| Generated by Pollo AI text-to-video AI software |
From the shadows, Resi watches Speaker Lincoln wake up in the middle of the
night in reaction to a notification. She blinks rapidly as her eyes adjust
to the harsh light of her device. “I’ve stolen the Kidjum elixir,” she reads
out loud. “What the hell? I never told you to do that,” she whispers loudly.
She scrolls a little. “Someone hacked my account!” she complains to what she
thinks is an empty room. She dials a number, and holds it up to her ear.
“Get security to the Tadungeria lab. We have a breach. Aether is going off
script.” She hangs up and rolls her nightgown up and over her head.
Resi taps on his own device, careful to not let the light give away his
position yet.
Lincoln’s device dings again. “Oh my God.” She opens the drawer of her
nightstand and takes out a gun. She checks the magazine to find it empty.
Only now does Resi flip on the lamp in the corner. He’s sitting comfortably
in her armchair, trying to look menacing but authoritative. He saw this in a
movie once. Actually, it’s been in a few movies. “The first to raise a hand
in violence dips one foot in their grave,” he recites calmly.
Lincoln looks down at her half naked body. “You like what you see?”
“Relax, I’m asexual. Go ahead and cover up.”
She wraps herself in a robe. “You must have Bungula tech if you could
teleport here that fast.” She jerked her chin towards the device that she
tossed onto the bed. “I just read your message that you’re gonna poison me
with an overdose of elixir.”
“You think I would order one of my people to do that in the same second that
I decided to just do it myself? You got security all riled up for nothin’.
No one from my House is anywhere near the Tadungeria. Your elixir is safe,
and so are you, physically speaking. I won’t hurt you, but I wanna know why
you’ve been impersonating me, and sending my people orders that I would
never give. You want us to stop. You wanted to bring the
Kidjums back, so why are you undermining those efforts?”
Lincoln breathes through her nose as she regards Resi with a facial
expression that he is unable to read. She’s trying to look calm too, though.
She thinks she’s still in control here. Bizarrely, she lets the robe drop
from her shoulders again. She then starts to remove the rest of her
clothing.
“I told you, I’m asexual. I feel nothing. Seducing me will not work.”
“I’m not trying to seduce you,” she explains as she’s crawling back into bed
and neatly rearranging her belongings on the night stand. “I don’t have to
tell you anything. I just need to let you step both feet into your
own grave, which you have done quite nicely by breaking into my house
tonight.”
“I’m having signals blocked. If the answers you give me are satisfactory,
I’ll leave before anyone notices. It will be your word against mine. If you
lie, I don’t know what will happen. I want to know why. It makes no
sense. Do you want a fifth House, or not?”
“I don’t care about the houses,” she admits. “It’s an arbitrary
stratification that most cultures don’t have and do just fine. Divide into
fourths, divide into eights, just have one united peoples; it’s irrelevant.
The total population is the same.”
“So the Kidjum is fake, and it’s all about control? Do you just want to
decide who goes where? Worker bees versus drones, as long as the queen stays
on top.”
She smirks. “It’s not fake. It’s not about control. It’s about human lives,
and the Garden we were promised. The Kidjum is very real. It’s the easiest
and most reliable way for us to know what you want. Everyone has a place,
and everyone chooses. Again, it’s not about that. But anyway, I’m tired, and
I just want to end it all. I won’t be answering any more of your questions.
It’s your turn.”
He sighs and grunts. This isn’t doing any good, and who knows where they go
from here? So he’s proved that she’s a bad guy? She didn’t do it on her own.
Anyone or everyone on the Assembly could be a part of it. The best he can
hope for is that the other two nations hear him out. Maybe
they’re not a part of the conspiracy. Or maybe they are, and House
Kutelin really does need to revolt. He’ll have to just go out and try his
best. Staying here, listening to these lies and vague answers, isn’t going
to pay off, so let’s be done with this quickly. “I’m an open book. I’ll
answer any questions you like.”
“Have you ever fired a gun before?” she asks, picking hers back up, and
sliding three of her fingers across it like it’s her pet.
“No, but I know that that’s a projectile weapon. It needs bullets, not a
maser charge, or whatever. I already took the mag out, and checked for
extras.”
She smiles and nods, still looking at it admiringly. “Did you check the
chamber?”
He jumps up in fear, now remembering other movies, where yeah, the bullets
aren’t only stored in one place. There’s also this other thing on the
top.
Instead of aiming it at him, she points it at the side of her own head, as
far from her temple as her bent arm will reach, and squeezes the trigger.
Blood goes everywhere.
He’s seen it in those movies before, but it’s a different thing, being in
the room when it happens. He’s frozen, though he doesn’t know for how long.
People don’t really die around here, except peacefully in their sleep, or in
a hospital bed. They’re not immortals, like the colonists, but life is
pretty safe. They’ve built out the infrastructure, and everyone knows what
they’re doing. The Kidjum doesn’t just choose what you want, but what your
mind knows it would be good at doing. Everyone is professional and skilled.
That’s why he doesn’t know history and geography, because their nation
doesn’t value those things. It places all of its focus on people who can get
work done. If they need to know anything about how the universe works, they
can ask the Bungulans. Leave science to people who’ve been doing it for
millennia.
Why the shit is he thinking about any of this right now? They’re hauling him
out of the bungalow by his upper arms. He’s not resisting, he just can’t
move his legs on his own. He feels the splinters catch on his toes as they
drag across the old front porch. They throw him into the wagon, and drive
off. He realizes that they never bound his limbs. He could jump out, and run
away. But where would he go? They would look for him at the dorms, and then
his birth parents’ home. It’s an island, and it’s probably being locked all
the way down. This is the first murder he’s ever heard of, so the whole
planet is probably freaking out. He could try to swim it. How far is Anchor
Island again? Only forty-some-odd kilometers? Easy, he could do that in one
breath.
He’s in a hardback chair now. When did they pull him out of the wagon?
They’re asking him questions. He can’t really hear them. They say something
about already finding his prints on the gun, which makes sense, because he
had to take that magazine out. The chamber. The goddamn chamber. How could
he be so stupid? That’s why the action stars are always pulling that thing
back while they’re making their snide remarks. He thought he had it all
figured out. The honeypot was brilliant. His people were on the ball. Like
he was saying...trained as professionals. He’s the one who screwed up, and
it’s gonna land him in prison. House Kutelin will fall, and she’ll get away
with it. Oh wait, no, she died. She killed herself. Why? Just to frame him?
What an asshole.
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