Drone
Postscript
The author would like to extend thanks to everyone who commented on this story. Your criticisms and suggestions are appreciated. “Drone” started as an ASFR daydream composed with little thought and intended solely as a ‘flash’ on the MC Forum under the title “Needle and Haystack.” That original story is reproduced below for clarity and completeness. I had not intended to expand upon this little piece, but it seized my imagination, and I ran with it.
In the story’s chronology, the following would take place during section 4 and represents Peter’s point of view of the matter.
“Needle and Haystack”
The new Sovereign of Outer Alpha Centauri surveyed the vast room and its luscious contents. Confronted as far as the eye could see by beauty, he nonetheless managed only a grimace.
“Are you sure she’s here?” he asked his recently appointed chamberlain. Until very recently, they had been fighting in trenches together as more or less equals.
“Absolutely sure, sire?” the smaller man began. “No. Reasonably certain, yes. Nearly every pleasure drone from four planets ended up on this asteroid when the Solarian Empire collapsed.”
Standing in row after row before the two of them, and the Sovereign’s bodyguards, also recently members of his resistance force, like an army unto itself, squads, platoons, battalions, an entire legion of troops, were a fallen tyranny’s abandoned toys. More than ten thousand pleasure drones: beautiful, sparkling, soft, juicy, the dream of every red-blooded male within three parsecs, and, unfortunately, each and every one of them, identical right down to the core DNA.
The Sovereign had to fight to restrain his anger and sadness.
“The problem is a complex one, sire,” the chamberlain said. “While we can successfully unspool a woman from the drone casing, restoring both her mind and a reasonable facsimile of her original body, the process is both expensive and time-consuming.” He made a wide gesture with his arm to take in the deactivated and silent legion of drones. “Unspooling them all would be prohibitive. It would take years. Moreover, even if our government did have the time and money necessary to undertake such a venture, we still couldn’t do it.”
The chamberlain looked up and met his leader’s eyes, which were ready to blaze forth with righteous anger. He spoke quickly to forestall that outburst.
“Sire, your supporters would never permit it. Too many of them want pleasure drones of their own, and now that word of this storehouse has reached their ears, nearly every one of them will put in a claim or three.” He sighed. “Sire . . . Peter . . . like it or not, the drones are a commodity, and a valuable one.”
“It’s not fair,” the Sovereign muttered. “We fight a war for freedom, and now that we’ve won, the first thing we do is keep and sell the Empire’s slaves for our own. It’s worse than not fair.” He slammed his fist against the railing separating him from the first rank of the pretty, doll-like drones. They were unmoved by the demonstration.
“It’s a hypocrisy! A devilish hypocrisy!”
The chamberlain nodded. “Yes. And a necessary one.”
The Sovereign clenched his hands about the railing, as though he wanted to strangle it. The choice, or lack of choice, before him was evil. It was no less evil than what the Solarians had done in the first place, taking these women, young, old, pretty, homely, commoner, or aristocrat, by the hundreds sometime, or the thousand, and sealing them in skintight slave coatings, films which melted into their skin and transformed it, transformed them, into mindless, perfectly obedient sex toys. The skinsuits were identical, and their internal programming was remorseless, rewriting flesh, lengthening or shortening bone, erasing fingerprints, retina patterns, and all other forms of identification, even replacing the subject’s DNA with its own semi-organic, artificial material, all to achieve a singular standard of perfection.
The Solarians hadn’t kept records, damn them! They hadn’t even bothered to keep track of whom they had used from each colony or hijacked ship to make their grotesque fleshbots.
There was no one to talk to, no one he could torture the information out of, if necessary.
There was no one who could tell him which of these innumerable, identical drones was her!
Her!
“Perhaps if we’re lucky, sire,” the chamberlain said. “A random selection. Twenty, maybe, even fifty, if we are economical.” He touched the Sovereign’s shoulder. “It’s a chance, Peter. It’s a chance.”
But all the Sovereign could do was shake his head, uselessly, like an old, lonely man.