Lives Of The Unknown Book 1: The Legend of Andrew Lockeford (18 page)

What inconceivable strength that Selentor had! Could
it have been the armored suit? Or was it truly how much more
powerful one got from that muscle-altering gene? Andrew was not
able to move—he had never experienced so much pain from one hit,
not from the hupac or anything else during his training. His blood
was flooding with adrenalin, but it was nothing to help him get
back up.

The Selentor shot Shul a couple more times until all
that was left was an unmoving, metallic body, covered in holes the
size of basketballs.

Andrew tried to reach out to Shul’s body, but every
inch that he moved seemed to increase the pain tenfold. His
eyesight was becoming blurry, but he managed to see the Selentor
approach him. He bent over and broke Andrew’s kneecaps as well as
his shoulders. With even more pain to deal with, Andrew nearly
fainted. He stayed awake for a few more seconds to see he was being
dragged out of the laboratory, and he could see the hupac right
beside him as they were both to be teleported onto a Selentor ship.
The hupac didn’t look like it was breathing, let alone conscious.
The Selentor made off with the human and the hupac before Juvir and
the AOIB had the chance to make any moves.

All of this had happened in about one hundred
seconds.

Chapter 18

“Wake up.”

Andrew was in a stupor; his sense of
time and place was dull. However, he could tell that he was not
lying down, but rather being hanged by his arms. He was stirring
into consciousness, but he felt like he could not awaken fully. His
eyes felt so heavy, as though they were no longer able to open.
Every muscle in his body was so relaxed, so hard to move. He never
bothered to breath harder, which would increase his oxygen intake
and help him—

“Wake up, already!”

His eyes opened as an electric shock
was applied onto his torso. He let out a small grunt after the
shock stopped, looking to the front of him to see what caused it.
There was the Selentor—the exact same one that murdered Anzem and
Shul, right in front of him. The human and the alien were alone in
a cubic, metallic room, twenty feet on each and every side. Andrew
was indeed being hanged against a wall, with some tiny yet powerful
tractor beams holding him to it by the wrists as well as his legs
and neck. The Selentor had barely touched Andrew with a plasma
blade—the electric shock jumped onto him like an arc. And yet, he
was not badly hurt by it, even with how high the voltage was on
that thing.

“Welcome back, Andrew.”

“What? What’s going on,” Andrew said
groggily.

“Do you remember me at all? Probably
not since I got my muscle genetics improved. I’m the guy you first
tried to kill, pouring all of those chemicals on me.”

Andrew drew in some
air, then let it out by speaking, “You’re
that
guy?”

“It’s Lieutenant Voriaku, and you
should address me as such. Especially due to my promotion up to
Lieutenant.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking
about. All I know is that you….mutilated me, killed Anzem and Shul,
and worst of all, YOU KILLED AN ANIMAL JUST TO USE IT AS
BAIT!!!”

“Huh? Oh, you mean that hupac? What’s
so wrong about using bait?”

“That ‘bait’ was an intelligent being,
just like you and I—”

“I’ll stop you right there. That beast
is not an intel-being, and neither are you!”

“Bullcrap! I
might
understand why you
think the hupac is not quite like you and I, but how am
I
labeled as an animal
while you are not?”

“I wouldn’t say you
are an animal, more so you are a savage, but the best way of
telling you the difference is to tell you what exactly an
intel-being
is
.”
Voriaku paused for a moment. “What do
you
believe an intelligent being
is?”

Andrew gathered his thoughts for
nearly a minute before responding; Voriaku waited patiently. “To
actually have intelligence. To use that intelligence, as well as
any arms or tools that you have, so that you don’t just survive in
the world, but also so you thrive. With me and the hupac working
together, we had no one above us—we thrived in the wild, being able
to enjoy life without worrying about survival.” The human himself
was marveled by his own words.

Voriaku reacted to this speech by
driving the plasma blade into Andrew’s right shoulder. As the human
shouted out, the blood either dried up from the electricity or
spilled out onto his chest.

“Any pet can thrive under their
owners, since they get food and shelter, maybe even companionship.
But what separates a pet from an intel-being?”

Andrew could have thought of a variety
of ideas that would satisfy the question: freedom, sense of self, a
purpose in life. However, Voriaku gave an answer that he did not
expect: “Control. That is what makes one civil.”

This statement bewildered Andrew, and
he soon developed the need to ask. Before he could speak, however,
Voriaku said the words for him. “You think that control isn’t the
answer? On the contrary, it’s the best one. Think about how your
species evolved. How did humans start off, in regards to
control?”

He needed to think about this for a
good minute—his thoughts were increasingly focused on stopping the
pain in his shoulder, although he could do nearly nothing about it.
He finally gave his answer: “Humans were bound by
nature.”

“Good, but I’m looking for something
more.”

“Uh….they didn’t rule the
world?”

“No! That’s a key element for what
I’ll say later, but that’s not it. Again!”

Andrew felt that his answers were
making less and less sense. However, he suddenly thought about that
one night, after he and the hupac took down that gray, leathery
creature. He was thinking about something….something about people
and freedom….

“They didn’t rule
themselves?”

“There we go!”

“But that’s just government! Humans
have had government for thousands of years!”

“But not complete government. What
separates civilized beings such as I from savages such as yourself
is this: intel-beings utilize control over everything—ourselves,
our planets, everything that we were bound by before!”

Andrew was not believing this. Why
would totalitarianism be the key to being an intelligent
person?

“Of course, we can’t
have
absolute
control over positively everything, but we are able to
completely control everything that matters to us. Nature, weather,
and most importantly, our own actions and thoughts. To make sure
nothing gets out of hand, to ensure everything goes as one wants it
to,
that
is the
answer! And before you say anything else….” Voriaku stopped Andrew
from interjecting once more. “I’d like to say
why
I’m telling you all this rather
than just killing you instantly. We’ll have time for more questions
later.”

Voriaku walked to a corner of the room
and pressed his finger onto a device on his wrist. Part of the
ceiling above opened up to reveal a beam that shined down upon him;
this beam caused him to float in mid-air. Andrew looked towards
him, able to move his eyes but hardly his head.

“Anti-gravity beam. It cancels out the
artificial gravity already on this spaceship, so I can give my legs
a break from standing for so long.”

The human remained silent.

“But, anyway, let me explain your
purpose here. Commander Fall wants to see you die. Not just dead,
but to actually see you die, slowly and painfully. Ordinarily, it
sounds cruel, but the fact that you’re not an intel-being makes up
for it. He’s watching us now through a monitor.”

The human made a growl from its
larynx.

“One more attempt at resistance, and you’ll have to
make me step out of this comfortable beam and impale you again with
my plasma blade. Do you want that?”

Andrew shook his head, however
slightly.

“Good.”

Voriaku stepped out of the beam
anyway, took out the plasma blade, and cut off his right foot. The
tractor beam moved up his leg from his ankle to keep the human
restrained. Andrew screamed for five seconds, then he kept his
teeth clenched and his voice down as he stared at Voriaku, both
with fear and resentment. It was more painful than having his
shoulder impaled.

“Because I can,” Voriaku stated, “and
also for revenge.” He walked back to his beam. “You were to be
killed from the start, but when you actually managed to escape and
even gain the support of our enemies—the AOIB—you were labeled a
serious threat. Even more so, you had killed two innocent
bystanders while you were in the armory with that old sword.”
Andrew remembered that segmented sword that he brought to Ku-an
Doel. He also remembered those two aliens, but what he did to them
was out of self-defense. Or maybe fear of what they might have done
to him. “Luckily, there is nothing now to let you escape again. No
robots are enabled, all of the defenses are engaged, and you—you
savage bastard—are stuck on a wall, while I have complete control
over your being.”

Andrew began to shed tears.

“But there’s something which I like to
do as a little preference of mine, something that I grant to even
savages such as yourself. I want my enemies to know everything I
want them to know before they die. That way, the moment before I
make the final strike and turn your body into a corpse, I’ll have
the satisfaction of knowing you were just a little bit civil like
myself.”

Andrew hesitated for a few seconds
before saying, “Why?”

“The universe has
enough people that I don’t like. But when I see and listen to
somebody that truly believes differently than I do, or if that
somebody is so incredibly
stupid
that it becomes unbearably annoying, I don’t want
him or her to simply die. I don’t even want to stop at seeing that
person suffer. I want to change them. I want to see more people in
the universe that would agree with me, but I don’t want to see less
people in general.”

“Wait.”

Voriaku allowed Andrew to speak by not
moving out of his beam. “Go on.”

Because of the pain from earlier, his
speech was slow and strained. “If….you don’t….want people….you like
to die,….then why do you kill….the ones that just….changed their
ways for you?”

The Selentor was the one to give pause
in answering this time. “Well, I guess it’s because if people die
stupid, then they are forever stupid. If they die as honorable
intel-beings, then they are forever intel-beings.”

“So forcing me….to follow your
beliefs….actually sounds….ethical to you?”

As Voriaku stepped out of the beam,
Andrew winced. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing….nothing,” said Andrew as he
trembled.

“You think
it’s
bad
to
impose your beliefs onto others? Do you
like
to be around people you don’t
agree with? This is exactly why you need to change!” He drew out
the plasma blade.

“Oh, God no—”

The blade sliced the other foot off,
and Andrew screamed violently again. It was almost
blood-curdling.

“And another one bites the
dust.”

He was in unbelievable pain. Through a
surveillance camera, too small to be detected by anyone with the
naked eye, Commander Fall was watching, enjoying himself like any
other sadist.

Once the human got his nerve together
again, he said, “You’re gonna run out of limbs soon….so why can’t
you just stop? I can’t take this….”

“Oh, no I’m not. I’ve got a solution
right here.”

Voriaku pulled out a bottle with a
dark purple liquid from inside his suit. He opened the cap and
force-fed it to Andrew. An intense burning sensation ran throughout
his whole body, but it was more intense as it got closer to his
absent feet. To his surprise, his feet grew back right before his
eyes within a matter of seconds.

“They look just like your other feet,
too,” said Voriaku. He took the old feet, pressed another button on
his wrist-computer, and dumped them down a chute that had just
popped up.

“Whu….where did you just put those
feet? In the airlock like they were trash?”

“What are you, crazy? Why would I
waste perfectly good meat?”

Andrew’s eyes opened wide in horror
and disgust.

Voriaku continued: “Sure, we can get
food from our pills, but real, organic food just tastes so much
better! Us intel-beings dare not eat each other, unless in extreme
circumstances, and it’s hard to come by mere animals
anymore!”

The human remained speechless, utterly
shocked. However, an epiphany had developed when he thought about
the hupac. “No….you didn’t….”

“Did what?”

“You ate the fucking
hupac! GOD DAMNED PRICKS!!!
RRRRAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!!
”