I take a seat on a floating stood at the bar to place my order. Nobody sits at the bar for long in a private blood joint like this. Freshies drink at the bar. They can only pay for one. They down a short of whatever 98.6 came in on the cheap that day and bolt. Get-n-gone. For the rest of us, the mature drinkers, we like to at least pretend we have some control over our habit. We add ritual and take our time. We have it chilled, request our favorite types, go top shelf, even gifted. We are connoisseurs of blood. We pretend our gift makes it okay, that what we’re doing isn’t just a fancy form of cannibalism or drug use. We order at the bar and take our drink to a private booth where we won’t be bothered, so we can sip while we check the scrolls, jump into the cloud, play a VR, make a holochat, but most importantly finish our drink in peace and only then will we be on our way. Of course, I pay extra for that privilege, something I won’t be able to do after today. I haven’t always been a part of that upper crust, civilized, “we” and I’m about to not be again. I lost my job this morning, but I’ve got the credits now and one last high-end jolt before I immediately fall back into the abyss of poverty isn’t gonna make any difference to my financial situation in the long run.
After thirty quick ticks of my soon-to-be broke a** taking up a stool, the Dora saunters over with her oddly sexual gait. All Dayth robots are Dora’s or Doran’s, short for Dayth Organic Robot and then their number. This Dora’s full name is DOR537908132, but nobody uses that. She’s got all the movements down, the lift of the leg, the sway of the hip, the slight lean forward to expose cleavage, and the exact tilt of the head that implies she finds me interesting, but it’s not the movements that give her away. It’s the slight jerking halts between. Each time the foot falls and weight is transferred to her other leg, the machine inside her shows itself just a baldly as if one of her designers wrote their name in ink all over her pretty tattooed face.
These microscopic tells that make up the visual distance between organic and machine aren’t apparent to everyone, but they are to my Taltrix trained eyes. Some folks are repulsed by these tells. They shell out top credits to buy seamless Dora’s who are human enough to really make you forget the robot inside. Those Dora’s are usually high-end companions rather than bar wenches. I’m comforted by the robot inside. A Dora doesn’t ask any personal questions. A Dora is gonna treat me exactly the same as any other paying customer. It won’t matter to her that I’m a former slave. Legally, freed slaves are supposed to have the same rights as every other non-property owning free person, and that’s all her programming cares about. A human Dayth, native or transplant like me, would have a whole host of prejudices about that, none of which are fun to contend with. Most importantly, it won’t matter to a Dora that I’m gifted and on restricted use, that my real name is Redder Torch and I’m running from a past that if it catches up to me it would mean the deaths of everyone I love. A Dora doesn’t care about any of that and that’s a big part of why I’m here, that and the blood.
Dora leans over the bar to give me a close up view of her see through top. At least half of all native Dayth women, including most Dora’s wear see through tops. The rest of us are in thick battle chastity suits for protection. Mine happens to be second hand, but it stops a laser burn or a cheap blade from biting into my skin, and it can’t be forcibly removed by anyone else. I clear my throat as Dora puts a permanently soft hand down near my own calloused one. Her smooth long fingers are perfectly shaped. My paws still look like the boxing mitts they are, covered in ink swirling patches over each knuckle that I managed to break in the last three years, which is most of them. I catch a whiff of Dora’s not unpleasant pheromones and sigh. I’m not totally immune to her robotic-flesh charms. I haven’t been intimate with anyone in years. Not worth the effort. Too many lies I gotta tell, to them and myself in order to get off and lies take the fun outta of it for me. More lies just make me tired.
Dora reads the mixed signals of my body language but doesn’t back off, perhaps making the computation that I’m shy. I’m not, but she doesn’t know that. Dora smiles. “Hi Iris. The usual?”
I’m always pleased she remembers what I want her to remember about me, and nothing else. “Yes. Thank you, Dora.” I make the payment including a nice tip for her using my wrist console as she starts preparing my order. When she’s done she pushes the tray over to me. When I go to take it from her she smiles again and tilts her head, her face a mask of empathy, but she doesn’t ask me what happened today or if I want company, even if a part of me does. Dora just freezes with an unnatural stillness that makes me relax a little. I smile at her for that kindness before taking my tray over to a private booth where I can relax in relative safety to enjoy my one last hurrah.
Taking the first sip is always a little jarring. The taste is acquired. Within seconds of swallowing I feel my body reconnect itself in a kind of wholeness I haven’t felt in a while.
Suddenly, I’m not alone in the universe. I’m not even myself, Iris or Redder, or RT. I am a reality flower, a blooming of gravity and mass, an expression of life that happens to look like me and thinks like me. I am as I should be and nothing else. I am perfect. Of course, even as I feel these things with the blood flowing through me I know they are lies. It is artificial, this blood induced state. Even if I wasn’t on restricted use of my gift, if I was at one hundred percent, I wouldn’t feel like this, because shame stands in my way, mistakes, regrets, memories. But not here in the blood high, where a sip or two gives me the euphoria of believing I’m on the right path, even when I know I’m not. I sigh quietly as the first wave subsides leaving me hobbled again at three percent, cut off from not only the outer world but from the bulk of my higher brain functioning.
Before I take a second sip, I make the decision to do something stupid. I’m going to take a risk, because if I don’t I really don’t know where I’ll end up this time. I’m starting to lose a lot of myself and I don’t know what I might do once all of who I was is gone. Hopping up, I double check the lock on my booth to make sure nobody can get in, then sit back down to flip the face of my wrist console up twisting it around so the camera faces me. Making sure I can see my reflection, I set up the angle. Unfortunately, there is no angle that doesn’t show what the last few years have done to my face. My once-straight aquiline nose, now has a pronounced bump in the bridge with a sharp bit of bone straining the skin like a tent pole, and below that the rest of my nose angles to the left. My right eyebrow has a mangled scar through it from that same injury. It was on the day Taltrix blew up and I was taken prisoner in Region Three.
My now short hair, which I continually dye lavender, shows off my alien-looking ears that I hate. They stick out from my head at the small narrow tips that aren’t exactly pointed but give the appearance of such. It’s a stark contrast to the long dark chestnut curls that once crowned my head falling to my shoulders, which I always wore down to cover my ears completely. Then there are the swirling, black, Dayth tattoos over my cheek, nose, neck, and temple leftover from the medical patches administered to knit the skin back together when I wasn’t allowed any access to my gift to heal myself. I look at that stranger’s face and know her much better than the girl I once was. This face has been my disguise, but it’s pretty much permanent. I take a gulp of blood. This time, I let it calm my nerves. I lick the remainder from my lips, press record, and start speaking.
“Sol year 5523. Region Three. Station time, 18:26. Main Vein blood bar. Q1-DS-994, Quadrant 1 Dayth Station 994.” I press pause. This is harder than I expected. I take another sip and breathe a moment before this next part. I don’t know if I have the strength right now to tell it from the beginning of my time in Region Three. Everyone I once knew believes I’m dead, which is for the best. And yet here I am recording this, which could get out. It’s stupid… But I’m afraid of losing my grip completely, afraid that I’ll never be anything other than those lies. I hit record again, take another slug, and then I go on telling the truth.
“It’s been four years, almost five, since the Taltrix explosion. I’ve been on the run ever since. I don’t have any intentions of going home to Mars. I should probably be sorry about that, but I’m not. I can’t. Instead, I’m tempted to do that thing I try to do every so often where I stop drinking blood, stop taking stimulants, start eating my vitamins instead of shooting them into my veins.” I shake my head and take another sip. “I attempt this kind of cleanse every so often, because either I hit a low spot like getting fired again or something catches inside my mind, a snag in the fabric of my thoughts. A reminder that there might be another life than the one I’m living.” I look at the small carafe and toy with it a little in my hand. It’s cool, perfectly chilled. I refill my cup and take another sip. A part of me knows this record is just for me and another part of me, the lying part, that part tells me it’s for everyone I love, in case I die before I see them again.
“There was a time when I thought change was possible, when I thought revolution or upward mobility or that the good in humanity would one day outweigh the bad. I don’t have such naïve thoughts anymore… I think it’s possible to carve out small hidden moments of happiness inside a bubble where the rest of the world cannot touch them, but as soon as they are exposed to the light, they will dry, wither and burn, like crops on dead planet…You know, Earth isn’t the only dead planet caused by humans. In Regions One and Two we like to think it is. Oh, we outlawed habitat destruction, but that didn’t stop greedy profiteers from stripping all useful resources off any planet they came across in Region Three during the Golden Age of Space Travel. The CN’s forces were too small to police the planets farther out. It’s why all of Region Three is a wasteland. Nobody lives on-planet in Region Three.”
I turn my camera around to take in the view of my small booth and all its lack of charm. Four walls in a tightly enclosed space, a table made of some cheap metal, definitely not spider steel, and a bench with cushion so worn out it has little runs in the plastic fabric. “We live on ships or space stations. The joke in Region Three is that the air is third rate, the water is third rate, but the killing is first rate.” I take another sip at a joke that really isn’t that funny, but I’m trying to decide how honest I can be in this recording. I can’t start at the very beginning. I don’t have it in me right now. I’ll need more than a small carafe of blood to go back all the way to the day I was captured when I first entered Dayth territory. I decide to fast forward to the more recent stuff. It’s fresh in my mind anyway, and I’m itching to get it off my conscience, not that I have a strong moral compass anymore given all I’ve done to survive.
I sigh and go on. “Ever since I fought my way to freedom, I’ve been working as a bodyguard. It’s a typical gig for former slave fighters. Granted, I was one of the smallest bodyguards in the business. Nobody likes to hire small bodyguards. Half our job is to just look intimidating, and since I barely came up to the chest of most bodyguards I was only ever hired to protect female clients. It was a good gig for a minute, mostly because I was allowed ten percent access to my gift. The problem was…Some of the clients I was hired to protect were slaves or even if they weren’t slaves legally they were still owned by other people. I got fired for protecting one of said slaves from her owner, which got me blacklisted from the industry. I was fired for doing my job you might say, except that when the person paying you wants free reign to hurt the person you’re supposed to be protecting for them, your job changes. Instead of protecting them your job is you keep your mouth shut and just let it happen.
You stand in the hallway outside of the room and you listen to cries. You stand there and you don’t move. You don’t let anybody else in that room either. You stand there while you hear the sound of flesh being slammed against a wall. You stand there and pretend you’re not listening to the sound of someone pleading for help, to the sounds of crying. You stand there like some sick pervert who gets off on these sounds while the other person’s bodyguard who is doing the beatdown nods at you and licks his lips like he would do exactly to you what his boss is doing to the person his boss is paying me to protect. I stood there for about as long as I could, which turned out to be exactly thirty-seven minutes. That’s a long time. I wish I could tell you it was five minutes or two minutes, but things like that creep up on you. You’re just standing there looking at your console trying to ignore the **hole next to you, guarding the door. Trying to forget all the people you once knew and loved who are off living these extraordinary lives, or boring and happy lives, or dead. You try not to wonder what they’re up to even though you see it in the feeds, and even though late at night after you promise yourself you won’t look at the feeds and won’t look for them, you have one or two too many cups of blood and you look anyway. You let the pain of it stab you in the chest to punish yourself for the s***hole that you’ve let your life become. You swallow against the lump in your throat and notice that the argument in the room behind you is getting rowdy and not in a good way.
You come back to the present and tell yourself it’s not your fight. You tell yourself, this is a good gig, that you get some access to your gift legally and with it you can at least protect yourself. You tell yourself, if you can keep this job, if you can stick it out for a few months or a year even, you can get enough money to make a new start in Region Two, far away from the cesspool of human degradation that is Region Three and far enough away from anyone you know. But then you hear another crash in the room behind you and the guy next to you lets out a laugh that sounds like a sneer and something inside you snaps.
I should tell you, at that time I was allowed ten percent access to my gift. I am allowed exactly three percent now, legally. I can hack the blocking tech when I need to, but it sets off alarms to do that and my slave status kicks back in, and then I’d have to fight in the cages again to get out. So I don’t hack it unless I need to, but as a bodyguard, legally I had ten percent access of my full capacity for speed and strength, as well as ten percent telepathy, psychokinesis, mind penetration, and psionic attack.
Ten percent doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough for me. Like I said, I get three now, which is why I’m… here… Anyway… So… I snapped and I killed the guard who was standing next to me. He was gifted too, not as strongly as me, so he was allowed thirty percent access. His mental blocking was reasonably strong, but he didn’t have my training. I set off a chain reaction of electrical, mental, malfunctions that caused a shutdown of his frontal lobe. After that, he dropped to the floor gurgling and I slid my short sword under his chin, through his soft pallet, and up all the way into the skull cavity to kill him and disguise the psionic portion of the attack.” I instantly regret saying that to the recording. I consider rewinding to cut it out, but I take a sip of blood and clear my throat and go on instead.
“That was probably pretty graphic for you. Sorry about that. I forget… people haven’t had my… experiences… anyway… Then I went inside the room and... I’ll spare you the details. The woman, who I was supposed to be guarding was… on the floor… barely conscious. Like me, she was legally free, a former slave, technically, by that I mean he had signed her paperwork to release her from his ownership, but then immediately employed her as his consort, which didn’t seem like much of a change. He only did any of it because she’d gotten pregnant… By the look of her laying on the floor… the details I’m omitting… I would say she probably wasn’t pregnant anymore.
My boss was oblivious to my presence. He was sitting in a recliner wearing VR Goggles and jerking ***. I’m assuming whatever he had in mind for them to do didn’t turn out the way he planned, but he still needed to finish the job. I picked up the woman and I took her out of room while he climaxed onto his stomach.
Later, after I dropped her off at a medical suite with all the credits I could spare and a contact for a woman I know who makes fake ID’s, I promptly went out and got blood drunk, at this very establishment as a matter of fact. Then got into a fight, which I lost badly, so I could walk into work this morning and claim I tried to intervene when the attackers came for us. They almost believed me.” My carafe is almost empty. I pour the last of it into the cup and admire the thickness of the liquid, even when it’s chilled. I take a tiny sip before continuing.
“I can’t tell you how many times I wish someone had snapped for me when I was a slave, or when I was a student, or just low on the totem pole. That someone had just lost it, not cared about their job, not cared about money, not cared about anything and came to my rescue, but… I’ve come to realize most people aren’t like that. That’s not how it works.
I mean, you already know I lost my job over that. Even though they couldn’t prove it, didn’t matter. Either way, I was a useless bodyguard as they saw it. So now I’m down to three percent gift, searching the wanted ads… Nothing pays enough live on. Nothing for ungifted labor anyway. So I’m considering what to do next. Do I..? What? Stop running and go home to my insane father who swore to hurt me and all those I love if I ever showed my face again? They’re better off without me. I’m a bad luck charm… I should get going.”
I press stop and save the file. Log it as Lost Years, entry one. I slowly sip the remainder of blood, trying to savor it. It’ll be a while before I have a taste of anything this good. After slipping out of the booth I call out a thank you to Dora and add, “If you don’t see me for a while, I’m either too broke to come in or… I’m doing something else. Something fun. I think it’s time I had a little fun...But if you do see me again, do me a favor yeah? Don’t ask where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to. If I’m back here you already know the answer.”
Dora smiles and gives me a nod that says she’ll do exactly that. I give her a little salute and take my leave.
After thirty quick ticks of my soon-to-be broke a** taking up a stool, the Dora saunters over with her oddly sexual gait. All Dayth robots are Dora’s or Doran’s, short for Dayth Organic Robot and then their number. This Dora’s full name is DOR537908132, but nobody uses that. She’s got all the movements down, the lift of the leg, the sway of the hip, the slight lean forward to expose cleavage, and the exact tilt of the head that implies she finds me interesting, but it’s not the movements that give her away. It’s the slight jerking halts between. Each time the foot falls and weight is transferred to her other leg, the machine inside her shows itself just a baldly as if one of her designers wrote their name in ink all over her pretty tattooed face.
These microscopic tells that make up the visual distance between organic and machine aren’t apparent to everyone, but they are to my Taltrix trained eyes. Some folks are repulsed by these tells. They shell out top credits to buy seamless Dora’s who are human enough to really make you forget the robot inside. Those Dora’s are usually high-end companions rather than bar wenches. I’m comforted by the robot inside. A Dora doesn’t ask any personal questions. A Dora is gonna treat me exactly the same as any other paying customer. It won’t matter to her that I’m a former slave. Legally, freed slaves are supposed to have the same rights as every other non-property owning free person, and that’s all her programming cares about. A human Dayth, native or transplant like me, would have a whole host of prejudices about that, none of which are fun to contend with. Most importantly, it won’t matter to a Dora that I’m gifted and on restricted use, that my real name is Redder Torch and I’m running from a past that if it catches up to me it would mean the deaths of everyone I love. A Dora doesn’t care about any of that and that’s a big part of why I’m here, that and the blood.
Dora leans over the bar to give me a close up view of her see through top. At least half of all native Dayth women, including most Dora’s wear see through tops. The rest of us are in thick battle chastity suits for protection. Mine happens to be second hand, but it stops a laser burn or a cheap blade from biting into my skin, and it can’t be forcibly removed by anyone else. I clear my throat as Dora puts a permanently soft hand down near my own calloused one. Her smooth long fingers are perfectly shaped. My paws still look like the boxing mitts they are, covered in ink swirling patches over each knuckle that I managed to break in the last three years, which is most of them. I catch a whiff of Dora’s not unpleasant pheromones and sigh. I’m not totally immune to her robotic-flesh charms. I haven’t been intimate with anyone in years. Not worth the effort. Too many lies I gotta tell, to them and myself in order to get off and lies take the fun outta of it for me. More lies just make me tired.
Dora reads the mixed signals of my body language but doesn’t back off, perhaps making the computation that I’m shy. I’m not, but she doesn’t know that. Dora smiles. “Hi Iris. The usual?”
I’m always pleased she remembers what I want her to remember about me, and nothing else. “Yes. Thank you, Dora.” I make the payment including a nice tip for her using my wrist console as she starts preparing my order. When she’s done she pushes the tray over to me. When I go to take it from her she smiles again and tilts her head, her face a mask of empathy, but she doesn’t ask me what happened today or if I want company, even if a part of me does. Dora just freezes with an unnatural stillness that makes me relax a little. I smile at her for that kindness before taking my tray over to a private booth where I can relax in relative safety to enjoy my one last hurrah.
Taking the first sip is always a little jarring. The taste is acquired. Within seconds of swallowing I feel my body reconnect itself in a kind of wholeness I haven’t felt in a while.
Suddenly, I’m not alone in the universe. I’m not even myself, Iris or Redder, or RT. I am a reality flower, a blooming of gravity and mass, an expression of life that happens to look like me and thinks like me. I am as I should be and nothing else. I am perfect. Of course, even as I feel these things with the blood flowing through me I know they are lies. It is artificial, this blood induced state. Even if I wasn’t on restricted use of my gift, if I was at one hundred percent, I wouldn’t feel like this, because shame stands in my way, mistakes, regrets, memories. But not here in the blood high, where a sip or two gives me the euphoria of believing I’m on the right path, even when I know I’m not. I sigh quietly as the first wave subsides leaving me hobbled again at three percent, cut off from not only the outer world but from the bulk of my higher brain functioning.
Before I take a second sip, I make the decision to do something stupid. I’m going to take a risk, because if I don’t I really don’t know where I’ll end up this time. I’m starting to lose a lot of myself and I don’t know what I might do once all of who I was is gone. Hopping up, I double check the lock on my booth to make sure nobody can get in, then sit back down to flip the face of my wrist console up twisting it around so the camera faces me. Making sure I can see my reflection, I set up the angle. Unfortunately, there is no angle that doesn’t show what the last few years have done to my face. My once-straight aquiline nose, now has a pronounced bump in the bridge with a sharp bit of bone straining the skin like a tent pole, and below that the rest of my nose angles to the left. My right eyebrow has a mangled scar through it from that same injury. It was on the day Taltrix blew up and I was taken prisoner in Region Three.
My now short hair, which I continually dye lavender, shows off my alien-looking ears that I hate. They stick out from my head at the small narrow tips that aren’t exactly pointed but give the appearance of such. It’s a stark contrast to the long dark chestnut curls that once crowned my head falling to my shoulders, which I always wore down to cover my ears completely. Then there are the swirling, black, Dayth tattoos over my cheek, nose, neck, and temple leftover from the medical patches administered to knit the skin back together when I wasn’t allowed any access to my gift to heal myself. I look at that stranger’s face and know her much better than the girl I once was. This face has been my disguise, but it’s pretty much permanent. I take a gulp of blood. This time, I let it calm my nerves. I lick the remainder from my lips, press record, and start speaking.
“Sol year 5523. Region Three. Station time, 18:26. Main Vein blood bar. Q1-DS-994, Quadrant 1 Dayth Station 994.” I press pause. This is harder than I expected. I take another sip and breathe a moment before this next part. I don’t know if I have the strength right now to tell it from the beginning of my time in Region Three. Everyone I once knew believes I’m dead, which is for the best. And yet here I am recording this, which could get out. It’s stupid… But I’m afraid of losing my grip completely, afraid that I’ll never be anything other than those lies. I hit record again, take another slug, and then I go on telling the truth.
“It’s been four years, almost five, since the Taltrix explosion. I’ve been on the run ever since. I don’t have any intentions of going home to Mars. I should probably be sorry about that, but I’m not. I can’t. Instead, I’m tempted to do that thing I try to do every so often where I stop drinking blood, stop taking stimulants, start eating my vitamins instead of shooting them into my veins.” I shake my head and take another sip. “I attempt this kind of cleanse every so often, because either I hit a low spot like getting fired again or something catches inside my mind, a snag in the fabric of my thoughts. A reminder that there might be another life than the one I’m living.” I look at the small carafe and toy with it a little in my hand. It’s cool, perfectly chilled. I refill my cup and take another sip. A part of me knows this record is just for me and another part of me, the lying part, that part tells me it’s for everyone I love, in case I die before I see them again.
“There was a time when I thought change was possible, when I thought revolution or upward mobility or that the good in humanity would one day outweigh the bad. I don’t have such naïve thoughts anymore… I think it’s possible to carve out small hidden moments of happiness inside a bubble where the rest of the world cannot touch them, but as soon as they are exposed to the light, they will dry, wither and burn, like crops on dead planet…You know, Earth isn’t the only dead planet caused by humans. In Regions One and Two we like to think it is. Oh, we outlawed habitat destruction, but that didn’t stop greedy profiteers from stripping all useful resources off any planet they came across in Region Three during the Golden Age of Space Travel. The CN’s forces were too small to police the planets farther out. It’s why all of Region Three is a wasteland. Nobody lives on-planet in Region Three.”
I turn my camera around to take in the view of my small booth and all its lack of charm. Four walls in a tightly enclosed space, a table made of some cheap metal, definitely not spider steel, and a bench with cushion so worn out it has little runs in the plastic fabric. “We live on ships or space stations. The joke in Region Three is that the air is third rate, the water is third rate, but the killing is first rate.” I take another sip at a joke that really isn’t that funny, but I’m trying to decide how honest I can be in this recording. I can’t start at the very beginning. I don’t have it in me right now. I’ll need more than a small carafe of blood to go back all the way to the day I was captured when I first entered Dayth territory. I decide to fast forward to the more recent stuff. It’s fresh in my mind anyway, and I’m itching to get it off my conscience, not that I have a strong moral compass anymore given all I’ve done to survive.
I sigh and go on. “Ever since I fought my way to freedom, I’ve been working as a bodyguard. It’s a typical gig for former slave fighters. Granted, I was one of the smallest bodyguards in the business. Nobody likes to hire small bodyguards. Half our job is to just look intimidating, and since I barely came up to the chest of most bodyguards I was only ever hired to protect female clients. It was a good gig for a minute, mostly because I was allowed ten percent access to my gift. The problem was…Some of the clients I was hired to protect were slaves or even if they weren’t slaves legally they were still owned by other people. I got fired for protecting one of said slaves from her owner, which got me blacklisted from the industry. I was fired for doing my job you might say, except that when the person paying you wants free reign to hurt the person you’re supposed to be protecting for them, your job changes. Instead of protecting them your job is you keep your mouth shut and just let it happen.
You stand in the hallway outside of the room and you listen to cries. You stand there and you don’t move. You don’t let anybody else in that room either. You stand there while you hear the sound of flesh being slammed against a wall. You stand there and pretend you’re not listening to the sound of someone pleading for help, to the sounds of crying. You stand there like some sick pervert who gets off on these sounds while the other person’s bodyguard who is doing the beatdown nods at you and licks his lips like he would do exactly to you what his boss is doing to the person his boss is paying me to protect. I stood there for about as long as I could, which turned out to be exactly thirty-seven minutes. That’s a long time. I wish I could tell you it was five minutes or two minutes, but things like that creep up on you. You’re just standing there looking at your console trying to ignore the **hole next to you, guarding the door. Trying to forget all the people you once knew and loved who are off living these extraordinary lives, or boring and happy lives, or dead. You try not to wonder what they’re up to even though you see it in the feeds, and even though late at night after you promise yourself you won’t look at the feeds and won’t look for them, you have one or two too many cups of blood and you look anyway. You let the pain of it stab you in the chest to punish yourself for the s***hole that you’ve let your life become. You swallow against the lump in your throat and notice that the argument in the room behind you is getting rowdy and not in a good way.
You come back to the present and tell yourself it’s not your fight. You tell yourself, this is a good gig, that you get some access to your gift legally and with it you can at least protect yourself. You tell yourself, if you can keep this job, if you can stick it out for a few months or a year even, you can get enough money to make a new start in Region Two, far away from the cesspool of human degradation that is Region Three and far enough away from anyone you know. But then you hear another crash in the room behind you and the guy next to you lets out a laugh that sounds like a sneer and something inside you snaps.
I should tell you, at that time I was allowed ten percent access to my gift. I am allowed exactly three percent now, legally. I can hack the blocking tech when I need to, but it sets off alarms to do that and my slave status kicks back in, and then I’d have to fight in the cages again to get out. So I don’t hack it unless I need to, but as a bodyguard, legally I had ten percent access of my full capacity for speed and strength, as well as ten percent telepathy, psychokinesis, mind penetration, and psionic attack.
Ten percent doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough for me. Like I said, I get three now, which is why I’m… here… Anyway… So… I snapped and I killed the guard who was standing next to me. He was gifted too, not as strongly as me, so he was allowed thirty percent access. His mental blocking was reasonably strong, but he didn’t have my training. I set off a chain reaction of electrical, mental, malfunctions that caused a shutdown of his frontal lobe. After that, he dropped to the floor gurgling and I slid my short sword under his chin, through his soft pallet, and up all the way into the skull cavity to kill him and disguise the psionic portion of the attack.” I instantly regret saying that to the recording. I consider rewinding to cut it out, but I take a sip of blood and clear my throat and go on instead.
“That was probably pretty graphic for you. Sorry about that. I forget… people haven’t had my… experiences… anyway… Then I went inside the room and... I’ll spare you the details. The woman, who I was supposed to be guarding was… on the floor… barely conscious. Like me, she was legally free, a former slave, technically, by that I mean he had signed her paperwork to release her from his ownership, but then immediately employed her as his consort, which didn’t seem like much of a change. He only did any of it because she’d gotten pregnant… By the look of her laying on the floor… the details I’m omitting… I would say she probably wasn’t pregnant anymore.
My boss was oblivious to my presence. He was sitting in a recliner wearing VR Goggles and jerking ***. I’m assuming whatever he had in mind for them to do didn’t turn out the way he planned, but he still needed to finish the job. I picked up the woman and I took her out of room while he climaxed onto his stomach.
Later, after I dropped her off at a medical suite with all the credits I could spare and a contact for a woman I know who makes fake ID’s, I promptly went out and got blood drunk, at this very establishment as a matter of fact. Then got into a fight, which I lost badly, so I could walk into work this morning and claim I tried to intervene when the attackers came for us. They almost believed me.” My carafe is almost empty. I pour the last of it into the cup and admire the thickness of the liquid, even when it’s chilled. I take a tiny sip before continuing.
“I can’t tell you how many times I wish someone had snapped for me when I was a slave, or when I was a student, or just low on the totem pole. That someone had just lost it, not cared about their job, not cared about money, not cared about anything and came to my rescue, but… I’ve come to realize most people aren’t like that. That’s not how it works.
I mean, you already know I lost my job over that. Even though they couldn’t prove it, didn’t matter. Either way, I was a useless bodyguard as they saw it. So now I’m down to three percent gift, searching the wanted ads… Nothing pays enough live on. Nothing for ungifted labor anyway. So I’m considering what to do next. Do I..? What? Stop running and go home to my insane father who swore to hurt me and all those I love if I ever showed my face again? They’re better off without me. I’m a bad luck charm… I should get going.”
I press stop and save the file. Log it as Lost Years, entry one. I slowly sip the remainder of blood, trying to savor it. It’ll be a while before I have a taste of anything this good. After slipping out of the booth I call out a thank you to Dora and add, “If you don’t see me for a while, I’m either too broke to come in or… I’m doing something else. Something fun. I think it’s time I had a little fun...But if you do see me again, do me a favor yeah? Don’t ask where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to. If I’m back here you already know the answer.”
Dora smiles and gives me a nod that says she’ll do exactly that. I give her a little salute and take my leave.