Chapter 2 #10
“Yes,” I say. “This place is really more of a working city than a traditional city.”
“Oh,” she says. “It’s like a project place.”
I nod, because that seems to be the appropriate response. This place has no official name.
The facility is located on an asteroid at the far end of a belt about a lightyear away from any real civilization.
There are around a thousand or so souls who live and work here; like me, they have private accommodation ranged around the main building, which is so large it takes up almost all of the asteroid.
What is left is dedicated to housing and some attempts at landscaping.
It has a post code so we can get deliveries, and even that makes me uneasy from time to time.
Those who work here are sworn to secrecy.
Most have no access to outside communications, and will not leave until the project is at an end and is no longer secret.
I have a privileged position of being able to come and go as I please because I have a privileged position in general.
I like to bring back snacks when I do a run anywhere, so that there’s a general sense I did not forget those who have been on this rock for ten years or more.
Some of them have started families, in fact, with others they met here.
We’re running a small school for the children who have never known anywhere or anything but this far-flung rock that barely has an atmosphere.
It was with great efforts that gardens were started, but I am digressing.
This is where we keep the secrets we cannot risk our enemies, or gods forbid, our allies from accessing.
Due to my status both as a researcher and in general, I have one of the highest tiers of clearance.
I answer to nobody directly, but there are collaborative partners I work with.
We have something of a decentralized command.
Some might say I run the place according to my will, and perhaps, due to the fact my largesse funded most of it, that could be considered true.
I am not interested in playing tyrant to the other scientists, or boss to anyone besides the human who is walking by my side, her eyes so wide, her head on a swivel.
I reach out and put my lower right hand on the back of her neck to keep her going in the direction I want her to go, right into the main entrance of the main building.
It is built conically, much wider at the base than it is at the top. The many floors are curved to create a calm flow. On a crisp morning, or sunny evening, there is a serenity to the building that I like to think anchors us all to the greater purpose.
She allows me to direct her, and at my touch she even moves a little closer to me. I think she is overwhelmed by the size of the space. She had a similar look at the port.
“It’s so big,” she says. “How many floors is it?”
“A few hundred,” I tell her. “But most of them are unoccupied at the moment.”
“Are we going to go all the way to the very top?”
The question is adorable. The way humans think has caught me off guard.
I knew she had a simple animal brain, but being asked if we will ascend for the sheer sake of ascending is such a perfect example of the human condition.
She sees a thing, and she wants to know how far she can go with it.
She is going to be perfect for the experiment.
“We can,” I tell her. “The lab we are going to be working in is about three-quarters of the way up.”
“Why?”
“Why is it three-quarters of the way up?”
“Yes,” she says. “Why is it there?”
“Because that is where it is located,” I say, slightly confused by her question, but mostly sure that it is a nonsense inquiry. She wants to know why things are because she wants to know. It’s not deeper than that.
I guide her through the foyer of the building, which is not built with a reception. We have security, and that is it. Nobody is coming here to get help from a cheerful receptionist.
“There are so many guards,” she says. “Why are they so heavily armed?”
“Well, we do all have four arms,” I quip.
She lets out a groan, followed by a little laugh that helps her get past the wall of security without any more fear.
We step into an elevator.
“We have these on Earth,” she says. “It’s so interesting how creatures across all kinds of planes of things all end up coming up with the same solutions to the same problems, huh?”
“Indeed,” I say, enjoying her prattling as we make our way up the building.
We are around halfway up when the elevator stops and Drak steps in.
Drak is my closest counterpart. He works under me, technically, but I tend not to make too much of it because he is very dedicated to his work, needs close to no managing, and very much hates being reminded he is not in charge.
“Where’s the human?” Drak asks. “Did she miss the flight?”
“She’s with me,” I say. He knows that, because he can see her on the leash.
He’s pretending not to see her just to be an asshole.
I glance down, and see that she did step back behind me when he got in.
Maybe she wanted to make space for him, or maybe she found him intimidating.
Either response would have been reasonable.
Drak is a polarizing and intimidating figure.
He is missing his lower left arm and his left eye.
There are a great many stories as to why that is, but nobody really knows the truth.
“Oh, see, usually lab supplies stay in the lab,” he says with maximum passive-aggression.
“She’s not a flask of acid. She’s a living being. An intelligent one. I took her with me to ensure that nothing happened after the warp incident. It was better than leaving her in the medical bay all night.”
He snorts at me, then looks at her, and snorts again. “Don’t get attached,” he says. “She’s part of the machinery.”
“What does that mean?” Evie asks me. “Part of the machinery? What machinery?”
Drak’s brows rise, but he does not say anything.
He does not consider the human to be a real person, as it were.
He performs a lot of experiments on living things, and I am not entirely convinced that he sees members of his own kind as being particularly untouchable.
Essentially, Drak would take anybody to pieces if it served one of his creations.
“Don’t worry about him,” I say. “I am taking you into my office. We have some matters to attend to there.”
“The training phase,” Drak says. “For now, you’ll need that body to create the mind we need.”
I give him a death stare. I do not want him to frighten Evie. I can feel her pulling back on the leash to try to get away from him by going around to the other side of me. I let it out to allow her to do that. I don’t want him anywhere near her.
* * *
Evie
That alien freaked me out. I’ve seen a lot of strange things among the aliens.
I’ve hung out with the Antari guard who had more eyes than I’ve had hot dinners.
Nobody has freaked me out the way that Drak just did.
I don’t want to put it down to his physical problems. I think you could be missing an arm and still seem very chill.
He seemed the absolute opposite of very chill.
He had an air of menace and detachment that is still sending chills through me.
He looked at me like I was nothing. No emotion whatsoever.
But there was interest, and intent. Like he had a plan for me.
Physically he was kind of, well, attractive.
Dark hair, cut shaggy. A missing limb. A scar on his face.
The remaining eye a brilliant green. I knew the second I looked at him that he was the bad guy.
The sort of guy Rustle would think was an alpha.
“What is wrong with that guy?”
“What isn’t wrong with him?” Arkon says. “Don’t worry about him. I am the one in charge of you. I am the one you answer to. He has no right to you.”
I can almost hear an unspoken ‘yet’ at the end of that sentence, but I don’t want to say anything about it because thinking about it scares me.
“Here,” Arkon says. “In here.”
He leads me into an office space that is, like everything, an alien-sized place with alien-sized items and a general scale that makes me feel like Gulliver on his travels.
Arkon picks me up and puts me on a soft table. Sort of like a medical table. After Drak, it freaks me out a little. Part of the machinery, he said. I don’t want to be part of the machinery. That seems like a very bad thing.
“Just what are you guys wanting me to work on, exactly?” I ask. “Like, what’s the job?”
“You’re training to interface with a new tech,” he explains, much as he has before, much as I was briefed while still back on Earth.
And yet, somehow it doesn’t sound as reasonable now as it did before.
There’s no quitting this job, I guess. Even if I wanted to, there’s no easy way home.
If I want out of here, I’d have to convince him to send me home.
I park that idea as Arkon starts fiddling with some machines I don’t recognize. Are they the machinery I’m supposed to be part of? They look like medical devices of some kind. There are dials and tubes and little suction-y things, and…
He turns to me and gives me a stern look that catches me off guard and gives me those excited zippy feelings I’m probably not supposed to have.
This man is incredibly attractive. Even with the extra arms, he has an air of complete authority.
I noticed that a lot of the people coming in were being checked by security as they did.
Security practically bowed to him as we came past, though they had their eyes on me like the little two-armed freak I am.
“In the meantime,” he says. “We have the matter of the forty-three thousand more credits for the damage to the ship.”
I’d forgotten about that. I mean, I guess I thought he had already dealt with it, maybe. I guess not. It was deferred, and now it’s going to be not deferred.
“Oh. Uh. Yeah. That was a mistake.”
“It was,” he agrees. “A mistake for you.”