Chapter 3

Solath sat back in her hover chair and glanced over her notes and small metal ball, to stare at the man laid out on the operation table. The deep scan she had just preformed brought more questions to her already sad and troubled mind. Her mind scans could offer no more than they did in the cargo hold of her old ship that had been refurbished for the needs of the Razory. What she did know was up to his late teens, and from that he was born more than one thousand years ago, and yet his body scans showed he was unmodified or mutated (which should be impossible), and purely human (another anomaly that was more than just rare).

Those two fact combined would be mysterious and troubling enough, but the fact still remained he had shielded his mind from her influence, only getting supposedly meaningless childhood memories. The memories were of a time long past, though, with airplanes that relied on air pressure not anti-gravity, cars ran on fossil fuels, and was a time before her people had come back to earth. This was all a long time ago.

Now, his body wasn't perfect by any means to last this long. He had too much fat and not as much muscle, suggesting lots of time sitting and not engaged in physical activity, still it had a slight athletic build to it despite the inactivity. His red hair was a passive trait that had not been seen naturally in years, since the Razory had culled most of their human stock. The one thing he really had going for him was that he was well endowed down below, though, besides that, his outside body seemed average for the time he supposedly came from, and was probably one of those diamonds lost in the rough that girls didn't see since they couldn't see what he has packing.

His internal scans showed that in a few years he would develop a heart condition, and since no modifi-cations had been done he would contract cancer in his late 60s or early 70s if he kept his heart problem down, so in all reality he should be dead... 'Ahrg this is so frustrating' she thought. His genetics were good for the most part, so children were a viable option for him.

What really interested her, though, was again his mind; physically it was very well developed, more neuron connections than most, and amazingly still had the blocks on it her people placed on the human race before they left, long ago. With those still in place, it should have meant it was impossible for him to come up with the metal ball in front of her.

The ball was unique also, because she could tell it had a consciousness. It was a computer construct, yet had achieved what her people had deemed impossible ('I'm using that word to much in reference to this man, ' Solath thought to herself) by her people. You could construct a complicated virtual logical algorithm, but it could not grow beyond those permeates enough to gain what she was sensing form this ball, which was true sentience. It was like there was a real mind in that small ball, and that allowed her to actually sense it with her mind.

With all these thoughts going through her mind, she realized her duty to the Razory would be to just start the usual process she did on the humans coming in that were slated to be "special" slaves. First disconnect them from their past, and slowly experiment virtually then on the until she got what they desired, be it the perfect sex slave, or a general who would lead the troops.

Looking around her lonely lab for answers on what she should do about this man, Solath could only see what she always did when she did this, a painful mistake. She quickly wiped a tear from her eye as she was looking at where her crew mates were sitting in those vats around her lab. They would never speak to her again. Sadly, she couldn't end it mercifully for them without making their sacrifice worthless in dying for disconnecting them. As of now her ship meant to bring freedom to the humans was being used to enslave them. Her friends' minds were being controlled to bring about even more horrors upon them, one of the last free races left in this part of the galaxy.

Tearing her eyes away from the murky waters holding her friends, she drew her gaze back to the man, John Burner of earth, born in the year 1988, and some one that shouldn't be here. He should be dead millennium ago, and yet here he was, now what to do with him?

Bringing up the video logs of his capture, she saw that her guess was right and that this ball was his. He had been spotted from a satellite feed that monitored the Alcatraz entrance to the Gotu world fortress that the humans hid in. He was walking around the remnants of the once beautiful city of San Francis-co, she remembered that place fondly, and two hundred years ago it was where she used to always have to visit if she was ever on earth.

She moved the satellite log forward a bit, watching as he conversed with the ball and seemed to be looking for anyone living by calling out loudly (or so it seemed, because there was no sound to the vid-eo). The Razory in the vicinity that had been laying siege to the world fortress had herd the shouts, and he was shortly afterwards restrained, and while knocked out fitted with a translator bot that got whatever language he had been speaking translated to Galactic Basic.