Zombie Road , Simpson, A. [best authors to read TXT] 📗

and had the best interest of all peoples. You could compare us to a police force from your world unless hostilities broke out. Then we became an army.”

Jessie turned the guns one way then the next, looking for a way to load ammo.

“So, these don’t work, they’re just for show?”

“No.” She said. “They are very powerful. The Captain of the ship was never expected to use his weapon but if the situation were so dire he was forced, then the confrontation was ended immediately.”

She showed him the power cells, how to swap them out, the multiple settings that went from mild shock to total obliteration and explained the higher the setting the faster the cells would deplete.

“Cool.” He said. “I’ve got laser guns. But seriously, can they be reduced in size? Can I cut off a lot of this flashy stuff, strip them down to the bare necessities so I can handle them?”

The next few weeks flew by as Jessie learned how to operate the jump ship, read enough of the language to understand the labels and stripped the Mark Sevens down to their bare elements so they would fit his hands. He spent hours hand carving new grips, modifying the shrouding and shortening the barrels. He started practicing his gun kata’s again, learning the feel of the new pistols. They were a little bigger than his Glocks even when stripped down to their bare essentials, maybe the size of a 44 magnum. They even resembled a wrist snapping AutoMag after he blacked them out. The good thing about a plasma pistol was no recoil. His whole life he’d associated big bullets with big kick. You barely knew you were firing a .22 round but a .50 caliber would break your shoulder if you didn’t handle it properly. The blasters were basically every gun he’d ever owned all wrapped into one and they used the same ammo. A refillable charge of compressed hydrogen.

“If you keep it on the lower settings, something equal to your 9-millimeter, the charge will be able to fire thousands of times.”

“What happens if I turn it all the way up to 11?” Jessie asked.

“It doesn’t go that high but you would kill everyone, probably including yourself.”

They worked together for long hours and she became better and better at emulating a real person. Even when glitching while trying to solve a problem, she allocated a portion of herself to keep up the façade. The first time he called her Scarlet was after a long day spent stripping the jump ship and refitting the pilot’s seat and controls. He hadn’t meant to, she was a machine, a computer, a bunch of weird configurable cells but it slipped out. There was an awkward silence. She knew how much he longed for her, it had overwritten much of her being.

“I do not have to keep this shape.” She finally said. “I am learning to control the conflicting commands, I can assume the shape of someone else.”

“No.” Jessie said. “I’ve gotten used to it and seeing you reminds me of what I have to do. I like it, I couldn’t imagine you as someone else, now. How much longer do you think it’ll take us to get off this boat?”

“Maybe another week. You still need to learn how to fly it once we are finished modifying the controls.”

“Cool.” Jessie said. “Then we go find a time machine and get me back home.”

“It is forbidden.” She said.

It seemed like she told him that a lot. She ran a memory check and wasn’t surprised to learn it was true. On average, three times a day he expressed interest in doing something illegal or ill-advised.

“Let me worry about that.” He said in his easy way.

The humans of old earth were certainly not like the humans she had served. The DNA was the same but twenty thousand years of different foods, different gravity and different survival requirements had changed them. They had forgotten where they came from. The Earthians no longer had the sixth finger and since their gravity was stronger, they didn’t grow as tall. Their head and eyes were smaller, too because they were only a few generations away from scraping a living from the land. They were only a hundred years removed from mass malnutrition, rampant diseases, and short life spans. From the new memories she had, she knew they were a violent and warlike people. Jessie hadn’t studied history, only what he learned in school, but she understood the planet was ignorant of their distant past and had been through much since the ancient wars. Their recorded history only went back a few thousand years. They thought the ice age was a natural occurrence.

From the bits of information she had, she deduced the earth systems jump gates had been destroyed. The last report she’d received seconds before she was destroyed was complete devastation of all planets. There were many of those reports, they had all come in the instant they passed through the jump gate. The next second she was attacked. Without the worm hole gates, no one was going to travel there again for another ten thousand years. The populations on all the known planets in all the known systems would have to be so great that people would risk the trip in a colony ship. That solar system had been written off and forgotten, there wasn’t anything particularly valuable about it. They had no unique minerals or ores that couldn’t be gotten from a thousand other planets.

The Earthians had no memories of the colonies on the red planet, Mars as he called it, or those on Venus and Maldek. From his vague recollections, the people of earth had forgotten that all four planets had once thrived. Maldek was now an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It had been completely ripped apart. Earth was the only planet that remained viable but it had been ravaged by extinction level events on numerous occasions. Every time they seemed to be moving