Chapter 6 #3
Arkon puts a hand on Drak’s shoulder to quieten him.
He’s saying too much. I’m not supposed to know about the striking down foes.
I’m supposed to be here as a human training machine.
I assume that once they have all the data they need from me, they’ll make an upload of it to the machine and then she will go forth with a little bit of me inside her.
I will be back on Earth one day, maybe soon, but some of my sense, my consciousness will be performing great and maybe wicked acts in alien skies.
“She needs to rest,” Arkon says. “That was a lot for her. I can see how tired she is already.”
“Yes,” Drak says. “I’ll take her to rest.”
“You?”
“Certainly,” Drak says. “I am capable of getting a human some food and making sure it doesn’t do anything too silly. You can analyze the data we just gathered.”
I never thought I’d take any kind of a liking to Drak, but I am starting to reluctantly appreciate his competence, and I really want to ask him a lot of questions about the machine and how he built her, and what he meant about souls in things that are made.
“Don’t let her out of your sight,” Arkon says.
“Not a problem,” Drak replies. “Put the collar and leash on her and I’ll make sure I don’t let go.”
It has been a while since Arkon leashed me in the building. I don’t really want to go back to having that on me, but if it’s part of the terms of getting to have an interesting conversation I suppose I can accept it.
Arkon has my leash in his pocket, a fact I did not know until he pulls it out and snaps it onto the collar that has been around my neck since he put it on.
That never comes off. I don’t even think of it as a collar anymore.
It just feels like a necklace or choker or something—right until it gets a leash put on it and then it is something different again.
I see him hesitate before he hands the leash over to Drak. “Keep her safe,” he says. There’s something in his voice that is much weightier than the situation seems to require, and once again I feel as though there’s something I don’t know that I very much should know.
We leave the room and Drak drops the leash immediately. “Don’t make me regret doing that,” he says with a wink, which is more like a blink because of his one eye, but I know what he meant.
This is so wild. I’m starting to like this guy. Yesterday I would have never imagined wanting to spend more than a minute in his presence, but now he seems kind of interesting to me. I guess a lot of people who are really immersed in what they do can come across as being assholes.
We go to the cafeteria, which has a lot of food I cannot eat. The smells make my stomach rumble.
He glances over at me. “Your rations are unacceptable,” he says.
“I mean, they’re not great,” I agree. “But I’m told all of this stuff is poison.”
“Hm,” he nods. “Then we will both have plain rations.”
We walk up to the counter where the stunning Lunch Lad with his four arms, his crooked smile, and his hair cut to fit under a white hat for sanitation is waiting to serve us while wearing a blue t-shirt or whatever the aliens would call it that barely has enough fabric to cover his massive muscles.
The Lunch Lad is a job that rotates through the juniors. I don’t know this guy’s name, but I would bet he has an indefinite number of girlfriends.
“Two gruel,” Drak says.
“I’m sorry, sir?” the Lunch Lad says, flexing in his confusion. He is very easy on the eyes… I need to rein in my desire. It’s getting all over everything. I think I am getting too used to having multiple orgasms a day. I didn’t get put in the stimulating sucker chair and it’s starting to show.
“I am eating with my human companion and we will endure the same slop,” he says.
“Oh,” the Lunch Lad smiles. “Then two plates of our finest slop it is.”
Drak takes our tray of slop while I nervously play with the end of my leash and we take a seat in the cafeteria.
I’ve never been the best at small talk, but he doesn’t seem like a small talk sort of guy, so we sit there for a couple of moments, both picking at our slop before I ask the question I really want to ask.
“So you and Arkon have known each other a really long time.”
“Both born of noble families. He was a war hero, as I have mentioned, and as I am sure he has alluded to…”
“He never mentions it. I didn’t know he’d even been to battle until you said that.”
Drak smirks at me. “His ship was attacked when he was bringing you back here. You didn’t notice then?”
I think back. “I mean, he was very calm under pressure,” I admit. “I suppose I thought that’s just how he was.”
“He was that way because he was a squadron commander of over a thousand fighter units. Arkon has been decorated more times over than you have had hot meals in your short human life.”
“Wow,” I say. “I wonder what else I don’t know about him. He doesn’t talk about himself much. Most of our relationship is built on…” I trail off because I don’t want to say sex and spanking in a cafeteria.
“Relationships have to be built on something,” Drak muses. “He is a good, honorable warrior, and he believes in the cause. That is why, in spite of his tendency to soften in the wrong places, I enjoy him.”
“Am I one of the softening in the wrong places?”
“Probably,” Drak says, his expression not changing much at all. “But that is his business, and I suppose, to a lesser extent, yours.”
“Why a lesser extent me?”
“Because you have been at a disadvantage since you came here. You are human. You are smaller, weaker, not as complex, and you are his employee. The moment he laid fingers on you, you melted for him. The machine bears the data out. You were primed to give him a strong sexual response. You’ve been his from the moment you laid eyes on him, I’d bet.
In some senses, humans really aren’t much more than sex-generating machines. ”
I change my mind back again. He is an asshole.