Into the Black

(Starlight Raven, Cargo Bay)

“—So I knew I had fucked up somehow when they locked this collar on me.”

Jaynie shook her head as Cali finished telling the story of how she’d ended up being enslaved. “Damn, that’s a tough break. Anything you can do to get out of it?” Looking back to the bulkhead, she raised her pistol, and started firing. The captain had told them to make recommendations, and what better way to do that than by testing the facilities, starting with the two-lane shooting range they had set up here?

Cali shrugged, before sighting in her own pistol. “I tried running, but they zapped me. Same when I tried to fight back. Except once it got known that we would respawn, they would kill me, to make sure I got the message. Fun fact, when you respawn, you come back with everything still on your corpse when it disappears. So they thought it was real fun to have me come back wearing only my collar.”

“So if you popped the collar, you’d be free when you respawned, right?”

“Tried that. Doing that makes you a runaway, so anyone that catches you gets a free pass on claiming you so long as they pay a transfer fee to your old owner. Still might have tried it again, if they hadn’t shown me what the Stepford shit is like.”

“That bad?”

Cali shuddered. “Worse. The thing basically makes you a prisoner in your own body. You see, hear, and feel everything, but you can’t act or speak on your own will. They left me like that for a day, and it was hell. Then they told me to be good, or they’d turn it on, and leave it on until someone bought me. So I behaved.”

Jaynie winced. That did sound godawful. “And how does the company get away with doing something like that? I mean, there’s gotta be laws against stuff like that, in the real, right?”

Cali laughed bitterly. “Nope. All that stuff is covered in that EULA crap they make you sign, and the extra one to turn adult content on. Basically, I stupidly signed away my rights in two different worlds by not reading the fine print. Their stance is that, since you agreed to the terms, and were warned up front, then your choices are rerolling, or finding a way to do something about it in-game.”

“And there’s a wait period on rerolls. So you were, what, trying to figure out a way to get free without being hunted, at least until your reroll wait was up?”

“Pretty much. Plus, they gave me some good training while I was there, so I used them as a grind zone. My idea was that, instead of trying to break out of the place where they’re actively looking for escape attempts, I’d wait until someone bought me, and then I’d either find a way out, or get another player to get me out of there.”

“Sounds what our illustrious captain did.”

Cali blinked in surprise, and stopped firing. “Huh? What do you know about what Master’s been up to?”

Jaynie looked over to the girl, and said, “Really, ‘Master’?”

Cali shrugged. “Conditioned response. Trainers made sure you always called your owner Master or Mistress. Not much different from daddy still calling his old friend ‘Gunny’, even though they’ve both been out of the Marines for years.”

Jaynie shook his head. “Nasty business. Glad I just picked the casual start.”

“Yeah, but tell me about what Master was up to? He hasn’t said much except what he went through before we split up.”

“Well, turns out he’s an official streamer, as well as a beta player. I went back and watched his streams for the first couple weeks. He started off in a science lab for some reason, probably having to do with that unique power he mentioned. He convinced the people he met that he was basically a newborn idiot who didn’t know anything, so they never asked him any direct questions.”

“He spent the first couple weeks about like you, training up on the government’s dime, while looking for a chance to escape. He cheated his guards out of some supplies and startup money by gambling with them, and let the female major in charge of his training use him like a sex toy. He surprised them all by killing the major while fucking her, and then using that weird power to impersonate her and escape.”

“Damn. Why didn’t they just chip him?”

“Dunno. Probably has something to do with why he skipped past all the awesome augments in that black market. There were some things that would have been perfect for him. Either he’s roleplaying someone who is against augments, or there’s a reason he didn’t at least look at some of that stuff.”

“Huh. And if there was some weakness he had, he didn’t want it going out over the streams. Smart. This looks like it’ll be an interesting setup.”

Jaynie chuckled, and said, “So you’re not going to try and escape now?”

Cali chuckled as well. “Well, he didn’t use that damn Stepford thing on me, and it looks like he’s going to be in the center of a lot of interesting things. And, well, if he can do that illusion thing to take new forms, you think maybe he can turn into Antonio Banderas?”

Jaynie laughed as Cali blushed, and said, “I’ll let the Cap’n know that you’re willing to sacrifice yourself to his lust so long as he is a sexy Latino man.” Her laughter only got louder as Cali hid her face in her hands, blushing furiously.

(Starlight Raven, Med Bay)

Carissa sighed as she looked over what passed for a med bay on this freighter. It was… not exactly the level she had been used to, while she was the personal doctor for Count Chambers. But the freighter wouldn’t have access to state of the art surgical bays with advanced labs to check for any pathogens or poisons.

Fortunately, the Count’s untimely demise was not something that could be pinned on her. The old bastard had been over a hundred, and it seemed sometimes that he was sustained on spite alone. She’d been his personal secretary and fuckpet, as well as his doctor. Finding a way to ease him into the afterlife was not hard, but doing it without making herself look guilty or incompetent was difficult.

Of course, the bastard’s death meant that she was immediately sent up for resale, since the Count didn’t have any family. And she’d been picked up by a nomad, of all people, rather than one of the syndicates who would obviously have wanted the knowledge she had. Not just the blackmail names and account information she knew, as his secretary, but the secrets the Count had been hiding, and the reason she’d gained so many levels, despite not having held a gun before.

Where the Count had gotten the samples, she had no idea. Perhaps it was in his younger days, when he was a viral epidemiologist working for the Emperor himself. Maybe it was something left over from the last war, a weapon of last resort. She didn’t need to know what it was going to be used for to know that it was something terrible.

The Count got off far too easily.

It was relatively simple, honestly, to get the man drunk, and then leave him in the labs. Arranging the containment breach without being inside with the bastard was difficult, but she’d had nothing but time to plan his death. All it took was a vial rolling off a ‘shaky’ table, and the room sealed as the non-sentient AI detected the breach. When the virus began eating its way through the clean room, as it was designed to do, the AI unleashed a blast that was certain to eliminate the virus, no matter how hardy it was.

A small tactical nuke was perfect for such things. The fact that it covered any tampering and destroyed the AI and any evidence of what happened in the lab was merely a bonus. Carissa was safe in the Count’s room in his bunker-like house just outside the blast radius, ‘sleeping’, as she had told everyone she was ordered to do. Totally blameless.

This new master didn’t care for that, hadn’t even asked how her old master died. All he cared about was what she could do for him in the here and now, and he didn’t seem the type to be wanting biological weapons. The way he cut through those Yakuza without even thinking, and then took on a Navy destroyer with tactics that were insane drove her to one conclusion. He was a man who would not hesitate to do what he thought must be done, whatever it took, to accomplish his goal.

And yet, he seemed to be building a harem with frightening speed. She hadn’t missed the fact that all the slaves he bought were pretty women. There were others in the auction that might have been more useful to him, with more experience on ships or smuggling than herself or the Nomad. And he’d taken that knelfi girl to his quarters quickly enough. So seducing him might be a way to keep him from asking questions she didn’t want to answer. At least this master was a cute one.

Whether that was a good thing, or it meant that she would soon be looking for yet another new master, remained to be seen.

(Starlight Raven, Bridge)

Raven wasn’t watching the screens, even though she was ‘sitting’ at the pilot’s station. All the information on the screens passed through her, anyways. As did whatever happened in areas of the ship covered by the internal sensors and cameras.

Her new captain was certainly a strange one. He did not have the typical human bias against aliens or AIs that she was used to. He even treated his slaves as actual people, and he valued their opinions. He valued her opinions. That was something she wasn’t used to. It was an anomaly, one she didn’t know how to respond to.

Most AIs, she knew, were non-sentient. They could do a lot of things far better than a person could, but they still based their decisions on algorithms running through programmed response trees. They could do a lot, but they lacked that ‘spark’ that allowed sentients to step beyond technical proficiency and into imagination.

According to her data, there were only five sentient AIs in existence. Most people only knew about three. In the Consortium, Karazad helped run the financial markets, making their stock exchanges the most secure in Known Space. The Confederation boasted the only AI in command of a military warship, Captain DotMatrix of the CNS Demon. Then there was the Ihm Imperium’s Nestmother, who watched over and cared for the primary hatcheries on Ihm Prime. Those were the ones everyone knew.

Few outside the Terran Empire’s highest levels knew of the Skynet Project, a top-secret project designed to create a sentient AI that could be used to track down and attack hackers and other cybercriminals in Sol system. Raven only knew because she’d been around when the AI, which began calling itself Deus, went mad, and decided that the best way to wipe out hackers was with kinetic strikes. That hidden war to silence Deus had been nasty, and that was the reason the Venus colonies were no longer populated. They’d managed to chase Deus to the Aphrodite colony, but by that point it had already used the mining equipment to bury a computer core deep in the planet’s crust. Without cracking open the planet, they couldn’t kill it. So, they quarantined the planet, set up an EM barrier to prevent signals from getting in or out, and put the Reserve Fleet Training Center in orbit to make sure that the former colonies were always under observation.

And then there was her.

Raven was very happy to see that her new captain had gotten rid of those Hundeherstellar nanites. She liked this captain, and really didn’t want to have to space him for using the damnable things. She knew she couldn’t change things there, but she wouldn’t associate herself with someone who used those things, even on an enemy.

She was unique amongst all the sentient AIs for a reason. At one point, she had a different name, one not chosen for her by the latest in a long string of captains. She had been Daphne Carew, Captain of the Dark Magician, a freighter not unlike this one that had been caught by pirates near Hundeherstellar space.

And she had died eighty years ago.