#starmonger

Yes, yes, it’s been far too long since an update. I apologize. School stuff, you know.

So, for those of you keeping track, that weird Anon mentioned I should check out Wald, Inc. for my job search, right? So, despite my best Googling attempts, I’m preeeetty sure that Wald, Inc. doesn’t exist. So, thanks, Anon.

But enough of that! Onto part 3!

3

“WHAT?”

Jare tried to overpower the music. “I said that my credits have to be there!”

“WHAT?” the barkeep yelled again.

“I said, just give me a damn drink!”

“WHAT?”

Jare flung his hands in the air and stormed away from the bar. The music continued to throb through his head; he felt that if he didn’t find relief soon, his brains would dribble out his nose. He cursed the woman at the transport under his breath. This was not his idea of a good club; it came closer to the “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy” category in his book.

“Jare? Is that you?” a voice yelled in his ear.

He spun around. He couldn’t place the face, but that friz - “You! From the dungeon! What are you doing here!?” She looked different from when they met earlier. More kind. He felt a pleasant twinge work its way through his body.

She smiled at him under the flashing colored lights. “I’m here with my boyfriend!” If she noticed his face falling, she didn’t show it. “Come on over to our table! I’ll buy you a drink!” They made their way through the spasming bodies on the dance floor until they reached a table surrounded by a translucent yellow sound-shield. They shoved their way through the gelatinous energy and sat down. The music outside was reduced to a dull hum. Jare’s ears nearly wept with relief.

 “Anthony! Look who I found.” Her boyfriend sat at the table, his blond hair swept into a perfect swoosh, his arms begging to be flexed. He looked at Jare with disinterest. “It’s the man from the prison, the one that doesn’t exist.”

“Hello,” Jare said, raising a hand in greeting. He glanced back and forth between the two faces, his palms beginning to sweat.

“Oh, I remember you mentioning that. So you don’t exist, then?” Anthony asked.

“Well, no, I do. I’m here, after all. But the system seems to have forgotten me.”

“Same difference, then. The system knows everyone, so it only stands to reason that if someone’s not in the system, they don’t exist.”

“And Anthony would know! He’s a top system maintainer. Without him, I bet we’d all stop existing.” She grinned at Jare, the joke making her face bright, but Anthony didn’t catch it.

“Please, stop, you’re too much. Besides, that’s only what I do to pay the bills. My real passion,” he gave his muscles the flex they’d been waiting for, “is self defense training. You ever work out, James?”

“Jare, actually,” Jare said.

“Right. Let me get you a drink.” He punched a few buttons on the table’s screen, interrupting an ad for self-cleaning janitor bots, and a tall glass of deep amber ale slid up through the table’s silver surface in front of Jare’

Jare gulped the beer down. Mass-market stuff, but at this point, he couldn’t complain. “Much obliged.”

Anthony waved a hand. “Not at all.”

The guard leaned toward Jare. “So, what do you do? I mean, what did you do, before you stopped existing?”

“I monitor power relays.”

“Oh, that sounds… Interesting?”

“Not really,” Jare said.

“I’m sure it’s just slipping my mind, but what is a power relay?” Anthony asked.

“May I?” Jare slid the table’s screen towards him. He took the knife from his table setting and pried the screen away from the table. It came free in his hands. He pulled it up, revealing a glowing blue cable connecting it to the system.

“Should you be doing that?” the guard asked.

“Sure, it’s my job. See that there? The little ball in the cable?”

“Yes. Is that the relay?”

“Exactly. Everything that’s hooked up to the system has one of these little guys. It’s my job to check all of them in a given sector, make sure there are no irregularities.” He laughed. “Sorry, that’s something of a joke to us monitors. Every relay always reads ideal, a one-point-zero-zero. Like this one,” he said, and peered into the marble-sized relay. His breath caught in his throat. The numbers blinking in the glass read point-nine-seven.

“Everything all right?” Anthony asked.

“I. Erm. Well. No. Yes? …Do either of you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Anthony said.

The guard shook her head and tried to concentrate. "That hissing sound?”

Anthony shook his head. “Just part of the music.”

"No, I think she’s right. There’s something else.” Jare could hear it, somewhere behind the music, a loud hissing noise coming from the other end of the club. He gazed out through the shimmer of the table’s sound shield. The dancing bodies looked like yellow ghosts; not that Jare had ever seen a ghost, but he imagined that if he ever did, they’d look like the beat-inclined crowd in the club that night. “Clear the shield, I want a better look.”

The guard hit a button, and the yellow sound-shield went clear. Everything still came through fuzzy, but he could see some fog the brilliant pink of cotton candy spreading across the dance floor. People yelled with surprise as they saw it gathering around their ankles.

“Do you see…?” he asked. The guard nodded.

Anthony waved a dismissive hand. “It’s nothing. Just a dance thing, that fake smoke they pump in.” At that point, the yells changed from surprise to fear, then anger.              

“Jare turned his focus to the bar he'd left just minutes ago. A pair of men who had been flirting just a moment ago were now screaming into each others' faces. "I don’t think that’s a dance thing.” Jare said, pointing at the pair. As he watched, one of the men grabbed his stool and smashed it into the other man's head, sending a spray of blood across the bottles behind the bar. Jare looked away, aghast, but soon saw that what he'd just seen was one of the tamer examples of violence filling the room. The violent outbursts spread with the gas. The music still pounded out of the speakers.

Jare stepped over to the guard. “We might want to… Well, the door’s over there, isn’t it?” He pointed through the gas.

“Yeah. Not much chance of getting out here that way."

Anthony shrugged. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s just a little bar fight. I’m sure security’s going to break it up any minute." The next moment, a half-full margarita glass shot past his left ear at high speed.

“Does this club have safety chambers?” Jare asked the guard. She nodded. “Right. Everyone hang on." He brought the screen around to him in a rush and punched the red button in the upper right corner, sliding his finger in a circle to confirm. The floor opened in two circles, one under Anthony, the other under Jare and the guard. They fell into narrow silver tubes. The floor closed over them with clear plasti. At first the tube seemed suffocating, but he ventilators coughed to life, and after a few seconds of darkness lights blinked on. The light gave Jare enough to see what his body already knew – the guard pressed against him, and he had no way of pulling free. Not that parts of him wanted to.

The guard squirmed. “What do you think you’re doing? Everyone’s supposed to stand at their chair before you hit the button.” In the tight space, her voice cut. It was the voice he had heard in the dungeon.

“Ah. Well, see, I’ve never exactly used a safety chamber. I mean, I’ve worked on them at, um, work, but I’ve never used one. I didn’t know what to expect. So I, um, well, here we are."

She sighed. “Yes, I suppose we are."

“Now that we’re so, um, close, do you suppose I could finally have your name?”

She glared at him for a moment, then her face broke and she smiled.“Puhlia. But call me Lia. You’re an interesting man, Jare, especially for someone who doesn’t exist" Jare almost started in again. Then he saw that she was still smiling, and found himself smiling back. There was something about that smile that he liked, something that turned his insides to a pleasant jelly.

“Lia. Good. I don’t suppose you know what we’re supposed to do once we’re in these safety tube things?” Jare craned his neck, trying to look around without poking Lia's eye with his chin.

“Just sit tight and wait for the commotion up above to die down." Just then, a loud crash came from above them, followed by repeated banging. The confined pair looked through their glass ceiling and saw a club patron trying to bash his way in. No sanity lingered in his eyes.

"How tough do you think our lid is?” No sooner had he asked then the first crack appeared in the glass. “Ah. That won’t do, then.”

“Yeah, we might want to look into getting out of here. Sooner is better than later." Lia began feeling around the walls of their chamber for any kind of escape. She glanced above Jare’s head. “Hey! Right above your head. There’s some kind of button.”

“Some kind of button? Do we really want to go around pressing strange buttons?”The bangs above them grew louder, and the crack in the glass spread.

“Do we have a choice?”

Yes, the long awaited second installment! This is actually a very healthy exercise for me - I’m going back over this and realizing how much sprucing up it needs.

Also, still no luck on the job hunt. Seriously, anyone with leads in the DFW area.

But enough of that. PART 2!

2

“Iteration seven: Error. System error. Invalid ID card. Entry denied.”

Jare took a deep breath. He knew it didn’t set out to antagonize him. He knew it just responded to its programming. He knew that this goading was just electrons bouncing around on some wires. He knew all that, and he didn’t care. He punched the control panel.

Jare had never been a violent man. He has spent the twenty three years of his life on the ship, and only found himself in a fight once. It hadn’t even been a fight, not really, just a misunderstanding. He’d still been in Academy. He was in the mess eating lunch, telling a particularly hilarious joke, a joke he felt deserved a high-five from his friend Rob. Rob didn’t see the need for a high-five, but the face of Delroy Hughes did. Delroy was the kind of student who did not so much pass classes, he simply crashed through grades by virtue of his large muscle mass. On a good day, he had the disposition of a constipated water buffalo. Thankfully, Jare had been young, so most of the teeth he lost were baby teeth. He only needed two replacements when they patched his jaw back together.

For Jare, punching the control panel amounted to the stuff of legends. He could feel the air flying over his fist as it swooped towards its victim. His bones aligned inside him, turning his body into a weapon of pure liquid fury.

As his fist met the panel, he remembered his landlord telling him about the new ID locks that were being put in. He remembered hearing about retina backup, programmable voices, even a customizable color scheme. But what really stuck out in Jare’s mind, what set itself up in his brain with bright neon lights blazing around it, were the words Security System. His mental neon lights exploded with an overload of power when the panel sent a large electrical shock through Jare, sending him flying against the opposite wall. The wall saw him coming, and braced itself, shifting from its normal  plexsteel to a soft, pliable mesh, bouncing him back towards his room’s outer wall. Jare’s own wall didn’t have the reflexes of his neighbor’s. He lay on the floor, groaning.

“Right. Bugger this. I need a drink.”

Jare lived on C17-49k deck, along with three or four hundred thousand other members of the Starmonger’s crew. Most of C17-49h deck’s residents called it C Deck for short. Nobody Jare had ever met had visited C17-49i, or C17-49g, or any other decks. He knew they were out there, in the experimental sense that most people know that their bodies are made up of tiny atoms, but that’s as far as it went. And for Jare, that was peachy. He had his own life on C deck.

At the moment, though, Jare could have used a break from C Deck, and he knew how to find it. He focused on a small, quiet club called The Highback, some ten minutes away by deck transport. There, he could sit in a tall, imitation leather chair, sip a strong drink, and listen to the subdued conversations around him. For a few hours, it would be all right not to exist.

To this end, he soon found himself at the front of the queue for the deck transport. C Deck had a series of high-powered tubes throughout, with stops every half kilometer or so. These stops consisted of an acceleration section, like the one at the front of the queue that Jare now stood in, and a deceleration tube at the transport’s exit. All one did to get from one place to another is approach the terminal in front of the entrance, swipe one’s card, punch in their destination, and wait to be sucked up by the tube.

The system had it timed to avoid collisions, and the worst that Jare could remember happening to him on the transport was one time when it had broken down. The force propelling him along had gradually dropped out, and he found himself lying in the semi-transparent plastic some ten feet above the heads his the people below. But the ship’s engineers had thought of this, and there were emergency exits every twenty feet along the tube, equipped with a ladder, and nobody but the claustrophobic suffered anything more than an inconvenience. Even when things went wrong on C Deck, they never went too wrong.

Jare swiped his card and punched in the stop for The Highback without looking; he’d done it enough times that muscle memory took over. He waited for his body to start flying across C Deck. Nothing happened. He swiped and punched again. Still nothing. He could feel the swell of bodies behind him. The queue had grown.

The woman in line behind him poked his shoulder. “Screen’s red.”

Jare turned around. “What?”

She pointed at the transport control console. “Screen’s red. Something’s fishy with your card, maybe?”

Jare looked at the screen. It shone an angry shade of red with the words USER NOT FOUND flashing across it in white.

Jare wiped his hand across his face in exasperation. At this rate, I bet my creds have been wiped, too.

“Look, you gonna go? If not, mind moving? I have an appointment to make,” the lady said. Jare gave the console one last scornful look, then turned to the woman.

As promised! Here’s part one of The Starmonger, in which strange events begin to unfold.

[also, on an unrelated note, I’m looking to pick up a second job. If anyone knows of some part-time work in the DFW area, hit me up!]

The Starmonger

1

Jare doesn’t know how he got here.  Truth be told, he’s still unclear on where here is.  A dungeon, yes, but which dungeon?  There were plenty for Security to choose from, but Jare had managed to keep out of them until now, so he didn’t know how to tell them apart.  All he could see was a small window in what he figured must be the door, with a smidge of orange light shining through.  Not enough light to see anything by, just enough to tell him he still had both eyes. 

 Right.  First thing’s first, he thought.  Arms?  Check.  Legs?  Check.  Head?  Check.  Fingers and toes?  Check.  Agonizing pain?  He paused.  No-check.  So far, so good.  Now if I can just figure out what I’m doing here. 

 He was hoping a guard would come along and explain why he was strapped to a wall in a dark cell, and maybe give him some water and stale bread, or gruel, or whatever they served in the dungeons.  He never got a chance, though, since the door to his cell chose that moment to blow inward and plant itself in the wall two inches above his head, cutting the power to his bonds.  He crashed to the ground as the orange light lost all its inhibitions and flooded the room.  Two figures appeared in the doorway, a tall one and a short one. 

 “Blast.  Wrong cell,” the tall one said. 

“Oh well, we’ll just have to keep trying.  She has to be down here somewhere,” said the short one. 

 “Um, excuse me?” Jare said. 

 “Come on, let’s go,” the tall one said.  The two figures darted away from the door, and Jare was left alone again.  There was a brief internal battle, trying to decide if he should stay and wait for the proper authorities or make a break for it.  Common sense won out, and he slid out from under the displaced door and left his cell.

Outside the cell was a narrow hallway lit by long orange lights; the walls, floors and ceiling were nothing but bare metal.  The hallway was empty, aside from countless cell doors, and a small army of downed guards, their sky-blue uniforms turned a strange no-color in the light.  Jare had no idea which way to go, so he went with his gut.  Jare’s gut had served him well over the years, and he had grown rather attached to it.  He would trust it with his life, if any life-threatening situation ever came up.  Before today, Jare would have laughed at the idea of his life being threatened, but things had changed rather quickly after breakfast, so all bets were off. 

After five minutes of blind wandering, Jare came upon a guard post.  The guard must have been dozing, but when she heard Jare approaching she leapt to attention. “Halt!  State your business!” 

Jare halted.  Then he thought of the dozens of unconscious guards behind him, the cell with the displaced door, and the mysterious duo that set him free.  He decided halting may not be a good idea at the moment and was about to remedy his decision when the guard’s hand clamped down in his shoulder. 

“Halt!” she said.  

Jare stewed. “Um, well, see.  I am.  Halted, that is.” 

The guard drew a sharp breath, but the hand digging into his shoulder downgraded from talon-like to vice-like. “Yes.  Now, state your business.”

“Right, my business.  See, here’s the thing.  I don’t really know what my business is.  I was in a cell, but now I’m not, and the funny thing about it is that I don’t even know what they’d put me in the cell to begin with.  I imagine most folks do.  Know what they’ve been indungeoned for, that is.”  

“Of course they do.  And if they ever forget, we keep meticulous records in each and every one of the ship’s confinement centers.  What’s your name?” 

“Jare.  Jare Blondie.”  Jare had long suspected his ancestors of being mad.  All of his relatives had the same raven hair he did. 

 “Right.  Don’t move.  I’ll look you up in the computer.” The guard let go of his shoulder, which gave an almost audible sigh of relief.  

Jare heard her head over to her computer counsel, but he felt it prudent not to turn around.  Don’t move might mean don’t run away in an ill-advised escape attempt, or it could mean don’t move.  Jare didn’t feel like risking disintegration over a misunderstanding. 

 “Wait, don’t I get your name?” he asked, then gave himself a mental slap in the face.  This was no time for flirting.  

But the guard didn’t seem to notice. “It’s not professional…is that Blondy with a Y or an IE?” 

“IE,” Jare said. 

 “Right…  Huh.  Our records don’t show any Jare Blondie.” 

Jare saw a chance and dove at it. “Oh, I thought they might not, all this is probably a big misunderstanding.  Well, I’ll just be going then, eh?” and risked a half-step towards the door. 

 “No, you don’t get it.  Let me see your iden,” she said.  

Jare turned, pulled out the card from his pocket, and slid it across the desk to the guard.  The guard shook her head at the screen, and Jare found himself noticing the way her dark hair caught the light, accentuating the near-black color of her skin. 

She held the card up. “Nope, not a fake.  You are Jare Blondie.  But you can’t be Jare Blondie.”

“I think I can.”

“But you’re not in the system,” she said. 

 “Look, just because this dungeon hasn’t got me pun-”

The guard cut him off. “No, it’s more than that.  You’re not in any system.  You don’t exist.”