Born from Fire: Tales from The Longview - Episode 1 Read online

Danyal Travers, SPORC Capital Offenses Interviewer, Cheegoth:

  Prisoner, you have stated your professional name and ident. For the record, who are you?

  Suzee Delight, First Courtesan, Court of the Diamond Dome, Mariposa Pleasure City, Cheegoth:

  What I am was chosen for me when I was nine years old, when the Educational Selectors discovered that I could sing and dance and play musical instruments and draw pretty pictures—and when they also discovered that my aptitude for science and mathematics was even stronger than my aptitude for the arts. Wishing to suppress my mathematical and science interests and to encourage my entertainment abilities, my Selector removed me from the General Consumer cohort, named me Tawny Girl, and placed me on the Introductory Arts and Pleasures track. I was trained to be a consort.

  Because I exhibited superior skills and ability to learn and equally because I was obedient, when I was twelve I was placed into Advanced Arts and Pleasures and renamed Sweet Silver. Along with my physical and entertainment training, I began learning languages, courtesies, and what the Pleasure Masters refer to as Polite Observational Skills.

  Danyal (interrupting): Spying.

  Suzee Delight: I’ve heard it called that. I do not think that is the correct word. My training teaches that as a consort and courtesan, my service to my profession must consist of equal parts information gathering and recording on my clients, and the providing of entertainment and pleasure for my clients.

  Third voice: Suppress that, Travers. That does not go into the public record.

  Danyal: I’ve deleted that. Prisoner, please continue.

  Suzee Delight: By the age of seventeen, I had learned so far beyond the rest of my Pleasure cohort that I was moved into Masters training in Arts and Pleasures. At that time, I was renamed Suzee Delight, and for the past six years I have been the First Courtesan of Diamond Dome. I have served at the direction of the Pleasure Masters, and at the pleasure of my clients.

  Danyal: While the information you have given is true, it does not answer my question. Who are you?

  Suzee Delight: I’m sorry. I don’t understand your question.

  Danyal: You murdered the Administrators of the five most populous and powerful Pact Worlds. You did so during a seduction dance performed for all five men at once, using a knife that you could not possibly have had, hidden beneath your costume and... on... on...

  (The sound of the interviewer taking a deep breath is followed by a long silence.)

  (Audio resumes.)

  You killed all five of them before any one could warn the others. Our holos show that you never hesitated, that you never missed a step, that not one of the men had any inkling of his danger or made any move to protect himself when you killed him.

  Suzee Delight: Yes. I am a remarkable dancer. And I killed them quickly because I wished to be merciful. I had always considered them dear friends.

  Danyal: Prisoner, I want an answer to the question I asked you. Someone planted you in the Diamond Dome, someone gave you the order to kill the Administrators, someone gave you the knife, someone put you up to this. Who are you really?

  Suzee Delight: You are mistaken in several ways. First, I am not a who. I am a what. I am the product of my training. Every moment of my life since I was tested at the age of nine has been recorded; every action I have taken with every man and woman who has paid for pleasure from me is available to you in full holographic detail. Second, in every encounter with every client, I have acted on my training, and I have done exactly what that training has dictated I do—including the encounter for which I am now here.

  Danyal: You’re saying that you acted on your own—that you murdered the five Pact Worlds Administrators—because your whore training required that you do so?

  Suzee Delight: I am a courtesan. I don’t know what training whores receive. My lifetime of training as a courtesan required that once I learned and verified the truth about my old friends and longtime clients—Radiva Kels, Stannal Bregat, Nethamatnu Ha, Soth Smithe, and Kiero Chenzwa—I had to stop them before they could commit the crime they planned.

  And the only way I could stop them, because of the enormity of the crime they were planning and how close they were to committing it, was to kill them. They were going to legalize sla—

  Third voice: OH, GOD! Delete, delete, delete! Stop the interview, get her out back to her cell, and delete that entire last bit.

  (The sound of someone pushing buttons while warnings sounded, and then a long pause.)

  Danyal: Prisoner, we’ll resume this interview at a later time.

 

  Suzee Delight

  I LIED TO DANYAL TRAVERS. I know exactly who and what I am.

  A courtesan is a whore with a good education, and what I am is the best-educated whore in the Pact Worlds—and the most famous one. I’m Suzee Delight, and from my original songs and dances and my Paint Beautiful Pictures as Suzee Delight Senso series, on through my instructional pleasure moves and positions, and right up to to my studio-recorded personal full-Senso sessions with famous clients, my mass-appeal products sell to more than three billion men and women across Settled Space. The Pleasure Masters make a great deal of money off of me.

  As for who I am...?

  Well, I’m the woman who, as a little girl, wanted to be a scientist and design custom nanoviral augmentations for GenDaring on Bailey’s Irish Space Station.

  When, during my Wish Conference back when I was nine, I told my Educational Selector that I wanted to leave the Pact Worlds and become a citizen of Bailey’s Irish so I could make tiger people and pony people, he should have let me go.

  Now—because he didn’t—I’m going to destroy the whole poisonous, corrupt Pact Covenants system and every power player in it.

  The five great men who had entrusted me with their pleasure and privacy had come to the Diamond Dome to make use of me... but also to write law—to modify the final language of the Covenants of the Pact.

  They had a clever plan to become even richer and more powerful, though at the expense of the people they supposedly served.

  And that's where I come in. The life I wanted to live was taken away from me when I was nine.

  In truth, it was taken away from me when I was born, but I did not find out that I was an Assisted child and that my government would choose my life path for me until my ninth birthday.

  My life—the life I wanted—was over a long time ago. My execution—if that is where I end—will be the conclusion of my long humiliation and pain.

  But if I die, I’m going to bury the people who did this to me right along with me.

  How?

  It starts with my comment during my interview about me being nothing beyond the thing their training created.

  I put that into the interview with Danyal Travers because I knew the new Administrator of Cheegoth was listening in, as were my Pleasure Masters, the Educational Selectors, and everyone else in the whole corrupt Personal Skills and Educational Tracking and Optimization system.

  By stating categorically that my training required me to kill my clients once I knew and had validated that they were planning to commit a crime against the Pacts of the Covenant, I sent everyone responsible for my education back through every bit of it from the day I was old enough to toddle into General Consumer training at the age of two.

  While they task ever more resources into dissecting those stored holos and figuring out where I came up with my justification for murder—and at the same time put more resources into searching for outsiders who might have somehow implanted in me a trigger they could use from afar—I have both the time and the means to contact an old client who promised to help me out should I ever find myself in a situation where I had to do something that was both right... and criminal.