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Episode 23 - Compulsion
🕑 Added 2024-06-11 20:54:12 +0000 UTC
“And you’re sure it said, ‘Tall over Wide’?”
Naomi paused in her restless pacing to fling her hands into the air. “Yes! Can you believe that? The stupid piece of garbage finally learns to communicate in English, and the first thing it does is insult me! I don’t know whether to be pissed off or impressed.”
Mark's lip twisted with amusement. Naomi was Naomi, after all.
Still, this latest revelation was perhaps less surprising than it should have been. It was patently evident that their adaptive computers were listening and could understand them just fine. Putting that together with her description and the context leading up to the incident, it sounded less like it had just ‘learned to communicate’ and more like it had reluctantly consented to do so.
After all, Naomi had just suggested she would rather die than be subjected to the horror of becoming a mindless monster whose only purpose was to birth more of the same—a reasonable assumption given what they had observed of their situation. Why else would they be transformed into the other’s idealized mate, if mating was not the goal? Why else would they be compelled to uncontrollably consume everything in their path unless mindless consumption was what they were being trained for? And he did not blame her. Faced with such a fate, who wouldn’t choose suicide?
Admittedly, there could be other explanations, many of which she had already touched on, but to suddenly be offered that strategy as an alternative? Her computer might as well have just given up the game.
“It’s not calling you fat, Naomi,” he explained. “Tall over Wide is a warfare strategy. Instead of going around conquering everything, you amass all of your resources into creating an unassailable and self-sustaining fallback point. The goal is to build your walls so high that your foes can either choose to waste all their resources trying to defeat you or sue for peace. It’s a turtling strategy. Quality over quantity.”
She whirled to glare at him, suddenly suspicious. “Why would you know about warfare strategies?”
“Video games,” he admitted offhand. “It’s one of the better ways of playing 4X titles like Civilization. See, what tends to happen is—”
She quickly held up her hands to stop him. “Okay… ‘video games’ is enough. I don’t need to know all that mess.”
“Hey, don’t knock it,” he grumbled. “It’s a legitimate hobby. And you can learn all kinds of neat stuff from them. I got through freshman geography just playing Europa Universalis IV.”
She waved his comment away and resumed her pacing. “Sure, whatever. So, how does that relate to our situation? What is it doing to us? Quality over quantity, you said?”
“At a guess? I’d say… it’s trying to shift us away from becoming the patients’ zero of a Zerg swarm and into more of a—”
“A Zerg what?”
“A Zerg… oh, that’s another video game reference.” His eyes screwed up as he mentally shifted gears. “Um… have you ever seen Starship Troopers?”
“I’m Jewish, Mike. Of course I’ve seen Starship Troopers.”
“What? How does being—” He shook his head once, quickly dismissing the matter. That sounded like a rabbit hole he wanted no part of, and it would only get them off-track. “Never mind. The Zerg are like the bugs in that movie. They spread like wildfire, going from world to world, and consuming everything in their path.”
She halted her relentless pacing to glare at him. “I think you may have missed the point of that movie.”
“The point,” he began, forestalling whatever argument she was trying to drag him into, “is that we’re changing strategies. Instead of becoming a whole lot of monsters, we’re going to change into two really big ones.”
“So…” She folded her arms beneath her breasts and frowned. “Like Godzilla?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if it’ll go that far. But maybe?”
Her head tilted down as she let that sink in, and for a few moments, she thoughtfully resumed her pacing. But slower this time. “Do you really think our computers were trying to push us toward a population explosion?” she asked finally. “Before, I mean.”
“I don’t see what else ‘wide’ could mean. If I’m half as attractive as you are, I am the sexiest man you have ever seen in your life.” Her lip curled in amusement at his self-assessment, but she did not interrupt him to refute it. “So, yeah. I think the play was to get us to eat, grow, have lots of babies, and repeat ad nauseam. As for why… my theory is they were prepping us for something.”
She nodded along as she passed in front of him once more, taking up his line of reasoning. “Makes sense. Drop us on a planet with lots of dangerous animals and minimal civilization, let us cook for a while, then recapture us to go nuts when and where they want us. But it would take centuries for a couple of humans to reproduce enough to be a threat—normal humans, anyway. I suppose this thing,” she thumped the light on her wrist, “could eventually force a slew of adaptations on us to overhaul our reproductive strategy and overcome the limitations of starting with a single breeding pair and find a workaround for the staggering number of problems rapid evolution brings to the reproductive cycle. But if that was the aliens’ goal, they’re idiots! They’d be far better off starting with something that gives birth to huge clutches of young to begin with—better yet, if it was naturally aggressive and unintelligent. That way, they wouldn’t have to worry about us trying to fight it. Did they honestly think we’d take something like that lying down?”
He shrugged with more emphasis than he probably needed. “Hey, you’re preaching to the choir. All I’m know is, the thing is trying something different now.”
She stopped pacing long enough to face him. “And what happens to making us more attractive to each other? Or… or losing our minds? I will not allow myself to become some savage beast who can’t even understand…”
She looked away, unable to finish the thought.
“I dunno, Stripes,” he said with resignation. “From what you said, whatever it’s planning will start up the next time we eat. And apparently,” he gestured to the patiently waiting tank, “this is a food locker of some kind. Kind of convenient, if you ask me, but that sort of thinking is more your wheelhouse.”
Naomi pouted, as if considering whether he might have been making fun of her, but then her stomach gave an audible squelch—likely from his mention of food—and she punched it. In a lighter atmosphere, he might have found her antics cute.
“Whatever,” she said finally. “Aren’t we just exchanging one bullshit for another?” She held up her wrist to yell at their inescapable voyeur. “I know you’re listening in there. I refuse this! Do you hear me?! I don’t care about your bullshit strategies. I refuse to be made into some mindless monster—tall, wide, or fucking sideways! I’ll kill myself first!”
She blinked and then frowned, her eyes silently scanning something in the dark.
“It actually replied?” he guessed, and at her silent nod, he scowled.
Not for the first time, he found himself more than a little jealous that he was required to find a reflective surface before he could meaningfully interact with the alien device. Without one, it would just beep and squeal at him, and that only when there was something it wanted him to pay attention to. But now that it had revealed an ability to respond to their queries in writing, he saw no reason it couldn’t speak as well. Then again, he wasn’t the one threatening suicide.
Apparently, that was the straw to break the back of their communications embargo—at least temporarily. Whether they would need to continue leveraging that threat to keep the lines open was yet to be seen, but it seemed clear the device was not about to play games when it came to their survival. It was a morbid line of thought.
Though he doubted Naomi was being serious about killing herself.
That is… he certainly hoped she wasn’t being serious. If it came to it…
His heart clenched in his chest before he could wrest his mind away from the self-inflicted nightmare. There were only two avenues he could foresee for himself were she to abandon him on this planet. One, dive headfirst into the mindlessness she had hoped to avoid. Or two…
Follow her into death.
Neither settled well in his stomach.
“It says, ‘Acknowledged’,” she read aloud, saving him from the depressing thought. “‘Tall over Wide protocol initiated. Addendum: per user requirement: sapience adjustments restricted to positive scaling only. Please feed to resume adaptive program.’”
“Huh… I don’t suppose we can ‘suspend the adaptive program’?” he asked, not at all expecting a response. But to his surprise, one came almost immediately.
“‘Negative,’” she reported. “‘Environment remains hostile to continued survival. Please feed to resume adaptive program. Resending ping to Seeker Unit.’”
< beep! >
He knew it was coming, but he twitched at the sound, anyway. “We got it. Thanks,” he intoned with a sarcastic grimace.
She glanced apologetically up at him before directing her glare toward the nothing in front of her face. “Don’t be an asshole to Mike, you dumpster fire of a computer! Your ‘adaptive program’ has been driving us nuts. And what about kids?! Do we need to worry about pregnancy or not?”
She waited, but apparently, the ‘dumpster fire’ was done with communicating for now.
“Damn it,” she growled. “Why doesn’t it answer?”
He shook his head. “Maybe it figures there’s no need. Godzilla monsters, not Zerg monsters. Remember?”
“Right…” She sighed unhappily. “But that still doesn’t make any sense. Godzilla isn’t intelligent.”
“That’s debatable.”
She just looked at him. “He rampages through cities and knocks over skyscrapers.”
“Well, yeah, but…” He waffled for a moment on whether the argument was worth it, but ultimately decided on a different approach. “Okay, I’ll give you that, but Godzilla is just an example. We could become more like Ultraman.”
“Who?”
“Uh… right. I guess you wouldn’t…” He cleared his throat. “Ultraman is this superhero who can grow really huge on demand. He often draws from the same rogues’ gallery as Godzilla, but he’s never actually faced off against—”
“Mainly? Just how many of these movies are there?”
“In the Ultra series?” He sucked in a breath through his teeth to think. “Like… forty? Or are we talking about the whole kaiju genre? Because… oof. There’s over ten just featuring Mothra, another twelve or thirteen with Gamera, countless other solo films, with monsters ranging from King Ghidorah to—”
Somewhere in the middle of his impromptu attempt at making a list for her, Naomi closed her eyes and begun massaging her temples.
“—then, of course, Godzilla himself has over thirty, and that’s just the Japanese productions. Once you include the American studios, you get into the King Kong films, and of course they have plenty of crossovers with—”
“Mike!” she shouted quickly, startling him. “The answer is a lot, okay? A lot! You don’t need to recite the entire Wikipedia article at me.”
He winced, suddenly regretting having gotten carried away. An old roommate had warned him about that tendency more than once. ‘Pussy suicide,’ he’d called it—an appropriate, if crude, appellation, given the conversation they had been having.
“Sorry. It’s a niche topic.”
“And you’ve seen all these movies?” she asked.
The nerdy fire in his heart surged with her apparent interest, but he stamped down on it quickly. He needed to do some damage control first.
“Oh, hell no!” He chuckled awkwardly, grateful she had cut him off before he had gotten into the foreign knockoffs. “Just, uh… just a few, here and there. Some of the ones from the 60s are really crazy, though. With like… space aliens and androids… a-and magical twin… Thumbelina fairies…”
There was a moment of silence as he trailed off.
“You realize I’m going to tease you mercilessly about this, don’t you?” she asked finally.
He nodded, accepting his defeat with as much quiet dignity as he could muster. “Yep.”
“Good.” She stepped close with hands on hips. “Now, kiss me.”
“‘kay?” he mumbled, then leaned down so she could give him a light peck on the lips before whirling away. It was a simple gesture, but it certainly made him feel better about himself.
“The question is,” she said, bringing them firmly back to the topic at hand, “can we trust the computer to make us into Ultra-whatevers, and not into Godzilla monster bugs?”
He blew a flummoxed raspberry. “I… doubt we can get it to make us into specifically that, but it’s just a computer program. As long as it’s fulfilling its function, it probably doesn’t care what we end up looking like. I mean, if it did, would it let us choose our adaptations?”
“It doesn’t let us choose all of them,” she countered.
He nodded. “Right. It still has its own agenda, so no matter what we do, we’ll at least end up ‘tall…’ whatever that ends up meaning.”
Muttering with frustration, she came around his side and slumped ever so lightly against his arm. They had been intimate not five minutes before, yet that slight brush against his skin thrilled him to no end—beyond even the kiss she had demanded. Maybe because it was something she was freely giving in return, a gesture of companionship. She was showing with her actions that she wanted to be near him. That she craved his touch. He gave her comfort. It was such a simple thing, but before this very moment, he had never known he might cherish such a basic signal of her trust.
“Well, whatever. All we know for now is that the warden has got a hard-on for whatever is in here,” she said after a moment, flicking a hand toward the mystery meat locker.
He turned to regard the still mostly black-cold cylinder. By that time, some of its edges had started taking on the warmer blues of the local atmosphere, which he would take to mean it was thawing. But he could see no mechanical means through which they might open it. Like everything else around here, it was perfectly smooth and rounded like a toy from a toddler’s playground. Even the pillar that had delivered it had sealed itself back up tight, showing no seams of any kind, even to his perving senses.
The only irregularity was a bit of debris stuck to one side, but he was doing his level best to ignore it. It looked kind of like one of those matted up chunks of grass that occasionally threw themselves out of the bottom of a lawnmower, and he was afraid that if he looked at it too directly, he might be compelled to eat it.
“I… guess I could try punching it for a while,” he suggested finally, brandishing his thick claws. “If I can get through the ceiling, I can probably get through this. It’s just a shame we can’t get the lights to stay on. There could be a button with PUSH TO OPEN printed right on it, and we’d never know.”
She shrugged. “To be fair, we’ve only had sex in the one area. Maybe if we keep trying?”
For a moment, he allowed his eyes to scan the stadium-sized dome they were stuck in before glancing back down at her. “We’d die of dehydration first.”
“It’d be a good way to go,” she suggested with a grin and a playful bite along his arm.
He tilted his head to one side in acknowledgment. “Call it… Suicide Plan B, then.”
She released him to pull away slightly. “What’s Plan A?”
“If there turns out not to be anything in here? Starvation, probably.”
She grimaced with obvious distaste. “Alright. So get to punching!” And with a little hop, she assumed a pose, yelling, “Ultraman away!”
“That’s not his catchphrase.”
*
Pull in… more… good. Refocus… next filter… and the next… Check long wavelength emissions. Hmm… short?
What a strange material to be able to block even—wait…
It’s a long shot, but… switch over to Filter W and change the angle of incidence to 91 degrees.
Yes! There it is. Oh, I can’t believe it! I must have been bloody daft not to have recognized… Look! Look there!
…?
The skeletal structure! The blooming size of it! Surely, one of you must recognize this species? They had the skull plastered all over scientific journals for years!
…?
Oh, come on! Ugh… the absolute state of education these days.
Swing the camera around to all those panels on the wall. See? See?! I’m betting those are thousands of cryogenic preservation pods. Put that together with a technology based around living plasma discharges and what do you get?
…?
One of the most famous pre-galactic civilizations of all time, that’s what! This is a Podar’unek Ark Ship. Has to be.
They were on the cusp of escaping their own solar system, when boom! Their sun went supernova. They must have sent out hundreds of ark vessels in a futile attempt to preserve their civilization, but they were too late. Their fleet was caught in the blast.
To this day, only one has ever been found—almost totally destroyed, of course. It took years to even piece together the remains of the shielded data capsule they had preserved within the core of their ship. But this one seems completely intact!
Do you know what this means? How valuable a find this is?
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re not only going to be rich, we’re going to be—
< thump! >
Oh, shit…
*
Thump!
“That-a-way, Mike!” Naomi exclaimed, bouncing on her toes with anticipation. “I just need a crack large enough to fit my claws in. You’re doing great.”
Mike resisted the urge to stare at her—more out of a sense of simple propriety than need. Still, it would be nice if she were more aware of the effect she was having on him. Did she not know what all that hopping around was doing to her anatomy? Was she trying to send his inner orangutan into fits? It was difficult for a guy to form coherent thoughts with a distraction like that around.
“Yeah, alright. Keep your pants on,” he muttered, rolling his arm a few times to work the soreness out of his muscles.
By contrast, his hand felt oddly fine, even after repeatedly stabbing the frozen brick with what amounted to his own stiffened fingers. He had to assume whatever option Naomi had picked to improve their grip strength was helping him out here… somehow. Else, he was sure he would have injured himself, claws or no claws.
“There’s probably just a bunch of frozen hamburger meat in here,” he continued, “and you know what it’ll do to us once we eat it. The way you act, you’d think you were excited.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t think you can act all high and mighty with me. I’ve seen what gets you excited, Mr. Kaiju-Fanboy. And anyway, I can’t help it. It’s the instincts. Seeing you hit things gets me all worked up.”
“Really?” Thump… thump… “I’m trying to recall, but… I can’t remember you ever doing something that triggered me like that.”
“Knowing you, you just weren’t paying attention,” she said, trying to sound aloof, but the effect was spoiled by the vibrating, anxious energy exuding from her every pore. She was like a cat getting ready to pounce. “Maybe when I attack something, you’ll be compelled to leap in and help? Or maybe you’ll go all feral on me at the sight of blood.”
He grimaced with distaste. “I doubt it’s that one.”
And besides, he had been paying plenty of attention—to her. But for everything else… well, the subject of their compulsions was a tricky one to unravel. Obviously, eating things they would otherwise have never touched, even with a ten-foot pole, was a part of it, but he would have been willing to bet money there was more going on beneath the hood to push the two of them together than just sexing them up.
Then again, with the amount of jiggling going on behind him, there didn’t need to be a lot more.
Naomi shrugged, as though dismissing the matter. “Well, if we’re really turning into gigantic monsters… maybe you’ll get excited once I can crush a car with my tits.”
He paused mid-stroke and turned, only to find her grinning up at him. The flirt. Maybe she had been aware, after all.
“Naomi, if they ever make a version of Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman where that happens, I would watch it a hundred times,” he informed her. He wasn’t even ashamed to admit it.
She chuckled. “You’re kidding. That’s an actual movie?”
“That it is.” He knew of at least four different iterations just off the top of his head, but he decided it was best to keep that particular contribution to his sexual awakening to himself. “And if you were in it, I’ll bet we could find at least a couple of guys to volunteer to be in the car.”
She might have claimed not to like compliments, but as he resumed his assault on the food locker, he could easily sense her wriggling with pleasure. “Please,” she said, verbally deflecting even as she covertly squeezed her breasts together with her overlarge hands. “Volunteer to be crushed to death?”
He paused again, just long enough to waggle his eyebrows at her. “It’d be a good way to go.”
“Oh, you!”
Throwing her own words back into her face earned him a couple of swats to the arm, but the two of them laughed it up good-naturedly all the same. To be honest, it was nice they could joke about something like that. It was a form of coping, he knew, but it was better than crying and throwing a fit over something they had next to no control over.
He was just happy to have negotiated for what little they had. As carrots on sticks went, the promise to at least keep their mental faculties intact was a dry and withered vegetable, but it was better than nothing. He just had to hope being intelligent would be enough to stop them from doing anything truly heinous.
Jokes aside, he doubted they were meant to take ‘tall’ quite so literally as they had been. Godzilla was just an example, after all. The strategy was just referring to raw power and impregnability; you didn’t have to be a giant monster to achieve that. But time would tell.
Thump… thump… crack!
“You got it!” Naomi cried, and quick as the cat whose spirit she was embodying, she lunged for the pinhole-sized breach, where she began scrabbling to enlarge it. “Keep punching! I can’t quite—”
Abruptly, a blast of frigid air sprayed into her face, and she jerked back, coughing.
“Oh, shit!” he snorted before he could stop himself.
Struggling to contain his laughter, he pulled her to a safe distance away from the decompressing cylinder to wait out the black fog billowing from it. It really wasn’t funny. If he had known the thing had been under pressure, he never would have attempted to puncture it. That was a good way to cause an explosion.
“I’m sorry,” he said, hugging her soothingly despite the continued shaking of his shoulders. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she growled and started softly punching him in the ribs. Which did absolutely nothing to quell his giggles. “Jerk! Why are you laughing?”
“I’m sorry!” he said again, then yelped when she pressed her ice-cold nose against his chest. “Ack! No! I just wasn’t expecting—no! Stop. You’ve got wicked-witch nose!”
“I’ll get you, my pretty!” she cackled. Then, taking advantage of her newfound weapon, she began chasing him around the cavernous room while the two of them tittered like school children.
Seeing her laughing and carrying on like that was a joy in and unto itself. Once again, he was coming to realize that it was here, in these rare, silent moments, where he could really connect with her. There was no need to second guess her intentions; he could see everything he needed to in her smiling face. For all the darkness, it was times like these when he was most aware of the light shining through eyes. Here was the real Naomi, free of the subterfuge and manipulations she so often masked herself with. Somehow, and despite the crushing weight of their situation, the seed of happiness had taken root within her soul.
So, he allowed himself to be caught after only a few minutes of dodging around the pillars. But instead of suffering her now-all-but-room-temperature nuzzlings, he pulled her close and kissed her tenderly on the lips.
“What was that for?” she asked, curious but still giggling.
He shrugged. “Because I’ve figured you out.”
The smile on her face faded ever so slightly and her eyes widened, twitching back and forth rapidly as she searched every contour of his face. Finally, she brought her lips close to his so that their breath could intermingle and whispered, “I doubt that.”
Her words might have sent him into another fit of second guessing himself, yet her body told the story her mouth never would. She did not struggle or pull away. She wanted to be exactly where she was—in his arms.
But just as he was about to again cross the bridge to her waiting lips, the air hissing from the nearby container died and, with a gentle pop, some previously hidden latch came loose.
“Did you hear that?” she asked, placing her hand on his chest to stop him.
He was mildly disappointed to have been interrupted, but he let her escape without resistance. He had been observant enough to put together an appreciation for dominance and forcefulness in her… but only on her own terms. It was a contradiction on its face, if no less accurate.
And dangerous, at that. What Naomi said she wanted and what she actually wanted often had nothing to do with one another. Or if they did, they were so couched in hints and innuendo, there was no hope of his discovering them.
She was a bit of a minefield that way. After all, most guys were terrible when it came to that sort of thing, himself included. He would have to be careful not to just march forward, full of brash confidence, and get himself blown up. And just to be safe, he would assume any blinking red lights were mines, whether she had planted one there or not. It was far better to miss the occasional signal than do something he would regret.
Following her back to the standalone freezer, they discovered that in place of the perfectly smooth—if dented, thanks to his own efforts—cylindrical exterior, there was now a well-defined seam in the shape of an oblong oval running almost down its entire flank. He assumed that was the lid. Apparently, in being extruded from the nearby pillar, the container had landed on its side.
“Should we roll it over before we open it?” Naomi suggested.
“Better than letting everything fall on the floor,” he agreed, stepping forward and tapping at the still-frigid surface. He could tell the warmest spots easily enough with his thermal vision, but it was difficult to get an actual sense for what his eyes were telling him. Black was bad, of course, but there were a lot of shades of blue that were still intolerable to touch for any length of time.
Eventually, he was able to use the thickened stubs at the ends of his fingers to get the huge container moving. Naomi tried to help, but her own claws were much too thin to be useful for this kind of grunt work, so she settled for the occasional light shove and skittish hip-check.
“Alright, let’s see what the ol’ warden has been so excited for us to sink our teeth into, shall we?” she said once they had finally gotten the thing into position.
It only took a bit of poking and prodding to discover how to open the panel. Surprisingly, given the odd way the rest of the nearby technology worked, all they had to do was press down, and the thing sank inwards and slid away. And when it did…
They both gasped in shock as the compulsion hit them like a baseball bat to the stomach.
“Naomi,” Matt grunted through his already chattering teeth, and his hands slammed against the side of the container in a futile effort to control himself. “Close it! Quick!”
She seemed not to have heard him. Her eyes were locked on the frozen creature before them, panting with want just the same as he was.
Whatever it was, it was ridiculously tall—taller even than he was—though rail thin, and had a set of four arms protruding from a wide set of shoulders. Each of its hands featured a set of three bulbous fingers set opposite one another, while its feet were more akin to the wide pads of an elephant than anything human. Meanwhile, its skull was a shade too large for such a slim neck, and its row of four eyes had the sunken appearance of an animal long mummified by dry, cold air.
It was clearly dead, but that wasn’t important. This thing was bipedal. Humanoid. An intelligent being!
Or… probably.
Naomi began edging closer. “Mike…” She squeezed her eyes shut for the barest of seconds and swallowed roughly before her attention was again yanked forward. “Mike, it’s old and rotten. No one’s going to judge us. Right? It doesn’t matter. Tell me it doesn’t matter!”
“It matters,” he countered forcefully, still every bit as fixated as she was. “It has to matter.”
His eyes flicked over to where her fingers were already creeping over the edge of the container… toward the enticing… meat.
“Then help me,” she begged. “Make me stop.”
Tears began to fill his eyes… but they did nothing to blur his vision. Nor did they mute the ever-growing desire overwhelming his heart. He had been wrong. Intelligence was no help. Not with this. It just made him feel worse when he was inevitably betrayed by his own body.
So, with a last gasp of defeat, he whispered,
“I can’t.”
*
Damn it! Why aren’t they responding to our hails?
…
And? Since when has being drunk ever stopped someone from using the comms? Bah! They probably switched them off on accident.
< heavy sigh >
Why does this keep happening? It’s like this entire project is cursed.
Timothy, please tell me that someone has at least thought to fuel the transport.
…
Well, that’s something going our way for once.
Alright, everyone. Here is the situation:
We have a pair of armed and exceedingly dangerous mercenaries on their way to capture our own, also-exceedingly-dangerous subjects, none of whom are at all aware of the potential value of the site—to history, culture, and our own pocketbooks—the forthcoming will take place within.
In the best-case scenario, the mercenaries will attempt to gain entry in a manner similar to Oscar’s recent ingress, track down our subjects, and safely capture them with the Gellite hip cannons they were showing me before our subjects can consume—
< the decidedly unpleasant sounds of teeth crunching into frozen flesh begin to come through the nearby speakers >
—more than… just the one… cryogenically frozen—
< the ongoing feast is punctuated by intermittent sounds of weeping >
…ahem.
< click! >
As I was saying… unfortunately, that seems unlikely. Going from some of the stories they were telling me—and their current state of inebriation—I would not be at all surprised were these mercenaries to simply blow a hole through the Ark’s hull and pluck our subjects’ bodies from the wreckage.
< gasps of horror >
My thoughts exactly. The fines would be enough to bankrupt a small planet.
So, we are faced with a choice: do we man the transport in a desperate attempt to flag down the mercenaries before they can do irreparable harm… or do we pack up our shit and get out of here before anyone can think to blame us for it?
… … …
…?
< murmurs >
Who is that? Geoffrey? Speak up, man!
If you have a better idea, let’s hear it.
==============
Hope you guys enjoy dark comedy!
Guilty lols...
...ahem
So, I've had an eventful few weeks. I got contacted by a company called Dorance Publishing, who said they were interested in publishing my book. But they wanted $4400 from me to do it. They sent me over a contract to read, and while they certainly offer a lot more in terms of PR than what I have available to me, they were only going to invest $1000 toward that end. Seemed a bit uneven to me. And they were going to make out like bandits no matter what happened.
Which... has led me to seek out the services of an agent. I haven't gotten anyone to bite yet, but.... here's hoping!
Comments
Tabitha Mularkey
Love the romance blooming here. Keep up the good work, Logee!
Nathaniel Bartley Logee
I'm glad I decided against going with them, then. They wanted to charge me $4400 to publish a book I had already paid to edit myself.
Jay
https://tenesha.medium.com/scam-alert-dorrance-publishing-and-the-3-red-flags-1fb15aa61ec4
Nathaniel Bartley Logee
Whoops. Overedited that one a skoch
Ryan
I got through freshman geography just Europa Universalis IV. - Seems to be missing a word or two. Also EU4 is great.
Nathaniel Bartley Logee
That was fast!
Jack5d5
I'm excited to see what new adaptations they get from this. Good luck with the publishing by the way.
