Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 41151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 206(@200wpm)___ 165(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41151 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 206(@200wpm)___ 165(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
Having secured her cursing form inside the shuttle capsule, locking it from the outside and removing the propulsion plugs so it cannot be started, I make my way up to the bridge.
“I am sorry, brother,” Malik says. “I know that can’t have been easy. But they’re gone. So maybe this is all finally over.”
“It’s not over.”
He cocks his head at me. “What do you mean?”
I look at Malik, my oldest friend, a man who has suffered losses greater than I could have imagined up until this very point. What I am about to tell him will destroy him all over again.
“I have good news and bad news.”
12
Dreamy
The authorities take me away from Shah, handling me not roughly, but indifferently. It wasn’t easy to do this. I wanted to cling to him and beg him to save me, but I couldn’t put everybody at risk just so I could have what I wanted.
I can already feel the walls of the Colony closing in around me as they lead me away. This ship feels just like the factory did, calm and mechanical and overwhelmingly beige. I want to scream and cry. I want to break down, but I can’t. I don’t know why. It feels as though I am shutting down, as if all the parts of me that make me a person are hiding away to protect themselves.
I stay quiet because I do not want to disturb the one I love. I do not want his last memory of me to be of pain and chaos. But internally I have never felt this much pain. It feels as though I am being ripped away from the one place in the entire universe where I make sense, my one source of love. Everything outside it is cold and unforgiving and mechanical.
“You’re going to be debriefed, Unit 4392,” the Colony personnel holding me says. “Answer every question honestly and fully.”
As if I will be given a choice. I was taught well in school. I know that a worker’s mind is not their own. Training is programming. Programming is life. I was not taught to make choices. I was taught to obey.
The irony is, I could never behave myself when it came to Shah, not the first time I met him, and not when I wandered my way into his embrace all those years later. Maybe the Seer knows something I don’t. Maybe fate and destiny are real forces in this universe. All I know is that I’m no longer the well-behaved drone worker who does as she is told - and the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I ever was.
They put me in a chair with restraints built into the arms and the legs. As soon as I sit down, I am kept in place. A Colony agent stands before me.
“Unit 4392,” he addresses me by my Colony code. “You have been in the possession of a criminal. You have no doubt been convinced to partake in criminal acts. I would like to hear about what you witnessed and what criminal acts you partook in. A full confession is necessary.”
I laugh. It’s the wrong thing to do. But how can I possibly fully confess to all I did with Shah? And all he did to me?
“What is amusing?” The Colony authority seems disturbed by my mirth. I guess that’s because drones don’t laugh. There’s not a lot of humor in our world. There’s just pure function.
“There’s too much to tell you,” I say, honestly. “I saw more in the last several weeks than I saw in my entire life before that. I ate food I’ve never tasted before, I talked to people I never would have spoken to. I saw violence, and I experienced it for myself. I was confused a lot of the time.”
“I bet you were,” the authority says. My confusion is the only thing that makes sense to them. They really think of me as a robot, a meat machine that probably shouldn’t have feelings.
“You were in the possession of the master criminal, Shah. What use did he have for you?”
“Sexual, mostly.” Again, I can be honest.
“She’s got nothing useful to say,” the agent concludes. He’s not talking to me. He’s speaking to those who are watching elsewhere. I get the impression they don’t actually care as much as they seemed to at first. It’s almost like someone has told them to pretend to care.
I sit very still, and I do my best impression of compliance. I know that my survival relies on them thinking I am harmless and submissive, a thing to be acted on. I was worried from time to time that I might be in trouble for being abducted, and then being with Shah, but I should have realized that they’d never be angry with me. That would be like being angry with your box because somebody took it. I’m just a thing. An object to be acted on. I can’t be bad, because I don’t have sufficient personality.