I'm home this time. Can't afford to be anywhere else. The red vacancy sign flickers in through the slot under the door. These mini-cabins are basically the size of four coffins stacked so there's a bed on the floor, a low table with stool, and small petri-vending machine with the lowest grade crap in the CN Ruled Galaxy priced as though it's single digit quality. I'm at the table with the bag of stuff I bought for my new life sitting next to my ankle.
I take off my wrist console, flip the camera up and turn it around. I take a sip of the garbage D grade 98.6 that came in this morning, which is about fifteen minutes away from turning to rot, and press record. I stare into a camera and check to make sure it’s centered on my face before I start speaking. I turn it on and begin…
“It’s been a of couple weeks since I made the first one of these. I was hoping to have some good news before I made this next one, but don’t yet. I do have a plan though… It’s not an easy or legal plan, but this is Region Three and slavery is legal here so I’m not all that worried about breaking the law.
As I predicted, I am not able to enjoy going back into my local blood joint with a modicum of civility any longer. The credits are long gone. I have bills stacking up that I can’t even begin to think about paying. I don’t bother to open the emails or respond to the alerts. I just ignore them. Eventually, they’ll get more aggressive and try to come after me, but that costs money, and before they do that I’ll charge up just enough to get a new identity, hop a cheap flight to a faraway station in Dayth Quadrant 2 and be gone. I’m still not going back to Region 1 or 2. That would be suicide. They have my DNA on record, missing person, wanted, and at least half of the people who want me found would sell me out for free and the other half would sell me out for the hefty bounty on my head. So, it’s Region 3 or nothing, but Region 3 is damn big, 12 Quadrants in all. Region 3 begins, ten thousand LY’s from Earth’s solar system in all directions, Quadrant 12 is the slice that begins on the far side, away from the center of the galaxy. Quadrant 6 is the slice closest to the galaxy center, and the rest of the Quadrants fall in like an old-fashioned sun dial clock. I was taken in Quadrant 7, but have been living in 1 for the last few months trying to make a go of it without fighting in the cages, but I can’t stick around much longer here.
The trick is to not leave too soon and not leave too late. If you leave too soon, you’ll miss out on all the sharks trying to offer you high interest loans. I’ve been through this a few times. You make some money, then you run out of money, and then everybody comes running to offer you money, money you and they know you can’t pay back, but they make the bet that you will or that you’ll be stupid enough to one day invest in something that’s worth something so they can take it, sell it, and get theirs back plus interest. Except I don’t ever buy anything that’s worth anything, and even if I did I sure as **** wouldn’t put it in my own name. I mean, any of the names I’ve used that owe money, which is almost all of them. I try to keep one or two clean travel names, names that can take me from A to B or in this case Quadrant 1 to Quadrant 2 without leaving a trail back to the money I’m taking with me and the money I owe left behind.
Is it a scam? Sure. Is it honorable? Of course not, but… Am I hurting anyone? Not as much as the collectors when they come after low level recently freed slaves who take their offers and end up as slaves again. Not me. I’m not claiming to be helpful either. I’m not stealing from them and then giving it out to the poor. That would be a mission. That would draw attention. That would require being involved enough in people’s lives such as to leave an imprint, one that I can’t afford. And who am I kidding? I’m not that selfless either. Don’t be too hard me. It’s kind of tough to be selfless when the only thing you have in the world is a digital stack of false identifications that are coded to your DNA, fingerprints, and retinal scans. Some of my fakes require me to shoot myself up with a small DNA enhancement so I will then and only then match the DNA tag. Then, once I’m done with that ID I will have to add another enhancement to fit the next fake or try to have the addition spliced out, which is a lot harder. Those are my good fakes, the most expensive ones and the last resort fakes. The ones that I use if I’ve stayed in a place too long and I need to get out ASAP.
I’ve got about two weeks left on this station before I have to bolt. That’s enough time for me to apply for those loans, get them processed, and bail.”
I pause the recording and take a breath. This is stupid of me. I know it. Admitting to all these crimes, but… but what? I can’t go back. I cannot go home and endanger everyone who was lucky enough to survive the Taltrix explosion. I won’t do it. It doesn’t matter how much I miss them, my brother and my mother, my friends, my family. None of that matters if they’re dead. If I go back and it all starts up again. It’s not worth it. To hell with my feelings. Better that they live and I’m lonely than go back and watch them taken from me knowing it was my fault… I turn the recorder back on and keep talking.
“I tried going after more bodyguard work, but nobody would have me. It was a stroke of insane luck for me to get the first job, but after that catastrophe I knew what would be waiting for me as soon as I walked into the others. Rare is the job that a woman hires a female to guard herself. Usually, if a woman is wealthy enough and smart enough to hire bodyguards she hires the biggest she can find, aka not a woman who is five foot three. Not me. I’m more for show, except I refuse to wear the bikini outfits of the other working bodyguard women. I don’t have anything against that, but you can’t fight in a tiny bikini. It offers no protection to your skin for laser burns or cuts. It’s stupid. Meanwhile…” I sigh and take another sip of the blood that’s about five minutes from rancid at this point.
“Meanwhile, it may not be a bad idea to see if I can’t get one of those bikini jobs of a different sort. You know I heard they get up to 50% access to their gift? 50%! You know what I could do with 50%? A lot. I could make someone forget they ever saw me, I could make a whole room full of people forget they ever saw me. Not highly gifted ones, but still. Most. But the bikini thing… Not really a bikini. More like a fishnet thong sort of thing. Pasties. Whatever. High heels. Whatever those girls wear up in the cages. They work regular shifts. They aren’t expected to fight, but they are expected to send out waves of se*ually charged energy out onto the dancefloor. The job is to create the vibe. The excite the audience, the spectators and the customers who are dancing. I know how to do it. I can do it. It’s not like I can’t.” I take the last bit of blood nearly choking on it. “God that stuff is foul. That’s what I get for buying the cheapest 98.6 on the market. I may as well have been drinking fracosa piss. Cancel it!” A shiver runs down my body as the last dregs of the blood fuel my senses.
“I studied it you know. Gifted art making, gifted dance. Of course I wasn’t in a bikini. And it’s something I like, dancing. Music. I miss the music. As a boxer I sometimes trained with music. The thing is… of all the two jobs I’ve had, slave fighter turned pro and bodyguard, the job was physical and intense and I liked that part of it. What I didn’t like was wiping the blood off my body, either mine or theirs, and despite my blasé tone I really didn’t… okay, I didn’t always enjoy ki*****. Sometimes it was deserved. Most of the time it wasn’t. Most of the time, it was just self-defense and me knowing the safest way to survive the fight was to kill my opponent. I didn’t have the luxury of mercy in the slave matches. In the pros I had more choices, but they came at a cost. Rematches. Life canceling rematches. And those were never fair fights. Never. I did though, because I was willing to end people. And that gets very tiresome on the soul eventually. Life in Region Three doesn’t mean what it does in Regions 1 and 2. Dayth culture is very casual about dying in fights. It’s natural for them, a natural way to go. They see it as better to die in the cage fight than to die of old age. Hell, two of the older fighters I went up against flat out begged me for euthanasia.
I don’t know if you really believe that, but when your body betrays you, breaks down past repair, and you have no money and no way to make money, you want out. You want to exit and if you’re cursed with people who depend on you, you want to give them something before you go. At least, taking on a fight with me, a few of them could leave their loved ones some credits. That’s if the fight organizers didn’t scam it. They scammed just about everything else.” I reach over and pull out a very skimpy red bikini, holding it up to the camera turning it this way and that.
“You thought I was kidding.” I put the straps of it over my battlesuit so the little red cups cover my breasts. It looks as ridiculous as tits on a Fracosa. “I know. Not my best look, but… I’ll pick up something better once I get to Quadrant 2. And I’m gonna get rid of the lavender.” I say, running a hand through my short pastel locks. “Blonde is the natural color of Dayths and even if my skin tone will always be a bit darker than theirs, I can keep away from UV and bleach it a little. That plus…” I slide a blonde wig out from the packaging and put it on over my head. The hair is not quite white blonde but has a touch of yellow in it. Its smooth waves fall to my shoulders covering my alien-like ears and markedly changing my appearance. I still have the Dayth spiral face tatts and my nose is still a wreck, but I can almost pass for attractive like this. Provided I wear some kind of face mask or something. “I know I’m not a looker exactly. I mean, without the chastity battletech suit on, my body underneath is honed. It’s… I’m in shape. I might have a bit more muscle than the usual dancer, but that will be to someone or some club’s taste I imagine, and once I stop training in the ring my body will change. It’s a good hideout gig.” I slip the wig off and ruffle my lavender tips around.
“Fifty percent access is a lot. I could get full gift access if I crossover into Region Two, but then I would have to register as a gifted citizen, and at my level… there aren’t many fake ID’s that can be made to cover me. Out here in Region 3, as a former slave, the authorities aren’t interested in digging deeper into my background. They already know I’m somebody from Region One or Two and they have no desire for that information to get out. It doesn’t serve them. So, my fakes work out here even though they shouldn’t. I just want to be at least some of who I was. I want to feel some of what I used to feel. Fifty percent is good! That sounds so barbaric to you in Regions One and Two, I can just imagine you hearing that and thinking how horrific it is, and it is, but with fifty percent I won’t need to wear this chastity battletech. I can go ahead and walk around naked and nobody will be able to lay a hand on me! I mean, they can try, but they’d be dead before the heat of their finger reached the cool of my skin. The reason dancers get so much access is because they can’t wear the chastity battletech and still do their jobs. And because of their jobs they need it. Solution, if they’re gifted, they get enough gift access to protect themselves from anyone. For me, even as a bodyguard I was only given 30%, but as a woman, my size, as a dancer… I would get 50% for sure and that’s more to me than just about anything.” I split off the red bikini top back over my head and set it down on the table.
“If I can do it, the dancing I mean, and I think I can. If I can do it well enough… make a name for myself as someone else, then I can probably get back into region two as a gifted artist, and I know what you’re thinking. I’m not trying to go back to Region 1. I’m not trying to go home. I just want to have some of who I was back. Not the part that got everyone killed. Not the part that’s cursed with a lunatic for a father. Not the part who is responsible for the destruction of Taltrix. None of that. I don’t want any of that! I just want a little bit more of my humanity. The option to get through a week without killing anybody. Doesn’t seem like too much to ask really. All things considered.
I’m hopeful that the next time I do one of these I’ll be long gone from Quadrant 1 and well into Quadrant 2 with a new identity, a new life, a new hustle. Still the same secrets of course.” I pick up the cup of blood and sniff it. I gag and set it back down. “And something better to drink.”
I press stop on the recording and put my console back on my wrist.
I take off my wrist console, flip the camera up and turn it around. I take a sip of the garbage D grade 98.6 that came in this morning, which is about fifteen minutes away from turning to rot, and press record. I stare into a camera and check to make sure it’s centered on my face before I start speaking. I turn it on and begin…
“It’s been a of couple weeks since I made the first one of these. I was hoping to have some good news before I made this next one, but don’t yet. I do have a plan though… It’s not an easy or legal plan, but this is Region Three and slavery is legal here so I’m not all that worried about breaking the law.
As I predicted, I am not able to enjoy going back into my local blood joint with a modicum of civility any longer. The credits are long gone. I have bills stacking up that I can’t even begin to think about paying. I don’t bother to open the emails or respond to the alerts. I just ignore them. Eventually, they’ll get more aggressive and try to come after me, but that costs money, and before they do that I’ll charge up just enough to get a new identity, hop a cheap flight to a faraway station in Dayth Quadrant 2 and be gone. I’m still not going back to Region 1 or 2. That would be suicide. They have my DNA on record, missing person, wanted, and at least half of the people who want me found would sell me out for free and the other half would sell me out for the hefty bounty on my head. So, it’s Region 3 or nothing, but Region 3 is damn big, 12 Quadrants in all. Region 3 begins, ten thousand LY’s from Earth’s solar system in all directions, Quadrant 12 is the slice that begins on the far side, away from the center of the galaxy. Quadrant 6 is the slice closest to the galaxy center, and the rest of the Quadrants fall in like an old-fashioned sun dial clock. I was taken in Quadrant 7, but have been living in 1 for the last few months trying to make a go of it without fighting in the cages, but I can’t stick around much longer here.
The trick is to not leave too soon and not leave too late. If you leave too soon, you’ll miss out on all the sharks trying to offer you high interest loans. I’ve been through this a few times. You make some money, then you run out of money, and then everybody comes running to offer you money, money you and they know you can’t pay back, but they make the bet that you will or that you’ll be stupid enough to one day invest in something that’s worth something so they can take it, sell it, and get theirs back plus interest. Except I don’t ever buy anything that’s worth anything, and even if I did I sure as **** wouldn’t put it in my own name. I mean, any of the names I’ve used that owe money, which is almost all of them. I try to keep one or two clean travel names, names that can take me from A to B or in this case Quadrant 1 to Quadrant 2 without leaving a trail back to the money I’m taking with me and the money I owe left behind.
Is it a scam? Sure. Is it honorable? Of course not, but… Am I hurting anyone? Not as much as the collectors when they come after low level recently freed slaves who take their offers and end up as slaves again. Not me. I’m not claiming to be helpful either. I’m not stealing from them and then giving it out to the poor. That would be a mission. That would draw attention. That would require being involved enough in people’s lives such as to leave an imprint, one that I can’t afford. And who am I kidding? I’m not that selfless either. Don’t be too hard me. It’s kind of tough to be selfless when the only thing you have in the world is a digital stack of false identifications that are coded to your DNA, fingerprints, and retinal scans. Some of my fakes require me to shoot myself up with a small DNA enhancement so I will then and only then match the DNA tag. Then, once I’m done with that ID I will have to add another enhancement to fit the next fake or try to have the addition spliced out, which is a lot harder. Those are my good fakes, the most expensive ones and the last resort fakes. The ones that I use if I’ve stayed in a place too long and I need to get out ASAP.
I’ve got about two weeks left on this station before I have to bolt. That’s enough time for me to apply for those loans, get them processed, and bail.”
I pause the recording and take a breath. This is stupid of me. I know it. Admitting to all these crimes, but… but what? I can’t go back. I cannot go home and endanger everyone who was lucky enough to survive the Taltrix explosion. I won’t do it. It doesn’t matter how much I miss them, my brother and my mother, my friends, my family. None of that matters if they’re dead. If I go back and it all starts up again. It’s not worth it. To hell with my feelings. Better that they live and I’m lonely than go back and watch them taken from me knowing it was my fault… I turn the recorder back on and keep talking.
“I tried going after more bodyguard work, but nobody would have me. It was a stroke of insane luck for me to get the first job, but after that catastrophe I knew what would be waiting for me as soon as I walked into the others. Rare is the job that a woman hires a female to guard herself. Usually, if a woman is wealthy enough and smart enough to hire bodyguards she hires the biggest she can find, aka not a woman who is five foot three. Not me. I’m more for show, except I refuse to wear the bikini outfits of the other working bodyguard women. I don’t have anything against that, but you can’t fight in a tiny bikini. It offers no protection to your skin for laser burns or cuts. It’s stupid. Meanwhile…” I sigh and take another sip of the blood that’s about five minutes from rancid at this point.
“Meanwhile, it may not be a bad idea to see if I can’t get one of those bikini jobs of a different sort. You know I heard they get up to 50% access to their gift? 50%! You know what I could do with 50%? A lot. I could make someone forget they ever saw me, I could make a whole room full of people forget they ever saw me. Not highly gifted ones, but still. Most. But the bikini thing… Not really a bikini. More like a fishnet thong sort of thing. Pasties. Whatever. High heels. Whatever those girls wear up in the cages. They work regular shifts. They aren’t expected to fight, but they are expected to send out waves of se*ually charged energy out onto the dancefloor. The job is to create the vibe. The excite the audience, the spectators and the customers who are dancing. I know how to do it. I can do it. It’s not like I can’t.” I take the last bit of blood nearly choking on it. “God that stuff is foul. That’s what I get for buying the cheapest 98.6 on the market. I may as well have been drinking fracosa piss. Cancel it!” A shiver runs down my body as the last dregs of the blood fuel my senses.
“I studied it you know. Gifted art making, gifted dance. Of course I wasn’t in a bikini. And it’s something I like, dancing. Music. I miss the music. As a boxer I sometimes trained with music. The thing is… of all the two jobs I’ve had, slave fighter turned pro and bodyguard, the job was physical and intense and I liked that part of it. What I didn’t like was wiping the blood off my body, either mine or theirs, and despite my blasé tone I really didn’t… okay, I didn’t always enjoy ki*****. Sometimes it was deserved. Most of the time it wasn’t. Most of the time, it was just self-defense and me knowing the safest way to survive the fight was to kill my opponent. I didn’t have the luxury of mercy in the slave matches. In the pros I had more choices, but they came at a cost. Rematches. Life canceling rematches. And those were never fair fights. Never. I did though, because I was willing to end people. And that gets very tiresome on the soul eventually. Life in Region Three doesn’t mean what it does in Regions 1 and 2. Dayth culture is very casual about dying in fights. It’s natural for them, a natural way to go. They see it as better to die in the cage fight than to die of old age. Hell, two of the older fighters I went up against flat out begged me for euthanasia.
I don’t know if you really believe that, but when your body betrays you, breaks down past repair, and you have no money and no way to make money, you want out. You want to exit and if you’re cursed with people who depend on you, you want to give them something before you go. At least, taking on a fight with me, a few of them could leave their loved ones some credits. That’s if the fight organizers didn’t scam it. They scammed just about everything else.” I reach over and pull out a very skimpy red bikini, holding it up to the camera turning it this way and that.
“You thought I was kidding.” I put the straps of it over my battlesuit so the little red cups cover my breasts. It looks as ridiculous as tits on a Fracosa. “I know. Not my best look, but… I’ll pick up something better once I get to Quadrant 2. And I’m gonna get rid of the lavender.” I say, running a hand through my short pastel locks. “Blonde is the natural color of Dayths and even if my skin tone will always be a bit darker than theirs, I can keep away from UV and bleach it a little. That plus…” I slide a blonde wig out from the packaging and put it on over my head. The hair is not quite white blonde but has a touch of yellow in it. Its smooth waves fall to my shoulders covering my alien-like ears and markedly changing my appearance. I still have the Dayth spiral face tatts and my nose is still a wreck, but I can almost pass for attractive like this. Provided I wear some kind of face mask or something. “I know I’m not a looker exactly. I mean, without the chastity battletech suit on, my body underneath is honed. It’s… I’m in shape. I might have a bit more muscle than the usual dancer, but that will be to someone or some club’s taste I imagine, and once I stop training in the ring my body will change. It’s a good hideout gig.” I slip the wig off and ruffle my lavender tips around.
“Fifty percent access is a lot. I could get full gift access if I crossover into Region Two, but then I would have to register as a gifted citizen, and at my level… there aren’t many fake ID’s that can be made to cover me. Out here in Region 3, as a former slave, the authorities aren’t interested in digging deeper into my background. They already know I’m somebody from Region One or Two and they have no desire for that information to get out. It doesn’t serve them. So, my fakes work out here even though they shouldn’t. I just want to be at least some of who I was. I want to feel some of what I used to feel. Fifty percent is good! That sounds so barbaric to you in Regions One and Two, I can just imagine you hearing that and thinking how horrific it is, and it is, but with fifty percent I won’t need to wear this chastity battletech. I can go ahead and walk around naked and nobody will be able to lay a hand on me! I mean, they can try, but they’d be dead before the heat of their finger reached the cool of my skin. The reason dancers get so much access is because they can’t wear the chastity battletech and still do their jobs. And because of their jobs they need it. Solution, if they’re gifted, they get enough gift access to protect themselves from anyone. For me, even as a bodyguard I was only given 30%, but as a woman, my size, as a dancer… I would get 50% for sure and that’s more to me than just about anything.” I split off the red bikini top back over my head and set it down on the table.
“If I can do it, the dancing I mean, and I think I can. If I can do it well enough… make a name for myself as someone else, then I can probably get back into region two as a gifted artist, and I know what you’re thinking. I’m not trying to go back to Region 1. I’m not trying to go home. I just want to have some of who I was back. Not the part that got everyone killed. Not the part that’s cursed with a lunatic for a father. Not the part who is responsible for the destruction of Taltrix. None of that. I don’t want any of that! I just want a little bit more of my humanity. The option to get through a week without killing anybody. Doesn’t seem like too much to ask really. All things considered.
I’m hopeful that the next time I do one of these I’ll be long gone from Quadrant 1 and well into Quadrant 2 with a new identity, a new life, a new hustle. Still the same secrets of course.” I pick up the cup of blood and sniff it. I gag and set it back down. “And something better to drink.”
I press stop on the recording and put my console back on my wrist.
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