Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
I crawl to the bedroom and I grab the bag I readied for just this situation. I head down the stairwell, shooting two people on the way down. Not sure if they were Sudo gunmen or not, but I didn’t recognize them and I can’t take the risk.
My temples vibrate. Someone is trying to put a call through my neural chip.
I blink it away.
They call again. My vision shakes slightly. It’s a bug, not a feature of the technology that keeps me linked into the world consciousness in general, and Sudo hierarchy in particular.
Fuck it. I take the call.
“What do you want?”
“You’re only prolonging the inevitable,” a cool voice says inside my head. It’s Tania. She’s my boss. Usually when I hear her dulcet tones, she’s giving me an assignment. I suppose she’s trying to give me another one. “You know about our retirement policy. We’d hoped you’d take it voluntarily.”
“You sent four people to gun me down.”
“Yes. We thought you’d like to die doing what you most loved, fighting for bloody survival.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Tania?”
“There’s no need to be rude,” she says, sounding genuinely offended.
I blink the call away again. The chips under my skin linked to my brain are convenient in so many ways, but times like these, a girl starts to wonder if she should have voluntarily irrevocably jacked herself into a network controlled by corporate state interests.
I can’t stay here, and when I say here, I mean I can’t stay on this fucking planet. There’s nowhere to hide. Nowhere they will not find me. Right now, they’re probably sending a dozen more agents to my location.
All I’ve got to work with is a knowledge of secret, terrible, illegal, and immoral things.
I know where the aliens snatch women from this world.
And that’s where I go.
Getting the hell out of Earth’s orbit was only the first step. I breathed a very real sigh of relief when I realized we’d left the solar system. The neural implants stopped humming almost as soon as we left orbit, but I was worried they’d somehow call the ship I’ve stowed away on back before they got far enough away to be out of communication range.
The ship contains an export load of high quality ladies bound for some distant lady slave auction. That’s a secret, of course. But nothing’s real back on Earth anymore, so nobody believes anything or does anything. They loaded these women onto the spaceship in plain view of cameras and people complained about it and then it was all fine anyway.
That’s probably a cynical take. If it didn’t matter what they did, I’d never have had a job in the first place. It’s more that what matters isn’t what people think matters. Public opinion isn’t worth anything anymore. But corporate opinion reigns supreme.
This might seem a strange ship for someone like me to sneak onto, but I needed out and off and away at all costs. The world as I know it isn’t safe for me. In addition to being burned by the Sudo Corporation, I’ve caused some problems. I’m on some radars. I have a few prices on my head.
I need to get away to a corner of the universe where nobody knows me, and I guess, if it comes right down to it, I’m not above the concept of seducing some poor alien idiot to get a fresh start.
The ship docks after what feels like years, but is actually only a week. Aliens have much better tech than humans do. They’ve given us enough to continue to survive even after what we did, sort of like an older sibling letting a dropout little brother sleep in the potting shed until he sorts himself out.
They can traverse lightyears of space at speeds we can only dream of. Meanwhile, we are living in floating bunkers, dreaming of the world we’ve turned into a dumpster fire.
The girls who have been sold are kept in the hold. I am hiding out in one of the storage bays. Fortunately they’re also transporting some plants, which means they have to keep the temps at a reasonable level and also provide water. I’m not even particularly hungry because the plants they’re transporting are bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers, apples, oranges, grapes, and more. It’s basically a vegan week. By the time we dock, I’ve never felt so healthy.
The aliens who have been trading us are a sort of slimy wet species who mist themselves down often when in low humidity environments. They slide around on one big squishy foot. Sort of like slugs, but with arms and big soulful eyes. They’re adorable. And they’re evil human traders.
I wait until the girls have been unloaded. Then they open the bay with the plants in it, planning to just wheel the trees off. I sprint out as fast as I can. I don’t know where I’m going, I just know that I am going.