Round 11, Part Two [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray]

Little Black Stray
In a world where violent male offenders are sent to labor camps on the remote prison planet, one crew of hardened men finds something impossible: a young woman in tattered clothes, mute and frightened. A small group protect and feed her, keeping her out of sight of the guards and away from those who would use her mercilessly. As she gains in strength it seems that she has an agenda--and the truth of what she was doing on a world where no women stepped before might be a big enough secret to shatter the whole planet of forced labor.

Character Sketch: John "Griff" Nakano
Relationship to Story: Protagonist

My name is John Nakano, but my Jukes call me Griff. It's an inside joke I'm not privy to. My life was pretty cozy up until my dad died, and then suddenly we were poor. I had family to feed, so I joined the army, and that was fine for awhile. When I got out of the army and found nobody hiring, I offered my skills to the highest bidder. I killed seventeen people for money before I was caught. I wasn't really caught, of course. I was just sold off to the highest bidder.

I am a murderer, and that's why I'm here. I'm stationed on XAE7809, a planet in the Corinthian system. Every decade or so, one of the prefectures gets their panties in a bunch and it's war. They pick some uninhabited planet to get fucked up, because that's more civilized, of course. This time, 09 drew the golden ticket, and so they fight and fight and drop bombs and plant mines and lots of people on both sides die. Then, when everyone's smiling again and the generals are shaking hands and the planet has cooled down, us Jukes go down and clean that shit up. And when it's done, it's onto the next one. We're free to go once we've served five years. I heard of a guy that made it to three.

The men around me are dangerous. Serial killers, schizophrenic maniacs, guys with bad impulse control who are just wound too tight. I'm not crazy. When I killed, I was always calm and in control. I would never, ever let my emotions spill out and affect my work. It was just work to me. I never thought of work as something that was a large part of me. My father was the same; he was able to put his work -- he was a doctor -- in some kind of compartment in his head, and never let whatever happened there at the hospital impact his family. If it wasn't for the medical books and charts and all that stuff, we wouldn't have even known what he did for a living.

Like every other Juke here, I got a chip in my brain. Boss tells me where to go, what to do, how to do it. If I don't know how to do something, Boss downloads it from a satellite and tells me. If I say I don't want to do it, Boss encourages me to do it anyway by tapping directly into my nervous system and fingering my pain receptors. Boss can't kill me, though -- there's a law against that. The Jellicoe Act. They can make you suction up chemical waste that will slough your skin right off, they can make you clean up a mine field, but they can't kill you with the press of a button. Sometimes, though, guys just drop on the job, and given the stress, it's probably natural. Still, you have to wonder.

The Jukes take care of themselves. Other than Boss's voice in our heads, we don't see anybody else, not even other teams of Jukes. There's about fifty of us in a team, and we all live inside Big Mama. Big Mama is our home on wheels. She's mostly automated, with a little help from Boss on high. Big Mama feeds us, bathes us, and puts us to sleep. She even jacks us off and relieves some of that tension. Big Mama also has a program that condenses a full night's sleep into a couple hours, because Boss always has work for us. But other than that, a team's on their own. They make their own rules, and they enforce them. There are always problems, but it usually works -- your fellow Juke is your only chance of making the five.

And I'm going to make the five. When you do your five, you're considered dead until you come back. I have to get back. My family's there. I haven't seen them or heard from them in almost two years. I have to show them I'm alive. I have to be there for them. I have to pay for these five years.