Dear Anyone,
We were warned. We were plied and consoled with those small comforts. We invited them into our homes to make things less tedious so we could have more time for what? To look away from one another and into the blue light at curated depictions of ourselves. They did not lie. They obstructed. That’s an important distinction. We did the curating, they simply harvested. Like worms on crops.
I write this from a facility that they insist on calling a “corporate retreat.” I worked as the Superior Court Attorney for the District of Cascadia. What kind of corporate retreat would I be party to? They bring us from these minimal cells into a large common area and create false intimacy by gleaning small details about our families, our lives, but never too much truth.
Too much truth creates true intimacy, and true intimacy is dangerous. I write to anyone, but I suppose that is as much a retraction of intimacy as anything else. I could write to my daughter, but I am certain she has been spirited away to one of the space stations to be “vocationally trained.” I could write to my son, but I cannot imagine him surviving this brave new world. The last time I saw him, he was huddling at the bottom of a boat trying to tell a knock knock joke. I am certain he has already been eaten alive in one way or another. My husband, so wound up in his place in this solar system, so concerned with obedience and honor.
When I met him, he was so drunk on palm liquor that he drew me into his arms to dance on a crumbling plywood floor. We were still in The New South then, drifting from bar to bar on flat rafts made of cypress pocket doors ripped from houses after the first floods. He whispered Spanish to me, crushing me against his rain softened military uniform. His dark hand pressed against my lower back. Moreno. It was forbidden to speak anything but English in those days. I suppose it still is.
His tiny rebellion was until it wasn’t. He tried to forbid me from teaching Spanish to my children. I don’t like children, not even my own. They tear your body. They require constant supervision, because they will hurl themselves into the hands of monsters if just one eye is averted. We were the generation right before “Naturalborns” were outlawed. In some ways I agreed with the new laws. It always seemed strange to me that we required testing and licensing for owning and operating a business or driving a car, but not for making another mouth to feed on this engorged planet. But the children came, and we weren’t allowed to get rid of them or prevent them in The New South, so they should know the language of their ancestors.
He argued that I didn’t know Mayan and that Spanish was the language of those who stole our gold and chocolate and corn and gods. How strange. How interesting. The man who hauled himself up the ladder of the new conquistadors drinking non-corporate wine as sanctioned by the United Front Army. I do not understand him. He did not want to be understood. He is certainly dead by now. We all know how that story ends.
No. I do not think I write to him either. I think this is for you, whomever you may be.
No one likes a chiding mother or a nagging wife. Do you know why? Because it makes you remember our great power over you. You suckled from our bodies or were fed by our hands. You were grown inside of us. We pulled your fingers from door frames. We held you away from that lunging dog. We gave you access, but when we pulled our breast from your mouth for the last time, you knew that you would never be as close to another. Our gift is a curse.
You beg us for closeness. You wish to cloister us and de-sex us, even from your own fathers. I do not blame those mothers who put their babies to bed face down and didn’t check, praying to find the infant cold and still the next morning. I prayed every night for my boy child to never wake up.
This “corporate retreat” is to tamp down this feeling. To make us forget what actual connection is. Actual connection is not of the body but of the mind. To replace it with the hollow interactions that can only be staged by sociopaths or cowards looking to escape their own ineptitude. These stooges. These worm tongues.
They had us do a scavenger hunt today. Citing “unfavorable atmospheric conditions” the goons came out wearing bright yellow t-shirts with The Corporation’s logo emblazoned across the front instead of the usual business casual. They giggled amongst themselves like they were the first people to think of this exercise. They divided us into teams with our “coworkers” and gave us a radiation detector. Whichever team counted the most blips in their designated area won a five credit Commissary gift card.
They engage you in these little activities to show you that they own your time. They own your labor. They claim, and some of the less gifted middle managers actually believe, that these little tasks bring people together. That they instill loyalty to The Corporation.
It is a shortcut to take from you.
I won the scavenger hunt. There is a system to it all, you know. Those who get bogged down in ideas and overlay their own notions of fairness or beauty or truth will lose. It is a raw system determined by algorithms. I will tell you how I won, though that is the first rule to never break if you want to win. The blood in my shit and my shrunken body have superseded that rule. The iron taste in my mouth reveals the ultimate truth: we will lose the larger game. You will lose the larger game. You already knew that. The second rule is to guide the illusion that the larger game can be won. Creams to plump. Dyes to hide. Diets to trim. Scalpels to cut. In guiding the illusion, the third rule comes easily: sell the illusion to those who cannot or will not accept the first rule. Let them believe they can win it.
These are the abstractions most do not wish to face. Face them with a bone club in your hand and wildness in your eye. To the victor go the spoils. Make them need you.
I am the one with radiation burns. I am the one with a five credit gift card to The Commissary. I gave that gift card to the Director of Security along with a blowjob. Next time he will trust me more. A little more trust each time until I bite down and tear. This is the final rule: establish trust in others, but do not trust others. I will take his chip and flee. Because even I am not immune to my own bullshit.
I do not want to die.
Sincerely,
Ana
***
Pai busied himself. He was good at that, busying himself with projects to avoid the weight. Alona had been a long-term project.
He had taken her DNA from his dead daughter’s epithelia, forcing open her mouth, his thumb pressed against her bottom teeth as he swirled the curettage against the inside of her cheek. Her first death. Not this one, so far beyond his grasp. This was her fourth reincarnation. Slipping the pink tissue into a test tube. Quickly, quickly before The Corporation came to attend to her retirement. To hide the evidence of their failure.
He would amend the lifespan alterations he used for his android research. He would ingrain her memories with a bit of brain tissue he saved from her. He would swirl away her nicotine addiction on a glass disk, holding his pipette like a knife. He would correct her astigmatism. He would hear her talk about the girls she liked again. He would see her dance under the false sun in the Solar Adjustment room again.
He would make her live again.
And now he would make her again. And again. And again. In his own image. He would drip hormones into the transparent womb until she loved him as he loved her. She would never leave him again. He must find the gene that drove curiosity and balance it with adoration. It was hard to separate it from the romantic love gene. He had trouble with that when he tried to replicate her mother. She would love him too much and interfere with his research. She craved his affection and attention. Never able to entertain herself. She starved to death when he left for a month-long conference on Titan.
He found her body when he returned, curled in their bed – Alona, the original Alona, squatting over her and pulling back her eyelids. She must have been only two or three cycles then. Already thin and tall from the reduced gravity, her knees jutted from under the sheets. Her eyes huge with confusion.
His stream blinked on, and Mechoben’s face appeared, shaking him from his reverie. He checked the settings. It was a direct call. Bile rose in the back of his throat, and he clenched his jaw. The CEO of the universe blinked at him.
“Dr. DeLuna, I see you there. Remember you signed the communication consent agreement. I own these channels. Answer me. We need to speak.”
He put down his Gene Genie 3000 splicer and tapped the audio button.
“I’m here, Lord. What would you ask of me?”
“Cut the formality. I had to send out Akimbo. We’ve lost the signal on them. They will destroy everything, and your daughter had a part in it.” He giggled. “Well, version 3.0 did.”
Pai shrugged, avoiding the CEO’s gaze.
“Well? What the fuck can we do?” Mechoben asked. His eyebrows raised.
“My daughter is gone. The signals have stopped from the base of operations there. We have no physical presence.”
“No shit. That’s why I sent Akimbo.”
“How far out is he, sweet Savior?”
“I told you to cut that shit out. About three weeks. Fuck. I still think in Earth time. Do you still think in Earth time, doctor?”
“Sometimes, but I have been on Mars for a very long time.”
Mechoben waved his hand in front of the screen, flicking his fingers toward it.
“Well?”
“I believe we will start seeing the first Natsar die-offs in about one Terran week.” Pai swallowed the “my Lord” that rose automatically to his lips.
A silvery android crossed behind Mechoben to stroke his thinning hair. She already showed neurological soft signs from the atmosphere on the hidden planet. One of her purple irises came unmoored and danced in its socket. She slipped from view, her lean body swaying like a current.
“Is it contagious?” Mechoben whispered.
“It’s genetic sir, but we will lose every woman with the implanted Natsar. So, it’s not contagious per se, but we will not be able to track them or send suggestive hormonal therapy like before.”
“Will they die?”
“No sir. But without the hormonal cues, they will be less suggestible to the cultivated stimuli.”
“The what?”
“The feeds, sir. The sedative mists. We designed them around the Natsar and the queen on Enceladus.”
Mechoben took out a pack of Camel Light cigarettes from The Far Before and drew one into the corner of his mouth. Pai’s eyes widened.
“Forgive me sir, but are those made with real tobacco?”
“Yep. They are the last ones in the whole system. You’re a scientist. I’m sure you know how hard it is to grow tobacco without Terran conditions.”
“It’s not my specialty, but yes.” Pai paused. “What is it like? I can almost remember.”
Mechoben lit the cigarette, peered into the pack and shook it.
“Only two left, and then that’s it.” Mechoben said, ignoring Pai’s question.
Mechoben sounded like a boy in that moment. A boy wishing for summer to never end. Staring at the fading orange of the last night while his backpack leans against the front door, packed and ready for the end of wild barefoot dashes and rainbow droplets arching over the chlorine-touched mists from the hose.
“What is my part in this, Lord? How can I assist Akimbo?”
“I’ll need you to start researching primitive sedative types and mind softening drugs. Possibly from pre-Event Terra. And you will need to cease your…” He paused to draw deeply on his cigarette. “…personal projects for now. This is a real crisis, DeLuna. We are about to lose control.”
“But, I just put her DNA into the growth solution!” Pai protested.
“Jesus, DeLuna. You won’t have a fucking growth solution if the Natsar are withdrawn. Do you understand me? We are going to lose everything we’ve worked for.”
“But sir…”
“Put it in the freezer and do what I have commanded.” Mechoben’s voice was hard. “Remember, I own these feeds and I am watching them.”
The screen flipped to the Commissary Advertising Screen. A pair of orangeish breasts being pushed together and released projected across his screen, bouncing like twin water balloons. He looked down at the Petri dish with his daughter’s DNA on it. The pale spot of sun burned like a low flame on the amber horizon. He opened a private channel that the first Alona programmed for him years ago and scrolled through to find Akimbo’s private audio-only stream.
Akimbo’s rich voice came on the line.
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“My my my. It’s been a long time, DeLuna. How are you holding up? Still a Peruvian beauty?”
“Still Peruvian, I suppose. I think you’re the only one who ever thought I was a beauty though.”
Akimbo laughed, and Pai remembered the light scar that cut through the stubble on his upper lip. He remembered holding his hand before it was forbidden between authority figures. He remembered the firm hands on his chest. They were good together. He loved him almost as much as Alona’s mother, Natasha. He loved to watch Akimbo and her spar, their muscular bodies sweeping past one another. He brought them cold tea. They kissed his temples on either side.
“Well, did our dearest leader of all spacetime and capital send you?” Akimbo said chuckling. “Or is it something else? Dinner and a show?”
“It’s something else. It’s something that requires utmost privacy.”
“I see. Hang on.” Pai heard a series of beeps and a muffled instruction. “Ok, I’m ready. What is it?”
“This has to stop. We have to stop him.”
“Oh sweet Keynes. Who are we talking about here?”
“Him. The Most High.”
“Why?” Akimbo was cheerful, confident.
“We can’t ask people to live like this anymore. He has cigarettes, Katsumi.” Pai said, using the general’s first name. The name he called out to when the flood nightmares came, to feel his hard arm sling over his hip.
Akimbo was silent.
“Almost everyone has Collapse Syndrome here on Mars, and the Shine production is tainted now. Everyone who uses it will have it soon.” Pai felt desperate. “Say something. Please.”
“This is treason. This is treason against God,” Akimbo’s playful tone had evaporated.
“Do gods smoke cigarettes and keep android pets? Do they hide disease from their children? Do they lose their hair? Why can’t we have fruit and cigarettes? Alona died. She died.” He choked.
“Our Alona? Our baby?”
Akimbo remembered Alona’s black, black hair, wet from birth. He remembered his fingers compressed in pain as her mother, huffing in silent pain, squeezed his hand. She had his eyes and DeLuna’s smile and her mother’s fair skin. This tiny golem. This child warrior. This wonderful experiment. The melding of three.
“You always did fight dirty. It isn’t fair. You’ve always been smarter than us. Than me.” A sad lightness flitted around the edges of the general’s tone. “What happened?”
Pai detailed her flight. Her distrust. Her demise. Her body sacrificed and torn by the Natsar queen.
“Why don’t we just kill the queen then?” Akimbo asked.
“We can’t. The network is entwined with the very physical structures of the GagGirls and the androids. We probably have microscopic spores lodged in our nasal cavities as well.” Pai paused, collecting his thoughts. “The queen, or MOTHER, as the siblings call her, is enormous. She is everywhere. She is us, Akimbo.”
“I forgot you sent the boy to Enceladus. How could I forget that?”
“We have to stop this. We have to.”
“What do I do, Pai pequeño? What do you need?”
“Don’t hurt the children. Pick them up and bring them to me. I’ll convince Mechoben it’s part of the research.”
“This line may be monitored.”
“I guess we’ll see. If it is, expect your ship to be returned to remote control.”
“We have a brilliant engineer onboard. One of the last Terran-educated ones. I think I can get him to rig a kill switch.”
“Katsumi, listen to me. If you hear nothing else, hear this: take care of the children. The boy and the girl. They can communicate directly with MOTHER.”
“Understood. And Pai?”
It was strange to hear his first name. Detached.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“That was so many cycles ago that my memories have memories.”
“Ok.”
“Ok.”
Akimbo’s mustache rasped against the embedded microphone as he signed off. Pai brought up a GagGirls stream and whispered to the disembodied navel-less torsos. His eyes wet and his hands clenched. He imagined the girls emerging from their plasticine sacks as infants. Always caul bearers, their faces pressed against the transparent sacks, their heads as round as Neptune’s belly.
They were the first generation without Naturalborns. They had a purity the consumer craved. Born without blood, without family, without death. Born to be consumed.
***
A drop of fuel crystallized in the cold as Riff-Alicia cranked the drip pan up under the engine. MOTHER, now free from her bonds, crashed around the moon. Seeming to revel, to stretch. Sometimes when Riff-Alicia slept under the artificial sun, long abandoned by the android mimic of their father, she thought she heard thunder and gasped awake to remember MOTHER’s tumbling revelry.
Rasp-José slid in beside her and handed her a tool kit.
“I worked on the electronics, and MOTHER showed me how to do some welds,” he said.
“Whose eyes did you see through this time?”
“Some GagGirl who used to do finish welds for custom ship jobs. She was good too.”
Riff-Alicia dipped her hand into the open tool kit, fumbling for a tool she couldn’t remember the name of. She traced her fingers along the metal edges, her MOTHER-suit slipping over her finger tips. Rasp-José chattered on as he sparked the MicroBind Welder™.
“You were in a factory, right?” He asked.
“Yeah.”
“What was your job?”
“I was just an assembler. I heard once that they keep the prettiest girls in the safest jobs so they can trade with the Gag sector.”
“Oh.” He focused on his weld, drawing the bead through the saline tube.
MOTHER flashed into their minds, jostling them from their work.
OTHERS
“What others?” Riff-Alicia thought back at her. She had learned that answering verbally often initiated confusion.
BIG OTHERS
Rasp-José chimed in, his voice mingling with the resonance of MOTHER’s.
“Can you reach them, MOTHER? Can you read them?”
MOTHER floundered in their heads. Her confusion wavered through their consciousnesses. Irritation rose in Riff-Alicia.
“You’re confusing her. Stop asking so much.” She said out loud.
He looked at the ground and shut off his mental communication with them, focusing instead on the panel he was reattaching.
“Where are the others?” She asked MOTHER.
OUT THERE
“Can you find their minds?”
NO
MOTHER undulated under the ice.
NOT LIKE YOU LIKE OTHER HERE
“Like Rasp?”
YES
“Okay. They are men.”
???
“Never mind.“
***
Space travel hurt Akimbo’s bones. Researchers thought the artificial gravity drives would mitigate the effects of space travel, and they did somewhat. He remembered the early days, running on those absurd treadmills, bungeed to the floor. His fingers swollen as sausages and purplish. The sound of his heart in his neck as he floated around the craft looking too far out between the whispering stars. They sang to one another, high and thin, a piping note that only the floating brains of the space weary could hear.
Once, when he was a child, he had read a book about Merlin. He sat perched on the roof of the compressed mega city where the light and wind reached, leaning against a spindly antenna. The book talked about how Merlin could hear the trees whispering ancient secrets to one another as the wind blew through them. A conduit. An automatic writer for the ghosts of the earth. He had never seen trees, except in streams and pictures. He imagined them feeling like painted brick, but warm and breathing. The leaves like thin fingers of plastic.
The first time he heard starsong, his tether had popped loose, and Control was murmuring into his ear telling him to remain calm, that remaining calm conserves oxygen. Remain calm Akimbo. And so he switched off his comms just for a moment. Just a moment to hear what true silence was for the first time in his life. He was certain that this end-over-end with no direction was his tomb. But instead of the thin static of pure silence, he heard them. These churning spherical collections of fire and plasma and gas, shuddering as they spouted and withdrew within themselves. Turning in a great ellipse, pulling away from the center, it sounded like the highest note on a violin. Then came the answer, a fluting chuckle.
After they sent the drone out for him to bring him back, he told his captain what he had heard.
They sent him to Psych.
Now he was nearing retirement and was ready for The Soup. The labor force had to be protected from the realities of The Soup, but he had been allowed to see the future. The iridescent gleam of The Churn. The trays of human femurs and scapulae retrieved and sifted out. It was quicker than disease. Kinder than the rot of old age. To be reduced was an honorable end, he thought.
Last mission. Last mission before sleep. Retrieve the siblings, and then die.
He tapped the screen and motioned his navigator over. The heat register chirped as the surface scan rolled over the moon’s surface. He pointed his sharpened yellowing fingernail at the screen as his navigator leaned over his left shoulder. Guidry’s android-smooth skin brushed against his bare forearm. The U-shaped nitrobrand on the base of his neck stretched as he leaned over the console. Old war Andys stayed one shape. One shape was all that was required. Thousands of Guidrys had already been reclaimed into this Guidry. They greased the engine of the empire with their fat.
“Is this register reliable?” Akimbo asked.
“Yes. They just released the latest update, and it was supposed to eliminate ghost chirps.”
“Are those the targets?” He tapped the screen over the orange blobs floating around a sea of cool blues and purples.
“I can’t be sure, but most likely. It’s close to the habitation quarters according to the briefs.”
“What is that?” Akimbo pulled a pair of reading glasses from The Before down onto his face.
A huge white shape moved under the orange blobs and spread like veins underneath them. It retracted into a tight ball, then poured across the screen like spilled milk.
“I need the comms channels clear so I can call the CEO.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Guidry floated into the next room and closed the chamber with the heat seal. No grav drives on this bucket.
Akimbo dialed in the sequence for Mechoben’s direct line and pressed his fingertip to the hollow needle. The familiar dart of pain as the DNA sequencer drew his blood. The screen opened as soon as the sequencer stopped whirring.
Mechoben’s chambers were empty. A bright smear of blood on the bright white floor shimmered under the bright sunlight from the bay windows. A robotic flamingo walked across the blood, tracking it throughout the room in a perfect ellipse. Its primordial feet clicking with each step.
“Sir?” Akimbo’s voice echoed back at him.
“Lord Mechoben? Are you there?”
No answer. The flamingo lapped the room again, its tracks matching perfectly with the first set.
***
The Holy Book™
Chapter 54 Verses 1–5
1 For when the Son returns to His Father after many years of providing for His children, the kingdom will be naught. He provided them with screens that do not break, with clothing named for the prophets of commerce, with visages of beauty, eliminating all disease and domestic violence, for by surveillance did He make you whole again.
2 You will know the signs by a great creature with eyes like Garmin watch faces who rises from the sea to find the Executive Directors and Chief Financial Officers laid bare before her.
3 And on her back will sit The Eldest of the Secondborn, clothed in station-grown cotton and dog leather loafers.
4 She will seduce his children with promises of fair labor and the intermingling of the sexes, but this is folly. The demise of Terra came of these unnatural yearnings.
5 For it is written, thy place is determined not by thy labor, but by thy station.
***
It was easy. Skin as fragile as tissue paper under the genetic dynasty of the ant’s strength-to-mass ratio.
Al had planned for weeks, thinking about how to take him. He was after all, the Son of the one true God. The God who gave her life, who gave her beloved life. This fine changeable body. He was the engineer who built this system in the black heart of space.
In the end, it was as common a death as any. No crosses like the god child from The Before. No ascension on the back of a white calf. No masses to witness, to lay hunks of animal fat on his grave.
It came to her after he drew her to orgasm, gripping her sides and biting her bare shoulder. He had asked her to assume a young form that day. To shrink herself into bare ripeness, her breasts to mere hints, her belly tight as a rounded drum.
“Make your eyes larger, my child. Make your lips softer. Yes. That’s it.”
As he drew his hands, huge in comparison to her new frame, over her cheeks and stared into her eyes, she remembered that if she could be small, she could be large. She had forgotten He-Al, with height and power, thick with muscle. Pumping with testosterone. Heart fluttering as he drew her to his mouth. To melt. To scream.
And so she waited for him to depart as he sometimes did, only to return with strange pets that disappeared within the week. Pets that spoke to her through their pursed little mouths and tic tac eyes.
She ate dog meat, sliding with Shine butter over top, and genetically modified bread and small pink fruits shaped like ribbons. Crushing the sweet-sour skin and swallowing the sweetness. She grew in his absence, her ova descending into testes, her muscles lengthening, her head brushing the tops of doorways. She became He, though They was more settled in their psyche.
Al dreamed about catching fetuses in their hands like butterflies, only to open them and find the fragile bones crushed under the heavy grip. They pulled themselves up the transparent cliffsides with bare fingers and no rope. They tore the skin, only for it to knit together like a tight smile. The sheets clung to Al’s back.
The day came when Mechoben returned, flinging his Meteorite Harvest Chopard De Rigo sunglasses onto the entrance, a small creature with a flicking tail clutched in the crook of his arm. Al held the top of the door frame, stretching their shoulders. Mechoben started.
“Al? You disobeyed me.” His brow furrowed.
Al stepped forward, releasing the doorframe.
“I did. What are you going to do about it?”
“What do you want, Al?” His hand trailed to the sonar security system panic button.
“Don’t bother, my Lord. It’s all been disabled.”
Al rushed forward and gripped Mechoben by the shoulders. The creature dropped to the floor and padded away into the great room. Tail erect and unconcerned with this interaction.
Mechoben’s shoulders were strange and thin under Al’s new hands. His throat stringy despite the Shine injections, the android plasma baths, the oxygen massage. The smell of urine wafted into Al’s nostrils. They reached back and boxed Mechoben’s right ear. His head snapped sideways.
“Why? Why, Al? I gave you everything anyone could have wanted,” he whined.
Al pulled back and clouted him across the mouth. A bubble of blood bloomed over his bottom lip.
“Not everything.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to be God.”
A smile crawled across his lips. He reached up to stroke the side of Al’s face.
“You do? Why didn’t you say so? It’s all yours. You are God now.”
“No, no. That’s not how this works.” Al gripped Mechoben’s throat and squeezed. “Gods require sacrifice.”
Mechoben wrenched back, but Al wrapped their arms across his shoulders and pulled him close, jabbing the Terran paring knife under his jaw. More blood, human blood, poured over Al’s forearms and hands. Rich, red, and hot. Mechoben’s feet flailed as Al dragged him toward the balcony that overlooked the lavender sea. They lifted him over their shoulder, his heart pounding against their massive shoulder, and hurled him onto the shining white rocks below. His head split into a black red maw as it struck the hard ground. Al leaned over the railing and peered down at the little blue flying reptiles that flitted over the moisture-rich feast. Their tongues darting into the staring eyes.
The private vidchat line trilled in the living room. The autoconnect feature picked it up. A voice echoed from the other room. Al picked up the creature Mechoben had brought in. It was soft, but tipped with sharp claws that it extended against their chest. It squeaked and slid out of their arms like liquid. Al took a sip of water from the fountain in the hallway. Water that flowed without charge from the basins around the house.
Akimbo’s space-bloated face hovered on the blank wall as Al entered.
“Hello, General.”
“Hello…Who is this?”
“This is an angel.”
“Where is the CEO?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Look.” Al held up their blood-slicked hands.
“What have you done?”
“I killed God. It was easy.”
“What are we going to do?”
“You’re going to pick up my best friend and her brother and come back here. I am God now. And so are you.”
“Your best friend?”
“I thought you were a genius, Akimbo. That’s what the dead god told me anyway.” Al wiped the blood onto the front of their white tunic.
“I want the brother and sister.”
“What about The Corporation?”
“What about it?”
“There are board meetings and other duties.”
“Not anymore. I want you to dispatch your troops to the richest space stations, exoplanets, and terraformed moons.”
“And do what?”
“They think themselves gods. They must be disposed of.”
“All of them?”
Al sighed and rubbed their temples.
“Let me speak with Guidry.”
“No, that’s alright. I understand. Shall we take them to The Soup for manufacture?”
“Yes, we can make them into biofuel.”
“Even the children?”
“Oh yes. None shall be spared. There was a Terran legend about a being who you could make a deal with, but the price was always high. This is the price for their clean air. This is the price for the real fruit and coupling and marriage. Throw the children in first and put all of it on the streams.”
“They are innocent in this,” he hesitated, “my Lord.”
“Don’t call me that. What about the GagGirls? Weren’t they innocent in this? Miners? Tube children? Deserving is a past concept. All of them. They committed the highest crime.”
“But, surely we can—”
Al cut him off.
“I told you I was coming back with a sword, didn’t I? Throw them in The Churn, General, or I will replace you with Guidry, and you can join the rest of them.”
“Yes. Yes, I understand.”
“Do not hurt the Andys or the slaves. Preserve the properties for communal use.”
“You mean the employees?”
“I mean the slaves. We will begin mass relocation as soon as we wipe them from the system’s face.”
Al clicked off the feed before Akimbo could reply.
Al felt the truth coursing through them, the suns streaking through the window. The third eye at their throat beaming golden into the sea. Al was God. They were God.