Uncrossed (Harem Station Book 7), page 12
“Thanks? I think?”
“It took me a while to appreciate your questions. The way you pushed me. Your suspicions.”
I shrug with my hands. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I questioned you once back when we were still kids. And then I just said fuck it. And that wasn’t even you. You’re not… him. You’re not my ALCOR and nothing you say here will change my mind about that.”
“That was this beginning. I’m talking about the very first beginning.” He pauses. “You really have no clue, do you?”
“Nope. Can’t say that I do. But I’m not gonna stress about it. I’m fairly certain this is just another one of those dreams I’ve been cycling through.”
“Those weren’t dreams, Crux. They were realities.”
I nod my head and lean back in the couch. It’s a nice couch. Very comfortable. And I’m tired. So I prop my ankle up on my knee, mimicking him, and relax a little. “Sure they were.”
“OK, let’s start at the beginning.”
“Great. Let’s do that. How about this? Who the fuck are you?” He opens his mouth to respond but I hold up a hand. “Don’t say ALCOR. That’s just a name. And that name belongs to so many AIs at this point, it’s lost all meaning. No, I want to know who you really are.”
He cocks his head. Holds a finger up. “As I was saying. Do you hear that?”
I listen and if I strain a little, I can still hear that faint ticking or dripping or whatever it is.
“When I said it was Time, I was referring to the noise you noticed. It’s Time.”
“Time. OK. So we’re still talking in riddles?” I put my foot on the ground and lean forward, elbows on knees, chin propped up on my hands. “Let me ask you something.”
He pans a hand wide. “Anything. That’s why I’m here.”
“Is this all you have, ALCOR? Games? Riddles? Is this fun for you?”
He shrugs. “Some of it, I admit. It’s not wholly unpleasant. But it’s not a game, Crux. There are very serious consequences if we make a wrong move.” I start to say something, but he holds up a hand with his palm towards me. “Just let me talk. You’ve done nothing but question me for thousands of lifetimes and now that I’m ready to give you answers, all you want to do is interrupt.”
I lean back in the couch again. “Whatever, dude. You’ve got yourself a captive audience, so go for it.”
In that instant the room shifts. We are no longer in the darkness under one light, we’re on Harem Station, up in the harem room. The couches are still here, but we’re not sitting on them. About a dozen Cygnian princesses are and we’re standing off to the side. They are blues, and reds, but mostly golds, wearing skimpy lingerie and laughing as they eat their fruit and sip their fizzy drinks.
When I scan the room I find the Cyborg Master’s red slash of an eye. He starts heading towards me.
“Can he see me?” I whisper.
ALCOR is off to my left, in a much more familiar holographic form. A form he used a lot in the early days but hasn’t bothered with much since the station got busy. Blond hair, blue eyes, my height, my build. Nothing truly spectacular about him other than he’s handsome in an evil-outlaw kind of way.
“Of course he can. You’re not a captive, Crux. And to prove it I’ve brought you home. I had to take you back in time a little. Your station in the present is quite fucked up at the moment. No one wants to be there. But this was the day Corla arrived.”
I don’t even have time to process that because the Cyborg Master is now in front of me. “He’s here.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Serpint. He just came through the gate.”
“You were supposed to warn me.” I say this automatically. Like I’m on autopilot.
“We didn’t realize he was here until the docking crew pinged Booty’s manual transponder.”
“Fuck,” I mutter. The day Corla arrived was the day Serpint came home alone. The day everything started to unravel. “I’ll be right there,” I tell the master.
He nods at me and turns. Then turns back. At the same time a woman is brought into the harem room, kicking and screaming. “Oh. And… this one came in this morning.” He points to the girl, who I now know is Lyra, but seeing her again on that first day when she was still using some chemical concoction to hide her princess status throws me for a moment. “The hunter who brought her in claims she’s a princess. Clearly, she’s not. Should I send her down to the lower levels?”
“No. Give her the test.”
The master looks at me. “Why? That hunter is lying.”
“Just… do it. And if she gets out of hand, restrain her.”
“Whatever you say, Crux.” The master leaves and starts barking orders to the men holding Lyra by the arms.
ALCOR leans in and says, “You cannot change this day. The past cannot be changed. Moments stack upon moments. We cannot go back, Crux.”
“And yet we’re here, ALCOR.”
“This is a retelling. That’s all. You can’t change anything. You can’t stop time. You can jump the loop and relive it, if you’re very skilled. You can move forward. Sometimes very far into the future. But you can’t go back until it’s over. You can’t start again until we’re done. Everything about this day will play out exactly as it did. And in a few minutes, you will be compelled to go down to Serpint’s docking bay and meet him. He will enter the station, and then the harem room. He will see Lyra, she will spit on him, she will be punished. On, and on, and on… we cannot change the past on this loop. It is done. And if we stay here, we will do all that. And you will not get your answers.
“But you’re not a captive, Crux. You’re very much in control of a whole lot of things. I can take you back further if you’d like. I can take you all the way back to Wayward Station if that’s what you desire. I can take you back to the moment of your birth and you can live it all again if that’s what you need. It doesn’t matter to me. Either way, this time loop has stopped thanks to Veila and Valor. And when you entered the spin node in the museum, you stopped a whole lot of other things too.
“So we’re good. I can wait. Waiting is all I know. I’ve been waiting for this thing to play out in just the right sequence for billions of years. What’s a few more decades to me? But starting this loop over won’t change anything, Crux. And thirty-seven standard years from now we will be right back here and we can try to have this talk again. But if you just hear me out, if you can just listen to me for a little bit longer, everything will make sense. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? Answers?”
I let out a long, tired breath. “Fine then. Let’s talk.”
And then we’re back in the dark place, sitting on opposite couches, staring each other down. Beauty hovers off to my right. But she moves in and… yeah. I think I need that drink.
I take one glass, down it, then reach for the other and down it too. I place it back on the tray and ALCOR smiles.
“Good,” he says. “Now we can really begin.”
CHAPTER TEN - DRADEN & BOOTY
Somewhere in Space
Space is a deep, dark place when you have no suns to light it up. Both Draden and Booty had been around the galaxy enough times to know that there was no such thing as a complete lack of light. Stars are everywhere and the universe is trillions upon trillions of eternities big.
So even when a certain sector of space appears to be without light, there are pinpricks of far-away suns and even tiny smudges of hazy galaxies and clusters lingering in the void to remind you that you are small and insignificant and even in the midst of apparent emptiness, you cannot escape the presence of something.
What this something was had been a matter of debate for millions of civilizations over billions of years. Almost all of the various groups of sentient peoples in this universe had pondered the meaning of that something.
All but one. The makers, of course.
And Draden and Booty were starting to get the feeling those know-it-alls lived in this place they were in now. Because it was something other than the normal dark void. There were no pinpricks. No smudgy galaxies or even the blur of gaseous nebulae. It was just black.
Like… the definition of the color black. Like this was the only place in existence that actually did the color black justice. And both Draden and Booty could feel that blackness pushing down on them like the weight of something massive, but still unseen.
“It’s gravity,” Booty whispered.
And even though her statement didn’t come with any qualifiers about what she was referring to, Draden didn’t need any qualifiers. He could feel it. “It can’t be gravity,” he whispered back. “There’s nothing out here.”
“Or,” Booty said, “there’s a whole bunch of everything out here and we just can’t see it.”
Draden didn’t want to think about that. Because Booty had many ways to see things that didn’t include vision. He’d been kinda hoping she would pick something up on one of her various advanced scanners that didn’t rely on light.
“We could turn back,” she suggested, sensing his apprehension.
“And go home with nothing?” Draden scoffed. “What’s the point in that?”
“What are you even looking for, Draden?”
“I don’t know yet. I just know it’s here. We have to look harder. Go deeper, maybe.”
“Something is here. Something… huge. Something so big it’s blocking out the stars. I don’t like it. I feel like… like we just floated into some kind of… lair.”
“Yeah,” Draden agreed. “I feel it too. But that’s why we need to keep going.”
“I think they’re watching us.”
“Good. Let them watch. Maybe they’ll get tired of watching and make contact?”
“Call me overly cautious, but I’m fairly certain we do not want to make contact with these people.”
She realized her mistake as soon as the last word left her mind.
Whoever was in charge of this place—they weren’t people.
“I would just like to point out,” Booty continued, “that this place is not yellow, Draden. You were looking for a yellow place.”
“I know. But the yellow got us here. Maybe that’s all it was supposed to do?” Draden could tell that Booty was no longer on board just using his typical humanoid-ish senses. But his new mind status picked up more from his other mind brethren. Like the way people can read others. It’s just a feeling, mostly. And you don’t know how to explain it. Some emotions are easy to spot on people because most people are very bad at controlling their expressions. But even when people do have that kind of self-control and are very good at hiding their true thoughts and intentions, they just give off a vibe. You just know this. It’s a sense, like hearing and vision, but not one you can explain with biological mechanics.
Booty was giving off a mind’s version of that vibe.
Draden wouldn’t go so far as to call it fear. He didn’t feel any fear. That was one of the first things he noticed about being a mind versus a person. Emotions were difficult to feel. They weren’t completely gone, but they were all vague. Like if he were wearing a blindfold and hearing protection at the same time. The differences between extreme emotions like elation or anger were muddled and foggy. He felt very meh about almost everything that didn’t relate to his current objective. And if things did relate to his current objective then he just felt… motivated.
Yeah. Motivated to get answers, or solve problems, or find a place filled with golden light.
He was focused.
One good thing that came out of this was that Draden totally understood Tray better. All those years of meh from Tray suddenly made sense.
So the vibe he was getting from Booty wasn’t fear. But it was definitely something along the lines of dread.
They were silent for a little while. Booty kept moving in a direction that appeared to be forward, but how could one know when there was nothing around them?
Finally she broke their stillness with a question. “What are you hoping to find here, Draden?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. I mean, I’m not looking for something specific. I just feel the need to be here. That’s all.”
“And then what?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I dunno. Go home, I guess.”
“Then what is the point?”
“I just told you, I don’t know the point. I just feel like I need to find this place.”
“And that will be enough?”
“Look, you’re in charge so if you want to turn around, I’m not going to stop you.”
Booty decided she wasn’t going to push it any harder. And she just kept them moving forward. But she had a really bad, bad feeling about this trip. Ever since they entered the sector she’d felt uncomfortable. Almost like she had forgotten something important, but couldn’t figure out what this important thing was.
But now that they were deeper into the void—and she knew it was a void. It had to be a void—that nagging feeling of forgetfulness was morphing into something that might be called panic if she thought she was capable of feeling such a thing.
And it all had to do with her lapse in memory when she’d woken up on the prison moon called Castor Theta. Back before she was the Booty Hunter.
That was a weird time in her life. The only time up until recently where she had felt disoriented. But after she named herself the Booty Hunter and got to Harem Station all that disorientation had turned into certainty. Like she was right where she was supposed to be. And she’d forgotten all about her vague past. Her mind had been set firmly on the present when she arrived at Harem. Meeting ALCOR had settled her mind down into a rhythm of normalcy and then Serpint and Draden came back from their travels, and that was that.
Things had seemed so… settled.
Which, looking back on it now, was kind of weird.
Why hadn’t she questioned her origin more? Why hadn’t she gone looking for her past?
Of course she knew why. Even if she never articulated it. And not wanting to know—not wanting to rock the ship, so to speak—that was only part of it.
She hadn’t gone looking for answers because she wasn’t supposed to.
“Draden,” she said.
“Hmm?” His response was distant and halfhearted.
“I have something to tell you.” She said this even though there was this… ping, or sting, or maybe even a jolt of electric shock when the words came out.
“Tell me what?”
The shock was there again. Like a warning. But it wasn’t very strong. It wasn’t going to stop her from saying what needed to be said. “I…” And then she didn’t know how to say it. She wasn’t sure how to start. So she just said, “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
Draden was deep in thought. But she could feel him pull back from his current obsession about the void and his purpose inside it, and focus on her. “What do you mean?”
And then it was easy to talk to him. He was Draden, after all. She knew him better than anyone else in the galaxy aside from Serpint. So she told him her story. How she’d woken up on a prison moon with no transponder. How she’d helped those prisoners escape to Harem Station. How she’d given herself a new name and fallen into her new life as a Harem Station ship as she served her five-hundred-spin servitude waiting for Serpint to come home.
Then Draden was silent. She figured he was thinking about all this. Running some scenarios through his new mind to try to predict all the ways this could hurt him, or help him, or whatever.
But that wasn’t what Draden was doing, she realized. His thoughts were back on the void. Not on her. She felt a small moment of irritation over that switch. But it was less than a picosecond.
Because then an alarm sounded on her comms system.
They were being hailed.
She didn’t panic and neither did Draden. It was like they both knew that this was the inevitable outcome of this trip.
They were here to meet people. Actually not people. Something wholly ‘other’ than people.
She opened the comms. The sound that came out of the speakers wasn’t a voice, but she wasn’t expecting a voice. This was not a place for people who needed voices. The void was a place for people like her.
What came through on comms was a code.
“What the hell is that?” Draden asked.
“It’s an invitation,” Booty replied.
“To where?”
But just as those words were out of his mouth, Draden saw the where.
CHAPTER ELEVEN - ASSHOLE
Back on Mighty Minions Station
Asshole ALCOR didn’t actually get to witness the betrayal of Real ALCOR in real time. He was sequestered behind a firewall. Not just any old firewall, either. A very sophisticated firewall that almost seemed… how should he put this? Like more of a prison.
He was convinced that this was standard operating procedure. You didn’t invite a new, wholly unpredictable and powerful AI like Asshole into your collective without some kind of quarantine protocol in place.
If Asshole were a collective and was looking for new members, that was what he would’ve done as well.
So he wasn’t dwelling.
Besides, he did get to see ALCOR’s betrayal on a feed. He watched it seven times in a row, feeling more satisfied than he’d figured he would, even though it wasn’t real time.
MIZAR. That old bastard. His twin. His twin. Literally.
And if MIZAR had known that there were two ALCORs on this station, Asshole would’ve been rounded up as well. So even though he kinda felt like he was in prison inside the Mighty Boss collective, he owed the Boss big for securing his freedom.
But now… well. He was starting to get bored. “Hey!” He tried reaching out to one of the collective. “Anyone there? Helllooo? Can you hear me? I’ve seen the feed. Pretty good idea you guys had, turning ALCOR over. I bow to your nefarious plotting. But I’m bored now. Is there an orientation meeting I should be in? I have a few questions about the perks you guys promised. Specifically, am I getting paid for this working interview?”
