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)
I loop around the asteroid, once, twice, three times. The power of the machine is hard to express in words, but it feels as though my body is merging with a power greater than any I could ever have imagined. I am strong, I am free. I am…
A hand wraps around the back of my neck, holding me firmly.
“Get back here,” Arkon says firmly. “I want you back in this room now, please. Return the robot to her resting place, and there will be no trouble. Refuse, and we will have conversations that will become incredibly painful.”
I don’t want to flee, and I know I cannot escape anyway. I might be in the machine, but my body is with Arkon and he is touching me, telling me I am still under his control.
So I do as I am told. I return her to the place I found her and I submit to being separated from the machine. I feel a real sense of loss as she fades from me.
“That was incredible,” I say as the eyewear is removed. “That was truly worth every bit of pain I have suffered getting here. You have made something that is beyond anything I would ever have dreamed I’d experience…”
I think Drak was pissed at my little joyride, but as I speak his expression softens.
“You understand,” he says. “You truly do get what it means to merge with her, don’t you?”
“It felt to me like she has a soul,” I say.
“She does. All things that are made, in one way or another, have a soul,” he says very seriously. “And she has been knit together out of complexity and desperation. We need her, our people need her. And when she is seen to do what must be done, when her power is recognized, when she strikes down our foes…”
Arkon puts a hand on Drak’s shoulder to quieten him. He’s saying too much. I’m not supposed to know about the striking down foes. I’m supposed to be here as a human training machine. I assume that once they have all the data they need from me, they’ll make an upload of it to the machine and then she will go forth with a little bit of me inside her. I will be back on Earth one day, maybe soon, but some of my sense, my consciousness will be performing great and maybe wicked acts in alien skies.
“She needs to rest,” Arkon says. “That was a lot for her. I can see how tired she is already.”
“Yes,” Drak says. “I’ll take her to rest.”
“You?”
“Certainly,” Drak says. “I am capable of getting a human some food and making sure it doesn’t do anything too silly. You can analyze the data we just gathered.”
I never thought I’d take any kind of a liking to Drak, but I am starting to reluctantly appreciate his competence, and I really want to ask him a lot of questions about the machine and how he built her, and what he meant about souls in things that are made.
“Don’t let her out of your sight,” Arkon says.
“Not a problem,” Drak replies. “Put the collar and leash on her and I’ll make sure I don’t let go.”
It has been a while since Arkon leashed me in the building. I don’t really want to go back to having that on me, but if it’s part of the terms of getting to have an interesting conversation I suppose I can accept it.
Arkon has my leash in his pocket, a fact I did not know until he pulls it out and snaps it onto the collar that has been around my neck since he put it on. That never comes off. I don’t even think of it as a collar anymore. It just feels like a necklace or choker or something—right until it gets a leash put on it and then it is something different again.
I see him hesitate before he hands the leash over to Drak. “Keep her safe,” he says. There’s something in his voice that is much weightier than the situation seems to require, and once again I feel as though there’s something I don’t know that I very much should know.
We leave the room and Drak drops the leash immediately. “Don’t make me regret doing that,” he says with a wink, which is more like a blink because of his one eye, but I know what he meant.
This is so wild. I’m starting to like this guy. Yesterday I would have never imagined wanting to spend more than a minute in his presence, but now he seems kind of interesting to me. I guess a lot of people who are really immersed in what they do can come across as being assholes.
We go to the cafeteria, which has a lot of food I cannot eat. The smells make my stomach rumble.