Being woken by being sprayed with honey is not a good experience. The honey that washed over me was thick and sticky. I got out of my hiding place to find the stores in a mess. There was a thin layer of honey all over the floor.
Honey was pouring in from the door. Curseing the builders of this space station because the door was metal but was not an airlock. I pulled out some space tape and began to tape the places where the honey was coming from shut.
I called the commander who looked like he wanted to eat someone alive and explained.
"I have had to use some tape to stop honey from entering my room." The commander's eyes lit up. "Good job apparently one of the children of the families we spaced has a valuable super power. Several children were hidden in the wall and when we went to try and bring them for extraction they reacted with violence. "
Translation We went to kill a bunch of children and at least one had a superpower and fought back. Now that at least one is valuable we have decided to spare them. I want to kill the idiots who did not screen the children for superpowers but I can not.
From the strain on the commander's face, I knew he really wanted to hurt whoever had been bribed or lazy and not given the super with the honey powers a power test. If the honey was edible and being created out of nothing then the newly woken super was worth a small fortune as a slave.
An unlimed amount of honey you could have the super sell tons and tons of it. I was betting they could change it into some kind of grey goo. With this one superpower, you could feed millions.
I was betting the commander had orders to take the super in alive. With the man made famine on the way. If he shot someone who could produce food out of thin air then the entire station would be blasted to pieces. The problem was the child causing this had just seen their parents killed. Somehow I doubt whoever it was would be happy with the excuse it was the corporation's fault and that the corporation has declared bankruptcy again.
Try explaining limited liability to a child whose parents you just shot. It was not going to end well for anyone. There was a bang and something exploded. Switching on the internet I saw an emergency warning message. The station was going into lockdown.
All I could do was pray and stick on a cheap space suit while cursing the fact the expensive one had been taken away. More than likely the previous storeman had a decent suit hidden somewhere but it would take me weeks to comb threw the entire storage space.
Of course, it was always possible the previous stock manager did not have a space suit. Looking at the hidden compartment he had with children's clothing I doubted he had the funds for a better suit for himself. Silently I prayed his child was the one with the honey super power.
As there was nothing else I could do I settled in and began a manual stock take. I finished fairly quickly and sat down and watched a television drama.
As I did not want to watch the standard soap operas mostly because they were crap. How that badly written crap was still on was beyond me. In an age when you could get a computer program off the internet that could write a play even the experts would think came from the quill of Shakespeare. Even now we had a bunch of cheap soaps on television.
They did not even alter it much. Rich man likes a poor girl. Poor girl is pressured by an evil gang. Rich man uses his money to rescue her. The only changes to the script were which gang was bothering the poor girl. It was mindless drivel designed to convince the lower classes the rich could be trusted.
I found a few computer-generated programs that had not been too badly edited. Friends was still popular after they banned Star Trek and Seinfield people went back to friends. They had not even edited it too much.
Except for a few bits where Chandler explained how an eco-terrorist planned to kill him when he was a baby the rest was supposed to be like the original. I knew why shows about the Wild West were banned. The images of trees and of mile after mile of just prairies full of grass just got to some people.
Then again if you lived in an area like Russia or America with miles of chemical swampland. Then you might be annoyed that you needed to put on a breathing mask and filter all the water as well. Of course, a lot of the American ancestors had the money to get gene therapy. The Russians that survived cancer and toxic air had begun to develop a natural immunity to the toxic waste. Checking the other TV shows I found an interesting one they did not edit called Dynasty.
About an hour into Dynasty, an ad popped up. Either I watched the thirty-second ad or I had to pay for the next Dynasty show. The ad flew by and before I could change the channel it was over. I looked at the next Dynasty episode in surprise and went to look up what had happened.
It looked like the local television companies had gone out of business but their computers had kept going. Finally, someone had broken the security system the television executives had left on and jury rigged an advert service.
People were too lazy to block one thirty-second ad every hour. Well, most people were. I did not want any mind control messages telling me to buy cola brand x. Knowing people who bathed in cola was enough reason to not take a chance.
It was also a perfect opportunity to make some credits. No one owned the stored programs. But if the ads were up to date that meant that someone was making money somewhere.
Creating a self-evolving program to hack into the ad program took me five minutes. I was guessing it would take the program years or perhaps months to hack into the ad program but that was ok. Worst case scenario I lost five minutes. Best case I received a couple of credits a day until someone did the same thing.
The entire space station seemed to lurch and I checked my space suit again wondering what had happened. Something had affected the gravity system. Checking my space suit again I went back to watching dynesty. The options were interesting as I could change the setting and have a program designed just for me. I could see why having a program change a movie depending on the viewer's attention would be addictive.
Having the story change halfway into the storyline and having your favorite princess suddenly seduce a slave girl would certainly spice things up. Still, I needed to make sure I was alive tomorrow and could not pay attention to a movie where the main character gets caught and seduces the other female slaves.
Four hours later I was glued to the screen as now evil empress seduced the latest of her victims. Finally, the alarm stopped and I accessed the local news.
All I found was an ad asking for donations for some Chinese city in Africa. Apparently, a group of the original tribes had mutated into cannibals. I doubted they were telling the truth more than likely the locals had decided to push the new immigrants out.
I yawned until the image of the commander appeared on one of my monitors. The Commander's eyes were like nothing I had ever seen before. They were the eyes of a man who had just seen hell.
Trying to stay still I waited with a sense of dread. The Commander looked at me and grinned "Well well good news you are getting a new assistant my daughter. It turns out that due to cutbacks and wage reductions, I can no longer pay for her air bill."
I looked into the eyes of a man on the edge. His daughter would have been born in space which would have given her a decent shot at developing a useful power. With him volunteering to accept brainwashing he would have been able to afford to get his daughter the best in genetic engineering.
His daughter would be insanely attractive due to the changes made by the genetics doctor. And would have spent time with the other rich folks. But now things had changed cutbacks were needed. An old security chief daughter would be in big trouble. The rich folk she used to call friends would be in a position of power over her. Worse she might have enemies or stalkers.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
The news stories of girls being mind controlled by their rich friends were everywhere. Rich teenage boys were animals. Then there were the stories of what other girls had done to ex-rivals. Those who had fallen into their grasp might have wished that they were caught by their pervert stalkers. Force-feeding their love rivals food until they looked like a hippo or giving them hair solution to grow hair all over their bodies before selling them on. The girls did far worse than the boys.
The Commander laughed "My daughter will be around in half an hour. Her name is Molly if you touch her or order her to be given a lobotomy you will regret it. " I looked into the eyes of a desperate man. Once his daughter started to work for me I could order her to be given the loyalty treatment or mind controlled. Worse I could sell her to her old friends.
It was all legal in the space station. The commander was betting i would not risk him going insane with grief and killing himself. I nodded knowing that if anything happened to the commander the first thing I would do would be to have Molly killed. After all, if she was brought up on this station with the rich folks she was already warped.
I looked around and tried to find some way of hiding things. Given this was space more than likely the power choices Molly had would have been far better than mine. At a minimum, she would be stronger and have better reflexes than me. More than likely she could kill me with one punch and that was not counting whatever her superpower was.
I had to hope that her genetically engineered body left me with some weakness I could exploit. Maybe she was more sensitive to high-frequency noise or sensitive to certain wavelengths of light.
I got to work trying to find any information i could on her. Pulling her school records was easy. She had not been off the space station since being born which was normal what was not normal was her list of hobbies.
She liked to 3d print weapons and there was even a notation she had tried to print a nuclear weapon. I winced as the image of a male with his balls shot off was shown. It was believed she had printed the robot that had ambushed the boy and shot his balls off before killing him.
There were a couple of worrying drug demerits. I did not mind the cannabis charges but the pain relief drugs charge was disturbing. No one dared produce painkillers anymore. If you tried to sell a child heroin you might get a beating. Try and sell children painkillers and you would be beaten to death. The old stories of what had happened when the advanced painkillers patents had run out were the stuff of nightmares. The fact you could go online and produce a dissolvable drug gave a new meaning to spiking someone's drink.
I looked over Molly record again and found another problem. She had actual experience using the 3d printer. It looked like she had constructed an actual working nuclear weapon as a joke. It was a fairly small device by modern standards. The device was merely capable of killing every living thing in a 20 kilometer radius.
Looking at the records I found something that let me relax. Molly had not designed the nuke but just taken the design off the internet and plugged it into a 3d printer. It looked like she did not have a technology-based superpower. Which was good for me.
What was not good is that she was part of a Trump cult. There were images of her tossing a number of screaming children into an airlock. I looked at her digital footprint and sweat began to flow down my back.
She had a whole website dedicated to Trump and the Nazi party and how they had both gotten raw deals. Then there was a part about the freedom to own guns and another part about why corporations should not be held responsible for cleaning up the pollution they caused.
I cursed as I finished reading Molly's profile. She was not rich enough for these beliefs. If you were Trump rich you could say things like your children choked to death because of my chemicals and it's your fault for not buying them my patented gas masks.
After all, if you had billions you could buy the news reporters and more importantly you could hire mind controlled bodyguards. But Molly was not rich she was now at risk from her ex-friends deciding they wanted to buy her employment contract. I looked up the local net and found a posting of a giant blob saying he would hunt Molly down and have her eaten by his hounds.
I checked the details the blob was not a male it was a female. How could a rich female in this day and age be fat? A couple of credits and super with the fat eater power could strip half a ton of fat from anyone. I really really wanted to check out the fat woman. Why was she so fat? Why did her online picture look like a pig but decided not to. I was not a good enough programmer to get away with that sort of thing.
A fact that was proven a few seconds later as an advert appeared. Honey glazed human. It was an advert for Molly. For five thousand credits i could help hunt her down and be part of the barbecue team. I swallowed as i realized that I was employed by a bunch of evil monsters.
Even worse i had no backing. If any of them wanted me dead I would be put on the grill with Molly. It was then i decided I was going to stay in my nice safe stores. I had bedding i had the means to produce food or I would have once I got my farming programme sorted. i knew there was a name for growing crops in water I just did not know it.
Deciding I needed to check on Molly I wrote a program to access the internal cameras. With the commander worried about his daughter I was betting the programs would easily bypass security. Once they were in the system they could not be taken out.
My fingers seemed to have a life of their own as they flew across the keyboard. A self-learning programme started up and I watched Molly's recent actions.
A unit of newly hired thugs chased her down a corridor. From the camera footage, it was obvious that they were herding her toward a smaller group of space station citizens.
While there were around 10 to 15 hired thugs and only 3 space station citizens i knew who was the most dangerous. The thugs had bats and whips and the space station citizens had what looked like cattle prods and some kind of net launchers.
Molly turned around and kicked the nearest thug in the balls. The thug flew into the air his face a picture of horror. The thugs stopped running as their companion hit the deck and just laid there.
I can think of worse ways to die. And I suspect the thug was dead in microseconds however the blood stains on his pants would I knew haunt my dreams for months to come. Molly snorted and lept at her would-be attackers. Her foot shot out again and again and again and again the thugs chasing her were lifted off the ground and hit the deck dead.
I checked where Molly was and realized she might be in trouble. The honey flowing out of the walls made it harder for her to make good time while the thugs were being sent to block her escape routes. Or at least that would normally be the way. The thugs were being sent to block the corridor to the shuttle docking port. Molly was heading to my location.
I swallowed partly in fear of the thugs and their masters and partly because of the smile on Molly's face. The men and boys who were being slaughtered in the worst way I could imagine faces bothered me. Still it was not the worst i had seen.
The old folk's home which was built to extract every last cent from the old and infirm still made me determined to save up for my old age. It was not now as bad as it had been during the age of hunger. But still, these days you paid for your own retirement home.
Molly finished off yet another thug and I watched the remainder run for it all but one unfortunate who slipped on the honey and was caught by Molly. Molly broke his feet and hands and then turned him over onto his stomach and pulled out something that looked a lot like a sex toy.
I switched off the image and cursed. Molly was being chased by a bunch of thugs and took the time to torture one of her enemies. This did not bode well for me. Still the fact she could slaughter a large number of thugs and was scary enough that the station nobles did not dare approach her meant she might be an asset.
I checked to her records again and found the main problem with her upbringing. Her father was being brainwashed every day to believe that pure capitalism was God's path for humanity. I checked and it looked like he had been an atheist before the brainwashing. What sort of moron brainwashes a trained killing machine into believing in god when they routinely tosed people out of airlocks. I would have to try and find out and soon. Or as soon as i could write a program to cover my tracks.
I turned on the internet and began to write a program to stop spyware and mind control software from being loaded into any of my terminals. Then i sat down and watched an unedited version of spaceship construction. They had to actually broadcast the show because the major corporations did not like people knowing how easy it was to build one with super powers and were scrubbing the internet again.
The super who was putting the one shown could warp clay. Using his power and a few molds he created a mile long spaceship in six months. I watched him create a room with a set pattern again and again. The documentary showed him working for a week.
He created almost 20 rooms in a day and then walked with them in zero g with a rope to the ship. Watching a guy move a room the size of a swimming pool with nothing more than a rope was calming. Or it was until the door opened and Molly showed up with a couple of what could roughly be called humans tied behind her back. I spoke up "They stay outside your father's programming will not allow him to block any legal requests."
Molly glared at me before exiting the stores and breaking the hands and feet of the men she had been carrying behind her. I winced as she shut the door knowing that outside it were two possibly alive thugs who were just laying about in agony. Molly snorted "Poor people deserve nothing. Not our pity, not our time."
I decided that pointing out she was not poor would not be healthy for me so i kept quite and checked what other illegal signals were being broadcast. "So do you want to watch the glass project? Its that super that can turn things into glass as strong as diamond and his construction of a giant glass space ship"
Molly glared at me "They should be whipped to death for" Molly stopped talking as the picture on the wall changed to that of a large ship with hundreds of people walking on what looked like diamond floors. Everywhere the clear glass-looking stairs and doors glowed with light. From the ceiling, chandeliers sparkled. Molly looked at me "Ok that is beautiful"