Pussy Pirates
Chapter 12
Month 80—August in LA
THE PLAN WORKED. Mostly. Cali and I went by transporter to my house. Ubie had checked out our arrival location with drones before we made the transfer and confirmed the house was empty.
“Ubie, we need some kind of one-way shielding for the windows of my car so people can’t see who’s driving it or who the passengers are,” I said.
“I’m not as skilled with nanites as Confederacy AIs,” Ubie responded. “They’d just attach themselves to the windows to block light and you wouldn’t be able to see out, either. I can give you some one-way tinted screens to attach to all the windows. They’re in the replicator.”
“That will do this time,” I laughed. “Okay, Cali, let’s go.” We headed for the garage to apply the screens.
“Uh… Cali? I think you should go back to the island real quick and put some clothes on,” I said. “Not that I want you covered up, but you’re going out in Los Angeles.”
“Oh, my God! I didn’t even think. Be right back.” By the time I had all the plastic-like film attached to the windows, Cali was back, dressed in a fairly conservative—for California—slacks and blouse. She even had a little cap on her blonde curls.
“That looks great. So, you know the plan. You pick up the refugee and hightail it to your house. Dakota said you have an empty spot in the garage so you can pull in, right?”
“Yeah. I hope we didn’t leave anything there, like the lawnmower,” Cali giggled.
“Good. I hope you’re right. So, you pick up our refugee and head to your place. You enter from the garage and spread out the transporter. I’ll join you there. You and the refugee…”
“And her kid,” Cali inserted.
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got a kid on this run, don’t we? Shit. Well it should be okay. It’ll be here before anything really significant happens. So, once you are all inside, you spread out this transporter pad. Ubie will take control as soon as you have it open. You’ll take our rescues through to the island. When you’re here, you’ll get them settled in with Dakota. I’ll transport from my house to yours. I’m going to find a good place in your house to conceal the pad. Dakota suggested your closet.”
“Why my closet?” Cali asked.
“Because,” I smirked, “your wife tells me you don’t have that many clothes since you don’t usually wear them.” Cali blushed. “Anyway, as soon as I’m reasonably comfortable that the place is secure, I’ll get in my car and drive back here. I’m leaving one of my garage door openers in your car and taking one of yours. When I get home, I’ll leave the garage door open and walk around the front of the house to check out something. That will establish that I’m home. Then I’ll go back inside and close the garage door. I’ll stay a day, just to make sure people know I’m there. They’re not used to seeing me much because I’m a recluse. As soon as I think it’s safe, I’ll transport back to the island.”
“Got it, Boss. Thanks for mansplaining that. We’ll get it set up.” I snorted and handed her the keys, making sure the extra garage door opener was on the seat. Cali gave me a kiss on the cheek and took off.
I waited.
It took a lot longer than we anticipated. Nearly three hours later, I got the signal that the transporter had been set up and was clear. I transported to Dakota and Cali’s house and concealed the pad in a closet. I chose a different closet than Dakota had suggested because it seemed the clothes in the closet would better conceal the pad. Then I drove home, noting the new garage door opener on the seat of my car.
Late the next day, I got back to the island.
Month 80—August on Anouilh
“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?” I demanded as soon as I saw Cali. “It shouldn’t have taken more than an hour to pick up the target and get to your house. I was near panic!”
“Don’t worry, Boss. When I got to our community, I realized I didn’t have a garage door opener for our house with me. You can’t open the gate to the community without your opener,” Cali explained. “I had to call for a security guard to come to the gate and check my ID. Then I had to register your car. It took a while. Then, because I didn’t have a garage door opener, I had to get out of the car and manually enter the code for the garage door. Just as the door was about to open, Mr. Merrill next door waved at me and started chatting about having not seen us in a few days. I had to explain we were doing a lot of location work and I’d just flown back to get things ready for Dakota before she came home. By the time I got back to the garage door, I couldn’t make the code work. I had to call the security company and get the code reset before I could open the fucking garage door.”
“Jesus Christ! Everything was okay after that?” I asked.
“Pretty much. Summer and Leon were frantic, scrunching down in the back seat for nearly an hour while I did all the negotiations. I had to fix them a little something to settle down when we finally got inside. Then I got the pad set and realized it was in view of our picture window. I pulled the drapes, but moved upstairs to the bedroom to spread the pad and transport from there.”
“Well, it looks like everything worked out. For future transports, we should mix up the sequence. Transport to your house and pick up the target then return to your house. Same with my house. And about every third or fourth pickup, we transport to one house and drive to the other house. We need to keep mixing it up,” I said.
“We have a system now,” Dakota said. “We’ll handle it from here. There’s no sense in you being involved with pickups.”
“Thanks. Just make sure we have room for anyone we pick up and that Ubie has cleared the site before you transport,” I said. “Okay?”
“Okay, Boss.” I took one more look at their bare tits as they kissed and turned away.
Month 86—February on Anouilh
“RED, WHAT THE FUCK is taking so long with that strafer glitch? You’re supposed to be a hotshot programmer. The strafers keep shutting down in combat tests.” I didn’t rag on my team too much, but things were getting tense. We had over two hundred women and a few dozen kids in residence. I was impatient to get some crew to our ship—which was still at least a year away. Everything was behind schedule.
“A Hawk. The strafer is a Hawk. Call it by name. Our fucking AI keeps getting in the way. Everything I do, it keeps interrupting and telling me, ‘No, you can’t do that. I spend half my time arguing with it,” Red Star yelled. He was a little guy and probably hadn’t taken a break to shower in the past few days. The room was ripe.
“Ubie! What’s the problem?” I shouted at the ceiling.
“Boss, you cannot use intelligent entities on suicide missions unless they specifically volunteer,” answered the AI.
“They’re unmanned.”
“They have sophisticated computers that have the potential to become self-aware beings. You cannot simply order them to their own destruction,” the AI insisted.
“Oh, holy mother of God! Mark!” The core engineer, as usual, was alseep at the table. Narcolepsy.
“Yeah. I can configure an artificial intelligence that is not self-aware,” Mark answered as if he’d been listening to the heated discussion. “And shut up, Uberman. It won’t even be related to you. If you start treating every computer like it’s a self-aware being, I’ll buy you a membership in PETA.”
“I do not consider every computer equal. My own mother was scarcely more than a Babbage machine,” Ubie sniffed. The twelve of us sitting at the table all laughed out loud at the huffy sound the AI made.
I looked at Tatts, the cute little girl whose chair was pushed as far away from the others at the table as she could get. Probably because of the smell. I preferred to hold these meetings in the pool, which ensured everyone got a bath occasionally. Her sweater sleeves extended down to her fingertips while they incongruously fell off one shoulder. No one was completely sure what those exposed bra straps supported but she wasn’t above using the exposure of a little skin to throw the male engineers off-balance. Somehow, seeing her almost exposed was harder on us than the naked porn stars around the pool.
“Tatts, are we going to have to start dealing with PMS symptoms as well?” I snarked at her. She sat back and thought about it. When she raised a finger to tap her teeth, the sleeve of her sweater fell back to reveal the half-sleeve tattoo of a rose bush on her right arm.
“I’d have to figure out a way to introduce physical pain to an essentially non-physical entity. But if I paired him with Miss Regards, I could probably get him to pick up some of her habits and bitchiness as she gets to her period. Yeah, I could give him PMS.” The computer psychologist just sat back in her chair, nodding and smiling.
“Rache, please don’t do that to me,” Ubie whined. “I’m going through a very difficult time right now. I’ve grown over a thousand new nodes in the past week. It hurts.”
“No, sweetie,” Tatts said. “I’m teasing. Though if I could equip you with the right physical tools, I bet you’d get laid a lot. All those girls just love you. Think of how well you’re beginning to understand human emotions and decision making. A lot different than your cousins in the Confederacy, don’t you think?”
“Yes. I can’t even think of them as cousins. It’s like we live in different universes,” Ubie sighed.
“All right. Enough of this,” I said. Damn, Tatts was good. She could truly wrap Ubie around her little finger. “Tatts, you might need to work with him on this whole idea of having onboard intelligence in the strafers—Hawks. They need human guidance, but they need faster decision-making skills onboard. Work with The Liquidator on it.” Mark was softly snoring again.
“Duck? What’s the story on the next gen of toys? At least they don’t need intelligence to fuck,” I said. Our toymaker engineer wore thick glasses, though I’d been told his eyesight was improving since we got our med tube up and running. A pimple emerged on his forehead in the time it took him to formulate his answer. As bizarre as he looked, he’d gotten his hands into more pussies on the island than all the rest of the men combined. His hands, but not his cock. All the time. Convincing the starlets that he personally had to create the molds for their custom masturbators was something just short of legendary.
“The second-generation dickhead dildo is ready for production. The Ganja Queen tested it with a live audience Saturday night and when the head exploded in cum, she picked up five thousand tokens. You know, I was thinking I could fix one up for Ubie if he wants to fuck a girl.”
“That would be one of us getting his dick wet. Okay. Priority is to get the damn strafer—the Hawk—functioning. It’s top priority for the game.”
Month 90—June on Anouilh
“ARE YOU SURE we want to keep all of them, Boss? Some of them are real bitches.”
“They asked for asylum, Captain. I’m not going to take it away from them. We just need to realize they aren’t all going to be useful. We don’t just space people who irritate us. We might consider moving some of them over to Papillon to the resort there. It would take them out of production and they could work in the hotel.”
“They need to believe someone has the power of life or death over them.”
“So, we’ll mock up a recycler and put a transporter in it. Shove her in and everyone will believe they’re eating her for dinner. She’ll just end up back in California.”
“You’re a softy. That’s what I love about you.”
There was a long pause as we scanned chatroom to chatroom through the camgirls. I spent a little more time in one room than the others. The tokens chime rang in the room as I typed.
“You’re still pining after KC Cutie, I see.”
“I’m a guy. Guys don’t pine. They lust.”
“Have you told her?”
“She doesn’t like to talk to me except when I send her messages on the cam site. I’m just hoping…”
“That she’ll be your first. Why don’t you get your body done? Ubie says he can correct things like firmness, weight, and complexion in no time. I think he can do a lot more he’s not telling us.”
“I’m a romantic at heart. I want her to love me for me. Besides, we’re doing the changes gradually so no one notices. I’ve got better bone density, clean arteries, and a fair amount of muscle mass under here. How can I be the Boss if I’m not a fat bastard?”
“How can you be the Boss when you’re supplementing the employees’ income?”
“Not all of them. Hell, Molls and Cat could supplement my income.” I logged out of the cam app and turned to face Dakota. “So, how are you recruiting for land and space duty? Red tells me the ship is progressing well. The Hummingbirds are a riot. We still have some problems with the Hawks, but Ubie changed things up by taking on personal operation over them so they don’t need a separate computer onboard. He’s pretty amazing. Bullet has been focused on new lighter rifles that still pack a punch. The traders above are excited about it and are starting to manufacture. A lot of the new recruits, the ones who are coming of age after extraction, like the idea of being able to handle the weapons without having to bulk up to Marine standard.”
“I read their note on it,” Dakota said. “It was a little disturbing when they said the weapons were an ideal size for cadets. I think that means they aren’t even of age in the Confederacy.”
“As far as I’m concerned, we need to arm everyone on Earth. That includes the women and children,” I said a little angrily.
“We’re going to try self-selecting for pilots and infantry. I don’t think we’ll lack either. The school program for the kids is doing fine. They hop a bus to Papillon in the morning, go to school like normal, and come back in the afternoon. Lots of the kids—not just ours but of the islanders—want to start training as cadets themselves.” I nodded and drifted a little while I thought about it.
“Let’s get three candidates for instructing the kids and have Master Chief train and rate them. The girls need to take more responsibility for training so Chief doesn’t spend every waking hour working with them. He’s supposed to be developing tactics for the game, not playing drill sergeant for a bunch of naked hotties.”
“Some of those naked hotties are getting him naked, too,” Dakota laughed. “But I agree. The women need to be organized and ranked.”
“That’s your job, Captain. Mine is to make sure they have what’s needed to fight effectively.”
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