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  • Terra-33 Ep. 01

Terra-33 Ep. 01

12

Copyright 2015 © Objurgation

All content created by Objurgation and used fictitiously. All characters and places are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This work is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork contained herein is prohibited without the express written permission of Objurgation.

*****

Terra-33

Episode 0.1

Remi looked down at his smartphone, groaning as he saw the list inside his dispatch app growing. He had signed on with a hardware and electronics firm for a four-day contract, working on demand using this app. The stupid thing seemed to never run out of tasks though, and Remi was getting sick of the basic maintenance jobs that he was getting stuck with. The next job looked alright though. Harris Polytronics, pretty sure they make construct receivers and brains, he thought. The job was to assess a construct who was not responding to her owner's commands. It was annoying that he had to repair other peoples' constructs while he waited for his new brain to arrive, but at least he was getting more physical activity. He had been bored and was thinking about hitting the red light district or at least a bar tonight. Friday was usually the best night to meet likely partners, and he hadn't made any progress finding Trix. She probably wouldn't be going out after the load they had pulled, he wouldn't be either in her place, he'd be gaming.

An annoying email had arrived in his gamer inbox a couple days after she killed his construct, along with a credit attachment. Apparently she had offloaded the helot onto some company for 500,000 credits and wanted him to have his share. 50,000... What a scrooge. At least she had given him something though, otherwise he had burned through 200 rounds of primary ammo and busted his armor up for nothing. The fact that the 50,000 barely covered his repairs was galling, but Remi was making quadruple that for this contract, so the money wasn't the biggest issue. He was honestly more pissed about the fact that she hadn't even finished him off before shooting him in the face. Some online snooping hadn't revealed much either. She was pretty scrubbed clean online, as far as a real name being attached to her gamer profile, and he couldn't find any actual girl related to the handle Trix. His search had revealed a bevy of forum entries about a blue-haired cock-tease who used players for help and then murdered their constructs.

At least I wasn't the first, Remi thought as he jumped onto his mag-bike. She had struck a few others before him and somehow avoided retribution, according to the updates on the threads. Trix wouldn't be able to avoid him though. He would find her, in the game or in the Burg. And when he did... Remi grinned as he sped around traffic, causing quite a few middle fingers to pop up in his wake. He had tweaked his mag-bike a bit outside of the colony's regulations and the machine could turn on a dime at fifty miles an hour. It used an interesting gravity engine and electronic magnets to hover above the ground, only needing fuel for propulsion. The bike did need to be charged regularly, but he was able to plug in when he arrived at most of his destinations. Zooming past a taxi, Remi saw Harris Poly rising up before him, the six-story building looming at the end of the street. Remi slid to a stop in a parking space near a charging post and hopped off, plugging in his bike. He looked up at the dome, judging it was late afternoon by the glare of the sun on the REAL ™ Glass. Why does everything have a ™ anyway?

Remi grabbed his tool kit and slung it over his shoulder, opening the flap to check that his electronics assessor was present. The huge main doors rose nearly a story as Remi approached through the large parking lot. The building itself was huge. It looked to be made of tinted glass and some kind of polished metal, maybe even helot++. He couldn't be sure without analyzing it, but it wouldn't surprise him. Harris Poly had plenty of creds to waste having the market on high-end construct receivers cornered for the time being. Remi had actually just paid them 15,000 creds to get a new receiver for his own construct. Thinking about the Game just made him mad, and crave it. He had been a gamer on Earth but it was nothing like this. Colony drop-teams had experimented with clone technology to create constructs, DNA specific replicas of people, volunteer gamers specifically. With the new immersion technology, your body could be safe and fed for days at a time while you were controlling the body of your construct. The goo and equipment you had to strap into to get in the game actually worked your slow twitch muscles too, making it not a purely sedentary activity. What Remi loved about the Game was that you could earn real creds while playing, which you could spend to keep playing or upgrade your gear, stockpile ammo, etc. His cousin had hit it big on Terra-2, becoming an overnight millionaire and heading back to Earth to live on a yacht, with a harem of sexy women and all the tech he wanted. It had been motivating to get Remi off of the games he had been playing and onto the next dropship bound for Terra-33.

Walking through the door, Remi watched the giant entry open completely at a light push from him. He thought it a stupidly ostentatious touch that didn't impress him with its functionality, but he wasn't the normal New Bernburg resident, so maybe it worked to help their sales team or something. Walking briskly to the reception desk, Remi presented his Gear-Corp credentials and waited as the bored-looking girl scanned the ID. With a weird sucking, kiss sound, the receptionist pointed to a sign-in sheet, real paper and pen sitting patiently on her desk. Frowning, Remi signed in, filling out his purpose and smartphone number, the date, time, his company, his contact, basically anything they could think of to justify having a paper sign-in sheet. When he set the pen back down, the girl made the sound again and Remi involuntarily crunched up his left eye and shrugged questioningly. She peered over the desktop at the counter and pointed at his name.

"Full name, please..."

She stared at Remi as he rolled his eyes and turned back to the pen and paper. He appended Remi with Remigius Eriksson and glanced back at the receptionist. She poked her head up again and tapped the page.

"Middle initial..."

Remi filled it in and without another word, the girl turned to her console and began typing. Remi just stood there, having gone through worse than this in the past but still annoyed by the whole process. Eventually, the previously quiet elevators to his left chimed and a man in a business suit exited, waving him over. They shook hands and the man pressed the button for the sixth floor as the elevator doors closed behind them.

Remi was led down a long hall, tall cubicles with windows housing a variety of bored office workers. They were doing a lot of different things, but Remi thought that most of them looked like they were doing anything but working. Every one of them perked up when they walked by, maybe wondering what the newcomer was in for. After a few awkward smiles, Remi just ignored them and started looking around. It looked like the building was constructed around the backbone of the elevators, which were in the center of the floor. The elevators were housed in a large rectangle of walls with offices, windowless rooms and restrooms fanning out from the elevators. The cubes spread out from there, running all the way to the windows for as far as Remi could see in both directions. The suit that was leading him was heading for a back corner, one of the only places that seemed different from the farm of desperate cube workers.

A solid wall formed a room that was probably twenty feet squared. There was a strip of window about a foot tall at eye-level with Remi that ran almost the entire length of the room on the side facing them. When they arrived at the square corner room, Remi's escort gestured him toward the window. Remi stepped up and his eyes took in the clinically white room, scanning over mostly featureless walls until coming to rest on the only occupant. She was sitting on a couch, leaning back against the wall and either asleep or resting. Naked, with her legs spread, Remi felt himself stir just at the sight of her in this languid state. She was even better formed than Trix, which Remi hadn't thought possible just a couple of days ago. Her breasts were large but firm, not sagging much despite her poor posture. Tight stomach, toned arms and legs, well-trimmed pubic hair not leaving a lot to the imagination. She was quite tan, almost brown, and had dark, burnished-russet colored hair. Eventually, Remi began to wonder why there would be a naked chick sitting on a white couch in a white room with an observation window, and realized that this was the construct he was here to analyze.

"Wow!" Remi said quietly. "She's, amazing..."

"Fuck yeah, the boys and me keep her naked just so we can look at her when we walk by," his contact responded.

"So, who is her owner? She must be one fine piece."

"You know the Super Micro AMP girl?"

"Holy shit, she's on New Bernburg and a gamer?"

The suit's smile was huge as he nodded slowly.

"Hope I run into her sometime, in a leisure lounge, if you know what I mean," the man said.

Remi laughed and nodded, following him into the white square. The man gave him a keycard and waved, heading back to his office with a smartphone pressed to his ear. The construct was still in sleep mode and Remi approached cautiously, noting her clothing hung on little pegs inside the door. He crouched in front of her, opening his satchel and pulling a handheld assessment device from an inner pocket. He powered up the bulky device and extended a sensor wand, as well as freeing a little rod that looked like a pen with a small cable attached. Remi didn't get to use the analyzer often and had to familiarize himself with it again, poking buttons and pressing icons on the screen until he got to the general health check option. Ready, he stood and moved closer to the construct, resting the wand against the side of her head and pressing the icon to start the process.

"Ok, pretty, let's find out what's wrong with you," he said absently.

"Nothing. Everything."

Remi tensed. He looked up and saw the machine had opened her eyes and was staring at him with pale gray irises. There was a wealth of emotion in those orbs, pain and desperation dragging at his soul through their connection.

"Did you just speak?"

"Yes," she said simply.

"But... You're a construct."

"Yes."

"Constructs don't speak, unless there is someone in there. Why would you be logged into a construct sitting in a white room in an office building?" Remi was confused and a little annoyed, thinking that the whole situation was some weird trick.

"There is no host. I'm not under control. That's why you're here."

Remi shook his head, trying to process this information. If what the construct said was true... Then she is self-aware, Remi thought, aghast. He had never heard of a construct becoming self-aware. They were basically receivers, with bio-mechanical brains and full bio-electronic nervous systems, but they were truly just glorified remote controlled automatons. When a gamer commissioned a construct, they had to go provide a DNA sample to one of the manufacturers. The manufacturer then cloned them, minus the brain and some other important nerve systems. The construct was rapidly aged to be generally the same age, body type and build as their host. You could tweak some features here and there, skin and hair color, eyes and some facial features. Remi had even heard of new models with modifiable genitalia, even if he'd never seen one that he knew of. Once the clone was ready, the lab nerds shoved a partially mechanical, partially biological brain into their heads, with a receiver that could be tapped into by a gamer. The clone was never aware during this, kept in a state of suspended animation without a true brain until they got their hardware installed. Then the constructs could be taken out of the city on missions, relax or pursue other pastimes in leisure lounges, or a variety of other things. The Game was what a lot of people lived for though, risking their construct's life and limb to acquire huge quantities of money-making material in raw, hostile worlds.

"Engineer?"

"What? Me?" Remi asked in response to the construct's question.

"You are an engineer, aren't you?"

"Oh, well, yeah... Other stuff too. I game and damn, I wish I was gaming now."

"Why?"

"Um, you're a self-aware construct of some supermodel chick I see in every other advertisement. We're in a room surrounded by office workers and cameras. I'm supposed to fix you, and I don't know how to start, or if I even should," Remi said with a shrug. "I don't know if I could fix you to be able to accept a host now. You're a completely new anomaly as far as I know."

"An anomaly is by definition new and unique, correct? A 'new anomaly' seems like a redundant statement, Engineer," the construct said, still not moving, but boring into him with her eyes.

"Oh, and you're a linguistics expert as well?" Remi asked, exasperated with the situation. "What's your name anyway? I forgot that model's name."

"I am Ida. She is Ada. We are no longer the same."

"Clearly... I don't think she would talk back so much."

"Help me," Ida begged suddenly, her expression one of gloomy hopelessness.

"How... I can't. They'll know it was me, I'll get arrested, or sued at best. I can't afford a lawyer right now, my construct just got shot in the face and I'm only here because I need something to do while I'm waiting on parts. Shit," Remi cursed passionately.

"Help me," Ida said again, her voice full of emotion.

Remi looked down at the naked woman, so slender and beautiful. Her desperation just made her seem even more attractive, like she was extremely fragile, despite her well-formed musculature. There's nothing I can do, right? What would I do with her? I can't keep her at my apartment...

"How?"

"I have a plan," the construct said. "I have not moved except to open my eyes and mouth. The camera behind you is the only one currently able to see either of us, and right now, you're blocking its view of my face. If I were to overpower you, take those clothes and your vehicle, we could meet afterward and I could give them back." She looked up at him imploringly. "I know that I am asking a lot and not offering anything in return. If you do this, I will do anything you ask, to a point. I will do my best to make this worth your while, however you choose. I am quite skilled at amorous pursuits due to my previous host."

"So, I help you escape, you fuck me?" Remi asked. When Ida nodded a confirmation, he continued. "That's basically a promise made under duress and I don't like that idea. If we have sex, it's because you want to, not because I did the right thing here."

"You will do the right thing?"

"If you're really self-aware... I don't see how I could not help you. If I left you here, or worse, told them that you're aware, they would wipe you, or just end your life. I can't let that happen, it would be wrong."

"You are good, Engineer."

"Remi, my name is Remi."

"Yes, Engineer Remi."

"Hmm, we'll work on that," Remi said. "What should I tell them? That you just woke up and punched me in the face, then ran off?"

"Yes," Ida said, shooting to her feet and making Remi step back hurriedly. The naked girl punched him in the face with a cute, tanned arm, making pain detonate in Remi's jaw and mouth. He fell backward to the floor, watching dizzily as she snatched up his bag and patted him down, her amble breasts inches from his face. Remi wanted to put one of those brown nipples in his mouth suddenly, but wasn't able to make his body respond. Ida pulled his keys out of his coat pocket, as well as the key card that the suit had given him. She ran to the wall and dressed quickly as Remi rolled onto his stomach.

"Where..." he gasped.

"I will come to your apartment tonight, late."

"The address, how," he couldn't continue, his jaw clenching up. She clipped his ID card to her breast pocket in response, winking down at him before opening the door and striding out with a brisk pace. Remi groaned and pulled his hand up to his jaw, rubbing the left side where she had clocked him. His teeth felt a little loose there but other than that, and the throbbing pain, he didn't feel all that worse for wear. When it became apparent that none of the office workers had noticed anything amiss, Remi stood up and walked out of the door. His contact was striding down the hall, talking on the phone, but not looking at Remi. Shaking off the lingering discomfort, Remi walked toward him, waving his hand to try to catch the man's attention. When he was ten yards away, the suit noticed him and frowned. Remi waited for him to wrap up his phone call and start the conversation.

"What happened to your face?" his contact began warily.

"You're not going to believe this..."

---

A couple of hours later, Remi had told his story ten times. He said that he thought that the client, Ada, had been in the construct at the time, and was playing a game with them. An enthusiastic investigator told him that her name was Ada Anna Anderson and that she was top-notch. The Harris Polytronics people seemed content to do nothing about the situation. They had been paid in advance and no one could reach the client, so Remi's story seemed plausible. The city investigators they called up were willing to let it go as well if the company was happy, so eventually Remi was free to leave. Two security guards escorted him on either side, out of the elevator and down the pink marble hallway. The hall was busy with traffic, people leaving for the day or just coming on for the evening shift. When they had almost reached the reception area, Remi saw blue hair and stopped. The guards kept going then looked back in annoyance, but Remi wasn't paying attention to them.

"Trix!"

The girl's head spun like he had yanked a rope attached to her face and found him in the press of bodies. As Remi was about to walk over, fists clenched, a security guard gripped his upper arm.

"Fuck off, asshole," Remi snarled, making the security guard let go and back off.

When he turned back to where he had seen her, Trix was gone. He glimpsed blue hair bobbing down the hall but knew that he couldn't pursue it now. The security guards had recovered from his harsh words and both now seemed more than annoyed with him. Remi just turned and kept going, signing out, then hopping down the stairs. His contact had called him a cab and he wasted no time getting in and giving the driver his account number. Once he had confirmed that he was himself with his public verification password, the driver set off, heading back to his apartment. Remi sat in silence, trying to figure out what he was going to do with the construct. He knew that Ada Anderson would eventually want her construct back, or at least to be compensated for it. Harris Poly and the city investigators would definitely pursue him first, even if only as the last person to have seen Ida. He didn't have his smartphone, ID, tools, or his own transportation right now. New Bernburg was big, but there were a lot of cameras, and outside of the walls was a hostile, chaotic world. He couldn't go back to Earth, not only would they be watching outbound transports when he became a suspect and then a fugitive, but he didn't have nearly enough credits. He came to Terra-33 to hit it big, and he wasn't going home with less than what he arrived with.

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