Variant Worlds 2

By Raymond Towers

This science fiction collection features multiple arcs, woven around the central theme of space exploration and the Starship Neptune. Meet the people: the military contractors, the scientists, the common workers, the prisoners and even the sex bots, in a setting where bold moves could reap great benefits, uncover unexpected sensuality or result in dire repercussions. Rating: HIGH controversy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raymond Towers
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463909898

Raymond Towers

Raymond Towers is an author of fantasy, horror and science fiction that strays away from the mainstream, plus a little in the way of true paranormal and other genres. He has written and independently published over forty titles, most of them full-length novels and collections, with several more on the way. The author has been a lifelong resident of warm and sunny southern California, a location that pops up frequently in his writing. At the moment, the author is looking for ways to reach new readers all over the world, in addition to pursuing his great love of writing and taking it to the next level.

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About The Series

New worlds, Variant Worlds, beckon for you to come and explore them. These worlds are full of fantasy and science fiction. Travel through space, through jungles, through parallel dimensions, into your own backyard and even into your mind. These fantastic worlds begin where your reality ends, and they will take you everywhere. In these collections of short stories, you will see, hear and smell the exotic. You will experience everything, and everything will experience you.

Variant Worlds 1

Welcome to Variant Worlds 1. This is a collection of fantasy and science fiction ranging from short stories to novellas. In these tales, everyday people like you and I must come to grips with the strange and perilous realities that have been presented to them. Only by relying on their inner strength, their wisdom and their humanity can they forge ahead and survive. Rating: MEDIUM controversy.

Similar Series And Titles:

Roaches In The Attic

For the first time in recorded history, humanity has developed the technology to travel among the stars. The unrestricted exploration of space begins, only for our first wave of pioneers to discover abruptly and brutally, that we are not alone in the cosmos. It will be up to the Space Marines not only to counter this new threat from far, far way, but also to prevent these bizarre new enemies, the Roaches, from finding Earth and bringing their unforgiving brand of destruction down on all of us.

The Throwback

M.E. Nottle is a throwback to an earlier age, when men had the guts to speak their mind and stand up for their beliefs. Unfortunately, cancer almost took him. He went into cryo for a century. When he opened his eyes again, his disease was gone but his life was no longer his. His job: to go into dangerous places and die, in a universe nothing like the one he left behind. Rating: HIGH controversy.

Variant Worlds 2

Raymond Towers

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Raymond Towers

Smashwords Edition, License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Content Rating: All of the characters in this e-book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, whether living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters depicted in sexual acts in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older. This e-book contains a HIGH amount of controversial subject matter.

About the cover: The cover image was created by Wombo AI.

About this title: This science fiction collection features multiple arcs, woven around the central theme of space exploration and the Starship Neptune. Meet the people: the military contractors, the scientists, the common workers, the prisoners and even the sex bots, in a setting where bold moves could reap great benefits, uncover unexpected sensuality or result in dire repercussions. Rating: HIGH controversy.

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Table Of Contents

Asteroid QQ37 - Part 1

The Anomaly Of Object AA

Asteroid QQ37 - Part 2

Taming A Gorilla

Asteroid QQ37 - Part 3

What Happened On Miranda

Sirens In Space - Part 1

QQ37 - Penelope Peril - Part 1

Rogue Flea, Meet The Seven Seas

Sirens In Space - Part 2

QQ37 - Penelope Peril - Part 2

Finding Love In Strange Places

New Beginnings

About The Author

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Asteroid QQ37 - Part 1

There are places that not even god can reach.

Asteroid QQ37 was one of those places. Men with severe prison sentences were taken there to mine, because capital punishment had long since been abolished on the civilized worlds. That’s what they said, anyway, but everyone knew it wasn’t true. The elites running the Federation Of Planets used every excuse they could think of to murder their constituents. The elites killed the masses through the food they consumed, the water they drank and with the radiation they sprayed into the skies. Autism, cancer and other induced maladies were running rampant all over the colonized worlds. The masses were too stupid, as always, to comprehend how they were being systematically weakened, and exterminated.

Lender wasn’t among the stupid ones. Lender figured things out and he was vocal about it. That’s how he got his prison sentence. After appearing in one too many protests and posting one too many links to real evidence online, the elite cleansing program targeted him. A hit squad broke into his home to murder his wife and two children, and to plant incriminating files onto his computer. The operatives branded him a murderer and a conspirator. They made up their ‘official story’ that he was trying to overthrow the government. They invented that he was part of a plot to assassinate the president, who was on her third clone by then after previous successful murder attempts on her life. Nobody knew that, by the way, except for those like Lender that used advanced facial recognition programs to study down to the pores of the president’s face. That bitch had been killed twice and reproduced by the elites, while the public couldn’t be bothered to see that her irises had a synthetic pattern in them. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look.

Len hated religion, as he knew how religious leaders manipulated belief and faith to control the masses. If someone had told him a few years ago that he would one day turn into a religious man, Len would have laughed in their faces. He’d been indoctrinated into Chrislam, of course, like so many others before him, and been taught to bow toward the rising sun of the east every morning. That had only lasted as far as Len’s teenage years, until he discovered that the leaders of the colonized worlds had years before conspired to merge the great religions into one, and that many other diverse religions had existed before the advent of Chrislam.

A new religion, a secret religion, was spreading among the many miners like him whom had lost their hope. Their new god had a name, but the deity’s worshippers kept that name out of their minds as much as they could. The new god had horns and carried a flaming sword in one hand and a book of law in the other. This was a god of vengeance first, of strict holy cleansing and the wiping out of corruption. He would become a god of purity and light only after the cancer of the galactic elite was excised and burned away. In the interim, the god’s flaming sword would swing with fury. The reason Len and others who followed this deity kept their religion out of their brains was because the wardens continually ran mind scans on their prisoners. Too many restricted thoughts would get a miner taken to Interrogation, and that was not a good place for any man to end up. Many times, those men would not come back.

Before the mining sentence, Len had not been a religious man. He hadn’t been a homosexual man either. After getting raped in dark places one time too many by roving bands of desperate men, he had no choice but to adapt to his new circumstances. Len searched out who the political dissidents in the mining colony were, the Truthers like him. He found an Asian man who was nearly as tall as he was, another loner being abused in the same way, and just as strong. He beat that man and raped him, and he made the man watch over Len’s cot as he slept, and to follow him around when he had to go into dark places.

The man’s name was Kyu. He was from New Korea, some new country that was established on one of Saturn’s moons, but Len always forgot which moon. After having enough of being raped, Kyu waited until Len was fast asleep. He beat Len senseless with his shoe and returned the favor. When Kyu was done, he demanded to be treated like a man and not like a slave. By then, both men had gotten accustomed to being near one another. Neither wanted to walk dark corridors alone where bands of men might find them. They become lovers. Kyu no longer sat on the floor while Len slept; now they slept on the same cot. If violence came their way, they stood by each other’s side and faced it together.

Len had seen similar relationships among the other prisoners. Sometimes one man would be the husband, while the other acted like the wife. That wasn’t the case with he and Kyu. They were both men, and that’s what they acted like. Their new god understood that they were committing unnatural acts out of necessity and oppression, and forgave the two men for that.

The two men walked astride, from the crowded dormitory over to the suiting up area. As they stripped nude in preparation for the compression area, Kyu reached over to slap Len on the bare ass. It was a habit the Asian man had taken up recently. At first, the act had irritated Len, but he’d since gotten used to it.

You have more meat on your butt than I do on mine. Kyu had explained this to him once. Sometimes while we are having sex, I can close my eyes and pretend you are a woman.

Too bad that didn’t work both ways, Len had frowned upon hearing that. Kyu’s ass was narrow, leaving no doubt as to his partner’s biological sex. Just don’t do that while everyone is watching.

Kyu hadn’t listened, of course. He seemed to get a kick out of embarrassing Len that way. Len found he could tolerate the act after at time, once he started viewing it as a sign of affection. In a remote, lonely place like QQ37, genuine love was hard to come by.

As the two men donned their thin specialized suits, along with about ten others, they took their last few breaths of cool, filtered air. Once the suits were on and they were out in the mining tunnels, they would breathe their own hot sweat until their shift was finished. After checking each other’s suits, they lined up with the other men to wait for the acclimatization chamber to open up. If any tiny leaks or punctures were found on their suits, they would show up in the chamber, before the men went into the tunnels. A hole in a suit could become a fatal flaw out in the asteroid’s underground atmosphere.

As the chamber shifted from the human environment into the asteroid’s, Len couldn’t help but think of all the petty jealousies circulating among their little squad. They had worked with those same men for a couple of months now, or at least that’s what Len calculated, as it was difficult to keep track of day cycles when only the wardens had clocks and calendars at their disposal. He couldn’t even talk to Kyu during their work shift, as their compact helmets were not equipped with transmitters. Only the supervisors could be heard speaking, and god help the prisoners if one of the supers was in a bad mood, as there was no way to shut the radios off. They would have to listen to the supervisor ranting and raving all day.

What was Len just thinking of?

Oh, the jealousies. Some of those were so stupid and arose from the simple fact that the men had nothing else to think about. Len and Kyu were resented because they were efficient at their jobs, as if being rebellious against the supervisors was a sign of heroism. Others hated that they were Truthers who had committed no real crime other than to expose the truth, while those men were cheats, scoundrels and murderers. Some even hated the two men because they were from different races. Never mind that they were all prisoners and being kept under the thumb of the same few people tasked with watching over them. Even in space, the dumb sheep still chose to remain dumb sheep; they would turn on each other because they were too stupid to band together and overthrow their rulers, the same as the people on Len’s home planet of Earth.

The compression chamber warning lights went from yellow-check to green-go. Several men crowded near the exit, eager to hurry out and claim the best excavators and sorters. It would be nice if all of the equipment was in good working condition, but the main reason the men were running out in a hurry was because they were lazy. Some of the digging machines were easy to operate, while others had to be constantly watched or broke down a lot.

It didn’t matter so much to either Len or Kyu; regardless, they would be out there for six long hours. The machines that were harder to work on also strengthened their muscles and kept them fit. The colony had a fitness and workout center, but too many prisoners would be thrown in there all at once, clogging everything up. Besides that, the prison gangs took over certain machines or sections of the gym, preventing anyone else from using the equipment. Doing the hard labor in the mines was a good alternative to having to fight some asshole for the grand privilege of using the bench-press station.

QQ37 was set up in the usual way. The giant asteroid had been plucked out of the belt between Mars and Jupiter, by a starship capable of producing electromagnetic waves that singled out asteroids full of metallic ores. The asteroid was shaped like a rough potato with a size of about seventy by a hundred miles. A domed colony was set up on the surface, tough enough to counter the surface temperatures of minus 100 Fahrenheit. Once QQ37 was deemed to be feasible for mining, the prison colony was built under the dome, and under the surface. The miners could dig in any direction they wanted to, basically, in order to extract the ores and to break the asteroid up into smaller fragments. They didn’t have to worry about tunnels collapsing as the starship held the fragments together electromagnetically. Even if the tunnels did cave in on top of their heads, losing a few miners in the armpit of space was no big news story. Hell, it probably wouldn’t even be reported.

Since they were working underground, at least they didn’t have to worry about micrometeorites tearing through their suits, Len thought, as he and Kyu made their way to the last of the excavating equipment. As expected, the other rabble had left them with the sorter, or feeder-breaker if you want the technical name for it. The two men had the unenviable task of waiting for the batch-hauler to come by with a load of full bins. It would be up to Len and Kyu to take out the material, one heavy bucket at a time, and dump it into the sorter. The machine could filter out the material by size and type, and put it into new bins. These bins were sealed up and readied for pick-up by the starship later. The problem was that the sorter had to be watched closely, as it wasn’t perfect in its selection process and it had a tendency to jam up a lot. If it threw too much material into the wrong bin after jamming, then the entire stupid bin had to be emptied out and sorted all over again.

Kyu got into the sorting machine and drove it out to the tunnels they were working on, while Len simply followed alongside on foot. They were alternating turns, with Kyu driving out and Len driving back. That was pretty much all the novelty they could expect for that day. The rest of it was a long and laborious effort of filling buckets up, dumping them into the sorter, and making sure the sorter ran smoothly.

Another machine followed them: the bin collector. This vehicle could carry four full bins at a time, taking them to the hangar where they could be picked up by drone ships and taken up to the starship floating in space. That’s the job most of the prisoners wanted and would come to fisticuffs over. By entering the hangar, those lucky men would enter a human environment where they wouldn’t have to wear their suits. Scientists would check the material in the bins, which took hours sometimes depending on the quality. After that, the full bins were secured to the drone ships, which could also take hours if the prisoners doing the securing took their sweet time. Of course, this extended waiting time meant a backlog at all stages of their line prior to the hangar, until the angry supervisors came by to rattle the laggards and got it all going again.

Because they could not talk, Len and Kyu went through a complex series of back and forth hand signals. The sorter was cleared out and ready to go. It was set to separate the poorer soil from the richer amounts of bauxite, haemitite and pentlandite, which would produce aluminum, iron and nickel, respectively. They had half a bin of material to go through from their last shift, and four empty bins sitting behind them waiting to be filled up. They checked the electric charge on the sorter, the oil in the gearbox and the ice that melted over the processor to keep it cool. Everything got a thumbs-up, until Kyu found a jagged rock stuck in the vehicle’s tire tread. He pried the rock out carefully, before it tore up the thick rubber the tire was made of any further.

Len went to fill the first of the buckets. He would dump them, they’d get sorted, and Kyu would watch what came out the other side. When Len got tired, they’d simply switch places. It would be a typical day for them, just like the last few days had been.

A supervisor came by after about three hours to check on them. All supervisors were hated men, even if they were nice guys. They were prisoners who’d been working on the asteroids for some time. For every day a supervisor worked, two days would be taken off their sentences, even if they’d committed heinous crimes in the past. Most of them were assholes that liked to lord it over the rest of them, but the rank and file hated them all, even the nice ones, because of the way their sentences were being reduced.

We need ice for the hydroponics gardens. The supervisor came to yell at them.

That was no problem. Kyu went to point at a bin that was two-thirds full of ice, which they’d been using to cool down the sorter. The supervisor took a good measure of what they had.

I need about half of that. The supervisor decided.

That’s when Len frowned. It was going to be a pain in the ass, because it meant they’d have to jump into the bin and hack the ice apart with a small pick-axe. All the broken chunks would go into a new bin.

Kyu pointed at the sorter and waved his hands to the sides.

Yes, turn off the sorter so you can do this. The supervisor nodded back. He looked at the two lazy bastards manning the bin collector. Those men had done nothing all day. Kyu, Len, I want you to push the bin into hydroponics. These other two shits are going to watch the sorter while you two are gone, and they’d better not fuck anything up!

Once their superior had walked off to berate the others, Len and Kyu glanced at one another. Pushing the bin was a pain on the uneven ground, at least until they got inside. After that, it was a breeze. Even better, they would have the chance to take their suits off because they would be in human environment. With half their shift already over, there was a good chance they wouldn’t have to go back outside that day.

Kyu was grinning, and after a moment, Len was grinning as well. It had been a while since they’d seen any women, but they were bound to catch an eyeful of them in the hydroponics area.

Since Kyu was the fresher of the two, he jumped into the bin with the small axe, while Len went to grab an empty bin from the bunch.

At a rough estimate, there were about two hundred people living on that asteroid, but they did not all live together. It was actually a big secret as to how many of them lived in which sectors, and what the civilian contractors did besides the mining. From what Len had been able to gather, the prisoners were kept in groups of twenty to twenty-five. This number included the supervisors. That was manageable enough for the five prison staff members that watched over them. He didn’t know how many groups of prisoners there were in total. Maybe they were the only bunch currently on QQ37 and the higher-ups had lied about the rest of it. Who knew?

Besides the prisoners there were a small number of scientists studying the material and grading it, and other bunches of people who maintained the energy to power the colony, to keep up the food production and to take care of the waste recycling.

Most of the time, prisoners were called into recycling for waste clean-up when something went wrong, like clearing out solids that had accidentally ended up in the biodegradable processors. That was a horribly smelling job, by the way. Because the prisoners went into that area so frequently, they could estimate that only four full-time engineers ran it.

The prisoners were never allowed into the energy production area. They didn’t even know what that area looked like; let alone how many technicians worked in it. If there was an administrative division in the colony, they’d never seen that either. Hydroponics, on the other hand, called the mining division for manual labor every so often. The reports from the prisoners who had been there indicated that there were multiple females, that they ranged in age from older to younger, and that the women outnumbered the men.

Len and Kyu took a good hour to get the necessary amount of ice into the rolling bin. They took another half hour to roll the bin over to the acclimatization chamber. The bin didn’t have wheels but ran instead on two long treads like a tank, which made the bin a bitch to turn in a tight corner. Before they entered the chamber, they cleaned the treads as best they could, so they wouldn’t leave tracks all over.

What is in the bin? A surveillance officer asked through a microphone, the moment the men sealed the chamber door behind them.

Kyu reached into the bin to pull out a chunk of ice. The officer cleared them to proceed, as it was not the usual time for any of them to be returning from the mines.

Two officers armed with electric stunners waited for them to come into human environment. One motioned the prisoners to the side, while the other peered into the bin to make sure it was filled only with ice.

Proceed. The officer told them.

Len and Kyu both checked the treads again for excess soil, before they each took a side and started pushing the bin out of the chamber. When the door closed up behind them, the prisoners removed their helmets. Their faces shone with sweat, and they knew they smelled bad, but at least they weren’t outside anymore.

Let’s get a move on. One officer motioned ahead with his stunner. We don’t want all that ice melted before it gets delivered.

The bins were leak-proof, and the people in hydroponics were going to use the water and not the ice, but apparently their guards still felt the need to bully them around. Len took one side, while Kyu went to push from the other. One guard walked ahead of them to warn off any passerby that the bin was coming. The second guard walked in back, to keep his eye on the smelly pushers.

Instead of heading down the corridor to the prisoner dormitories, the first guard used his access card to open up a new pathway. It was large enough for an Earth car to drive through easily, Len saw, or maybe for two bins to sit side by side. They pushed their burden down that corridor until the guard called out for them to stop. After using his card again, their escort took them into civilian population.

The lighting and walls were brighter here, almost white, contrasting with the dingy and darker gray they’d left behind. The prisoner section had light fixtures with burned out bulbs and walls with scuff marks, but this new area showed much better maintenance.

A guy could get snow blindness in here. Len joked to the guard behind them.

The officer didn’t reply. He looked like the sort who would rather stun him unconscious than talk to him, so Len decided to keep his mouth shut.

They did run into a minor obstacle when they came to an intersection. The bin’s treads had to make a near right angle turn, but they were never designed for such a maneuver. That meant Len had to push his end while Kyu held the other side still. It took them a couple of tries, but they managed to get the bin around the corner.

As the prisoners got the bin to face forward in the new route, Len glanced down another corridor. Two people in their twenties were standing there, both wearing silvery tunics with a company insignia over the left side of their chest. One was a black man, the other a white woman. For some reason, Len felt contempt at the black man, for simply standing next to that woman. He didn’t understand this feeling at all. He’d never been racist; that much was evident from him having taken an Asian as a lover. Also, he saw so very few women that he hardly thought about them at all.

Len scrutinized his angry reaction as he and Kyu resumed pushing the bin. No, he did not hate the black man or the white woman. He did not hate that they were standing together either. It was freedom, he decided. He hated that they could stand there freely, watching two lowly prisoners performing a menial task, while wardens and supervisors and guards were always watching them.

Kyu was in the mood to talk smack, as he turned his head toward the guard behind them. You’re the kind that likes spying on civilians, aren’t you? I know you wank off while watching women like that strip for bed, or when they’re in the shower. Or is it that Negro? Are you the kind who likes watching Negroes take off their clothes, when they think they’re undressing privately? Which one do you wank off to?

Len heard the guard chuckle. He didn’t want to look back in case the officer became angry enough stun them. If the man did hurt Kyu, Len would have no choice but to defend his lover, just as he would against any other attack.

Are you going to tell me? Kyu persisted.

I have a love bot. The guard revealed.

What is that like? Kyu asked. What does she look like? Is the bot a she?

This time, Len did look back. He saw the officer shrugging.

It looks like whoever I want it to. The man admitted. As long as I download a new program for it, anyway.

Come on. Tell us more about that. I’ve never had a love bot. What about you, Len?

No, never. Len shook his head.

It cost me three thousand digi-coins. The guard replied.

Holy fuck! You must get paid in gold, man! Kyu marveled.

No, no, just regular digi-coin. The guard said. The standard model comes in either a man’s body or a woman’s. Pretty generic, really. Black hair, black eyes, white skin, average body shape so it can conform to any Caucasoid race. The base price is bad enough, but where they really get you is the downloads. Those go from three hundred credits up to a thousand. I download a new program, the bot conforms to it in three to five days, and then the bot looks like somebody new.

A thousand coin to get your bot to look like somebody new? Kyu shook his head. Those must be the biggest celebrities in the galaxy to warrant such a high price.

Yes, they are. The officer confirmed. Celebrities go for around eight hundred. The most expensive makeovers are the customized programs. That’s where you might have a college sweetheart or a co-worker you have a crush on. The bot company will go through all sorts of social media and background info for that person, and it will design a unique personality program based on that person. That will cost a thousand digi-coins. I’m sorry, but I’m not spending that much on my bot. The lower priced programs are good enough for me.

And they walk and talk and everything? Kyu asked. You’re not going to tell us what your bot looks like, are you?

They do everything a real person does, except have temper tantrums and go to the toilet all day. The man replied. My bot will have dinner waiting for me when I go off-shift, cooked to perfection and just the way I want it. Sure, I’ll tell you what she looks like. Some guys, they want to change the way their bot looks every few months, but not me. All I did to the standard model was change her hair from black to brown and curly. I gave her C-cup breasts and added about twenty pounds to her weight. She’s no beauty queen, but who wants a fucking beauty queen? You see how those bitches act on the tele-vid. I don’t want a bitch that looks like that at home. Yeah, you could say that I’m happy with what I got.

I have you beat. Kyu joked.

How is that?

I’ve got Len here. He becomes whoever I want when I close my eyes, and I don’t have to pay a single coin for that!

Len was surprised to hear the guard laughing. Maybe the man wasn’t as big an asshole as he thought at first.

Stop! The guard up front said, just a few seconds later. For a moment, the haulers didn’t hear anything. They soon understood the guard was speaking with someone on an intercom. Hello? This is Officer Murphy. I have two workers here from mining division. They’ve brought over a bin half full of ice, as requested.

They didn’t hear the answer, as it came in a low voice.

Yes, they were both evaluated while in decompression. Murphy said. Neither of them has much of a violent history. They were sentenced for dissent and political crimes, but nothing like terrorism.

We’re not violent men. Len felt compelled to tell the guard standing behind them.

The guard up front appeared to be listening for about half a minute, before he called out, We’re entering hydroponics division now. You men are to be on your best behavior. Any problems will be reported to the wardens. Do you understand?

Yes, sir. Both Len and Kyu replied.

The prisoners heard the door beeping as the guard used his access card.

All right. Murphy informed them. There is a slight warp here on the floor, between the corridor and the next room. Be careful with that.

The pushers looked to either side, seeing how much clearance they had for the bin before they moved it forward. It was no problem getting the bin past that hump, as the bin had treads. A