Tem delivered Nok, Kek, Dan, Kitty, Jack, and me to the sex ship where many creatures greeted us. The aliens had piled into the lock just after the air pressure and gravity adjusted, before the shuttle’s hatch opened.
As we waded through the sea of bodies, I casually glanced around for figures like mine. Not seeing any, I asked Kitty’s permission to discuss the fight with Cherish and Ravish. She informed me that they’d already settled their negotiations with the Trakennad Dor Corporation’s Board of Supervisors, and welcomed me to talk to the two free sexers.
For my part, I’d also negotiated and signed a contract, and I thought donating my cut to the University would be helpful to them.
I’d learned that Lukan had skillfully roped in Buster.
Once again, I decided to rely on the tried-and-true brain damage excuse for why I couldn’t recognize Cherish and Ravish. Their bodies, like my body, were constructs made by twenty-first century Earth humans. They’d been soldiers and spacers. Jack had told me of our history when I was still a slave on Spauch’s arena ship.[3] Jack thought, because I had told him this lie to cover a reality he wouldn’t understand, much less believe, that I couldn’t remember the first eleven years of my life. This included my construction, which took a year, my training, which took four years, and the six years of military and security service while humans expanded out into space. Nor could I, my story went, remember my sale and first decades as a slave on Trakennad Dor. Cherish, Ravish, Buster, myself, and one hundred and ninety-six other constructs had protected humans and enabled off-Earth colonization until non-military humans got wise to our reality. They then became squeamish and protested our use. In those six years, one hundred and eighty-eight of us were destroyed in one way or another.
Jack didn’t know, but Kek and Nok did, that the personality now residing in the construct G-9SR025T was not the original personality which had occupied it. Cherish, Ravish, and Buster didn’t have a clue that the incipient person who had occupied this body had been killed during a match in the arena aboard the Trakennad Dor, and the conscience now occupying Ghee was originally named Carol. Carol, a human from twentieth century Earth, was me. I’d died on Earth in 2008, and my personality had then gone on a strange journey, culminating in the occupation of this construct called Ghee-nye. I would have to fake it.
I always felt nervous and deceitful about the brain damage story, but Kek and Nok could be relied on to keep their wide, predatorially toothed mouths shut. Mek security would not be breached.
The ship had three levels; the workshops below, the engine, navigation, bridge and living quarters in the protected middle, and the sex shop on top. Not a pretty ship, but deep and squat, it comfortably housed a well-functioning business.
Kitty had not spared the inhabitants any luxuries. Carpets were deep, colors abundant, furniture plush and well made, and the technologies top of the line; except for the sexbots, which were, incongruously, archaic. They were her mother’s design. Dan exclaimed in dismay when she saw them, after we’d made our way to the lowest decks of the ship.
“Oh, Kitty, I can do better for you than this. The physics department has some programmable matter that will make lifelike looking and acting ‘bots, and your employees will be able to use a sophisticated interface to effect a wide variety of naturalistic movements from terminals aboard ship. They’ll also be able to respond almost instantaneously to customer requests. Didn’t you say you’d had some problems with employee injuries and ‘bot malfunctions?”
I heard sighs of relief and pleasure from the techs, all of whom had made the trip up to meet Dan, and from the sex workers present among them. They even applauded and cheered a little.
The Madam and la femme scientiste wandered off, followed by techs and some of the sexers, to discuss the possibilities. I wondered what kind of money Dan, her team of biologists, and the physics geeks would make from the pleasure profiteer. If they played their cards right they’d charge a decent fee for the materials and training, and for every use of the new ‘bots, and they were nothing if not smart.
Nok, Kek, Jack and I drifted along surrounded by chatty sexers. We learned more than we ever knew we wanted to know about the business of pleasure.
Watching Kek and Nok soak up the elements of the business provided much of the fun for Jack and I. The brothers loved attention and new experiences, and I felt certain this kind of entertainment would be a big, silly hit on KekTan.
The Mek were normally fiscally conservative, and for the most part, emotionally reserved folk, but not prudes. They had not been allowed to breed freely when they existed as slaves on the Trakennad Dor. Spauch had only allowed them to replace themselves to keep the population of guards stable, and since they were very long-lived, they couldn’t breed much. Since they’d escaped, they’d embraced sex, contraception, and parenthood spectacularly.
Picking a rather large planet for their new home had been a most intelligent and forward-looking choice.
Mek were realistic. They wouldn’t mind helping Kitty and her folks, as long as some of the wealth came back into the KekTan economy through Dan and her folks. As an experience, the pleasure trade was entirely new for the Mek. When they’d been slaves on the arena ship with me, they’d been the prison guards and fighter wranglers. They’d handled more alien flesh more securely than any creatures currently known in the Galactic Union. They’d escaped that reality, leaving the disabled ship in the hands of the other slaves, like Klon. The MekKop had bargained through Jack, who’d also briefly been enslaved there, with the humans for the planet now named KekTan, or “Great Kek”. Their new home had been named after the Mek we had with us today. Kek had been my personal guard, with his brother Nok as his second, and Kek had come up with the plan to escape the Trakennad Dor.[4]
Once ensconced on KekTan, the Mek had renamed themselves MekKop, or “free kin”.
I still felt a swell of pride when I thought about those heady days. I had no doubt they would relish an experience as alien and exciting to them as the sex trade. What excited me was the virtual nature of the sex; prostitution was never even mentioned, or for that matter, engaged in. (Although prostitution in many societies doesn’t have negative stigma attached to it, for better or worse, I guess I was still just an old-fashioned American girl at heart.) The client base could be much larger this way, the sexers much healthier and safe, and my respect for Kitty and her mother, as I realized this, grew.
Judging from the scents wafting down the hallway we walked, Kitty didn’t feed her employees on the cheap. The odors were rich and complex.
We came to a plush dining hall and our doting crowd ushered us to one of the long dining tables. The tables held crystal ware, real silver utensils, white porcelain, and light peach cloth napkins, which complimented the fine mauve tablecloths. The lighting was muted, and the soft tinkling of music could be heard coming from all around us. The music seemed to adjust to the noise level so it was always just audible, but did not overwhelm conversation.
Once we were all seated, servers rolled trolley after trolley to the ends of the tables. Somehow, the platters and tureens of food and pitchers of drink rolled down the centers of the tables in a slow, controlled fashion as if on a conveyor belt. We took a little of everything until we could fit no more on our plates. We sampled all the drinks. After a while the food stopped coming and people started placing used utensils, plates, bowls, glasses, cups, and napkins on the tables’ center. They were taken to the end and loaded on trolleys by means I’d never encountered before. Everything was in constant, quiet motion. I enjoyed a wonderful meal.
As consumption slowed, folks began drifting out, and we discovered several forms of entertainment were available. One theater was a holoshow, and one, live performances - the sexers were excellent actors and had a lot of fun, as you would expect. An extensive games room beckoned. Some found instruments and gathered and played here and there. Many just lounged and talked and even fell asleep in big plush chairs and on sofas.
At s
ome point Kitty and Dan escaped us, but we were well taken care of. We found a library like one you’d find on Earth in a castle or fine home, with a high ceiling, real wood bookshelves, and rolling ladders. Gilt-embossed spines peered at us from everywhere, as well as colorful popular editions. This seemed to be a large collection of reproductions from many Earth ages, with sections of non-human works in several different languages as well, probably reflecting the population living on the ship. Simulated fires crackled in two “fireplaces” at opposite ends of the room, and reproduction antique “oil lamps” shed a soft golden light and produced a fresh, light, fruity scent. The fixtures even flickered. They were authentic looking replicas, but the light itself was unusual, not real flame. I couldn’t figure those contraptions out.
Jack, Kek, Nok and I chose a grouping of deep burgundy velvet upholstered chairs and a couch and settled in.
“Hello, G-9,” a voice much like my own interrupted my musings. I turned and stared at… two of me, two beautiful versions of myself. Well, beautiful compared to me, they were actually quite plain in the face, but their skin was smooth and scarless. Both had light milk chocolate skin, brown hair and eyes, and were tall, lean and vascular, with large joints. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the boys’ focus suddenly intensify on the new arrivals, both of whom seemed as hormonally attractive as me to at least two species.
I watched both of their expressions pinch when they got a clear view of my decimated face.
“Ouch,” one said.
“Geez!” yelped the other.
“Sorry,” they said in unison.
“We heard you’d been sold to an arena ship, but…” said the first.
“It’s okay,’ I said. “It’s impossible to be prepared. Then I blurted out, “Brain damage.” I hadn’t realized I’d become so tense; I hate lying so much.
“What?”
“Huh?”
“I apologize. I don’t remember you because of the concussions. Many concussions.” I realized I was speaking too fast.
They both seemed to slow down as they sat. They looked at each other and then spoke quietly to me.
“I’m A-8VNO61Z. You used to call me ‘Eight’. They call me Cherish around here.”
“And I’m D-3LV134N. ‘Delvin’? I’m called Ravish here. We’re twins, you understand?”
“Yes, I do.” Actually, we were triplets, but for their purposes, they’d pretended to be biological twins.
An awkward silence was broken by someone clearing his throat.
We all turned to Jack, who was grinning wickedly. He scooted to the front edge of his deep chair, eagerly clasped his hands in front of him, elbows on his knees, and asked, “Do you girls remember how to fight?”
Both Kek and Nok made some sort of gurgly noises.
All three boys looked, well, greedy.
Cherish and Ravish smiled.
“Yes.”
“Of course.”
Jack said, “Well then, have we got a proposition for you.”
I sat back and watched as Jack, Kek, and Nok seemed to fall all over themselves explaining the business of the Trakennad Dor, apparently forgetting that Klon and Lukan had already gotten to them. Talk about brain damage. Cherish and Ravish smiled and nodded.
I sat and thought about Doc, who’d told me I was mainly human, but that splices of unidentified alien genes in my genome (probably from various species of Earth animals, since we hadn’t yet gotten out into space) had made me the unusual creature I am. I can take a huge amount of physical punishment because my muscles and connective tissues are dense, and grown around a relatively lightweight, but super strong carbon fiber composite skeleton. I heal rapidly and survive damage that ordinary humans cannot. We remaining constructs have been alive for almost two centuries.
Then there’s the super-special attractiveness that pretty much gets me whatever I want whenever I want it. Doc has been examining my ovaries, brain, and unusual hormones, virtually, of course, and by chemical analysis. He scanned me when we first met, made computerized models to study, and took samples.
He’s working on the theory that my super-special attractiveness is an accidental by-product of genetic manipulations designed to disallow menstruation and reproduction, both big problems for a female soldier who is also a slave. He also thinks we were made female and have such little breast tissue because of the utilitarian idea that the male reproductive parts and breasts get in the way of physical work. Alternatively, a theory has escaped him proposing that our special attractiveness may have been engineered in to make our work easier, since it seems to work on a lot of different species and would be useful for a push into unknown space, which is what we had been built to accommodate. This is all theory though, because most of the documents regarding our engineering and construction were lost when Earth fell to the Nameloids.
My super-special attractiveness had also been quite a problem in the arena, but I was strong, and became tough, tricky, and mean enough not to be beaten bloody and raped by my opponents in front of all those spectators.
Two new specimens for Doc to obsess over sat in from of me, not to mention Buster. And Doc had also surreptitiously scanned Deena, though he had kept this unauthorized intrusion a secret. I think he may have broken some laws getting the data, I’m not really sure. Doc is going to examine us before we go to the arena ship to train, and I’m sure he’ll charm these two into letting him make two more virtual simulations and biological samples of them for his studies. I wonder if he’ll ever figure out how to make more of us. Anyway, he’s written several papers and published them, has made constructs a new, and his main, field of study, and has become quite a celebrity in medical circles.
“I’ll do it!” Cherish exclaimed.
“Me, too!” Ravish concurred. “This should be fun.”
They had already agreed, but were being polite and engaging with my silly boys.
They turned their identical faces to me.
“Excellent,” I grinned with one side of my face. “I’ll tell Klon and he can coordinate times for us to train together on the Trakennad Dor.”
He’d already given us schedules to approve.
The boys beamed. Cherish and Ravish smiled. I did my lopsided best to smile as well.
“Oh,” Jack blurted inanely, “Buster!”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “There’s another of us on KekTan. One of Klon’s boys has talked her into joining us.”
“Buster, I remember her,” Cherish said.
“Gonna be like old home week,” Ravish said.
“We haven’t seen any others of us all this time,” her ‘twin’ mentioned.
“And now we’re four,” Ravish pondered.
“You don’t remember her either?” Cherish rested her gentle hand over mine.
“No, I don’t,” I replied. “She looks just like you two, though.”
“What does she do?”
“She runs a garbage scow.”
“Alone? Or are there more of us?”
“No, she’s alone, as far as we know.”
“Is she free, too?”
“No, she’s owned by Apical Mining and Recycling Company of Ordoron, wherever that is.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Me neither. Must be a long way away.”
“We’re free, too, G-9. Kitty’s mom bought us, but she freed us just before her death.”
“All legal and everything.”
“We stayed on ‘cause, well, this sex business is fairly easy.”
“And this is a terrific place to live.”
“Good friends.”
“Good food.”
“Plenty of work.” They both laughed.
“And lots of vacation time, too, on interesting planets.”
“You can call me Ghee, if you want,” I said. “Everyone else does, except Doc. He calls me Gina. My name evolved into Ghee-Nye because the Mek found it difficult to say G-9.”
“Okay, we’ll call you Ghee.”
> “There’s one other construct that I’m aware of, but she went bad. She calls herself ‘Deena’.” I informed them.
“Went bad? How?”
“I’m not sure how it happened, but when she was imprisoned for crimes against the humanity of her planet, she was in total control of it.”
“’Power corrupts’,” said Cherish.
“’And absolute power corrupts absolutely’,” said Ravish.
“That’s what they say,” I commented, knowing full well that K-8, or ‘Kate’, the construct now called Deena, must have died at some time, because the personality of the woman who’d killed me on Earth had somehow ended up in that construct’s body, just as I’d ended up in this one. A strange coincidence, if you believe in them. And I don’t. It seemed as if we’d both been tampered with, and I wanted to be sure Ravish and Cherish had not.
“Oh, sure. We’ve seen it happen. Haven’t you?”
For a moment, I was confused. Oh, she was talking about power corrupting, not souls bouncing.
“No, not really,” I replied. “I’ve been with the Mek. They’re incorruptible. Now I spend most of my time training and conditioning Sheriff’s Department personnel, and minding various business interests. As far as I can tell, no one I’m familiar with now has gone corrupt, unless I’m not seeing it. “
“You’d see it eventually. No one can hide it forever. They don’t think anything’s wrong with them, or if they know they’re twisted, they get skilled at hiding it and projecting a ‘proper’ image. They don’t want to get caught.”
Cherish shook her head.
“The thrill is getting away with it, makes them feel like they’re smarter than the fools they fool. Basically, they’re very insecure and need a lot of attention.”
Ravish nodded hers.
“Pathologically insecure.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You two seem to have a handle on this,” I broke in.
I turned to look at my human and my Mek. Jack seemed pleased to be among us, but both Nok and Kek had been staring at Cherish and Ravish while we’d talked. The brothers nodded at me and smiled, and all four wide Mek eyes winked at me, catlike. Hmmm.
“We can’t wait to visit KekTan.” Cherish said, looking eager.
“You’ll love it,” I said. “The city is modern, tasteful, and practically designed.”
“Kitty says most of the planet is still natural.”
“Yes. The old growth forests and jungles are amazing.”
“Can we go camping?”
“There are several campgrounds, but I’m guessing you want to go way out, kind of like survival training, right? You can’t really get lost, not with the communications system we have.”
“You remember that?”
“What?”
“Being dumped in the forest and finding our way out. Alone.”
“No, I don’t. But I realize that was part of our training. Some records survived.”
“It’s been a long lifetime,” Cherish commented wistfully.
“Hey, we heard humans have left Earth and now reside in space. Do you know why?” Ravish asked.
Oh, shit, they don’t know, I realized.
Jack saw the brief expression of shock flit across my face. He was pretty much the only person who could read my expressions, because of the facial derangement. Him, and the Mek brothers, that is. He said, “We didn’t leave, we were infected with a disease cocktail. Only the populations of three of the self-sufficient planets, a few traders who were far out, and some of the military and Sheriff’s Space Force survived, that we’re aware of so far.”
Cherish stood up and exclaimed, “Oh, fuck me to death! They’re our clients!”
Ravish leaned forward. “Shit. I’m gonna to be sick.”
But she was made of sterner stuff than that. She leaped up and trotted over to a public com unit on the wall. She talked for a few minutes and came back.
“Come on. We’re going to meet Kitty in Playpen Four.”
We all trotted to the lift and took it up to the main business areas. As we went, Kek looked up at me and murmured in his language, “They’re original.” Nok nodded vigorously and said, “Like you were, before you changed into you.”
So, only Deena and I had been switched into the constructs’ bodies.
We found both Kitty and Dan in Playpen Four. Dan was excited.
“Jack”, she said. “They have detailed biological files of the fuckers.”
“They call themselves,” Kitty said something that sounded like something pretty close to ‘Nameloids’. At least we got the name right. “We call them Nams, for short. We have the capacity of monitoring their hormones, respiration, and circulatory pressure patterns, as you see here in this replay, to optimize the sexual experience for them; we draw their pleasure out for as long as we healthfully can and intensify the climax for them using these graphs.”
An actual recorded sex job was replaying on the monitor. The sexbot had recorded a view of the Nameloid client responding to its performance as directed by two sexers called Upender and Tailgunner. The feed had been sent to the ship and recorded in the computers for future reference. To the right of the replay scrolled the graphs of the creature’s sexual vitals. To the left was a transcript of the conversation between the sexers and the client, as well as the sexers’ personal conversation. One conversation was in royal blue and one in deep, dark orange.
Jack became deadly calm. I hadn’t experienced him in quite this mood since before we’d escaped the Trakennad Dor.
“Madam LeMieux,” he said formally, “if you would allow the Sheriff’s Department Space Force to review all your business records with the Nameloids, we may find a way to get our planet back and bring to justice those creatures for the genocide they perpetrated on humanity.”
“I hope you intend to punish them severely,” Kitty sniffed. “You can have access to it all, Most High Ambassador.” She stared at the creature on the monitor trying to climax. The beast was ugly and ungainly.
Jack nodded. He seemed to be too emotional to speak.
The old woman turned to Jack and said sternly, “You bet your sweet bippy, honey buns. Total fucking access.”
Chapter Eleven
The Rapha Disappears