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Last Ride of the Blood Letters Part 1: 1

Hey folks, this is the beginning of my in-progress novel, The Last Ride of the Blood Letters (Working Title). It's a "science-fiction-like-Star-Wars-is-science-fiction" novel I started for NaNoWriMo 2016....totally failed at THAT, by the way--but I haven't quit working on the book! As a way of encouraging/putting a fire under my ass, I've decided to start serial-posting chapters of the book weekly until I've posted the whole thing. Which means I've got to keep writing so I don't catch up to myself.

I'll mention now--this is FIRST DRAFT. So, typos, grammar, all of that good shit....well, I do my best to edit while I write, and I think I'm pretty decent at it--but if you notice anything, commenting about it would be really nice as long as you're not an asshole about it.

The Last Ride of the Blood Letters

A long time from now, in a galaxy uncomfortably near…

1.

“The show always looks the same to me, T-12. I don’t get it.”

“Considering that most of the consumers of these videos are beings who intend to be chemically addled beyond sentience while viewing them, I do not believe it matters.”

“That’s a good point.”

Rab sat in the pilot’s seat of the Downed Horizon, being careful to keep his right eye trained on the colors and shapes moving outside the cockpit.

Travel through intraspace was, without a doubt, a captivating thing to look at—it was said that more colors than any single being could comprehend passed by as a ship made its way through. In a ten-minute video, a Human would see every color they’d ever known—and some they hadn’t. Even that didn’t explain it.

The shapes were beyond drawing. The colors—beyond understanding.

Rab used to be fascinated by it—he used to stand in the cockpit of the Downed Horizon, staring as intraspace passed by, amazed by it. His old pilot, Cress, had said that it made him nervous to have someone looking over his shoulder—and Rab would have to assure the little Chig that he wasn’t paying attention to the piloting at all—just the show passing before them.

But, like anything, familiarity destroyed wonderment.

At this point, Rab was bored. He’d recorded the last fifteen minutes of their intraspace journey using his cyborg eye—and his patience was wearing thin for maintaining the view.

Sending an impulse to the tiny computer stored in his right eye socket with a thought, Rab shut down the recording.

“I think we’re done with that for now.”

“Are you sure? The journey to Eunthis should take another hour and fourteen minutes. I would imagine there is a lot more material your audience would appreciate.”

“I’m sure they would—but I’m done. Gonna get a quick nap before we drop the cargo.”

Rab pulled up the sleeve of his jacket and pulled open the small flesh-colored flap on his wrist that covered a computer-interfacing cable. Grimacing as he always did, he pulled the cable out, extending from his wrist, and plugged it into the onboard computer of the Downed Horizon.

He’d had the prosthetic arm for nearly two years—but the light tickle of unwinding the interface-cable  from within his ‘arm’ hadn’t ceased to unnerve him. He’d considered having a techie turn off the sensation signals in the arm—or even seeing if T-12 could do it—but there was a part of him that still wanted to be able to feel the other sensations the arm was capable of.

If Rab hadn’t been so cheap with his biological replacements, he would have been able to choose which sensation signals he received. But he had been—and a fully new arm was out of the question at this point.

Rab was struck by how silly—how sad—it was that he was down to this—using his prosthetic eye to record videos of pretty colors for chemical abusers to entertain themselves with.

The Blood Letters had done real work—and they’d made real money doing it. And now? He was delivering barely-illegal cargo to backspace planets and selling vids to life-wasters to keep the Downed Horizon, which was also his home, fueled.

While the video of his past fifteen-minutes uploaded itself to the ship’s local hard drive, Rab could feel T-12’s robotic eyes analyzing him.

“If you’re trying to read my biometrics, you can stop. I’m not sick. I’m not disturbed. The injuries from that last delivery have almost fully healed—just some tightness across the ribs when I stretch.”

“I would never condescend to check your vitals without asking you first. I would hope you would know me better.”

Rab thought he could hear actual indignation in the war bot’s vocoder-induced voice. He turned and looked at T-12.

It seemed so rare for him to actually look at T-12 these days. These months. Too much a reminder of how things had gone. Of what had happened.

His black-metaled, Humanoid form was as comforting as a dog foaming at the mouth, but Rab had known the robot long enough to know that T-12 would never do him harm.

Rab appreciated the company, of course. T-12 was a decent conversationist—and a damned good chess player who would (only) occasionally let him win—but he was still…A robot.

Rab was struck by his own softness—had he not spent nearly eight years completely alone on the streets of New Earth, fending for himself?

Had he not done things he could no longer speak of in order to stay alive? Stolen from people—hurt people—even killed those who would have threatened his existence?

He had done everything necessary—and nothing short of it. He wasn’t sorry for it.

There was no warmth on those streets—New Earth may have had a temperate climate, but Rab still felt a to-the-bones chill when he thought of the planet and his childhood there.

And here he was—bemoaning that his only company was a war bot who would die before allowing him to suffer harm?

Straighten up, man. You’ve had it far worse. Remember how it was when you and Reese—

But again, Rab was struck by memory.

Reese was dead. Nostalgia wouldn’t bring her back. Wishes wouldn’t put oxygen in her lungs—and even if it did, after what that monster did to her—

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

Rab has spent the first few months after…what had happened…recoiling emotionally. He’d set the Downed Horizon on a drifting course towards a distant sun.

It would have taken a month for the ship to reach the sun and burn to a crisp, ending his life.

T-12 had been aboard and had agreed to not do anything to stop their fate.

Because T-12 believed in him. As much as a robot could believe in a Human. Rab supposed that T-12 wasn’t like most robots—he was certainly capable of more critical thought. Maybe he’d known all along that Rab wouldn’t let the ship become ashes.

And he hadn’t. That was why they were now on the way to a planet no one cared about to deliver something the Galactic Coalition police probably would have laughed at and allowed through customs without a fuss.

The plant, fairgone, of New Earth was a simple hypnotic—best imbibed by smoking or making a tea from it. It didn’t cause the user any known long-term health problems and consumers of it were often the most docile within their given populace.

Personally, Rab didn’t see the appeal. The drug was useful for relaxing, he’d been told, but Rab had never really understood the concept of that word anyway.

Relax.

It sounded like something in Chig or Nestapian. Foreign to his Common English speaking tongue, hard to pronounce and harder to understand.

No one who grew up on the streets of New Earth took to the idea of relaxation. They all knew exactly what Rab knew—that the second—the microsecond—you did that…that was when the blade dropped on your neck.

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