Chapter 2
Four years ago…
I’m enjoying a cup of herbal tea after a long day at work.
I’m partial to chamomile, but I’ve been experimenting with a ginger and turmeric infusion.
I’m swiping through a furniture catalog while light classical music is playing on the sound system that infuses my apartment with a soothing ambiance.
The golden hour is upon us, and the sun’s rays are flooding over the city, casting my apartment in a warm glow.
Boom!
That’s the sound of my custom ceramic front door bursting into pieces.
Four men armed with the kind of guns that have sights on them that people would call out for cheating if this was a game have just burst through the door of my high-end 49th-story apartment with a view of the park and the river that flows over the edge of New Chicago.
Their boots leave black rubber marks on my marble floor.
That pisses me off. It’s going to take hours to get all of those smudges off, and my back hurts enough as it is from squeezing through server stacks and bending over fucking backwards for the people I work for.
The same people who sent these masked clowns, I’d bet.
I had a performance review today. They said they’d get back to me with final feedback. Now I’m wondering why I didn’t realize exactly what that meant.
The soldiers open fire on me without bothering to ask who I am. I am fortunate that I leaped behind the couch when the door burst off its hinges. I’m even more lucky that I invested heavily in the concrete and rebar furniture trend.
The floor-to-ceiling windows behind me blow out, crashing inside the apartment and outside as well. Shards are raining onto the street below, creating a horrible hazard for innocent people who just want to enjoy a pleasant walk without having shards of glass crashing all over them.
I pull my side arm. I’m never without it. The four men are fanning out with the obvious intention of flanking me and riddling me with bullets. It comes down to speed.
My bosses cheaped out. They should have sent assassins, not soldiers.
If I was unarmed, I’d be fucked, but they should have known I’d never be caught without several weapons.
As a soldier swoops to my left, I fire once, hitting him right under the helmet.
His brain matter gets stuck in the notches of a piece of modern art that is probably going to be worth slightly more for it.
The one to the right also gets a bullet.
His hits him in the groin. That also goes very poorly for him.
He does a lot of screaming, which distracts the last two.
It’s one thing to come and shoot a woman when you assume you have the advantage.
It’s something else when you watch one of your mates get shot in the face and the other bleed out from his dick.
“Come and get me!” I shout. “You wanted this? Come and fucking get it!”
I’m furious.
I knew one day this is what would happen.
It happens to everyone in my field. You can’t work in corporate espionage without eventually learning too much.
The work I’ve been doing for Sudo ensures that I know more than anybody should.
They made me rich, they put me in an apartment with a view of the edge of the city.
They told me I was indispensable. I knew when they said it that they were lying.
I just didn’t know when that lie would fuck my day up.
That means I’m prepared.
In the wake of two swift deaths, the other two gunmen flee.
They’re not interested in dying for the sort of employers who will probably have someone waiting to kill them too.
It’s assassins and cleanup crews all the way down.
I’m willing to put money on several of my colleagues being dead if they consented to it tonight.
Consent being allowing themselves to be murdered.
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.
“Stop!”
Someone yells the word in modern Earth language. I ignore it, naturally.
I still have a gun. Several guns, actually. I’m trying not to use them. I don’t want to draw that kind of attention right away.
We’re on a big station, or a planet, or maybe an asteroid.
Actually I can’t tell because when you land in a port anywhere in the universe, all you can really see is the port.
There’s got to be an atmosphere, because I can see a sky.
And there’s got to be enough oxygen, because I haven’t passed out and died without noticing.
I rush through crowds of aliens. This is the first time I’ve ever seen so many non-human persons. They come in a range of shapes, sizes, and textures. They do, however, all seem to share a similar attitude to chaos that happens around them—they ignore it.
I am so relieved to realize that nobody seems to be actively chasing me. The traders have the cargo they thought they did. They’re not out any real product. They are down a few bananas and whatnot, but it’s not worth hunting me down for.