Warsinger James Baldwin (read this if TXT) 📖

get information out of him.” I watched the man weep and writhe on the floor. “There are two - and only two - exceptions to the 'never hit a bro in the nads' rule. I've been wanting to do that “That was for Suri.”

While Vash chuckled, I crouched down in front of Jacob and smacked his cheek to draw his attention back to me. He pulled his head back, preparing to spit.

I grabbed him by the jaw, keeping them shut, this time. “Rule one. You spit at me even once, and I’m going to cut your balls off. It’s taking me an effort of will to not do it already. You understand me?”

“Mm-hmm!” Jacob shrunk back, his hands jammed between his legs.

I let go of his mouth with a shove.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he whined. “When the Admins find out what you’re doing-!”

“We haven’t seen an Admin in three months. As for what you did wrong, we heard the way you talked to Suri in Dalim. I read your journals in Al-Asad. You aren't fooling anyone, least of all me. You know exactly what you did to deserve this. You just never thought you'd get caught.”

“She’s an NPC.” He glared at me with one eye, shaking with pain and petulant rage. “A fake person. As in, not real. And even if she is, she’s a crazy bitch. You saw her!”

“That ‘crazy bitch’ is the Countess of Myszno,” I replied. “And I’m the Count.”

He laughed nervously, staring at me in disbelief. “You’re fucking her? Dude, she’s not even human. She’s some data that we uploaded that got player privileges, somehow.”

“We’re all ‘some data someone uploaded’ here.” I stared back at him, unflinching. Jacob wasn't the worst person I'd ever seen in this position, but he was up there. “What’s your point?”

He spat. “Her data is from the Pacific Alliance!”

“So?” I said. “How does that make her not human?”

“I just told you! She's from the Pacific Alliance! They’re animals!”

“Ah, yes, I remember when I was deployed to Indonesia to go fight the cats and dogs threatening the UNAC.” I said. “What kind of animal are we talking about here? Frogs? Horses?”

He blanched. “YOU were... you fought them?”

“Private First Class, 72nd Battalion,” I said. “Five years, three tours, and only two rotations.”

Jacob's big brown eyes grew even wider. “A conscript?”

“Yeah. Like almost everyone other than draft-dodging creeps like you.”

He shook his head, struggling to sit upright. “No no no! I-I wasn't conscripted. I-I had an essential j-job. My brother, Jeremy... my brother was in the 72nd.”

He trailed off on the last words, and looked down.

“So?” I said.

“They murdered him,” he muttered. “The Pacific Alliance captured Jeremy's unit. He died in a POW camp. Tortured to death.”

“So you think it’s okay to torture captured people as long as they’re not your family? Got it.”

“She was one of them,” Jacob said sullenly.

“One of the soldiers who tortured your brother?”

“How the hell would I know!” He scowled. “I don't know! Maybe she was! She wasn't even human... she was something they bred in a lab. That's what Nick said, anyway.”

I shook my head. “You have no way of knowing that.”

“Nick knows.” Jacob wouldn't meet my eyes now. He looked everywhere but me and Vash. “Nick was a conscript, too. He worked in some I.T. intelligence role in Alaska, and while he was there, he ripped copies of some POW test data. He said that soldiers had found a huge archive of rips in one of the death camps they seized. Most of it was from our side, you know, the UNAC. But some of them were rips from Pacific Alliance soldiers. They use… used… them, for a whole bunch of different experiments.”

Damn. The military kept some nasty secrets, but... “Why the fuck would Nicolas risk something like that?”

“That dataset was used for like... testing V.R. interrogation algorithms and shit. He got a copy of it because, umm...”

I tapped a foot.

“Because it was one of the toughest datasets in the tests,” he admitted. “And he was b-bored. He’s had a lot of different playmates in Al-Asad, so he wanted a challenge. So he like... cleaned the data... and combined it with a clone of that bitch queen character, Sachara. H-He was a S-Senior Dev and we were p-part of the ATHENA Team, the character database team, so he tweaked Suri's data so she'd be like, you know...”

I shook my head and raised my eyebrows at him.

“Sexy,” he admitted.

Vash drew a sharp breath and turned away to mask his disgust. I didn't bother.

“Nick's a psycho, man.” Jacob licked his lip. His face was covered in sweat, and his nose ran freely. “You don't know how much of a psycho he is. He stole the brain rips because he really doesn't give a fuck about anyone or anything. He cached those P.K weapons. They’re like a temp admin thing, something we used during alpha testing to create ghost characters and then delete them off the map. When he told me about this, I-I didn't know he’d use them on Suri-”

“Bullshit.” I looked down at him. “You had some fucked-up fantasy you wanted to act out, so you convinced yourself Suri isn't a real human being and tried to get rid of her so you could pretend there were no consequences. Well, they do. She doesn't remember Earth, or anything she might have done during the War. But she sure as hell remembers you, and she's going to have to live with that for the rest of her life.”

“She's not real,” he muttered. “None of this is real. I-It's just a-”

Vash strode up and planted his boot right between his legs a second time.

“ARRGH! What the- IEEEEE!” Jacob screamed as Vash ground the cleats in, hard.

“Certainly feels real to me,” the monk remarked, pushing back. “What do you think?”

Jacob shrimped up, then retched onto the flagstones.

“The day I start caring about your sob story is the day you work out that Suri is a real human being.” I crouched