Chapter 3

The airlock doors cycled shut and I let my head sag against the wall for a few moments. The feeling of no longer being dangled over a pit was something I was going to revel for a bit. Seeing the Earth had really crammed the importance of what I had done to me. Virgil Station was no longer in an unstable orbit. It was no longer going to plunge through the upper atmosphere like the fist of a furious god. It was no longer going to smash into one of those massive, blue-blue oceans and create a tsunami the likes of which our poor planet hadn’t seen for centuries.

But that left one big question.

“What now?” Lucas asked. His voice crackled in my ear - loud in my helmet. I grabbed said helmet and yanked it off, breathing the station air. I had gotten into the air lock that was on the second level down from Habitation – Lucas had said that it was PsyOps.

“What does PsyOps do?” I asked.

“It’s a fancy term for rest and recreation, La- Bae,” Lucas corrected himself. Halfway. My brow furrowed.

“Bae?”

“I’m not callin’ ya Beatrice. I’m not paid by the syllable,” Lucas said, sounding dry. “PsyOps has a lot of recreational shite. Immersion Rooms, some restaurants, a null-G pool, that kind of stuff. But it also has some working food dispensers, if you’re getting hungry.”

At that, my belly rumbled. I made a face.

“Way to remind me,” I said, pushing away from the airlock wall. “I’ll get something to eat, and we can work out what to do next.”

The airlock doors opened to reveal a broad, welcoming corridor. The walls were painted a pale blue and the ceiling was decorated with slowly moving cloud motifs. The lights were bright and yet not harsh. Instead, they diffused a warm yellowy glow through the whole place, like sunlight. The only problem was that rather than a soothing breeze, the air was filled with the feted stench of rotting meat. I gagged and put the back of my hand against my mouth to try and block it out. “What is that?” I whispered.

“I don’t know, Bae. Last I heard from PsyOps was that the Tesc were fuckin everything up, like they did on tha rest of the station.”

I nodded slowly, then stepped back and grabbed my helmet. With it snapped back into place, I could only smell myself, but the memory of the scent clung to the inside of my nostrils like a fine film. I wanted to blow my nose. Instead, I walked forward and past several doors that led into open meeting rooms that had a wistful, forlorn air to them. One had a rotting meal set out beside a bench with a book dropped on the ground. Another had some clothes left behind - whoever had been changing or naked inside had run off and left them behind. A third had a single severed hand, still clutching what looked like a baseball bat that had been bent in half.

Then I came to an intersection - more like a courtyard, actually. It was two stories, with the wrap around balcony overhead leading to yet more stores and rooms. The lower level had three fountains in the middle. Each one was choked with bodies. Feet faced me and arms were placidly laid across backs. Heads were forced under the slowly burbling water. Hair floated and tangled together like chunks of sea weed. But the thing that made me want to scream and scream and scream and never stop ... were the shoes.

Fifty. Maybe sixty sets. Neatly taken off, paired off, then set to the ground. Almost a hundred people had walked in here, quietly taken off their shoes, then as a group, jammed their heads into the fountain. Their bodies had started to tighten and rot - and I could see the faint squirm of bugs underneath the skin. I stepped slowly back.

“Jesus...” I whispered.

Tink tink tink tink.

The sound - not unlike a piece of bone rapping against a metal wall - echoed from the mall.

I gulped. “Lucas. Go through the networks and find the security footage of this place. Find out what happened.” I backed towards one of the stores - a large, cheerful sign overhead announcing that it was a TempleSoft Toy’s For Tots store. The interior showed large squishy stuffed animals in neat rows on shelves, their button eyes looking out at the mass suicide with clear curiosity. There were several blocks strewn across the ground, each one unmarked. I stepped over them carefully - but my nearness caused one to whir and open up, revealing it was a multi-modular playset. It started to construct a replica of Virgil Station and play a cheery tune.

“Checking,” Lucas said.

I crouched down near the corner of the room and tried to get my breathing under control. The tink tink tink noise was growing closer. My ears filtered some of the echos out and I breathed slowly in and held the breath. Tink tink tink. It was coming from above me. Whatever it was was in the balcony right overhead. I looked at the ceiling, trying to gauge the thickness of it. Then I heard a quiet sigh - a very human sigh, as bizarre as that sounded. Then the tink tink tink faded away. I remained still for a few more minutes, letting my heart rate slow.

“I think it’s gone,” I whispered.

“Still working on the camera footage,” Lucas said.

“Keep at it.” I stood and walked forward.

“I love you!”

I screamed and leaped away from the shelf of stuffed animals. A large teddy bear was looking up at me, it’s eyes shining as it cocked it’s head. It spread its tiny arms. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

I lowered my shotgun, panting heavily. “Fucking- Lucas, these are smart toys, aren’t they?”

“You’re big and smart!” the teddy bear said. “I am not actually a person. I’m just a toy.”

“Ah, those fuckers,” Lucas muttered. “Teddy Fazbear fucking scared me, even when I was a kid.”

I shook my head at the bear. “I’m not a child,” I said. “The shotgun and spacesuit gives it away, doesn’t it?”

The teddy bear nodded solemnly. “I am sorry. But since you are an adult, I can tell you that the Teddy Fazbear semi-sentient talking bear toy is a perfect toy for a new mother.” He sounded so cheery I could almost forget the pile of corpses outside the store. “We can help take care of your baby, and tell you if anything goes wrong. All yours for only three hundred United Nations credits - but you get us fifty percent off using TSPN!”

“TS ... what?” I asked.

“TempleSoft Promissory Notes,” Lucas said, casually. “The longer you work with TempleSoft, the more your TSPN to credit ratio goes up. Mine was at 1.5. If it was at 1.2, I’d have quit this bloody job...”

I shook my head. I was starting to think it was a good thing I didn’t remember Earth. I turned away from Teddy Fazbear and started for the door.

“Achieve death, Beatrice!” Teddy said, cheerily.

I spun around and used my shotgun to bash the bear off the rack. I stomped its head and felt the flimsy plastic endoskeleton crunch under my nanoclad heel. I smashed my foot down again and again and again, until it was nothing more than a mangle of metal, wires, crystal and smoldering fur. I stepped away from the mangled mess, then glared around at the rest of the store. “Any of you else want to say creepy shit?” I snarled.

The bears were silent.

Once I came into the mall again, I looked for a map and found it - blown up big in the corner of the room. There were several dozen TempleSoft brand restaurants. I headed for the nearest one, taking a broad corridor. I would have been more comforted to find signs of battle, or other haunting reminders that humanity had once thrived and walked through this place like the population of a small city. Instead, I walked through a corridor so utterly clean and litter free that it only accentuated how busy this place should have been.

My mind drifted back to those shoes, lined out. As if everyone was going to get out of the pool. Instead, maggots were eating their fat, chewing underneath their skin. A convulsive shudder tried to crawl from my ankles to my forehead. The next mall had no fountains. Instead, it had what looked like a jungle gym that had been designed just big enough to make adults think they might be able to play on it - but there was a glowing blue fence surrounding the false grass that the gym was built on. The shimmering letters that slipped and twisted along the blueness made it clear: Kidz Zone.

Four children sat on the swing sets.

They were all dead, but it took me a few seconds of looking at them to figure it out. I saw the tiny bloody dibbles coming from their ears as I walked a circle around the blue fence. I stepped hesitantly over the fence – but it didn’t set up an alarm. I came closer to the corpses and saw they too were slowly rotting, their bodies stiff. I saw that each one had a set of foot prints in the grass behind them, leading to one of the cafes I had planned to eat at. My eyes followed the prints and I tensed.

Four people sat in the cafe, at a round table. They were stock still, but their skin didn’t look drawn and greyish. They breathed. They were alive. I walked forward, my shotgun at the ready, and the door hissed open and let me into the cafe itself. I was so glad for the helmet - it made me feel secure, even if it was only a thin pane of glass and plastic. I could breathe myself, and not the rot of the corpses of children.

The four people were a mixture of genders and races. A black man, a white woman, a pink haired androgynous person who could have been anything, and an older Asian woman with a strong, mannish chin. They were seated stock still, their faces blank, their hands clasping tea cups. The liquid within looked like it had cooled and concealed into a muck that was as drinkable. As I stood in the doorway, I saw the face of the white woman’s face was streaked with tears. She breathed in ragged breaths. Her hands shook with tiny, barely perceptible motions.

Suddenly, each of the people pulled out tiny things. The white girl pulled a screw driver. The tip was black and studded with hardened globules. She put it into the cup and stirred it. The Asian woman had a knitting needle. The black man had a pen. Each one was caked with gore.

I wanted to throw up.

“He’s coming,” the white woman hissed.

“Kill us,” the black man wheezed. He sounded like he could barely get the words out between his lips.

Tick tick tick.

“Run,” the pink haired androgyne whined.

Tick tick tick.

I stepped backwards, then ran out into the mall itself. I tried to tell where the ticking sound was coming from - but it seemed to come from everywhere. It had been on the second floor back in the toy shop. Run. Run, that was what the pink haired one had said. Run. My mind flashed to the people drowned in the pool. The killed kids. I turned and I ran - my heart in my throat, panic rushing through me. Whatever that thing was, it had made people kill themselves and each other. If it saw me, who knew what-

My legs staggered. I fell and planted my face on the ground. The faceplate crunched, but the crack sealed itself up. My legs felt as if they had turned into solid stone. I panted, grabbing at the floor - and now my hands were locked in place.

Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound had slowed. My eyes rolled around - looking desperately for the source of the sounds. But then the ticking stopped and I felt every muscle in my body twitch. It wasn’t instantaneous. Rather, it started at my eyebrows and worked its way down my head, to my neck, to my shoulders, along my spine. Every muscle group I had twitched and wriggled and settled. My toes wiggled in time, and then my back twisted, stretched, and I pushed myself to my feet. My muscles weren’t moving because I wanted them too. Instead, they pushed and tightened and stretched themselves, leaving my brain inside my head, screaming. I walked back to the cafe, grabbing my helmet and yanking it off. I breathed in the scent of corruption and filth and smiled brightly as I walked to the table.

It wasn’t my smile.

“Lass? What are you doing?” Lucas hissed. I didn’t respond.

I sat down at the chair, my palms pressed there. I tried to fight, desperately, as I looked at the black man. My lips moved despite every single thing I tried to do. I could feel my lungs dragging in air, pushing them out. What was natural and normal became painful as my diaphragm compressed and the words formed, my tongue twisting to form them.

“Do you have a nice big fat black dick?” I asked.

“Beatrice!” Lucas shouted.

The man - tears glinting in his eyes - nodded. “Of course.”

I smiled and stood. My hands went to the collar of my suit, undoing it. The nanites slithered away from my body, splattering onto the ground with wet drops as the controlling force that kept them in place was removed. It felt like solid mud being peeled off my body. My nipples hardened. And I felt a shameful blush rush through my whole body - the Tesc that was doing this didn’t suppress the blush. Because the telepath hadn’t needed to tweak and twist my body to get my nipples hard, to get my sex moist. Being exposed to the four people - the three others were all looking at me, their faces blank, their eyes filled with sympathy.

We all knew what was going to happen.

The black man was also dressed in nanites - but they had been coded to look like a rather nice three piece suit. When his collar came off the clothes seemed to freeze. Jagged lines of black formed across the white and gold hues of the suit, as if it was on a screen whose channel had changed unexpectedly. Then the suit began to fall away in pieces, revealing sculpted muscle and ebony dark skin, glistening with sweat. It was as if he had been struggling for ... days ... to move. To do anything. And that wear showed, even if he walked over languidly as a panther. His head was bald and he had a sleek circle goatee shaved around his mouth. He looked dignified and sensual, even naked, even with eyes filled with pain.

I tried to force out words. I breathed them. “It’s okay...”

His hands cupped my breasts. They were so very warm. I shivered and hissed quietly, my eyes half closing as those dark fingers found and tweaked my nipples. Pleasure tingled and buzzed along my body. My back arched without me wishing it, pushing those breasts into his hands.

“Jules,” he whispered.

“Bea,” I whispered back through clenched teeth. Then his hand smacked across my face. It was sudden and hard enough to send me sprawling to the ground - for a moment, I thought that the telepath had let me go, but I realized with a sinking feeling that that was the furthest thing from the truth. It had orchestrated my fall with the same grace and poise as a movie director. My body was as under control as it had ever been - I fell in exactly the pose the telepath wanted, with my thighs slightly spread, my face twisting into a look of confusion. My lip bleed sluggishly and my tongue moved under its whims, licking along the stinging cut.

Jules stepped forward, his cock hardening. It was long and thick and my head spun with his closeness. I breathed in and for once, didn’t smell the corruption and rot. He whispered, barely audible. “I’m so sorry.”

His cock slapped my face. It was gentler than his hand, and yet felt infinitely more humiliating. The thickness of his shaft left an impression against my cheek, and I felt hot pre dripping along my neck. My breasts ached, wanting to be touched, but instead, I whimpered and my voice forced out words. I looked up at him - trying to show with my eyes as I spoke to the telepath’s script that I didn’t mean what i said.

“J-Jules, don’t. Please don-”

His hand grabbed my hair.

His fingers - strong and firm - clenched on my hair and I felt the roots tug at my scalp. Tingling buzzing pleasure shot along my spine despite the pain. Or maybe it was accentuated because of the pain. But my begging, pleading words were cut off, cut off by Jules shoving his thick cock into my mouth. My throat opened for him and my eyes locked on his. And as my tongue twitched against the underside of his cock and his balls slapped my chin, I felt something shocking.

I...

I was feeling good.

It wasn’t from any physical stimulation. The telepath could move my muscles, but it didn’t seem to do anything to my brain. To my soul. And my soul buzzed with the happiness at the fact that in this sick, twisted moment, I could give this man something. It was nothing next to what he had been forced to endure. What he had been forced to do. But it was a tiny flicker of physical pleasure. And the telepath couldn’t take that from me. My tongue swirled around and around his cock, my hand closing around the base of his cock. I was no longer quite sure if the telepath was pushing me to do this as I bobbed my head and Jules squeezed my hair roughly. His hips bumped against my knuckles and his balls slapped my chin.

“Fuckin bitch,” he snarled - the words too loud, too unforced to be real. I ignored them. “Suck my dick. Bitch. I’m gonna skull fuck you.”

The slick want between my legs grew more insistent.

Then Jules’ cock slipped from my mouth. I gasped loudly. “Please...” I whispered. His hand shifted. Pushed my head backwards. The cock leveled at my eye. My eye widened and the look of terror on my face was slapped there by the telepath ... but it really didn’t need to be. “Don’t...” I begged. That cock slipped against my cheek. Then Jules shifted to the side. I felt a moment of relief. Then I felt his cock pressing to my ear.

“Don’t,” he hissed.

His cocktip pressed, gently, against the hole of my ear. My fingers tightened and my brain raced. There had to be a way to get out of this. But everything I did, every single muscle in my body, all of them were controlled by the telepath. Jules bumped his hips back, then mashed his cock against my ear hole. The pressure of his member made my ear ache, and I heard a quiet hiss of pain shoot through Jules. Pain! Maybe pain would- his cock smashed again, and I whimpered, my eyes filling with tears. My ear rang with the impact and I felt something hot and wet drip from my ears.

“Please don’t,” Jules snarled. “Stop it!”

Pain didn’t stop it. He was hurting. He had hurt worse when he had slid that pen into his own kid’s ear.

What...

His cock pushed a tiny bit further in. The ringing in my ear became a scream. My eyes screwed up tight.

Electrical impulses.

Nerves were electrical. And the new ability in my body wasn’t a muscle most humans had. I had one shot. I looked down through a blurring mass of tears at the ground. Tile flooring, not metal. It’d have to work. I breathed in deep, focused through the pain, and let my electrical pulse out through my palms. Lightning surged along my body, crackling and popping. Jules whole body tensed and the hair of his goatee stood out like porcupine pins. He tensed, then fell backwards, the bleeding tip of his cock flecking my cheek with a mixture of fluids I tried to not think about too hard.

But I was slightly too focused on the pain of the lightning surging through me. Some of it had pulsed through my muscles, transmitted through the hand on my scalp and the cock in my ear. That connection was gone, and the pain faded as I wiggled my fingers, then slumped forward. I gasped. Jules was sitting up, groaning.

Ticktickticktickticktick!

The sound was receding. Though it was hard to tell - I could only hear out of one of my ears.

The telepath was fleeing. But as I tried to get my body to rights, I saw the three other stand up and march towards the back of the coffee shop. As they walked mechanically towards the back, Jules managed to rasp out. “Stop them.”