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’m subscribed to Zeal and Sudo. I got banned from Condor a while ago, and it’s best not to think too much about what’s going to happen next time I have to travel through Peach space. My plan for the moment is to stay on New New York. It’s mostly owned by Zeal. But that means I have to be careful about how many terms of service I break. They’re allowed to terminate their services at any time.
Back in the day, a company withdrawing service would be a mild inconvenience. You might get your power turned off or similar. Now, you get a one-way trip to Earth under your own power when they throw you out the trash chute with all the other garbage. It’s technically legal to murder people as long as you call it a spontaneous unsubscribe.
So I keep sliding through the crowd, doing my best to blend in. I dance for a while, buy a drink, chat with some guys, slap one because he got fresh with me. Just girl things. My bandolier gets emptier as time goes on.
If I can get rid of most of my stock tonight, I’ll have enough money to pay subs on my apartment, keep up my food sub, and keep existing for another two weeks. Living the dream. I might even have enough to put toward memory recovery treatment. I’m not the only person who can’t remember what happened to them. It’s a bit of an epidemic around these parts.
Zeal got mind wiping technology as part of chip tech from an alien species several years ago, so the story goes. Might be true, might not be true. It’s hard to tell these days. As soon as it came into the world, all sorts of people got their brains washed pretty much immediately whether they wanted it or not. I’m not sure what I did to earn my amnesia, but I still don’t have a clue about anything that happened to me before I woke up in that hospital room.
If I get enough money, I’ll be able to undo that process. I’ve been a little ambivalent on that front. On the one hand, might be good to know what happened. On another… maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s merciful.
“Pet.”
Someone growls the word near me. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I am surrounded by conversation of all kinds, most of it high and drunk and crass.
“Pet!” The word comes more insistently. I ignore it again. Doesn’t mean anything to me.
Then someone grabs me from behind. That’s not entirely out of the ordinary. The club can get handsy, especially in the earlier hours. But I am not going to let it stand. I spin around, ready to hit whichever man is stupid enough to touch me.
But it’s not a man who has touched me.
I find myself surrounded by a wall of flesh. Three very big… things… have blocked me out of the crowd, the same way wolves used to pick a deer out of the herd before… well, before. I watch the ancient history channel sometimes. I wish I could have seen the world when it was complete with animals and plants and things besides human debris. They tell us that what’s left down there now is nothing but rats and trash.
“What the fuck do you want?” I ask the question with a real hostile tone while my stomach flips as I look at the predators who have isolated me from my herd.
They’re not human. I’ve never seen aliens before that I know of, though some people insist that there are aliens everywhere around us all the time.
The more I look at them, the more I start to think that these guys are definitely not humans. For one, humans have round pupils, not diamond star-shaped slits in diamanté eyes, or horizontal pupils, or lizard-like slits. I guess eyes could be faked with contact lenses, but then there’s their height. They’re all 6′5 at least. One of them might be 6′8. Stilts? I don’t know.
They’re wearing human-ish clothes to blend in. Denim and leather, or materials that mimic them anyway. One of them is very tall and blond and his shirt is open almost all the way to his navel. His stomach ripples with distracting musculature. He has most of my attention. There’s something about him that draws my eye and… I haven’t gotten laid in three years. It’s usually not a hardship. Suddenly, it feels hard.
I try to think of my alien facts to put my brain in some kind of useful gear. I can feel instinct taking over, a kind of arousal that is dangerous as hell. It feels like my brain is getting fuzzy, like my thoughts are running scared.
Aliens made contact with humans around the year 2028, but most people were too distracted to really notice or care. It was difficult back then, when everyone was stuck on the surface of the planet like basic animals.