Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 61982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
“You’re getting even better with every passing run through the system. You should be pleased.” He pauses for a moment, tips my chin up toward him so I have to look in his eyes. “I am pleased.”
I beam broadly and sip a little water. I am going to need electrolytes if I keep coming this hard.
He sits down and starts looking at all the files that get generated when I’m jacked into their particular little matrix. I don’t know what any of the symbols are. For all I know they’re blonde, brunette, redhead. I don’t know why that’s what any of them would mean, but I have a faint ancestral memory that it might be so.
There’s a tap at the door as he’s going over the data. It’s polite this time, and he doesn’t look like he wants to physically obliterate whoever is on the other side, so that’s good.
It seems to be a young alien with fiery red hair and a timorous voice that suggests something is going wrong somewhere.
“Arkon, could you please help with the hyperspatial terminal inputs? I swear they’re reversed right now, but Droll is telling me it’s supposed to be red to green. He’s colorblind, and so am I, and if we have to talk to Drak about this he’s going to write us up…”
“I’ll come and help,” Arkon says. He turns to me and points four fingers, the index ones on all of his hands. “Stay,” he says firmly.
I give him a little salute. I don’t look like I am going anywhere, I’m sure of that. I’m slaked with sweat and gleaming with post-orgasmic bliss.
I guess that’s why he leaves me unbound, and why he doesn’t secure the door behind him. This is the first time I’ve really had an opportunity to get into stuff without being noticed right away.
“Okay, time to lock in,” I murmur to myself.
I feel a bit disloyal even remembering this, because I just slept with my alien boss and it was fucking amazing and I am sure I will never have sex that good again in this life or the next. But I can’t let myself be distracted by the orgasms that ripped through me, changing my brain chemistry perhaps permanently.
I was given a mission on behalf of humanity herself when I left the planet, and though I’ve failed it at each and every turn so far, I don’t want to keep failing it.
I have to get some alien tech. I have to do it whenever I get the chance, and I have one now.
That’s why, in spite of feeling guilty as sin, I break the one rule Arkon gave me before he left by going out into the hall and looking around. I remind myself that this is for a good cause. It’s for all of humanity. If I have to disappoint my alien boss to advance all of humankind, I’m going to do it. Maybe that makes me a bad employee, but it definitely makes me a good human.
I need to start stockpiling stolen stuff. This is a big building. I bet there is somewhere I can start stashing things. And I need to work out how to get home with it. Maybe I can get a crate and fill it up and then just send it home. The people who handle freight won’t know not to send stuff to Earth… oh, wait. They will. Well, maybe I can send it to an intermediary planet and then get it sent on again from there…
I wander around the floor, peering into various rooms, seeing what things are in what places. I can see some stuff that I could probably swipe without too much trouble because it’s relatively small, but I want to get something that I know for sure we don’t have on Earth.
Still has to be little enough to send, though. But I guess what counts as shippable really depends on the ship? That big transport freighter was so large I bet I could hide stuff away on it and they’d never know. Maybe I can work out how goods are sent from here, and then move them to somewhere else, and maybe I can…
“What are you plotting?”
A dark voice interrupts my thoughts. The speaker is that very particular alien, the one called Drak. I turn to look at him, and find that he is staring at me with that magnetically single green eye in a way that I think I can safely call peculiar, even though I’m well aware aliens don’t always emote the way humans do. Drak is attractive in the way villains are attractive. He’s lean and calculating and when he looks at me it feels as though he is taking an inventory of me.
“Plotting? Like, a book?” I smirk inwardly as I respond. I would never plot a book. If I was going to write a book, I would just start and let the story flail like an angry colossal squid and hope for the best. But he doesn’t know that.