The Joomits game dominated the Intergalactic Spaceball League’s news feeds for the following week. I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the news and only skim the headlines, but I’ll admit I was curious about what people were saying about us. There was rampant speculation about where all the pirates trained. Everybody expected them to behave like an unorganized mob. Some of the more outlandish things I read alleged that the Blood Suns were actually the Gikathka Stormblades masquerading as pirates to get back into the game. Man, some people are really desperate.
Kissy got the lion’s share of the attention. It was the first time anyone had played League spaceball in a suit even remotely shaped like hers. When word got out that she was a sex robot and played the game naked in a souped-up exoskeleton, the coverage went viral. I don’t watch the news and I still saw her demon body from more angles than is really healthy while trying to maintain an estranged, long-term relationship with another woman. Mostly while sitting in those boring meetings Maurice talked about. I tried to avoid him, but he always knew where I was. Tracking me down was easy. I whined a lot. Definitely didn’t threaten him. Bowler hats.
Some people made a big stink about Kissy being a robot and her body on full display to the universe, but the ISL squashed all of it with the statement, “There are no rules against mechanical players, and there are no rules against playing without clothes. We are looking forward to seeing Miss Kissy play in upcoming games.” What they didn’t say was that the game saw viewing ratings 1200% higher than normal for a game played in the first week of the season. No media conglomerate is going to screw around with an instant viewership like that.
Unfortunately for us, Kissy had a lot of fans from her old job and they kept showing up on Freehaven hoping for another taste now that she was famous. She turned them all down, but they didn’t go away.
***
I’m hiding in my quarters on the Hercules, when I hear an insistent knock. I get up, muttering to myself about what it’s going to take to find a spare six minutes around here to jerk off and nap, and open the door.
Bucky storms in. “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last hour. Why haven’t you been taking my calls?”
“I’m working on the strategy for next week’s game, Bucky. We’re playing the–”
“There ain’t gonna be a next game if you don’t come over the station, Rick. You gotta come now!”
“Whoa! Slow down, tell me what happened.”
“Okay,” Bucky says, breathing hard. “Okay. You know how Kissy’s been gettin’ all this attention over the last couple of days? All those crazy people showin’ up and tryin’ to have sex with her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, turns out after we showed the porcupine vid, most of ‘em went away. But one guy stayed behind and talked his way into Kissy’s quarters last night.”
“I’ve seen Kissy in action. One guy is no problem for her.”
Bucky shakes his head. “Not even a robotics engineer who specializes in her model and has a nasty habit of dismembering them? Been in prison twice for wanton destruction of Pleasure Palace property? The guy’s disassembled over forty sex robots in the last decade.”
Fear grapples my stomach and puts a crushing fist into my lungs. “Is she okay?”
“Who, Kissy? Yeah, she’s fine. You know those three ogres that we’ve got for offensive linemen? They decided to protect Kissy off the field, too, after all her former lovers showed up. Over twelve hundred of ‘em.” Bucky smirks. “She’s a busy girl.”
“Bucky! What happened?”
“Well, one of ‘em was guarding Kissy’s door, but this bastard got in, talkin’ some line about routine Pleasure Palace maintenance and promisin’ a secret vid of it. So now there’s two ogres on her door, the ones who can—”
“Bucky! I don’t give a shit about our linemen! What happened?”
“The guy waited until one of the guards went for a pee break. I guess the smarter one, because when he got back, he found out about Kissy’s visitor and got mad. Both ogres went into Kissy’s room and found the guy just getting’ started.” Bucky grimaces. “They tore him to pieces. Literally. ‘Poetic justice’ is what they said. Doesn’t seem all that poetic to me, unless you’re into that death poetry. Nasty stuff.”
“You have the attention span of a goddamn gnat.”
“Yeah, well, they’re lucky they didn’t get arrested.”
“Bucky? Jager is on our coaching staff and Clippers owns the team. You could hijack the entire station and probably get off with a slap on the wrist.”
“But now Kissy can’t play.”
“What? Why?”
Bucky shrugs. “She won’t say. Not doin’ a lot of talkin’. She’s just sitting in her quarters bawlin’ her eyes out.”
“She’s crying?”
“Yep. I wasn’t aware that they could do that, but apparently she absorbs moisture in the air to get the water. She’s a regular dehumidifier. Anyway, she won’t talk to no one, not even Laura, and we both know that they’ve got some sort of friendship goin’ on. She won’t talk to anyone, Rick. We’ve tried everybody. Even Jager.”
“I’m last? Wait, you tried Erik Jager before me? A guy with a necklace of teeth? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Nobody thought that you’d be the one to get through to her, seein’ as you have such a hard time getting through to every woman you meet.” He shrugs at my affronted stare. “It isn’t exactly a secret, Rick. You argue with your wife in public, she shot you, made you apologize on the vid, and—”
“Okay, okay!” I say, holding up my hands. “Stop right there, I really don’t want to think about all the ways I’ve embarrassed myself in public. I’ll go see how a machine can have a psychotic break.”
***
I can tell when we get to the section of Freehaven Station with Kissy’s quarters because it’s so empty. Freehaven’s a big place, sure, but there are twenty-five thousand people living here and it’s really extraordinary for there to be any hallway without at least some of them in it. The clansmen had shut down the entire section for Kissy’s protection, or at least that’s what the burly men blocking the access hatch said before they let me through. They let me through but not Bucky, who says he’s going back to his apartment, and to call him with updates.
The clansmen are all really uptight. I can see how nobody dares to try to get past them, what with the swords and all. Many clansmen are expert swordsmen. Shooting a gun guarantees a visit from Mall Security, but they don’t give a shit about edged weapons if you can’t cut a hole in the station’s outer wall with them. It’s like living in an old western town with no laws, but the town itself made sure you didn’t fuck with the buildings.
Two offensive linebackers are still standing guard outside Kissy’s door. They look happy to see me. “Thank God you’re here,” the biggest one says. “She won’t talk to anybody. It’s almost as if her brain is stuck in cry and sob mode.”
“How long has this been going on?” I ask.
“Three hours.”
“Straight?”
“Straight.”
“Your name’s Arthur, right? Arthur Porchetto?”
“You got it, Coach.”
“Did you really tear a man to pieces?”
His expression goes flat. “He had it coming.”
“I don’t doubt it. Were you the one who let him in to begin with?”
“Nah,” Arthur says. “That was Pauly. He ain’t here. He ain’t gonna be guarding anybody for a while.”
“Erm, Pauly’s an offensive lineman and I need him to guard Kissy in the next game. So you didn’t do anything permanent to him, right?”
Arthur gets an evil grin on his face. “Oh, yeah, he’ll be there. He might be limping a little, but he’ll be there.”
“Oh, okay, that’s—”
“He’s lucky,” Arthur says. “We only took one of his testicles.”
“—good … Wait, what?” I hear a muffled wail through the door. I decide that I don’t want to hear about pirate justice. “I’ll try and talk to Kissy. You guys wait out here.”
Kissy’s apartment is a lot bigger than mine on the Hercules. She has actual rooms. They’re small, sure, but walls go a long way to keep people sane when sharing small spaces. I can hear Kissy’s whimpering in the room on the left. She starts quiet and then ramps up to full-blown howl, then back down to whimpering again. I’ve never heard a machine cry. They’re very methodical about it. Bucky was right about the humidity, too. Dry.
“Kissy, it’s me, Rick. Can I come in?”
No response. I can tell from the volume that she’s in the front half of her crying loop. I walk into the apartment and let the door close behind me. Kissy’s sitting on the floor beside her bed. She’s hugging her knees and rocking back and forth. She looks up when I appear in the doorway, but she doesn’t stop crying. She sees me. There’s no recognition in her features.
“Kissy!”
Nothing. More crying.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I’m not qualified to troubleshoot a machine as complicated as her. But maybe … She got shocked into this, so a shock might her out. “Kissy, will you have sex with me?”
Like flipping a light switch. All crying stops and she stands up. “Really?” she asks.
“No.”
Confusion. “Then why—”
“Kissy, are you aware that you’ve been crying for the past three hours?”
She stops. Her eyes do that little dance that all robots do when they’re checking their internal memories for things. “Wow, three whole hours. It’s that stupid Sadness Protocol, it’s never worked right.”
“You have a Sadness Protocol? What for?”
“So I can empathize with people better. It was a late addition to my model and they never tested it properly. Under certain circumstances, I get caught in a loop until a doctor does a hard reset.”
“You mean a technician.”
“Semantics. Aren’t you just a machine, Rick? You have microscopic cells and I have microscopic nanobots. We’re really not that much different.”
I raise my hands in defeat. “Please. I’m sorry I mentioned it. If you need a hard reset, how come I was able to break you out of the loop with a single question?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I guess you asked the right one.” She pouts. “Are you sure you don’t want to have sex with me?”
“I’m sure, Kissy. So what set you off?”
“That asshole Victor,” she says, her features contorting to anger. “I’ve never met him, but he killed six of my friends on the Palace circuit. He was a systems engineer for my model before they caught him in a customs checkpoint with the heads of two missing girls.”
I assumed she means robot girls instead of regular girls, but I don’t push it. “How did he get in here?”
“He flashed some old credentials to the boys outside, said he was coming in for some overdue maintenance on the Palace women. He looked okay and said all the right things. Never mind the fact that Laura completely upgraded my exoskeleton and I no longer have any of the parts Victor’s familiar with.”
“Does that make Laura your doctor now?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. I wonder if she’ll play doctor with me.”
“You really have a one-track mind when she’s concerned, don’t you?”
“Pretty much. What happened after Victor got in?”
Kissy sits down on the bed and folds her arms. “He’d changed his face. Surgery. I didn’t recognize him. I was trying to tell him I didn’t need him, when he pulled out a handheld EMP. I cried out. The boys charged in and Victor didn’t stand a chance after that. I would not want to get in a fight with them.”
“You’re no slouch yourself, you know.”
“Yes, I could have handled him. But all he had to do was touch me with his EMP, and it would be lights out for me forever. That’s how he killed the other girls.” She touches her throat. “Well, it used to be like that. Laura upgraded my neural net’s shielding so that can’t happen anymore. I guess the old fears don’t die when you change your configuration.”
“Is that what triggered this Sadness Protocol? Your fear of dying?”
“I suppose so. I’m not sure, it’s never happened to me before. I’ll ask Laura to find a neural expert and see if we can’t remove the Protocol or bury it somehow. I really don’t want this happening in the middle of a game.”
“Good thinking.”
Kissy squints at me. “You know, he said something really weird, right when he pulled out the EMP.”
“What?” I ask.
“He called me ‘one of his dear ones’. He sounded jealous.”
Fear seizes me “Shit. Fuck! Grab your stuff, you’re coming with me.”
“Why?”
“Because Victor had help. I think they used Victor first because if he succeeded, nobody would have asked any questions. Nobody would’ve thought about who’s next.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Kissy asks.
“The Veeni. They hate my guts. Gave me a death note and everything last week.”
Kissy stands up with a bright smile. “I’m one of your dear ones? Give me a couple of minutes to get my things.”
I toggle my fast contact list and call Bucky.
No answer.
I pay the override. I really hope I’m going to see the horizontal tango again, however much damage it’ll be for my own psyche. I see his apartment, and it looks as if Arthur and his buddies started the party there before coming over to handle Victor. The place is trashed. I can’t see anything other than this narrow view. No panning on Freehaven cameras. Too old.
I disconnect and make another fast call to Laura.
She picks up immediately. “Rick, I’m glad you called. Is Kissy all right?”
“She’s fine. Where are you?”
“I’m working with the suits. Why?”
“It's a hit, Laura. It's the Veeni. I’m having trouble getting a hold of Bucky. I’m going to go find him, but I want you to be ready.”
“I will, but why aren’t they going after you?”
“They said they’d destroy ‘all I held dear.’ You know how they are.”
“So you hold me dear, huh?”
“Baby, I’ll disassemble them with rusty nails if they hurt you.”
“That’s sweet. I’ll be careful, Rick. You go find Bucky.”
***
Bucky’s apartment looks worse in person. Jager and I are standing in the open doorway. Neither of us have gone in, on account of all the broken glass. It’s really hard to trash a place these days, since there are no pots or pans to fling around, no bookshelves to turn over, and no wardrobes to sack. But whoever was in here was intent on breaking everything they could. Which is weird, because they have to work hard to do it. Why go to all that effort?
“I have my people looking for Bucky and his fiancée,” Jager says. He’s wearing his pink shirt again. He doesn’t look worried. I suppose it’s hard to look worried when you’ve got human teeth clicking together on a necklace.
“Remember that note you said you’d help me with?” I ask. “I think this is it.”
“Not possible,” Jager says.
“Well, they’re going after people I care about, so yeah, I think it is.”
“There are no Veeni onboard Freehaven,” Jager says, “and they like to carry out their assassinations in person.”
“How do you know there’s no Veeni here? Are you telling me that you kicked them all off the station?”
“Not as brusque as that, I would like them to come back at some point after the Tournament. No, I simply convinced Freehaven’s commander to declare a cockroach infestation. A nuisance to humans, but their droppings are noxious to Veeni, even deadly in some cases. The Veeni are staying away all on their own.”
“That just means they don’t want to sleep here, but they’ll definitely drop by to kill some people!”
“Calm down. We have the station covered, and no Veeni have arrived in the week.”
“And there’s no way to sneak onboard, right?”
Jager frowns. “I already know about all the ways to sneak aboard. Don’t you think I’d cover those routes, too?” He gestures around at the room. “We’re wasting time. I think this is a trick. I think it’s made to look like a Veeni attempt, but it’s something else. Why go through all the effort to wreck a room like this? He hardly had any belongings, so they had to break the room itself to generate this much debris. You can’t do this in a scuffle, you have to bring a crowbar. This is—” He gets a faraway look that says he’s talking to someone else. Then he comes back. “We found Bucky. He’s fine. He’s in the Mall with Janine. She’s shopping. I have three men shadowing them now and they’ll let us know if anything happens.”
I call Laura again. “You all right?”
“Fine. I locked down the armory just to be safe, and I asked Bartholomew to place the Hercules on alert. Nobody on or off until you give the all clear.”
“You sure there wasn’t anybody in the armory with you when you locked it down?”
“Yes, Rick, and before you ask, no, there isn’t anyone hiding in the suits. You can’t get even open them without my say so, and I checked them to be sure.”
“That’s assuming that whatever might kill you is a person,” I say. “Will you do me a favor, and get into some armor? I’d feel better if I knew you were safe until we figured out what the hell is going on.”
“I think that’s cute, Rick, but no. I can take care of myself.”
“So can Kissy, and we all know how that almost turned out.”
“Yeah, well, if I have to sleep before we know what happened, I’ll sleep in a suit. You happy?”
“Very. I’ll call you back soon.”
I disconnect and give Jager the update. “I’m really confused,” I say. “Why try to kill Kissy and then make it look like Bucky is missing when he really isn’t?”
“I’m not sure,” Jager says. “I rarely have to deal with this sort of thing. Clansmen are more straightforward. We challenge each other to duels.”
“We need sneaky person kind of help.” I make another call. “Jint.”
“What do you want?” she asks.
“Look, I need your help.” I explain about Kissy and Bucky’s apartment. “We’re trying to figure out what this is all about, but coming up empty. I figured you’d have a better idea.”
“Are you still in the apartment?”
“Well, we’re standing in the doorway.”
“What does it smell like?”
I sniff. “Well, it’s sort of fruity, now that you mention it.” Strawberries? I sniff some more. “It’s stronger towards the back room.”
“Don’t go inside, you fucking moro—”
***
I wake up in a completely different place and I can barely see. Mostly just grays and blacks and a couple of bright spots in front of me that slowly coalesce into lights on a ceiling. I turn my head. Or, at least, I try to turn my head. Doesn’t seem to want to work. I open my mouth to speak, but that doesn’t work, either. What the fuck is wrong with me?
“Don’t move, idiot,” Laura says, her voice somewhere off to my left. She sounds angry and scared at the same time. I hate to hear her like that. “The nanogel is still working on you. Shouldn’t he still be under?”
“Oops,” says a mechanical voice.
The ceiling swirls and fades out.
***
When I come to again I’m in a different place again, but at least when I turn my head it works. The walls are milky white and so are the floors and ceiling. I’m in one of those elevated hospital recovery beds. It’s really just a “we were going to discharge you but wanted to wait a couple of minutes in case you tried to die again” sort of rooms. Laura is sleeping in a chair in the corner. That’s not a good sign, it meant I’d been here for a long time. Healthcare in the 29th century is fast. Everything takes fifteen minutes, tops. They only keep people overnight who have been blown to pieces.
I look down. There are leg shapes beneath the blanket, and arms and a torso, too. Oh, thank God. But if I still have all my parts, then why am I still in the hospital?
“Laura,” I croak. Man, my mouth tastes like absolute shit, like death crawled in there and pitched a tent.
Her eyes pop open and she looks at me. There’s fear and hope and relief and then anger. Ah, I’ve seen that before. I’ve done something fairly horrible. Then why am I the one sitting in the hospital bed?
“What happened?” I manage to get out.
She comes over and gives me a sip from a water cup next to the bed. It’s room temperature but slightly minty. “You got blown up,” she says.
“Why am I still in the hospital?”
“The bomb was in Bucky’s bedroom, and everything in the room turned into shrapnel. You got shredded by his marble collection.”
I frown. “By his what?”
“There were hundreds of them. Ever since he was a little kid, he said, his mother would send them as gifts from different parts of the universe. She had to travel a lot and was never home.”
Her voice is tired and I can tell she’s trying to be brave but is having trouble getting to the meaty part of the story. I wait.
“Jager saved your life,” she goes on. Her fingers laced in my own, and her grip is strong. Or maybe mine is weak. I can’t tell. “He has a mobile stasis pod in case of emergencies. If he wasn’t there, you would have bled to death.”
“Bled to death? Medibot response times are less than twenty seconds on Freehaven.”
“You—” Laura stops. Covers her face with her free hand and swallows down a sob. “You were blown apart.”
“Apart?” I look down again. “But it looks like they put me back together.”
“The Freehaven hospital wouldn’t touch you. I called Paul Chippers and he sent a specialist team. We’re on a medical frigate. They … They put you—” She stops again.
I terrible idea dawns on me. Oh, shit. Not again.
“What did they replace this time?” I ask.
Her voice is a whimper. “All of you.”
***
The door bursts open and Bucky runs in. He points at me and screams “OH MY GOD YOU SHOULD SEE YOUR FACE!”
Laura convulses and hisses a long string of giggles. The white walls vanish into clear glass and I see every member of the Blood Suns watching and laughing and high-fiving each other. I’m in one of the VR training rooms on the Hercules. I can hear the muffled roar of their glee even through walls that are supposedly soundproof.
Kissy struts in and says, “So, how did it feel to be a robot for a few seconds?”
“Unbelievable!” Jager says, coming in after Kissy. “You bought the whole thing!”
“V-victor?” I demand.
“Oh, that happened,” Bucky says. “We almost didn’t pull the prank, but we’d been plannin’ it for days and it was a great opportunity. Then you came up with that goin’ after me was connected to the attack on Kissy, and it was perfect!”
Jager turns to Laura and bows. “That was a masterful performance.”
She’s practically hyperventilating. “Thanks,” she manages between hysterical gasps.
“Whose idea?” I ask.
“Ours,” Carter says, walking into the room with his sister in tow. Samantha has reddish blonde hair and she luckily doesn’t look exactly like her brother, who has a face like a flat board. Fraternal twins, then.
“We’re big on elaborate pranks,” Samantha says. “We asked Laura if she thought it was a good idea—”
“—and of course I said yes,” Laura finishes. “If we did it in-between games you’d never notice us, you get so engrossed in planning the next game.”
“But I called Jint,” I say.
Laura nods. “I asked her about it and she thought it was the funniest thing in the world. She’s the one who came up with the idea of using a flash grenade.”
“In Bucky’s apartment.”
“Yep. We drugged you while you were disoriented.”
“I woke up in a hospital.”
“My idea,” Samantha says. “It enhances the illusion of a hospital trip.”
I rub my face with my hands, and then look hard at each and every one of them. “I have one question, and one question only.” They wait with those half-smile, half-worried looks people get when they’ve done something they think is funny, but are waiting to see if the subject will laugh or get really, really pissed. “WHO TOOK OFF MY FUCKING PANTS?”