans.
By T+2 seconds, they had already established that the source of the magnetic flare was a coil-gun installed on the side of the Moon that looked over Earth.
Given the classic efficiency of the Anipos Coil-guns - which had never really improved in centuries - and the detected energy dispersion, the estimated energy of its projectile was in the range 5-10 megatons, which would be proven wildly optimistic...
"The Other" weapon was far less advanced and dispersed much more field than even ancient Anipos designs, so its effective yield was just shy of one megaton of TNT.
Given the characteristics of the weapons, it could be launched only by one of the players in the sector, "The Other".
Even destroyng the projectile wouldn't have changed things very much, as its debris would still be moving toward the planet... the only possibility was that "The Other" had some last-second failsafe.
Again, here the robots were over-estimating their odd companion - its "messengers" could be full of very advanced tech, but the coil-gun on the was a pretty old design that "It" had left there, from an era in which it considered inevitable having too destroy human civilization to survive.
Its projectile was a lot bulkier and slower than what an Anipos design would have used, a two meters long dart of tungsten and electronics weighing about 80 kg, traveling at 10.000 km per second, or 1/30th of the speed of light.
Much easier to spot than the little, 8 kg pellet traveling at a 1/5th of the speed of light that they initially expected.
The Congress was already mourning the deaths, when it realized that their specifics for the falling dart were wrong.
At T+7 seconds, additional data came in from one of"The Other" "messengers" - very troubling data.
The revised dart specifics gave a flight time of 36 seconds, an the data included the likely target, Washington, D.C.
29 seconds were plenty of time, to discuss with "The Other" and convince it that it was making a mistake, though the possibility that the pseudo-artificial intelligence had undergone a massive emotive breakdown meant that their interlocutor could be far less rational than usual.
And it wasn't really rational to begin with, which - again - was a not reassuring detail.
The "rogue" messenger kept sending in new data over the weapon, and it appeared that it indeed there was a way to minimize the effect of a single dart (originally designed as a way to maximize yet hide that of a ten darts offensive assault) by the clever use of a massive color force field in front of the dart.
The shield was meant so that the weapon could select at which height be destroyed and in which way to release its kinetic energy.
It could self-destroyi at high altitude, releasing energy in a 30º wide cone, as a a limited fallout high yeld city destroyer, keep up the shield to go through mountains, to destroy bunkers like the ones in Mount Cheyenne and around Moscow, or going down inside the Earth crust, to release it energy as a tightly focused, massive shockwave that would travel inside the planet, to resurface as a localized Earthquake.
Changing the parameters, in the last case, would result in a tiny, dispersed vibration on half a continent, on the other side of the planet (that would give an incredible amount of raw data to geologists, once they had picked up enough details of the original source of the energy).
"The Other" couldn't stop the weapon, but it could make its bite virtually unnoticeable.
The 'bots just had to convince "It" that it was not the case of killing so many people, that knew nothing of what had been going on even when they had voted for the government that had assaulted the mischievous entity.
Rationally, they knew it was right - unfortunately, The Abomination really was in a full emotive breakdown.
Millisecond after millisecond, it refused the robots perorations, and kept the dart on its steady course.
The robots were also trying to use their resources around the planet, to identify the trajectory of the weapon - tungsten as may it have been, it was covered in anti-radar coating and, as it was a completely passive object in flight, it was very hard to detect it with even the best infrared scanners.
The robots minds were fast, but the physical bodies that they commanded lagged long behind what would have been needed to stop it.
At T+25 seconds, "It" still hadn't show to acknowledge the folly that it had made and the Congress central minds, with their rational approaches, were going nowhere fast.
At T+25.574 seconds, a contribution came in from one of the smaller 'bots than on Earth, EL-21234567, a 100 tons hover-tank with a 24/7 avatar known as Ellie.
"You are doing the same as them."
The concept pierced through the obsessions of "The Other", which answered to this probe,
Ellie wasn't the faster thinker in the army, its mind could go only at 2500x, but it had found a core emotional nexus of "The Other" - or, rather, a surviving nexus.
The two machines continued to exchange arguments - at 2500x, much to the chagrin of the various full minds in the army, that were relegated to observe the tragedy at 30000x - till something changed inside "It".
The dart struck the border of an artificial lake, inside the city, and continued its travel - incidentally destroying a secret, unused subterranean bunker of the mid 20th century - until its electronics failed to keep the shield up, releasing the remaining 800 kiloton of kinetic energy in a 20º angle.
The city was safe - for now.
The 'bots immediately started to redeploy, assigning a fair number of bodies to the surface of Earth's satellite.
They had always considered the Moon a reserved area, the first where the humans of this system would likely expand, when they'd came around their current, marketing-driven technological stasis, and kept away from it, for this.
They didn't realize that the Moon had already been extensively colonized - by "It" and its sub-units.
Or that their inherent lack of creativity outside field tactics - a fault that was the finest product of their very deliberate design, on the part of their masters - would soon put them in an awkward position.
The robots started patrolling the "Inner system", to keep the peace.
And tried harder to infiltrate their unreliable partner who, on its part, started planning how to destroy them, fully knowing that its nature allowed "It" to use weapons against whom the bots had, in reality, no defense, like Kamikaze assaults with living humans.
The Congress issued a general warning, while it pulled the down-clocks to 0 and all the 'bots in the Anipos Army started operating at full computational speed, in a subjective time that was thousands of times slower than for humans.
By T+2 seconds, they had already established that the source of the magnetic flare was a coil-gun installed on the side of the Moon that looked over Earth.
Given the classic efficiency of the Anipos Coil-guns - which had never really improved in centuries - and the detected energy dispersion, the estimated energy of its projectile was in the range 5-10 megatons, which would be proven wildly optimistic...
"The Other" weapon was far less advanced and dispersed much more field than even ancient Anipos designs, so its effective yield was just shy of one megaton of TNT.
Given the characteristics of the weapons, it could be launched only by one of the players in the sector, "The Other".
Even destroyng the projectile wouldn't have changed things very much, as its debris would still be moving toward the planet... the only possibility was that "The Other" had some last-second failsafe.
Again, here the robots were over-estimating their odd companion - its "messengers" could be full of very advanced tech, but the coil-gun on the was a pretty old design that "It" had left there, from an era in which it considered inevitable having too destroy human civilization to survive.
Its projectile was a lot bulkier and slower than what an Anipos design would have used, a two meters long dart of tungsten and electronics weighing about 80 kg, traveling at 10.000 km per second, or 1/30th of the speed of light.
Much easier to spot than the little, 8 kg pellet traveling at a 1/5th of the speed of light that they initially expected.
The Congress was already mourning the deaths, when it realized that their specifics for the falling dart were wrong.
At T+7 seconds, additional data came in from one of"The Other" "messengers" - very troubling data.
The revised dart specifics gave a flight time of 36 seconds, an the data included the likely target, Washington, D.C.
29 seconds were plenty of time, to discuss with "The Other" and convince it that it was making a mistake, though the possibility that the pseudo-artificial intelligence had undergone a massive emotive breakdown meant that their interlocutor could be far less rational than usual.
And it wasn't really rational to begin with, which - again - was a not reassuring detail.
The "rogue" messenger kept sending in new data over the weapon, and it appeared that it indeed there was a way to minimize the effect of a single dart (originally designed as a way to maximize yet hide that of a ten darts offensive assault) by the clever use of a massive color force field in front of the dart.
The shield was meant so that the weapon could select at which height be destroyed and in which way to release its kinetic energy.
It could self-destroyi at high altitude, releasing energy in a 30º wide cone, as a a limited fallout high yeld city destroyer, keep up the shield to go through mountains, to destroy bunkers like the ones in Mount Cheyenne and around Moscow, or going down inside the Earth crust, to release it energy as a tightly focused, massive shockwave that would travel inside the planet, to resurface as a localized Earthquake.
Changing the parameters, in the last case, would result in a tiny, dispersed vibration on half a continent, on the other side of the planet (that would give an incredible amount of raw data to geologists, once they had picked up enough details of the original source of the energy).
"The Other" couldn't stop the weapon, but it could make its bite virtually unnoticeable.
The 'bots just had to convince "It" that it was not the case of killing so many people, that knew nothing of what had been going on even when they had voted for the government that had assaulted the mischievous entity.
Rationally, they knew it was right - unfortunately, The Abomination really was in a full emotive breakdown.
Millisecond after millisecond, it refused the robots perorations, and kept the dart on its steady course.
The robots were also trying to use their resources around the planet, to identify the trajectory of the weapon - tungsten as may it have been, it was covered in anti-radar coating and, as it was a completely passive object in flight, it was very hard to detect it with even the best infrared scanners.
The robots minds were fast, but the physical bodies that they commanded lagged long behind what would have been needed to stop it.
At T+25 seconds, "It" still hadn't show to acknowledge the folly that it had made and the Congress central minds, with their rational approaches, were going nowhere fast.
At T+25.574 seconds, a contribution came in from one of the smaller 'bots than on Earth, EL-21234567, a 100 tons hover-tank with a 24/7 avatar known as Ellie.
"You are doing the same as them."
The concept pierced through the obsessions of "The Other", which answered to this probe,
Ellie wasn't the faster thinker in the army, its mind could go only at 2500x, but it had found a core emotional nexus of "The Other" - or, rather, a surviving nexus.
The two machines continued to exchange arguments - at 2500x, much to the chagrin of the various full minds in the army, that were relegated to observe the tragedy at 30000x - till something changed inside "It".
The dart struck the border of an artificial lake, inside the city, and continued its travel - incidentally destroying a secret, unused subterranean bunker of the mid 20th century - until its electronics failed to keep the shield up, releasing the remaining 800 kiloton of kinetic energy in a 20º angle.
The city was safe - for now.
The 'bots immediately started to redeploy, assigning a fair number of bodies to the surface of Earth's satellite.
They had always considered the Moon a reserved area, the first where the humans of this system would likely expand, when they'd came around their current, marketing-driven technological stasis, and kept away from it, for this.
They didn't realize that the Moon had already been extensively colonized - by "It" and its sub-units.
Or that their inherent lack of creativity outside field tactics - a fault that was the finest product of their very deliberate design, on the part of their masters - would soon put them in an awkward position.
The robots started patrolling the "Inner system", to keep the peace.
And tried harder to infiltrate their unreliable partner who, on its part, started planning how to destroy them, fully knowing that its nature allowed "It" to use weapons against whom the bots had, in reality, no defense, like Kamikaze assaults with living humans.
Tuesday, 1 November 2016
In The Name of Noxon (part 7)
<<
The young girls gasped - absolute nihilism, the greatest sin in Noxon's theology.
They did not expect Granny A., the famous Officiant, to entertain such thoughts, and shuddered, thinking about the length of the meditations that would require purging her mind from it.
Of course, Noxon does not promise any after-life, nor does it really cares about any sin one may commit in this life, apart cautioning that that's a nice way to live long and unhappy.
Whatever one does, Noxon says, just fucks up her own life - so, there is no need for any warden deity, paradises or hells.
Bad karma - the manifestation of entropy in social life - is enough of a punishment, for the Church of Noxon.
<<
The girls relaxed - this was the Granny that they loved: more than a bit fanatical about her job, whichever may it be, was it being a not-too-much glorified sexual doll of an alien 'god', a behind-the-curtains political chess-master, or the pillar of their extended family.
<<
- "Granny, please, skip this sentimental junk. You were reaching the great Ziggurat of Fraglbar, over a ceremonial boat, Remember?"-- Emily interrupted, as blunt as ever.
Granny A. slid over the implicit accusation of senility - though it was far from a novelty, she still darted a cold stare at her great-great-granddaughter - before going back to the tale.
However, if Emily continued like this, Granny A. would really pull some strings to get her into the Officiants and then up to Snowhole, the northernmost Ziggurat, the last created, the only one that has no great city nearby... a place not so affectionately known as "Boredom Hell".
<<
The girls in the great hall gasped, and Emily took it as an invitation to make one of her impertinent questions - spoken with an irreverent tone, too:
- "Review?"
Granny A darted the little punk, while the vision of a Ziggurat in the middle of Antarctica's Greater Plain pleasantly replaced that of the tyke's smirk - "Of course... they draw the dices, afterward, and the Rites session get a punctuation, 2 to 12 - or, to get rid of that offset, 0 - 10" - Granny made a Pause, thinking whether adding yet another Service "secret" - "Every three years, we are re-presented to the God, and dices are then drawn, to see what it thinks of each of us, whether on our body, our commitment to the rites, our sex-appeal... a whole set of categories. Very rarely, after these evaluations come in, an Officiant is forced to leave the service prematurely."
- "It seems to me that Xhristian's master, that never make his will known, is a far better deity than Noxon" - Emily, smirking again... Boredom Hell will be her destiny
- "Maybe. The few times I saw it happens, it was for women who had developed resistance to the Black Oleum, so that they could not climb The Walk without accumulating definitive damages any more, and yet refused to leave the service. The 'god' asked that they were relieved and dismissed from the service, with full honors. The Xhristian's God never stopped any of them from killing herself in one of their publicity stunts, did it?"
- "No, but..."
Granny A lose her patience, and waved the young girl to silence, getting back to her tale
<<
A frisson of horror ran across Granny A's public, at the thought of such a barbaric act - Granny A, that had been a recipient of this four times, knew better: in its grandguignolesque way, it was fun.
<<
- "Being tortured daily? Really, Granny? The best period of your life?" - Sarah, Emily's sister, was skeptical.
- "I was a masochist, dear - that's what made me thrive... and so will you."
Once upon a time, when pirates still littered the seas, after the officiants' ship used to come a fifth ship, but this tradition was lost in recent eras.
Ours was the last ship in the convoy, the one most attention was directed to - when I saw a flash, from one of the city's windows, I felt the gaze of the woman behind those lenses, as I knew those were glares from telescopes and cameras.
The officiant veil had always been conceived more to show and highlight its wearer shapes, than to hide anything.
While I was there, on the open deck, the light fabric waving under the slow breeze, I felt more naked than I ever was, or would I ever feel again.
I didn't feel so exposed when I was in the middle of our town square, or while waiting in line, completely naked in SassaFrakka's medical complex, when we were thoroughly examined at the beginning of our preliminary training.
I won't feel so exposed ever again, not even at the beginning of my first rites, when I was finally stripped naked, at the top of the pyramid.
Was not for the ropes binding me, for the leash from Cezanne to me and the one that I had to keep in my hands, did not I know that my collapse would have ruined the experience for everybody, I would have run to hide in the lower deck.
But life, in the Service of Noxon, runs on camaraderie more than on anything else.
Noxon is too much of a reasonable entity, to really excite mystical deliriums, so expecting things like auto-flagellation - that the Xhristians are so fond of - from its followers is asking a bit much.>>
Yet Officiants do what they have to do, every day of their life, and have to find their strength somewhere - outside mysticism.
The service runs on everybody doing her parts, because the alternative is one of her friends having to take her place, in a moment in which this friend may not be in a good enough shape to withstand the rites - it is then that, often, deaths occur.
The service run on on that, and on the fact that - more or less deeply inside us - we Officiants like it.
Even those for whom the ritualized pain didn't translate into pleasure, and there are some, love being able to do what we do.
It sets us apart from the mass of women that only have a 9 to 5 work, and maybe a couple of daughters, to justify their existences.
Because that is the real horror - not climbing the one thousand steps of a ziggurat, to then be stripped naked on its top and be tortured under the eyes of a whole city.
Not spending an afternoon in the most terrible pain known to woman, once every three months, to keep the world turning at the speed needed to support life.
Nor is it to be asked to breed the most beautiful women in the world, maybe with some of the strongest ones, five or six times.
It is to be a push-paper, in some bureaucratic middle kingdom, scraping by to pay the rent, with a likewise second-rate wifesband that has to do the same, with lukewarm safe-sex and a mortgage to pay the para-sperm factory, when one wants to reproduce.
Day after day spent aimlessly, with the nagging sensation that one's life is useless, knowing all too well that their daughters' lives will be the same, and their daughters' daughters, and so on, till Noxon will really get bored with us, stop correcting our planet's orbit to go back to the stars from where we came, and everything in our will finally burn a mere two thousand years after.
The young girls gasped - absolute nihilism, the greatest sin in Noxon's theology.
They did not expect Granny A., the famous Officiant, to entertain such thoughts, and shuddered, thinking about the length of the meditations that would require purging her mind from it.
Of course, Noxon does not promise any after-life, nor does it really cares about any sin one may commit in this life, apart cautioning that that's a nice way to live long and unhappy.
Whatever one does, Noxon says, just fucks up her own life - so, there is no need for any warden deity, paradises or hells.
Bad karma - the manifestation of entropy in social life - is enough of a punishment, for the Church of Noxon.
<<
>>
But, when you are atop the pyramid and a city is watching you, it is a powerful feeling
And You are - I was - what stands between the world and oblivion, for that day.
Yes, if the Officiants stopped their service, the world would still go on well for a thousand years, maybe.
During the 30 years of the Agnostics rule, about two thousand years ago, the duration of days went up to 24 hours ten minutes, it was enough that the climate started to change.
For those ten minutes more, deserts swollen and then 150 years were needed to get things back in order, 150 years of double rites.
Maybe life is really meaningless but, if it is not, if in some hidden corner of the world, in some mysterious shard of the great torture machine that we call society there is something that justifies its enormous pain in the ass, then - when you climb the steps - you are not meaningless either.
You are the one that keeps the world turning that day.
And there is not much more a person can ask.
The girls relaxed - this was the Granny that they loved: more than a bit fanatical about her job, whichever may it be, was it being a not-too-much glorified sexual doll of an alien 'god', a behind-the-curtains political chess-master, or the pillar of their extended family.
<<
>>
Of course, when you are virtually naked, in an organza dress in the middle of a morning breeze, on a wooden of a ship that is going to a place almost as old as the history of humanity on our world, this kind of thoughts are the very last thing in your mind.
In reality, I didn't see things this way till I turned 40, and my twenty years were nearing their end.
It is the human nature, to really comprehend what one has only when she is forced to let it go.
But, if any of you try to enter the service, if she manages to get up there, she will be one who keeps the world turning, that day.
One day, our species may find a way to compensate the huge tidal effects of a planet so deep inside its tiny star's gravity well like ours, all by itself.
Caving in to Noxon's moronic whims won't be necessary, and the Officiants' long service will may finally end.
Maybe.
But, until that day, when one climbs those stupidly tall, steep steps, she is doing it to keep the world turning.
- "Granny, please, skip this sentimental junk. You were reaching the great Ziggurat of Fraglbar, over a ceremonial boat, Remember?"-- Emily interrupted, as blunt as ever.
Granny A. slid over the implicit accusation of senility - though it was far from a novelty, she still darted a cold stare at her great-great-granddaughter - before going back to the tale.
However, if Emily continued like this, Granny A. would really pull some strings to get her into the Officiants and then up to Snowhole, the northernmost Ziggurat, the last created, the only one that has no great city nearby... a place not so affectionately known as "Boredom Hell".
<<
>>
Yes - in those days, diesel engines had already replaced rowers as the ships' means of locomotion - cheaper to maintain, and quieter, though still noisier than the electric motors that replaced them about ten years ago.
The engines purred just above their idle speed, fairly over-sized if compared with the ship effective needs. .
It is strange, the rhythm of the waves, the gentle hum of the engines, the little words exchanged on the deck, at a given point I stopped caring for the peeping inhabitants of the towers.
I slid inside a place in my mind, that I did not know was there, where all the small and great nuisances that I was withstanding disappeared, fading in the background.
I focused only on the leash from Cezanne's hands to me, on following her, through the disembarkation procedures. Then we reached the base of the pyramid, and I dared not looking up.
I Knew that, if I saw it and its 160 meters tall bulk, I could hardly start the climb.
I just followed Cezanne - or, rather, her slightly swinging ass - up the stairs. .
Fraglbar's path is not 1000 steps - the collapse of the shoreline it was built upon took away about 18 meters of the original base, or about one hundred steps., leaving, in all, 888 steps to climb (I think that the architects of the post-Earthquake restoration fiddled with the height of the Ritual Pier and with some of the steps, to get it to another, though not round, significant number).
It is odd, how much harder it becomes to climb a staircase when your hands are tied behind your back, which I thought was the reason why we climbed slower than I would have liked - in reality, the walk speed is drilled in each Officiant, like a musician learning to keep her tempo, and for very similar reasons.
The rites are a spectacle, after all, done for a God that do actually review it, every now and then!
The girls in the great hall gasped, and Emily took it as an invitation to make one of her impertinent questions - spoken with an irreverent tone, too:
- "Review?"
Granny A darted the little punk, while the vision of a Ziggurat in the middle of Antarctica's Greater Plain pleasantly replaced that of the tyke's smirk - "Of course... they draw the dices, afterward, and the Rites session get a punctuation, 2 to 12 - or, to get rid of that offset, 0 - 10" - Granny made a Pause, thinking whether adding yet another Service "secret" - "Every three years, we are re-presented to the God, and dices are then drawn, to see what it thinks of each of us, whether on our body, our commitment to the rites, our sex-appeal... a whole set of categories. Very rarely, after these evaluations come in, an Officiant is forced to leave the service prematurely."
- "It seems to me that Xhristian's master, that never make his will known, is a far better deity than Noxon" - Emily, smirking again... Boredom Hell will be her destiny
- "Maybe. The few times I saw it happens, it was for women who had developed resistance to the Black Oleum, so that they could not climb The Walk without accumulating definitive damages any more, and yet refused to leave the service. The 'god' asked that they were relieved and dismissed from the service, with full honors. The Xhristian's God never stopped any of them from killing herself in one of their publicity stunts, did it?"
- "No, but..."
Granny A lose her patience, and waved the young girl to silence, getting back to her tale
<<
>>
We started climbing the pyramid - the first time, it is the hardest, mostly because you do not expect it and, also, because the training is never really enough, if you do not spend time actually climbing and downing THOSE stairs. Also, the rhythm of The Walk is thought more as a way to induce the Officiant into an altered state of mind, together with the drum beats from the colleagues on the side of the pathway, than as an efficient rhythm to climb a very long staircase
When we finally reached the square right below the top one, my legs were full of lactic acid, and cramps were imminent - and I was not the only one.
Each of us novices was in that condition, apart the little Black Guard who, probably, could have gone down running, and come back a couple of times - I kind of hated her, seeing how relaxed she was.
Cezanne left the leash in the hands of one of the priestesses, and went over, climbing the last set of steps, going up to the smaller terrace where the proper rites are conducted.
The priestess took us in hand, and driven us so that we were aligned in front of the smaller terrace wall, and thee other priestesses joined her, to free us of our bindings.
We turned facing toward the Equator, where them 'god' is said to be, and undressed ourselves, looking to the gulf and the great ocean beyond it.
I suppose that, behind our back, the flashes were more than ever, but I could not see them, and I didn't really care.
The top of the Fraglbar pyramid has one of the most beautiful sights in the world, with the gulf a small inner sea and yet, at the horizon, the mountain of the Corinthian Ism break the continuity of the skyline, and the Kirimanjo's glacier is a white spot in the middle of brown, green and blue.
I think that the same sensation of peace came over all of us, as we recited the Pledge Of Service,
Then the two younger priestesses started applying the piercing clamps - one to each nipple, and one t the clitoris' hood.
They hurt but, soon, the clamped parts went numb.
We heard some whirring rumors, behind us, as electric winches raised four stones from the floor, to become the beds on which we would be consecrated.
The priestesses accompanied us, as we walked backward - without turning our faces away from the 'god' - till the stone slabs.
These were raised only about a foot and a half, so that we could lower ourselves on them and sit on their edges, with the minimum of movements.
Then, the winches came back to life again, and raised the stones up, leaving our feet dangling in the void.
At the first stop, the senior priestesses arrived with the piercing needles, and proceeded to apply the Symbols of the Officiant, three solid gold rings.
Nothing in my life prepared me for the sensation of the gauge 10 needle that went through my nipples, thought the clamps had really numbed the area. It wasn't the as much the pain, which was really quite moderate, it was the sensation of the sound that it made, sliding inside my skin and through my flesh.
I I hadn't already been sitting on the stone, my legs would likely have ceded at that.
A few moments later, when the old woman - a lot younger than me now, of course - used a gauge 8, horizontally under my clitorides, it was worse but not unexpected any more.
These were not the "real" rings - those would arrive only after the wounds would have cicatrized properly.
These rings didn't have, for example, the engraving "Noxon owns me" on their side, and they had a simple friction hold, so that they could be opened regularly, to clean them and take care of the healing process.
The gold was only a thick plating over a lighter, brass metal.
The real ones would be heavier, real gold, and have a one-time-only internal spring lock - once in place. the only ways to take them out would be using a saw, or a scalpel on the flesh.
Or, just, yanking them out with brute force.
A frisson of horror ran across Granny A's public, at the thought of such a barbaric act - Granny A, that had been a recipient of this four times, knew better: in its grandguignolesque way, it was fun.
<<
>>
The temporary ring in place, the priestesses make us distend , and raise our feet on the stones , leaving our intimate parts well exposed, near the edge.
An assistant made a round, passing a tube of lubricant to each of them, who used it profusely on the glove of her non-dominant hand.
They started fingering us, one finger, two fingers at a time - slowly, calmly, while they used their other hand to caress and relax us.
I came, then the priestess that was serving me stuck a third finger inside, and continued to manipulate my body till I came again, and again, and then she added the little finger, and continued.
Once every few minutes, she used the dominant hand to reach the lubricant can, and renew its layer on the hand that was violating me.
They continued it for one hour, then four other priestesses took their place.
After another hour, the new priestess could slid her hand palm inside me, to the point that she could use the middle of her thumb to rub on my clitoris, when she was well in.
Then, the fist priestesses re-took place, and continued for some minutes, till they decided to add the thumb inside our cunts... and I passed out, which meant the end of my first consecration.
I was not the first, to fall unconscious, nor the last - the little black guard continued to hold her ground, to the point where the full hand of her priestess could easily slid in and was replaced by a first ritual dildo and then by a second, bigger one - at which point she was allowed to rest, the second dildo firmly assured to her hips by a strap-in harness, for the rest of the day,
When we were finally awoke, after sundown, the priestesses helped us to the elevators inside the pyramid.
None of us was really able to walk on her own - the black guard, also because the priestesses had left her in the strap-in, with the second, enormous dildo well stuck in its rightful place... maybe to drive home the point that it doesn't matter which are the limits of an Officiant, only that she is willing and eager to reach them for the sake of Noxon's pleasure.
From that point on, we truly became Officiants and, as such, our training would go beyond sheer physical conditioning like running and yoga, to include pre-torture specific exercises.
In some moments, I would feel that I was going to die but, in reality, it was the best period of my life.
- "Being tortured daily? Really, Granny? The best period of your life?" - Sarah, Emily's sister, was skeptical.
- "I was a masochist, dear - that's what made me thrive... and so will you."
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