skonen_blades

“She can’t have children, you see,” said the coliseum owner, “She’s barren.”

He reached for another salamander tail and popped it into his mouth. The aircars outside the restaurant burbled past in their layered traffic, missing each other by inches in the daily miracle of the traffic AI. It was a beautiful day outside. This sun glinted down through controlled clouds, predictably great weather providing all the people with great vacations.

I was interviewing the owner of one of the most famous arenas on the planet about his star attraction; The Alien Hive Queen.

“Please continue,” I said.

“She was captured in a cave system. No light on that planet. That’s why she’s an albino, you see. The only white hive queen in existence that we know of. No pigments. That in itself would make her an attraction,” he continued. “Of course I leapt at the chance to pay top credit for her.”

He shook his head wistfully, chewing and looking out the window at the passing arteries of vehicle traffic.

“I thought I’d breed a whole batch of white aliens. Sell them off. Ah well.” He wiped his hands on a napkin.

“What happened?” I asked

“Well, we put male drones in there to mate with her. They did their job as they are genetically programmed to do, like any old wasp or bee, I suppose. But it was the eggs, you see? The eggs were just filled with half-formed larvae in barren slime. Useless. No viable children at all.” He paused in thought. A scowl crossed his face and his eyes glittered.

“She killed those drones. Quite viciously. And any others we put in there from that point forward. That was that. Not a breeder. So I had to make money. That’s where the billboard idea came from.” He said.

“The advertisements on her crown carapace, you mean?” I clarified “The stenciled animated logos for Coca Cola, 3M, Semtex, and the like?”

“Yes, those. I mean, she’s basically a blank canvas, right? A giant expanse of white. A wall waiting for graffiti. I figured I could rent it out as ad space. And I was right!” he smiled, triumph in his eyes. But it quickly turned dispirited again. “I still have years to go until I make my money back.”

“Tell me about the handlers.” I said.

“Oh right. Well, see that’s the interesting part. She just huddles there with what’s left of her eggs, keening. It sounds like, crying? Crooning? She strokes the calcified shells of her failed brood. Twenty years now. Sometimes she’ll go quiet and stop for an hour or two. I assume that’s what passes for sleep for her. But other than that, her life is just eating the food we throw into the dark cage and crying over her never-were babies.”

“Anyone or anything alive we put in there is torn to shreds. Just like in the arena during her fights. You saw the fight with the grizzlies from Earth? Sixteen of them! No contest. The T-rexes? The first two were dead inside of a second and the third actually rolled onto its back like a dog and surrendered before she tore its head off. The dragons? The rhinocs? Nothing. Nothing defeats her. It’s dynamic. But where was I?” he asked.

“The handlers. The women who change the ads and clean her. And the ones who ride her in the arena when riders are required for the fight.” I prompted.

“Ah yes. They’re barren, too, you see?” he said, reaching for another tail. “Something about pheromones, I guess. A fertile woman or a man walks in there? Boom. They get turned into juice. But a barren woman? The queen barely even notices them. Sometimes she even she’ll reach out a claw to touch them and stop crying for a few seconds. Other than that, the women can climb all over her, scrub here, and change the pigmapaint on her forehead and she doesn’t care.”

“That’s really impressive.” I said.

“And quite sad.” He responded. “I mean, I’m glad she has friends. And I’m glad I’m making money. But I wish it had turned out different.”



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“You’ll overload the memory pools if you don’t match the emissive bias. You have to allocate. Use the exterial array frame.”

She leaned towards his lips for the kiss. Out here in the prairies, the summer air was still. Jim stood tall on her parent’s porch looking down at her. She pressed up against him, knowing that what she was doing was crossing all boundaries of convention and that if they were caught Jim might even be killed. She could feel his hard chest against her, smell the hard day’s work coming off of him. She sensed his need. He simply stared at her as if by not moving he could somehow will it away, pretend it wasn’t happening.

“Reel back the extension modifiers. Jesus, Jake, reel it back! Dataspool is zeroing out. You need to skip the error nodes. Flip the exporter tuning. Grind the keys if have to. Hack the curve.”

She clung to his strong arms, trembling as if she was cotton blown against a cliff. Her entire body was fire as she moved against him. Still he remained passive. He stared at her eyes with a ferocity she was scared to engage with but the fear excited her. It was her own hand that pulled her skirt up, her own hands that pulled her top down. His grimy overalls rubbed grease and dirt on the front of her Sunday dress as she gyrated her urgency into his oak body.

“Charge capacitors. Integrate one-to-one bandwidth. We’re losing the antenna gain. Signal-to-noise ratio is fluctuating too much. Wavelength is in danger of repeating. Hold on!”

The sky flashed purple as he quickly brought his arm up behind her. (purple) He lifted her easily up to his lips. She opened to him like a summer orchid would to the probing tongue of a butterfly and the taste of chrome filled her mouth. (chrome?) Hot tears stained her face and for the first time in the heart of this metropolis she’d called home too many times, she didn’t feel alone. (Metropolis? Wait? What happened to the farm?) Her boss caught the express elevator down to deliver the letter in purpose. The outer recall of the program had been reached. With his strong arms, she called for immediate backup to cell twenty three and offered immediate reductive price incentive and special offers.

She convulsively yanked the trodes from her head as her pod opened up.

“What went wrong in there?” she demanded through gasps as her body’s chemistry fought to return to normal.

“Your internals, your majesty. They interfere with the dream state. You can’t have such exciting dreams and stay asleep. We’re working on it.” Stated the terrified tech, eyes averted to the floor.

“Well, work harder.” Rasped the Queen, and slowly eased her wizened frame out of the trans-pod onto the gravbed.




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“It was our own fault, you see,” said the queen, “we were given rules and we broke them. The Galactic Council didn’t believe in a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ policy. We had stringent guidelines for inclusion and like the prideful, stupid race that we are, we broke them.”

Queen Charlotte Decidua was being interviewed on national television as part of a History Channel documentary detailing Earth’s fall from grace. She was the grandchild of the queen that was in power during first contact and later, inclusion into the Galactic Council.

“Those days are still looked on as the apex of humanity’s existence. Faster than light travel, diplomatic, commercial and scientific missions to other planets, and exposure to new cultures. The periodic table grew by sixty elements in as many weeks. We were gods, we thought. Picked because we were special. Boastful and proud. Well, pride goeth before a fall as the bible says.”

Queen Charlotte was walking through London’s exhibits of our time during The Inclusion. Her fingers brushed over the historic photograph of the American president shaking the main appendage of Kroldu Septo, the junior GC Ambassador assigned to Earth.

“That should have been our first sign right there that this was only the first rung. Junior ambassador. We didn’t even rate a full ambassador. It was only later that we found out that our race’s adoption into the Galactic Council was a matter of some debate. There was a ‘there goes the neigbourhood’ feeling amongst some of the more advanced races. We were too impulsive and primitive, it was thought, despite our surprisingly advanced level of technology. Not ready yet. Apparently Kroldu was trying to further his own career by championing us and fighting for our seat at the table.”

The Queen looked up at the replica of Kroldu’s head with its shimmering helmet of balconite from his homeworld. His gill slits glimmered with the iridescence of hummingbird wings. It was a fantastic reproduction of the original that still sits on its spike in a refrigerated display case in the Louvre.

“They really didn’t take anything into account when they shut us out. Anybody that was offworld on a mission or just on vacation was there forever as soon as the council passed the edict. Our planet was thrown into a sub-light doctrine by a vote of 295-1. That one vote was cast by Janet Foulger, the only human on the council as her last act as a representative of our planet. She knew she would never see Earth again unless she wanted to freeze herself and make the three-hundred year sub-light trip from the outer border of our newly deemed zone to Earth. Who knows? She may have done it. Maybe two hundred years from now she’ll show up on our radar.”

The Queen laughed at her own use of the ancient technique of mass detection that we had reverted to in the absence of the alien technology. Most of the hardware the alien races had lent The Earth had vanished or self-destructed when the edict was passed. The bits and pieces that had stayed in one piece were pored over by engineers and then donated to museums like the one the Queen was walking through right now.

The heyday of Earth was on display around her. Photographs of levitating cities that no longer levitated, transporter pads that no longer worked, miracle cures that used technology we hadn’t yet deciphered a century later, and artificial intelligences that sat brooding and silent inside their shells. They still drew power but they no longer talked. For fear that they were somehow gagged yet aware, power had not been cut to them.






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The Queen came out of the entrance on the far side of the arena floor like some sort of ravenous stick figure scarecrow on stilts, her blind deathrap of a mouth slavering thick deadly mucous. Her muzzle snuffled the air obscenely from underneath the rock hard carapace of her massive head as acid like hair gel dripped down and lubricated her jaws. It hung off of her in playful long wet strands. They flailed in the wind and sizzled in the dirt where they landed. Her second set of jaws lanced out, stretching in the dazzling sun. Her four arms clutched at the air like dancers as the giant misshapen top-heavy body found balance and settled back into a squat on her huge back legs. Her thick long serrated tail whipped around and stabbed impatiently at the walls. The spear-shaped one ton shovel head on the end of it lashed the dirt, sending fantails of soil up against the safety screens of the front row to their delight. The stalks on her back tasted the air for prey. For viable baby food. To give you an idea of the sensitivity of these stalks, it was like they were studded in bear noses. They soaked up cubic miles of surrounding scent. They blasted out long chemical scent paragraphs in response to what they smelled but no one ever understood those paragraphs.

No one ever understood because she was one of a kind.

She was three stories tall, six tons of fun, and a dyed-in-the-wool intelligent killer. Would have been top of the food chain if she wasn’t a sterile albino. She had gestated inside the body cavity of some subterranean pigment-free mammal that was like a cross between a white bat and a polar wolverine. The reformers that found her out there on that distant planet broadcast their find back to New Terra before being torn to ribbons. She’d turned out sterile and had eaten nearly every other living thing on the planet. She’d been in a lot of fights and was nearly insane with the need to have eggs but unable to do so. She was a queen of an empty kingdom. She was a queen without subjects.

Until now.

The white carapace on her head was emblazoned with garish squared off logos from Skemtex, 3M, Macinsoft, Coke and Sheen. Other logos took up space on her long arms and thick back legs. Like a living billboard of death, she paced around the perimeter of the arena, ravenous for the flesh of the crowd but unable to penetrate the energy screen to satisfy her endless need for fuel to make her heavy non-functional eggs. Deep under the arena, every morning, they’d shock her to sleep and take the next batch of eggs that she’d spent the night trying to nuzzle into sudden life. Every single one of them held sterile barren slime. Her screams echoed down the corridors, haunting them.

But here in the sun she had no need to restrain her rage.

She triumphed over whatever they found to put in the arena with her. The cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex just pissed on the ground when the lights came up and offered the queen his throat in a pathetic wolfish display of non violent submission. The queen was only too happy to tear his car sized head off with a stoccato four beat swipe of her claws.

Lions, tigers and bears. Armoured cats. Beasts from other planets. Her ferocity and cunning had outdone them all. She played with them before the kill. She was always fun to watch. She was exhibition only. She was a never fail warm up act for the events that people bet on.
She was alone in the universe. She was the best at what she did. She was a captive. She couldn’t have children. She was angry all the time.

Her virtual rider hit the left shockbit to make her scream and turn her towards the opponent door in preparation.
The portcullis on the other side went up and in walked a black hive queen.

It was to be another Chess Match.

There was never any doubt as to who would win in these. The black queens were entirely too predictable and just the fact of their fertility seemed to send the White Queen into a rage that had no equal or end until the opponent lay in pieces scattered around the ring. They had not had the years of combat that the white queen had. The black queens had soldiers to do their bidding in the hives and although ferocious, the black queens were not used to fighting a) their own kind and b) for the sheer pleasure of it.

It was always something to see, I’ll tell you that.

They set three black queens on her once. After the White Queen had killed them all in the most exciting half hour metrovision had ever seen, she’d thrown herself against the energy screens until she shorted out one of the quadrants and launched herself into the fleeing crowd. She took out sixty eight people before they shocked her to sleep.

The arena owners didn’t do that again.

Someone had hung a silver star on the thick acid proof door of her lair underneath the arena. Her screams were constant when she wasn't pleading mutely with her stillborn children to live. If she cried there were no tears.

She padded silently tiger like towards the other queen, baring her crystal teeth in a terrible rictus promising nightmarish death.


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