The Interrupted Queen

Sci-fi with hangovers and sex. Because yes, the future is depressing, but in the end it can turn a little satisfying, if you find violence satisfying. You don't, right?

1. The Awakening

Charmaine woke up, inhaling the air so deeply she almost choked. It took courage for her to get up, just as it wasn't easy to look at herself in the mirror once she'd dragged herself to the bathroom. The reflection offered a merciless version of reality: against a backdrop of shabby pink and white tiles stood a thirty-eight-year-old woman with asymmetrical features and an overly square jaw, who must have overdone it with alcohol the previous night and was hoping a good layer of makeup would be enough to bury it all.

She decided the only wise thing to do was to hold her face under the stream of cold water from the bathroom tap for a few seconds, get dressed quickly, and just as quickly leave the house. And so she did: she closed the door behind her, turned the key listlessly a few times, and walked down the hallway towards the elevator. She entered the steel box and, during the ascent to the surface levels, checked her personal belongings: she panicked, believing she had lost her wallet during the previous evening's debauchery.

In reality, she found it shortly after in its usual place in her bag, along with all her other personal items. Trying to find order in the chaos, she thought about some details she had noticed at her apartment: the toilet seat left up, some towels on the floor, the ashtray full, and on the table, three used glasses next to a bottle of wine. Her annoyance was already at high levels, and she didn't dare check her PDA to see how much money she had left, to avoid discovering how much she had spent the night before. That morning she was on shift with Hendricks, and if she needed some money, she could certainly ask him.

She hated those parties, hated them with all her heart. But then again, as an employee of Merman-Shima, and in the absence of a partner, she was obliged to participate. The colleague get-togethers were described as innocent, but they always had a strongly libertine character: it wasn't hard to notice how the staff had received directives to encourage a certain kind of crude behavior, and alcohol and ecstasy flowed like rivers. The real problem, if anything, was the unavailability of contraceptives in the pharmaceutical kits. For months, Charmaine had been trying to buy condoms, but her PDA kept returning a negative result. And this choice not to make them available to employees wasn't accidental either: they were rapidly approaching the Seventh Cycle, and for some reason, the Behavioral Schools had little effect on sexual attitudes. So the only option for the company was to provide the right environment, the right situation.

"Opportunity brings life," Charmaine said aloud, just as she had been forced to do hundreds of times.

The elevator catapulted her to her destination. She walked along the metallic corridors following the orange line, reserved for administrative staff. She arrived in the meeting room, and a thread of panic ran down her spine when she discovered they were only waiting for her.

She thought: and I fucked one of these assholes last night. Maybe more than one.

She sat in her usual seat next to Hendricks. The man looked her in the eyes and let out a big sigh, and Charmaine could only lower her gaze.

2. A Monday in the Office Like Any Other

There were some unwritten rules between her and Hendricks: one of them stated that on workdays following Merman-Shima parties, the one who was in better shape would work in the dreadnought, the giant control crawler; the one in worse shape would work outside on the reconnaissance team. Outside, you had to use your brain less, and you paid for any mistakes personally. Moreover, Charmaine was also lucky: as Hendricks' subordinate, she shouldn't have been entitled to such courtesies, but her boss was quite different from the others. He had never forced her to do anything, had never even laid a finger on her.

Vaun was disgusting, as always. The dead and collapsed skyscrapers, the sky orange like desert sand. The wind that had swept life from the planet blew incessantly, but Charmaine didn't have to be afraid of anything as long as she had her guardian angel watching her back. The Vore pierced the fabric of reality, turning it into Swiss cheese, but as always, Hendricks had established an extremely efficient route, capable of taking her through entire neighborhoods without any nasty surprises.

That morning their task was to check an anomaly in the Kormak-16 sector, but the truth was that Charmaine had other things on her mind. Through the neural keyboard, she accessed her PDA and sent a private electronic communication to Hendricks.

"Hendo, what did I do last night?"

The reply quickly reached her subcortical chip, which translated into impulses that Charmaine found hard to believe.

"You left with Takahito Shima and his assistant."

Charmaine stopped for a moment. Now, having casual sex with a worker, some military personnel, even a politician, was entirely acceptable, but with the Shima heir, no. That was too much even for her. Takahito Shima, very young, just twenty years old, the great-grandson of the great Michiko Shima, who led the construction of the Underground City. It was extremely rare to encounter him in the metal corridors. Protection was essential: without him, the Shima family line would end, given the almost simultaneous deaths of Yoshinao and Nobunaga Shima, his father and uncle.

But it was at that moment that the radio crackled: behind that building was the anomaly. Years of training had taught her to set aside personal matters with almost robotic efficiency: it was time to act, she had to focus and eliminate personal problems from her brain. She didn't want to be caught unprepared facing something that had emerged from a Vore, and so, gripping her minigun, Charmaine turned behind a building of concrete and metal.

The sight, however, caught her unprepared: a gigantic mountain of red earth, with a dark opening leading into a cave.

"Hendo," said Charmaine, "what do we have here?"

"My God. Are you ready?"

"Go ahead."

"The inside of the cave is clean. The anomaly is oxygen, ionization is very low. Shit, Mimi, it's been years since we found a clean zone on the surface."

"Then I'm going in to take a look."

Hendricks paused for a second, just long enough to grab his PDA and contact Charmaine privately.

"Have you lost your mind? You'll have to take off your suit. The communication was on the work channel, the protocol office will now expect you to enter."

"I don't care, it has to be done."

Charmaine would have liked to say other things to Hendricks, but there was no time left. The protocol office authorized the removal of the suit, and so the woman positioned herself at the cave entrance, executed the extraction procedure from the carapace, and stood completely naked, with no more access to the transceiver or the PDA. She had thirty minutes to go in and out, and she would have to do it like this: without any kind of protection or clothing, and without any weapon.

Immediately, no longer distracted by procedures, she noticed something: from the back of the cave, where there should have been total darkness, a light was shining.

3. The Mother's Song

When Charmaine found herself facing the heir and his assistant, she was completely petrified. She had only heard about the girl, but something, from the haze of the previous evening, resurfaced, and even a name linked to that face emerged: Sachiko. The girl was standing next to the man, who instead was sitting on the red earth and sipping whiskey from a bottle.

The two looked at her and said nothing. She found the courage to open her mouth and say:

"What are you two doing here?"

The assistant replied:

"We were waiting for you. We knew you would come. We created the anomaly on purpose, to lure you here."

"You can create terraformed zones on the surface?" Charmaine asked with immense astonishment.

"We can do whatever the fuck we want," replied the Shima heir, getting to his feet with the bottle in hand. The boy was quite tall and imposing and took a few steps towards Charmaine, who in turn took a step back. The boy scrutinized her naked body, causing a reflex that made her bring both hands to her chest, as if to protect her breasts.

"Go on, Sachiko," said the heir. "Do what you have to do."

The woman stepped forward. She had a small white instrument in her hand, which emitted a blue light. It looked like a thermometer with a luminous tip.

"Stay still, I won't hurt you."

The tip pierced Charmaine's stomach. She felt her flesh liquefy and then rebuild itself. It was extremely painful, but she had been trained for a long time to endure pain, and in the presence of the heir, even the slightest flinch would not be permitted.

"The child is male and is going to be healthy. She may proceed."

"Why did you choose me?"

"Because you are nothing. We will transfer you to the palace, in the Shima zone, before the bioscopic control, so no one will know anything. Leave now. You will not say anything to anyone."

Walking towards the exit, Charmaine had time to reflect. First: the amnesia from the previous evening wasn't due to alcohol, but was induced. Second: the check had been done here because this was perhaps the only place in all of Vaun free from the company's control. Then, the mystery of the terraformation, but something more important: the family bloodline. It was her task to carry it forward.

Imagine that, Charmaine said to herself: if something were to happen to him now, the line would be broken. The break would lead to the extinction of the family.

She processed the consequences: it meant that after a certain transition phase, the underground districts would pass under the control of Merman. Perhaps switching from one jailer to another, completely similar in every way, wouldn't improve her life.

Charmaine found her carapace at the cave entrance. She put the suit back on according to procedure, without turning on either the PDA or the transceiver. At her feet lay the minigun.

The bubble of control doesn't reach here, she thought. No one will ever know anything.

The decision was almost ripe within her, but her behavioral responses began to get in the way: Charmaine started to sweat, her legs went weak, she didn't know if she would be able to do it.

She thought of the behavioral training cycles. All that pain, all that suffering, to learn those rules that guided her actions.

"The objective must be pursued without hesitation," she thought, shouldering the minigun.

"The evaluation of consequences is your creed," she repeated, activating the rotating motor of the barrels, which began to spin with the sound of a drill.

" Opportunity brings life."

Yes.

Then one day someone will do the same thing to the Mermen, she concluded.

She had a moment of hesitation.

Sachiko.

And here too, her nervous system, trained for controlled fight-or-flight reactions, found an efficient way to bypass the obstacle.

It was easier there. She thought this: she was very beautiful. Who knows what kinds of favors she had to do to be Shima's assistant.

She concluded thus: whore.

Charmaine pulled the trigger. The armor-piercing bullets began to stream from the barrels like sparks from a grinder and the cave disintegrated into a cloud of dust.

During the destruction, the hydraulic support of the exoskeleton allowed her to relax. She thought about the girl. If she could have spoken to her, she would have said she was sorry, but then again, perhaps they had really managed to teach her cruelty too.

Silently watching the dust, she finally turned on the transceiver and PDA. Almost immediately after powering up, she heard Hendricks' voice on the radio.

"Mimi, are you okay? What the fuck happened?"

"All that effort and I had to run from a Vore. I caught it just in time."

From the radio came silence and static for a few seconds.

"Shit, and I was hoping we'd found something."

"Maybe next time."

Charmaine looked again at the depressing buildings of Vaun and headed towards them with a determined step, but then she realized something was missing, to ensure no one could ever link her son to Shima. An act of love, finally.

"Hendo."

"Yes?"

"Would you like to come over for a drink tonight?"

Hendricks smiled. He had hoped Charmaine would ask him sooner or later.