#expositional

Are you deranged like me? Are you strange like me? Lighting matches just to swallow up the flame like me? Do you call yourself a fucking hurricane like me? Pointing fingers 'cause you'll never take the blame like me? 

Whispers covered the crowd like the hum of a drive core, the bodies pressed close like narrow corridors. It was oddly comforting to him, to be surrounded by people and quiet noise. On a ship, in a prison, out in nature, it seemed he only really felt comfortable in any guise when he could blanket his own buzzing mind with a layer of nigh-incomprehensible murmurs and whispers that only a practiced ear could discern.

And Sevens had nothing if not a practiced, discerning ear.

It is, in all honesty, by and large a blur. He’s tried, convicted, and sent away with very little in the way of actual legislation or fanfare. They know if they let it become too widespread, too well-known, that he’d become a living martyr, his ship and life destroyed at last in the name of righteous action. So they keep it quiet. D.M. Strider, AKA Prisoner #097784-2205-3, is quietly shuffled into the evening news with no mention of how or why he was captured and jailed.

For the most part that doesn’t bother him.

What does is the fact that he had to spend time there at all. And that his ship was destroyed. And that for some reason when men of any species are forced into a small space with limited outlets for aggression they more often than not turn on one another.

It helped that he was only a smuggler, and a clean one at that. No gun running, no drug trafficking. It gave him a certain weight with the more honorable crooks and criminals. It meant the bottom-feeders wouldn’t even try to mess with him. They targeted the true slime, the pedophiles and rapists, the child-killers and the patricides, though often those very same men made up their numbers. They were ultimately all cowards, and none of them wanted to mess with someone as rough-looking as #097784.

The rebels wanted him, though. The leaders of movements the state had deemed too dangerous to leave free but even more dangerous if killed. Men with big ideas about how a talented smuggler could help them and their movements. 097784 wanted nothing to do with them, though. They were radicals, their notions extreme, often just as much so as the dictators they professed to oppose. In reality they had just been slower to the punch than their rivals.

Another group were the smugglers. The prison men whose lives had been lost the day they were incarcerated, who made a living peddling goods for cigarettes, blowjobs, a choice favor here and there. Men who saw 097784 for what he was and wanted no threats to their enterprise. It was them who came first, with hired fists and clumsy threats. Seven men, put down in seven seconds.

097784 became Sevens. Quiet, composed, dangerous. People left Sevens alone for a while after that first fight. The guards had turned a blind eye, no doubt paid off, but he had seen some of their apprising looks in the aftermath. The respect the fracas had built for him. And even he knew that was key.

The rebel leaders came next, though, inevitably. They tempt him with promises of exotic concubines smuggled in for conjugal visits, women who will twist his mind and body in ways the human psyche could simply not envision without the aid of powerful hallucinogenics and an extremely active imagination.

They offer him riches of gold and silver, of gemstones and glory that would wait for him if only he could help The Cause.

Sevens ignored their temptation. He has had the finest of women that the multiverse could offer. He ignored their riches and glory. He had run his fingers through raw spun gold and gazed into amethyst so pure even the memory makes his gut ache with longing. No, they could not tempt him, not with all the gold and jewels and willing flesh in the universe.

So they decide to force him.

The guards can’t ignore the fight that time. Sevens is assigned one week in the dark cells. The fourteen men sent to beat him into cooperation are either hospitalized or transported to prisons that specialize in physical debilitation.

When he got out nobody seemed all that interested in trying to test him or win him over. He was quiet, kept to himself, and not worth the trouble of trying to kill. He had some secret, too, a name he never spoke and a tattoo he paid for in a year’s worth of cigarettes to be etched in rare expensive violet ink right at the base of his neck. Nobody knew what it meant but Sevens. Nobody found out.

Even so, Sevens knew it was a matter of time. A shiv in the lunch line, a garotte in the shower, a dose of poison in his meal. One way or another someone would just get rid of him.

People like Sevens, Prisoner #097784-2205-3, D.M. Strider, Dave, people like him are never just left alone.

That never proved more true than the day he was released. A pair of guards came to his cell, woke him up, marched him wordlessly to discharge. He was given his clothes, his belongings--what remained of them--and marched to the shuttle bay, where an automated taxi sat waiting in launch prep for him.

“What’s going on?” he asked one of the guards, a thickset Susuide with ivory tusks curling on either side of his blunt snout.

The guard just gave him a dirty look from his tiny piggy eyes and scowled. “You’re leaving.”

That was all he could hope for, he supposed. As he boarded the shuttle and allowed the launch sequence to finalize he settled back against his chair, awkward in street clothes that didn’t quite fit as well as the red jumpsuit he had been assigned. To leave. To put Sevens behind him and remember Dave.

The shuttle never did make it where the automated service intended. A false positive was sent several light-years out from the prison complex, but the actual shuttle fell right off the radar and hadn’t been seen since.

The world had been a fairly chaotic place for long enough now that the random twists and turns didn’t do much to disrupt Dave Strider. Of course, by world it can be safely assumed to refer entirely to his perception of reality, rather than a single isolated world. For an interstellar smuggler and ex-military man world was a much simpler word to refer to a galaxy many several thousand times beyond the scope of average imagination, and many hundreds of times beyond even an advanced one.

Even so, he found himself ill-prepared for what the ‘world’ in all its compartmentalized meaning threw at him on that day. He had sent her, his muse, his love, his life ever since that bizarre road trip, he had sent her far away and knew he could find her on the other side, if there was another side to this. The numbers, the coordinates, were stored safely in his computer, and once he got free and clear he could send her the signal and they could keep on going.

But he didn’t get free.

Some nights it still haunted his dreams, those final moments aboard the Unreal Air. They had punched through a blockade on a high-risk run to the colony past the Horsehead border, a highly contested region of space rife with political bullshit he couldn’t be bothered to try and keep up with. Innocent pioneers were being caught in the crossfire, though, and Dave would be damned before he let them suffer.

As life contrived he would be so damned.

They punched through the blockade readily, the disabling weapons on the ship humming through the hull as he throttled up and shot into the nebula to try and ditch their pursuit. But the warships chasing them were more dogged than he had given them credit for. It had all boiled down to a single moment, a final chance to decide if they would go down together or if he could give her a final chance to experience something outside of his limited scope.

“Please,” he asked, voice quiet, “There’s nobody in this I want to save more than you. Don’t ask me to watch you go down with me. Don’t make me lose you to my own folly. Please.”

Sometimes he wished she hadn’t agreed. Or that he hadn’t asked. A selfish part of his darkest core wished she had been there with him but he knew if she had they might have executed her on the spot. The Bonnie to his Clyde, the power to his stealth. She had always done more, gone further, been more driven to do whatever it took, and by extension was the more dangerous. So he put her into the pod, trusted she could pilot it safely away as their weapons punched through the last of his shields and the ship caught fire and a hundred alarms screamed imminent hull breach.

All he cared about was hitting the perfect angle, the right one so she could shoot into the nebula’s depths and evade any pursuit. Her signal would be masked by the electronic interference. In his dreams he can hear her scream ‘wait’ even as the pod ejects, which is impossible, absolutely impossible. But he hit the angle. She got away, even as a volley of bolts struck midship and tore a massive gaping hole in their bedroom.

He slammed the emergency seals, and the cockpit jerked free of the rest of the ship instants before it exploded into a thousand tiny fragments. Emergency deflection shielding spared his angular pod from being shredded by the blast, but the damage was done. The ship was gone. The coordinates of her trajectory were gone. The plans to reconvene he had made without telling her were gone.

He had been captured, taken, imprisoned. Prisoner #097784-2205-3. Dave Strider was effectively dead, sentenced to forty years in a hard-labor supermax. He has nothing left of her but a memory, and nothing left of his ship but a meaningless registration chit embedded into his omni-tool.

In the end he supposed it was actually better than he could have hoped for. She was alive, and he was imprisoned. At least she’d be allowed to live.

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