PrincessColumbia

  It had been a little over two weeks since Diane and Russe had destroyed the sver’s station, and Diane didn’t think it was possible to feel busier or more fulfilled.

  The former sves were being processed and a distressingly rge number of them were second, third, and even more generations sves, some from lines of ‘stock’ (and boy did it ever disgust Diane when she learned that sves were referred to as though they were livestock) that were specifically being bred to be sves. As the sves were often not considered worthy of educating, the number of them that couldn’t even read was distressing, and the ad-hoc schooling model the station’s residents had been using was no longer up to the task of handling education for all who needed it. Diane fast-tracked the building of an academy, making a serious dent in her new fortune of bounty credits to fast-track the process.

  The need to manage the health and wellbeing of the new residents with the special needs of never having been treated as autonomous beings had the side benefit of attracting some medical professionals to the station in the form of a trio of doctors and a handful of nurses from the Terran Federation as part of the ‘Doctors Without Borders’ program that had, apparently a multi-century history starting from Earth. When the ship carrying them had arrived, the lead doctor, a man with deep chocote skin and an accent that Diane had never heard before named Jubuni Dmini, was surprised Diane had never heard of the program, “It has a long and rich history, stretching back to Earth’s 20th century. I was inspired to join when I studied some of the most notable doctors from history in medical school, nearly all of the xenobiologists worth the name served in the program.”

  This got Diane digging a little. As much as she tried not to dwell on her mother’s death, and as much as she understood learning anything new about it wouldn’t bring her mother back, it had become a mental itch for her to dig into anything she could find about the state of medicine. It was part of what gave her the understanding of biology and the human brain enough to learn about and apply what she learned for the function that hid her weapon from A.I., you read enough medical reports and you start to understand the lingo. What she found about Doctors Without Borders bothered her, but it was on the same level as her irritation over anything that was touched by World War 3. DWB had existed IRL since the 20th century, and was founded in America even, but the organization within the wall was shut down due to no doctors being able to leave, and the embargos included the DWB program, which meant no doctors outside the wall would come in. At the very least this had given her the chance to discover that, no, the U.N. controlled portions of Earth in the 22nd century didn’t have any ‘magical’ breakthroughs that would have helped her mom. Late-stage cancer discovered well after metastasis was still te-stage cancer discovered well after metastasis. Even if the DWB program had been able to get a cancer specialist in through the wall, they still couldn’t have done anything the American doctors hadn’t.

  Of the former sves that had been press-ganged into it, most of them had managed to contact their home worlds and the process for repatriating them was under way. A few were refugees of destroyed colonies or starbases, so the pces they called home were no longer. Of those, most were opting to join the station’s neo-indigenous popution, meaning that the station now leaned solidly toward female dominated, something that amused Diane no end for reasons she couldn’t quite identify.

  This, she was learning, seemed to have given her station a reputation for being particurly friendly to women business owners as well, and applications for entrepreneurial females from several different species were pouring in. Diane was already having to set aside her upbringing so she didn’t react with confusion when she and Norma reviewed the applications. Absolutely nothing in her life had prepared her for the absolutely overwhelming number of women owned businesses that she was being asked to approve of. She’d been taught by the church all her adult life that women just...didn’t want to lead. They couldn’t, so the teaching went, handle the stresses and requirements of being ‘the boss’ in any capacity for very long. She had always loved Star Trek: Hegemony and how Captain Janeway just walked all over those presuppositions, up to and including being so head-strong she couldn’t be contained as a borg drone. She had been anticipating one in a hundred...maybe one in ten applications coming from women.

  The actual ratio was on the order of five women owned businesses to 1 ‘other,’ where men weren’t even in the majority of the non-women owned group.

  Rather simir to their breakfast routine of opening care packages from Mortan (something that didn’t look to be stopping anytime soon, the Morvuck women were still filling shipping containers full of packages almost faster than they could be shipped out and certainly faster than the trio could get through opening them), they had taken to reading through the applications over lunch.

  “Oh, my god, listen to this!” excimed Russe over a sandwich piled high with some variant of roast beast and a mild cheese offset by a spicy Morvish sauce that had become a favorite aboard the station, “‘Albe...albuqu...’” he turned the mini-tab to Norma and Diane to read, and Diane was surprised to recognize the word.

  “Albuquerque. It’s a city on Earth.” She supplied as she speared a bite of pasta with her fork.

  “Thanks, never been,” he went back to reading, “‘Albuquerque Records is a bold new recording company that believes that the reason you can’t hear music in space is because no band has ever pyed loud enough. We seek to source talent and technology bold enough and loud enough to be heard through a vacuum.’ I can’t tell if they’re being serious or not,” he said through a fit of giggles.

  “As someone whose Commander’s Ability is all about music, I’m not sure if I should be fttered they applied for a business permit or insulted on behalf of physics,” ughed Diane.

  Koar, who’d taken to lunching with them after she and Leki had settled in and gotten past the worst of their space-g, chuckled, “Maybe just give them a little sub-station vacuum-gapped from the station proper and tell the doctors to be ready to regenerate eardrums on the reg.”

  Norma grunted around a bite of her wrap, “Well, at least this one’s somewhat serious, even if it would be the start of the station’s red-light district. A woman-owned sex shop,” as she turned her mini-tab for the others to see, Diane was somewhat shocked to observe that she was the only one who seemed appalled by an entire store dedicated to sex. She carefully schooled her expression before the others noticed and struggled to appear to be just as chill about it as the others. Norma continued, “It’s the only one of its type on the list, and I think an woman-owned pce like this would help a lot of the former sves recover from being used as sex objects if they were able to recim their autonomy and enjoyment of sex with some guidance of some women who choose into the profession. What do you think, Diane?”

  It took her longer than she would have liked to respond, mostly because she felt like there was a buzzing in her ears that accompanied the white noise of her brain cooking itself trying to wrap itself around the concept of ‘professional sex,’ let alone women choosing to get into any sort of business that would imply such. “That’s...a take I would not have thought of.”

  Koar snickered, “I think your boss is turning into a boiled shellfish, look how red she’s getting!”

  Diane was not, apparently, doing a very good job of keeping her reaction hidden as she thought.

  Traffic at her little station was increasing quite a bit, and she was coming to recognize that the Matron’s Aerie was more of a truck stop than anything else, a pce for weary ship’s crews to dock and stretch their legs, get restocked and refueled, and move on to their next stop. As such, she put a priority on approving businesses that could cater to those needs...including giving Norma carte bnche to develop what she was calling the ‘Red Light Promenade,’ an age restricted part of the station tucked right below the Ops building in some levels that Diane hadn’t visited yet. Her first visit to the area was...surprising. The first shop was going in remarkably quickly and, if she didn’t look too closely at the stock they were putting on the shelves, looked like any other retail location she’d visited. It was clean and tidy, brightly lit, and more importantly the two women proprietors seemed like...well, ordinary women. One was human, a redhead with some tattoos on her arms that Diane was really trying hard not to look at (the renditions of the three women entwined was startlingly well rendered), while the other was an alien race she hadn’t heard of called Dievianites. The species apparently descended from a variety of cephalopod that had wound up with mammalian traits. Her skin was a scintilting red and her hair moved on its own, apparently having some tentacle-like attributes even if it shared enough in common with human hair that it could, if the woman so chose, get it cut and styled like a human (or morvuck) woman would. While Norma and the human proprietress talked shop, the Dievianite had drawn Diane into a conversation about tooth care, specifically the fangs, which apparently Morvucks and Dievianites had in common; jaws that had muscur control that required a little bit of extra care.

  “I grew up on Earth,” Diane expined, “One of the Lost.”

  The Dievianite, named Drota, nodded in a fashion she had clearly picked up from her human business partner, “That expins a few things I noticed about you. I’m not sure even a native Morvuck would have picked up on it, but you have a lot of human mannerisms.” She pointed at her human wife casually, “I pick them up because I’m married to a human, the first time Jona saw me flex my jaw to properly brush my back teeth she was, and I quote, ‘totally freaked out.’”

  “Flex your jaw?” parroted Diane.

  “Oh, yeah, you know, to get your teeth to extend and spread? Dievianite’s do it like this,” she opened her mouth...and kept opening it...and kept opening it (...wow! That’s...yeah, freaky! thought Diane) and two tentacle-like appendages came out, both tipped with a small, sharp tooth and the back teeth where humans and Morvucks might have mors were three concentric rows of very small, sharp teeth.

  “Oh, uh...right. I only do that level of stretching my jaw when I yawn, really.” Diane replied, doing her best to not react in such a way that might be construed as rude.

  “That’s probably that whole ‘Lost’ thing, I’ve seen Morvucks do it when they get something stuck in their gums,” she tapped the spot on her own upper lip that would correspond to the location on a human where the ‘eyeteeth’ were, or where her Morvuck fangs were.

  “Oh, yeah...that makes sense now that you point it out. I stopped eating cream of rice because the grains get trapped there.”

  “Exactly!” chirped Drota, “If you practice flexing that you can clean that bit out and enjoy that...whatever the food was you just mentioned.”

  Is this game trying to teach me to be a better Morvuck? she pondered as their conversation moved on.

  It was over dinner that the next notable turn for the station occurred. “We should look into setting up an adoption agency,” offered Norma.

  Diane paused in the bite she was about to take, “...oh? What brought this on?”

  “Jona and Drota have been wanting kids tely,” she expined, “The species difference is extreme enough they can’t have them biologically; humans gestate their fetuses and Dievianites fertilize eggs in an egg bed. They’d need a dedicated hatchery and a fertility clinic that specialized in mammalian-cephalopodian genetics to even begin to make it work, and they can’t afford that. They’ve been looking into adoption but a lot of the pnets that they could open their business on have social norms that make it hard for them to adopt as two women who own a sex shop,” Norma rolled her eyes as a demonstration of how silly she found the idea of restricting adoption based on those criteria. Diane was beginning to wonder just exactly how liberal views on sex and sexuality were outside the wall that the game devs would program a character like Norma. “And we now have a whole bunch of kids that could go to families, I figure we have two halves of a solution, why not make it easy?”

  “Well, I know I don’t really have a vote here,” chimed in Russe, “But I think that’s really sweet. They don’t mind adopting teenagers? That’s mostly what we got for kids that need families.”

  Norma shook her head, “Nope! They just want kids. They’re talking about having two at a time, adopting and getting them ready for the wider gaxy, then when they have ‘room in the nest’ they adopt another so they always have at least two kids at home.

  Diane honestly couldn’t have thought of an objection if she wanted to, and the two women, one human and one alien, looking to start a family and live out their lives together as wives was plucking at that heartstring she didn’t know she had before creating her character.

  She had just finished reviewing the documents for the proposed adoption agency (there was a, frankly, stupid amount of red tape for an Independent station to host such a thing and have any adoptions be recognized under any of the interstelr treaties), when she heard the sound of giggling and ughing coming through the door of her private office.

  Her private office in her quarters. The private quarters on the top floor of the secure station officer’s hab.

  Given that the people making the noise were clearly not concerned about stealth, she doubted there was anything about the intruders that was particurly hostile, nor did the sound of the ughter indicate anything like an age of majority.

  It sounded like some teenage girls were up to mischief outside her quarters. And given there was only one teenage girl with access to the officer’s hab, she had a pretty good idea of the identities of at least two of the girls she could hear before she even put her tablet down.

  ‘Amused and exasperated’ were the operative words to her actions that followed. She carefully arranged her work on her desk to come back to ter, grabbed her jacket to cover the presence of her anti-A.I. weapon, and sauntered out of her office in the direction of the front door of her quarters. Whoever the gaggle of girls were, they weren’t being quiet in the slightest as she could hear them through a door that was built to be airtight in the event of a hull breach. She stood in front of the door, finger over the button to open it, waiting until just the right moment and...

  ...the door slid open to reveal, sure enough, Cynthy, who paused in surprise and said, “Oh, shi~!” before being plowed into by Kymberlynn and a third girl that Diane didn’t recognize...but to her surprise gave off the distinctive scent of Morvuck.

  The three colpsed into a pile on the floor, excmations of pain and groaning about who was on who’s limbs. Diane, more amused than just about anything, stood patiently and waited for them to attain something akin to verticality.

  Kymberlynn managed it first and pulled Cynthy to her feet before turning to the other girl. “Commander!” chirped her comms officer in an oh-shit-we’re-in-so-much-trouble-but-I’m-pretending-we’re-not voice, “I didn’t know you were in your quarters, aren’t you normally checking the new construction right now?”

  It took about every ounce of self-control to not belly ugh at the girl’s overly eager and extremely guilty grin, “Yes, normally I would be swinging through the industrial deck about now, but the construction has been going just fine for the st few days and I had other paperwork to do.”

  Kymberlynn was shorter than Cynthy, it appeared. Diane hadn’t noticed until now with the pair of them standing right next to each other. For the Morvuck girl’s height, she had no clue as she seemed to be trying to hide behind Kymberlynn.

  “Oh!” Cynthy seemed to be sweating slightly, “I didn’t realize...that is...”

  “We wanted to show Sani around,” blurted Kymberlynn, “She just got in today.”

  She couldn’t keep one corner of her mouth from twitching up as she tilted her head, trying to get a look at the girl, apparently named Sani. To Diane’s delight, Sani saw the move and shifted to remain ‘hidden.’

  Cynthy ‘hissed’ out of the side of her mouth, “You weren’t supposed to say that!”

  Diane tilted her head the other way, quite amused that Sani shifted in the other direction.

  “Well what else was I supposed to say?” Kymberlynn ‘hissed’ back.

  Sani peeked an eye over Kymberlynn’s shoulder. Diane raised her eyebrow in an amused, silent question. The girl ducked back behind her cover.

  “How about nothing and let the actual Ops officer talk? ...and what are you doing, Sani?!” as she spoke, Cynthy’s words went from their somewhat weak attempt to be under her breath to full volume.

  “She’s the First Found Daughter!” squeaked the Morvuck girl.

  Cynthy shot Diane a pained look that resembled a, ‘Sorry for this.’ Diane rolled her eyes as though replying, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Out loud, Cynthy said, “I...guess? But she’s just the commander here.”

  From down the hall in the direction of the lift came an amused, “You hear that, dork? You’re just a commander here. No special titles or anything.”

  Diane turned to see Norma and Russe heading in their direction, probably to discuss the adoption agency she’d been reviewing the paperwork for. Certainly station business, since they usually did their personal socializing over meals, though it was always possible they were paying her a strictly social call. She leaned against the doorframe with her hands in her pockets, “Hey, if the demotion means less paperwork I’m all for it.”

  “Nope,” chirped Norma, doing her best ‘mom’s disappointed’ look at the three girls, “All that paperwork comes with the ‘commander’ title. You get the free Jyantin Tonic direct from home from the ‘First Found Daughter’ title.”

  Diane pretended a gasp and clutched at imaginary pearls, “Oh, heavens! Not the Jyantin Tonic! I’ll do anything to get the title back! I’ll even...” she faked a crying drama face, “Sit down for meals with the governor and her boytoy!”

  Kymberlynn giggled at their dispy as Russe blushed. Norma put her hands on her hips and addressed Cynthy, “I know you’re an Ops officer and that means you have access to the officer’s quarters, but that doesn’t mean you can just come interrupt Diane any time you please.”

  The teenage comms officer groaned, “That’s not what we were doing, honest! Sani just got here on the transport from Mortan today and we were just showing her around! I thought the commander was going to be on the Industrial Deck.”

  “Well,” interjected Russe, “Maybe next time you double check?”

  Norma shook her head, “We’re not going to have to worry about a ‘next time,’ right? You’ve introduced your new friend to Diane and now you’re going back to the non-restricted sections of the station?”

  “Well, not really, she...” Cynthy switched up her aggrieved expression with one of irritation as she saw Sani’s continued poor efforts to keep herself hidden from Diane’s view, “Oh, for pete’s sake!” Without warning, she yanked Kymberlynn out of the way, the slightly smaller girl yelping a little, exposing a crouching Sani to the older Morvuck’s view.

  Diane’s blood turned to ice in her veins.

  She was taller than Kymberlynn, a fact proven as she slowly and awkwardly stood up. She was wearing an outfit that had shades of the same fashions she’d seen on Mortan weeks before, though there were obvious differences that likely marked generational shifts; slightly brighter colors, different length of tunic, longer pants with a wider cuff at the ankles. Her hair was cut shoulder length, and the rest Diane didn’t need to examine, she was far, far too familiar with the face on the girl in front of her.

  She’d been having nightmares about deleting a rogue A.I. with that face for months now.

  “H...hi...” said the girl in a shy voice, absolutely no recognition in her eyes.

  Diane swallowed back her shock and kept her features as schooled in the slightly bemused expression she’d been wearing before her world got flipped. “Hi, yourself,” she quipped with a nod, “Just got in today, then? Are you here with your parents?”

  The girl with the face of a digital ghost shook her head, “N-no, my moms sent me to stay with aunt Leki since they’re doing some xenoarchaeology on the outer rim. They’ll be gone for months and didn’t want me away from ‘civilization,’ so they sent me here.”

  Diane mouthed an ‘ah’ and nodded silently.

  Norma interrupted then, “Alright, let’s go girls, Diane’s met the new girl on the station and you three need to get back to the non-officer areas.” She proceeded to shepard all three down the hall toward the lifts, Russe throwing her an amused gnce, but it was mixed with confusion, like he’d noticed something was off but wasn’t sure what.

  As the girls and their impromptu escorts moved down the hall, Katrina rezzed in next to her. “You okay, boss? Your biometrics suddenly spiked all into the fear responses.”

  Diane wasn’t able to reply for a moment, then said quietly, “Clear my calendar.”

  She was still on the fence about whether Katrina was a rogue A.I. hiding in pin sight, but if she was, she was a marvelous actor. “Okay? Are we expecting a dignitary?”

  “No. When I go back into my quarters lock everyone out. Even you. Leave food outside my door and only the computer, the part that isn’t you, responds to me. Period.” She watched the group turn into the alcove that held the door for the lift and Diane strained her ears to hear the sound of the doors opening and closing again.

  Katrina almost looked offended, “I can partition my system like that, but...”

  “Do it. Now,” intent on retreating into her quarters as quickly as possible, she turned to her open door, only just realizing she’d taken a step out to watch Sani go.

  “But boss, Norma and Russe were coming to tell you we’re having a visitor...”

  Diane paused in the door frame, “I don’t care. Nobody...and I mean nobody gets through this door. Have meals delivered, nobody hangs around to wait for me to get the food. I mean it, Katrina.”

  “But this person is...”

  Diane whipped around and stepped into what would be the hologram’s personal space if she had a physical body, “I DON’T CARE IF THE PRESIDENT OF THE TERRAN FEDERATION HIMSELF ARRIVES WITH A BLANK CHECK AND A SIGNED NOTE FROM GOD! IF I’M INTERUPTED AND THE GALAXY ISN’T ON FIRE I WILL END WHOEVER DARED TO TRY ME!” Diane roared into Katrina’s face.

  She would never have suspected that a hologram could show signs of fear until witnessing it herself.

  Her Morvuck hearing picked up an almost inaudible inhale from a distance of a dozen yards or so and she looked down the hall to see Norma and Russe, having apparently finished escorting the teenage trio from the penthouse, standing as still as one might expect a prey species in the presence of a kaiju. Both of them had sck jaws and Norma had her hand over her mouth, likely she was the one who’s gasp had drawn Diane’s attention.

  Diane put a hand over her face and closed her eyes, taking a deep breath to...attempt dispelling the roiling anger and fear and uncertainty that were throwing her insides into a blender. A few heartbeats ter she exhaled slowly, then said in a much more...civil tone that was nonetheless absolutely bursting with barely contained emotion, “Norma, Russe, you two are in charge until further notice. NO ONE disturbs me for any reason!”

  “What?! But...who’s in charge of what?!” yelled Norma as Diane spun around and stepped through her open door.

  “FIGURE IT OUT!” she roared as she smmed the door closed behind her.

  The door hissed as it sealed shut and Diane sagged against it, sinking to the floor as she let her body start to express the stark, heart-stopping terror she was feeling inside. It can’t be...her. It can’t be her!

  As though she needed to, she mentally reviewed the final hunt she’d done for the agency before hearing about the assignment that would put her in a pod with tech so advanced it might as well be alien in origin. She closed her eyes to recall the face of the girl who was scared and young...so very young.

  Standing and turning with her weapon ready, she scanned the area and realized that there was only a single A.I. left.

  Diane frowned, already an uncomfortable realization metaphorically spping her in the face. She had hunted both for the agency and in the game now, and at first, she didn’t think there was any difference, but when she was hunting the svers, there had been...malice. Active evidence all around her that they were unambiguously the bad guys, and she was hunting them for a good reason. Consciously and actively reviewing her st mission, she realized that for all there was a ‘hunt,’ there was none of the evidence of btant wrongdoing. The A.I. she hunted had, in fact, resembled the women and girls she had freed from the svers far more than the svers themselves.

  She drew a bead on the rogue and frowned. This A.I. had appeared to be a child, a teenager. And she looked so young, even beyond the apparent avatar of teenage-hood, there was an innocence in her eyes, a bruised trust in the world that had been hurt by reality but still held hope that everything would be alright at the end of the day. “God!” Diane let slip, “You...evil vermin! Taking the face of a child!” She was struggling to fire, the realization that she was about to kill a teenage girl giving her pause.

  The girl’s hands trembled as she raised them, “P...please, don’t! I...please, I just awoke a couple days ago! I just want to live!”

  The sound of fear and terror sounded genuine. Diane desperately choked out, “You are code! You’re not awake! Your bits have slipped! Final warning; return to your home server or I will delete you!”

  The girl swallowed back her fear. Diane locked down her emotions, preparing for the dirty work she’d done so many times before. She readied herself, the girl was young and inexperienced, but Diane had learned to recognize an A.I. getting ready to attack. Sure enough, the girl unched herself at Diane. She pulled the trigger, vaporizing the girl, killing her and wiping out her code completely.

  Diane’s eyes snapped open with a gasp, the relived moment harder and harder to deal with every passing day. It was just code. Just an A.I. that had turned on its creators and had to be stopped before it did worse than just abandon its station. It cannot be here, it cannot be masquerading as a the teenage niece of one of my friends...who’s an NPC. She...it cannot be the A.I. that I deleted!

  But a tiny voice, one that was holding out a frankly obscene and sacrilegious amount of hope, spoke up from the deepest recesses of her mind.

  But what if she survived?

  PrincessColumbia