Bound for the Stars chapter 2

         

Chapter 2

It did not take long for the aliens to finish herding in the stragglers, by which point things had definitely gotten cozier in the two sections which now held all the people. Alex remained on the edge of the men's cordon, right next to the line floating above the ground. He felt certain that he would not be able to cross that line, but he had no idea how the aliens intended to prevent it, and that only poured fuel on the small part of him that felt an urge to try. To spare himself the temptation, he looked out across the room at the two yellow cordons.

One of them--the one he and Miranda had started in--was completely empty, but the other surprisingly wasn't. There were no people in it anymore, yet it had become filled quite densely with what looked like large metal boxes, situated end-to-end in a way that loosely resembled cubicles, except these were fully enclosed. The boxes must have been put there at some point during his and Miranda's feeble attempt at defiance, because he was sure they had not been there when he'd first dropped down--

"Attention!"

The word boomed through the chamber, squashing Alex's thought process and ringing in his ears as if it had been blasted directly into his ear canals by two invisible loudspeakers.

"We are require a volunteer from the males!"

For the first time, the words struck Alex harder than the volume. Volunteer for what? was his first thought, followed by: Does it matter?

If the aliens were going to kill them, surely they would have just done it? Asking for a volunteer confirmed, in his mind, what he'd already suspected: they had something else planned. Whatever it was, he was sure it wouldn't be pleasant, but he reasoned the agony of waiting was likely to outweigh any hardships the aliens could throw at him--the worse the hardship, the worse the waiting, especially if he would be forced to endure the hardship eventually regardless...and doubly especially if he would have to watch the others who went before him, both of which scenarios seemed likely here. He glanced around. No one else looked inclined to volunteer, but he knew time was limited. Worse than anything would be deciding to volunteer only for someone else to beat him to the mark. Ever the one to prefer to just get things over with, he opened his mouth...

...but failed to think of a way to articulate the decision, so he raised his hand and stepped forward. His feet passed smoothly through the floating line, encountering no resistance.

Everyone turned to leer at him, alien and human alike. He looked at the closest alien and muttered, "I'll do it," which was the best he could manage when it came to speech.

Several of the smaller aliens closed in. One of them directed him, first into the middle of the corridor that separated the sections and then along it. Alex tremulously followed its beckoning. A Slicer swiftly arrived to escort him properly, possibly questioning whether he could make it under his own power. It was right to be skeptical. Alex was so busy grappling with his own thoughts that walking in a straight line was not a trivial endeavor. He'd reasoned his decision through--or he thought he had--yet he was already questioning whether it might have been wiser after all to wait for more information. Perhaps they would continue asking for volunteers...if he could see what he would have to do first...or what if not everyone would have to go at all? Waiting didn't sound so bad now.

It was a dazed version of himself that the aliens led over to one of the yellow-bounded sections of the room, the one with the rows of metal boxes. These were revealed up close not to be completely enclosed, possessing a single, small opening in the side, and Alex was ushered into one, after which he began what was clearly some sort of test. First, he was made to do a series of physical exercises, which he knew he did not do well on. They were not difficult per se, but the aliens appeared to be more interested in testing endurance than raw strength, and stamina was not something Alex had ever had in abundance.

Following was a series of logic puzzles, delivered via projection. The projections manifested as semi-translucent three-dimensional images, floating in the air just like the lines outside. Alex had to physically interact with these puzzles to solve them. He would touch the space they occupied, moving pieces into place, identifying relevant information and filtering out noise, brushing it aside with the flick of a finger. The projections always reacted to his touch, though Alex never felt anything more than a wisp of moving air.

He thought he did better at the puzzles. There were many of them, delivered one at a time and varying in both difficulty and complexity, but the physical exercise had at least helped Alex clear his mind, which enabled him to focus better on problem solving. He completed this section quickly and was reasonably confident that his solutions were correct...he was limited to saying 'reasonably confident,' because the aliens provided no feedback. In fact, they did not once address him throughout the entire process--verbally or visually--not even to give instruction. Something in the testing cube would always change in such a way that it became self-evident what he was supposed to do. The floor started moving like a treadmill when they wanted him to jog; a metal bar emerged over his head, which he assumed he was supposed to use to do pull-ups (he wasn't able to even do one); all of the exercises were like that, as well as the puzzles. Figuring out what he was actually supposed to do seemed to be part of the test.

After the puzzles, the side of the box--which had closed during his trial--reopened, and Alex was led out and over to the remaining empty section of the room. This must be where those who had already undergone the trial were supposed to wait for the rest of the group to go, although that looked like it was going to take a while. The aliens were no longer asking for volunteers; they simply pulled people out of the crowd as convenient, regardless of willingness, and escorted them over as boxes became available. Even so, there must have been several thousand men in that cordon, perhaps as many as ten thousand, and that was to say nothing of the women, whom the aliens had not yet started on. Presumably, they would go after the men--perhaps they were to be given different tests, which was why the aliens had separated them? The upside, for Alex at least, was that he had already gone. He felt little in the way of nerves or apprehension; now it was boredom that he feared.

But--not being able to see what was going on inside the boxes--watching the other men being tested proved to be a dull exercise, and Alex's attention rapidly drifted back to the crowd of women, who remained waiting in the section adjacent to him, now adjacent on his other side, still separated by a small corridor. His eyes wandered across the group, again trying to spot Miranda, and in the meantime taking note of those whom he could see. Some garnered more notes than others. A lot of them, having clearly found the enclosed boxes to be equally dull, were watching him back...him and the other men that soon started filtering in to join him.

Alex locked eyes with many of the women. Most simply looked afraid--as indeed did a lot of the men--and he knew what they were thinking. Others looked glazed or in shock, and he could guess well enough what they were thinking too, but then there were others still whose expressions were totally inscrutable. These were the ones Alex's gaze returned to the most, because they could have been thinking anything, and trying to guess what was the most exciting activity he could come up with to pass the time. That was excepting, obviously, the vast array of topics concerning what had happened to Earth over the past 12 hours, all ripe for consideration yet each as unsavory as the next. Alex knew there was nothing to be gained by pondering them except misery and despair, and he had made a conscious decision to avoid it as much as possible. It was much more comfortable to look past the overarching problems and focus on his immediate situation.

But in his immediate situation, there was still only so long that staring at strangers could hold his attention. Surely over an hour had passed since he finished testing, but there came a point when there was simply no one left to look at whom he hadn't already looked at more than he cared to. It wasn't like the cordon was filled with young attractive women for his eyes to feast on. There were some, to be sure, but by and large they were just ordinary people--the men too--young and old, some thin, more not. He didn't see anyone younger than a teenager, but he also didn't see anyone truly elderly. The males ranged in age mostly from late-teens to mid-forties, with a few into their fifties and a handful that might have been older; he didn't see anyone that he would have described as feeble. All of them looked to have finished puberty, which was not necessarily true of the females, who looked younger on average: mid-teens to late thirties, with a few perhaps into their forties, but none who looked older than that.

Based on their dress, Alex guessed that most of the people in this group being sorted had, like himself, been taken from the city's central business district. Most everyone wore suits or nice dresses, or even if they were wearing something more casual, they were still smart looking...well, Alex imagined they used to be; people were rather less smart looking now than they probably once were. They had been held in captivity for the better part of a day by this point, as best Alex could reckon, and they looked the part. Appearances were dirty and disheveled, and after so much time spent here standing and waiting, pretty much everyone looked glazed. Alex was so glad he had gone first.

Throughout this period, the aliens--both species--devoted themselves tirelessly to escorting men to and from the testing cubes, and as time went on Alex found himself increasingly focusing on them instead. He was particularly drawn to the smaller ones, because the more he watched them the more it struck him that they truly did not seem very intelligent. They appeared to prefer being proactive, and could move with incredible speed and precision when they wanted to, but when forced to react to the actions of others, they looked more than a little slow. He watched one of them attempt to shock someone for refusing to come with it; the move was telegraphed, and the person stepped out of the way and then grabbed the shock rod around the mid-point, which notably did not cause them to be shocked. The alien made no attempt to prevent this, in fact it did not react at all, but a Slicer arrived to intervene before the situation could develop further.

On the reverse side, Alex saw one instance where a smaller alien pointed its shock rod at a person, selecting them, and that person jumped out of the group and headed for the testing cubes so fast that the alien looked as though it moved in slow motion. It paused for a full two seconds, staring after the person in very much the same way that the alien that had shocked Alex awake had done, while again the shock rod remained pointed stupidly at the place where the person had been. It was clear that Alex's experience had not been an anomaly.

In the face of a fresh mystery, Alex's focus redoubled, because this was simply not what he would have expected from members of such an advanced civilization, and he spent the next while intensely scrutinizing the behavior of the smaller aliens. He barely noticed the people, the men the aliens were interacting with, but he did sometimes glance at them, and on one such occasion he was forced to do a double take, for the person the alien had pointed its shock rod at and started escorting was none other than Jonathan Sparks.

Whatever important business Jonathan had gone off to, Alex was betting he hadn't accomplished it, because Jonathan did not look happy. He shuffled sulkily after the alien, looking as though he would like nothing more than to attack it. And then, it seemed, he gave in to that temptation.

He wound back and punched the creature as hard as he could right on its head. It never reacted, but collapsed, limp. Jonathan leaned down to pick up its shock rod, shouting at those around him to follow his example and rebel.

No one did.

Alex never even considered it. Aside from his targeted resentment of the man calling for aid, the room was filled with Slicers, and in the extremely unlikely event that the humans managed to defeat these, what would that accomplish? Even assuming they were able to find a way to control the tiles in order to leave this room--which seemed almost as unlikely as being able to overpower the aliens at all--the amount of things that would need to go right from there to allow them to leave the ship was so great that Alex could scarcely conceive of it...and what would they do then? Go back to Earth? Earth was overrun by an alien invasion. Actually taking control of the mothership seemed just as laughable.

The best possible outcome was likely that the humans would just be overpowered and taken back here to finish testing without further punishment. But what if there was a punishment, or what if they were all summarily doomed to whatever fate would normally befall only those who tested poorly? A portion of the humans might be killed in the attempt, perhaps, or may get the chance to kill themselves, which some might consider an escape, but Alex was not such a person, and he suspected it would never work as envisioned no matter what. This was an alien ship; they had no idea what sorts of weapons or security measures it might possess, but based on his experience so far, Alex was inclined to assume it would possess mechanisms for both that he could never have anticipated in his wildest dreams. He could see only one conclusion: the humans could not win, and he'd already established that he could not help Miranda from the grave. The odds he would be able to help her were low enough already, no reason to willfully do something to reduce them further. For now, the goal was simply to survive...and hope he would get a chance to redeem himself.

Whether other people considered the matter as thoroughly as Alex was unclear, but regardless Jonathan's rebellion remained a solo act, and Slicers hurriedly pressed in towards him. He was able to grasp and lift the shock rod, but with no support and only the rod for defense he was easily subdued. He did manage to land a single strike on one of the Slicers, but the rod had no effect on them, who again declined to kill someone who resisted, though they easily could have. Basically, it went exactly as Alex had expected, and he did not even slightly regret his decision not to help...not that it had been much of a decision.

All movement within the room had largely adjourned during the excitement, but the moment it was done the aliens returned to escorting males to and from the testing cordon, and activity returned to pre-revolution levels. Meanwhile, those nearby were left to watch as the limp bodies of Jonathan and the alien he had struck were hauled off, taken to the end of a corridor and out of sight--probably out of the chamber. The alien looked dead, but Jonathan was definitely still alive.

Afterward, the remainder of the males' testing proceeded uneventfully, and noticeably more smoothly than it had before. There was a lot less resistance, and the aliens had to spend less time fighting people's reluctance. Alex returned to observing the smaller species, whose apparent slowness was even more glaring in the face of much increased cooperation. They were passive in the extreme, always requiring several moments to process anything unexpected. The Slicers were better in this regard, but when Alex's interest inevitably shifted to them, he noted that they too looked to suffer from many of the same shortcomings. They excelled at breaking up resistance and intervening in a timely fashion whenever the smaller aliens encountered opposition, and they were undeniably better at encouraging cooperation, if only by sheer bearing, but when it came to such menial tasks as escorting the comparatively puny humans to and from testing, they too appeared slow. They were better at hiding it--or perhaps their imposing stature made Alex less inclined to be critical--but there was definitely still a delay whenever a Slicer was forced to react to a human being more cooperative than expected.

Eventually, after what must have been upwards of four or five hours total, the males had migrated in their entirety from their starting pen to the one that had initially been empty. Alex expected the women to be tested next (a prospect he was not looking forward to, given how long the men had taken), but it seemed the aliens wished to deal with Jonathan first while everyone was free to watch.

The now-empty quarter of the room which had originally housed the males was removed, and the boundaries demarking the two currently occupied cordons shifted to fill the space, the humans within forced to move as well so as to remain in the lines. Jonathan then reappeared, lifted into the corner of the chamber where the corridor between the two adjusted pens now ended; a smaller alien accompanied him. Other aliens assembled around them from within the room, and they marched in formation up the corridor. One of the smaller aliens--the same one that had risen up with Jonathan, if Alex was not mistaken--led the procession. Jonathan followed. They made him walk under his own power, but he was guarded by no less than four Slicers arranged diagonally around him, with more of the smaller aliens scattered about and behind. The group did not stop until Jonathan was positioned precisely in the center of the room. There was no announcement. Jonathan was simply levitated high off the ground, ensuring everyone could see him.

An image appeared even higher, directly above him. It was a 3D projection, much like those used during the testing, but larger, many times life size. The projection lasted only a few seconds, replaying Jonathan's strike on the alien and cutting after the alien crumpled, before Jonathan had even started to pick up the fallen shock rod and well before the arrival of any Slicers.

Then, one of the real Slicers below walked forward. There was a flash of metal, and the room was pierced by a hideous scream. The Slicer had cut off one of Jonathan's arms near the shoulder. His body jerked in midair, no longer supported by that arm's wrist restraint, and he tilted and wobbled as he rebalanced under the remaining arm. Blood spurted, vanishing on contact with the pristine floor.

Jonathan continued to vocalize his suffering, while the Slicer leisurely walked to his other side. There was a second flash, and Jonathan's body jerked again. The screaming stopped abruptly as Jonathan appeared to gag, and it took Alex a moment to realize why. Although neither of Jonathan's wrists were still attached to their owner, the aliens had installed an additional metal band around his neck, and this was now the only thing holding him upright. Without it, he certainly would have flipped over to hang from his hips, but as it was he remained aloft, choking and sputtering. But the aliens were not done.

Another flash of metal, and one of Jonathan's legs fell to the floor. A resumed scream perforated the room, making itself heard even through his constrained airway. Torrents of blood streamed from the stumps of Jonathan's fallen appendages, while the Slicer moved and struck again. His other leg fell, leaving him limbless, convulsing, visibly struggling for breath, and also visibly in more pain than Alex cared to comprehend. The aliens allowed Jonathan to remain in this state for a solid minute, ending it only when he was in danger of passing out.

They could have had a Slicer cut off his head, but they opted for a more visceral approach. Jonathan's body--or what was left of it--appeared to tense, the metal band around his neck being pulled upward while the implants on his hips were simultaneously pushed downward, all by invisible forces as always. Jonathan made a dreadful rasping noise, and then his head started to detach upward from his torso. There was a huge outpouring of blood and gore as the last of his life leaked out of him, the skin of his neck tearing to leave muscles and tendons and veins visible underneath. These too stretched until they snapped in turn, and his head gruesomely lifted free of his now lifeless body.

The screams had long since ventured into the crowd by now, particularly audible from the women's half of the room, but the men were far from silent. Alex did not contribute to the outcry. Certainly, no one deserved to die like that, no matter how much Alex had despised them. It was horrible, he should feel bad for having watched it...so why didn't he? Alex felt nothing. He continued staring at the mutilated remnants of his former boss, the limbless torso suspended upside-down while the head floated separately a little ways higher. The severed limbs lay scattered on the ground below. Blood had been absorbed by the floor, but solid material remained, the limbs interspersed with bits of organ and flesh, all laying as if naked, dispossessed of their normal cloak of red. Somehow, that made the already horrific sight look even worse, and Alex tried with all his might to summon the will to feel sympathy...or revulsion...anything, but the emotions would not come. He was quite unable to pretend--even to himself--to grieve the death of Jonathan Sparks. Some people weren't worth mourning for.

Yet, Alex found he had a hard time convincing himself that Jonathan was one of those people. Jonathan may have been a prick, but no one had ever accused him of being a murderer or a child molester...something truly sinister. He had never, to the best of Alex's knowledge, even so much as been accused of unwanted sexual advances towards his female employees. He was by all accounts a devoted family man outside of the workplace, who was deeply committed to his wife. So what did it mean that Alex couldn't mourn him? Should that be held against him, or against Alex? Alex wasn't sure. And it bothered him that he wasn't sure.

Alex's thought process was cut off as speech erupted in his ears. One of the floor tiles had risen upward to form a sort of dais, on which stood one of the smaller aliens. This alien seemed to be the one addressing them.

"We are finished with the evaluation! Male slaves will to be ordered based on performance!"

Why do they make it so lou--Alex began, but then the rest of the announcement hit him.

Slaves.

His mind fixated on the word, usurping his attention for anything else. So that's what was to become of them.

Alex had spent much time in the past day pondering why: Why had the aliens come? It had seemed strange to him that they should come in such overwhelming force, their invasion so organized and determined. He had been shown a glimpse of the invasion's true extent as his shuttle rose and departed the atmosphere. His city had not been the only one targeted, not even close. The planet and the space surrounding it had been swarming with ships--mostly shuttles, but there were some larger ships too. It looked as though every major population center on the planet had been attacked in exactly the same way at almost exactly the same time.

Yet Earth had no special abundance of resources; there were not, as far as Alex knew, any minerals present in the whole solar system which had not been observed in far greater quantities elsewhere. It also seemed unlikely the aliens were here for scientific purposes. If they wished only to observe and study, why invade at all? They could just sit back and watch, and people's behavior would likely not even be tarnished by the knowledge of their presence, so long as they were careful. There had seemed to be only one conclusion. Even before now, Alex could think of nothing else: The aliens were here for us, for humanity as a whole--not to observe, but to capture and collect. It was the only thing special the solar system had to offer. They had wiped out humanity's entire civilization, destroyed their history and culture and monuments, in order that they could capture and enslave the human race, for purposes still unknown. Just thinking about it, Alex felt in danger of becoming sick.

The aliens didn't notice. Within seconds, there was another announcement.

"Next, males will choose cellmates for the upcoming journey from among the females, based on performance! Best performers will select multiple!"

After a pause, the announcement added, "Males to stand on your number."

Both of Alex's bracelets briefly trembled, and, looking at one of them, he saw that some kind of symbol had appeared on it:





[The symbol would go here. It has been created, but I'm not sure how to add it.]





Is that a number? he thought. It looked more like a paragraph out of a classified CIA document. Alex stared at it, then checked his other bracelet. It was the same.

Lowering his arms, Alex saw that more symbols, similar in form, had appeared on a large number of tiles. Every affected tile hosted two symbols, projected flat above the ground just like the lines, floating an inch or two above the surface. Each symbol was large enough to take up its whole half of the square tile. The occupied tiles zigged and zagged across the entirety of the men's cordon, from one boundary line to the other and back. There was definitely a pattern to the symbols, in that adjacent ones looked similar, but now there was too much movement for Alex to study the symbols more closely, figure out the progression. From what he could see, it looked like the line of symbols started in the center of the room, just on the inner edge of the cordon line right at the intersection of the boundaries to the three sections, and from there it snaked back and forth until it reached the outer walls of the chamber, ending in the very back corner.

Alex took a last look around, then sighed. There was nothing for it but to just find the symbol that matched his...unless he wanted to share a fate with Jonathan, an unappealing prospect for several reasons. Alex bumped and pushed his way towards the center of the cordon, hoping he would have been able to figure out the pattern well enough by then to know which way to go from there. It transpired that he was even more fortunate than that, for he stumbled into his own symbol while still trying to reach the middle. He didn't literally walk over it, but he caught a glimpse of it through a brief gap in the multitude of legs ahead of him. He hurried forward, and must have been one of the very first of the males in the whole group to find his position.

With that accomplished, he found that he no longer cared very much about the symbols or their pattern, and his mind turned to the reason, stated by the aliens, that they were being put in order. So the men were going to be choosing female cellmates? This opened up a whole host of questions.

It explained why the women weren't being tested. There looked to be about as many of them as there were men--maybe a little less, but only a little--and Alex had questioned when the aliens were going to get to them. Surely the aliens hadn't forgotten about them? A lot of women had been thinking along the same lines, and voicing their objections while Alex was busy grappling with the word 'slaves,' but here was the reason. The women's performance did not matter, not for what the aliens had planned...aliens who clearly did not subscribe to the principles of gender equality. Alex supposed he was not particularly surprised that males and females would be treated differently, but the brazenness of it, the naked unfairness...that came as a shock.

Trying as ever to avoid the dark allure of larger topics (many new ones having been brought to his attention since the testing), Alex dedicated his thoughts to the question of who he would get. Picking Miranda would be the dream obviously, although he knew it was unlikely to work out that perfectly. He assumed he would be living with the girl--the use of the term cellmate did seem to carry that implication--and the term further implied that it would be alone in a confined space, so hopefully he'd at least be able to get someone he could get along with. He wouldn't want to end up spending all of his time fighting with his roommate...or cellmate, or whatever. He wondered briefly how the aliens were going to determine the order in which the men picked, but then his eyes once more found the line of symbols-which-were-apparently-numbers on the floor. Right, he thought, the aliens said 'based on performance', and now they're ordering us into a numbered line...

Ok, so dreams of a charming beauty to spend his time with were probably dashed, but that didn't mean he couldn't still get someone agreeable. Except...then he recalled something else the aliens had said, and he switched to a different question: Would he be able to get someone at all? As he'd already noted, there appeared to be roughly equal numbers of men and women in this chamber, more men if anything, and he assumed that they would be picking only from the women here. But the aliens had said that top performers would select multiple. If some men were going to get multiple women, that would implicitly mean that other men would be left without. Had Alex done well enough to get anyone? Looking around--trying to gauge his position--he was not at all confident that he had. He was definitely in the back half of the winding line...fairly comfortably by his estimate; closer to the two thirds mark. How many extra women would the top performers get? If the aliens gave one extra to the top quarter of men, then the bottom quarter would get no one, and it would not take much more before the cutoff for those who were left out would start to get very close to Alex's own estimated position.

Suddenly, the women's situation didn't seem so bad. Sure, they wouldn't get to choose who they were paired with, but at least they should all be theoretically guaranteed to get someone. Alex understood now why Miranda had wanted to stay with him. Faced with the prospect of being alone, he would have happily taken any woman, whether he got to choose her or not. Even if the roles were reversed, and the women were choosing the men, Alex would have still accepted that gladly if the alternative was isolation. That would naturally require that a woman existed who was willing to pick Alex--a statement Alex could not so far contradict with his own experience--but miracles were always possible. If all the men were going to be picked eventually (as was presumably the case with the women here), then there must come a point where Alex was the best one left...even if it was because he was the only one left.

Of course, this was all assuming that the picks would be based on complete information, but realistically that was pretty unlikely. The aliens would surely want to streamline the selection, which allowing the opportunity for the men to speak to the women and learn personalities would inhibit. And with that being the case, the picks were obviously going to be based on looks, which would radically taint the whole process, but what else would people use at that point? There would be a broad correlation between attractiveness and pick order (which should apply to both genders, since the men who had done the best in testing were likely to be among the most desirable of their sex), but there would be no regard for compatibility or forms of appeal other than beauty. Happiness would be determined by luck of the draw. In truth, it did not seem so different from being random.

         

***

Considering how long the testing had taken, the process of sorting the men into a line passed surprisingly quickly. The aliens had been clever. They could have come into the cordon and manually arranged the humans into the desired order, but why do that when you can make the humans order themselves? It was not instantaneous: Given how many men there were, and the fact that each of them had only an unexplained symbol to match--one they had only just seen for the first time and which didn't even leave them with an approximation as to where they should start looking--it was still a decent while before all of the males were in position. But, with each person searching for their own number-symbol and only their own number-symbol--and motivated to do so by having just been given a demonstration of what could happen to dissenters--the process took astonishingly little time, all things considered. The crowd compacted to squeeze onto the one tile thick swerving track, their personal space migrating into the gaps between the snaking arms to make room for two people per tile, but eventually all of the men were standing in a neat, twisting line that corresponded exactly with the marked squares.

With everyone in order, Alex's position was confirmed: definitely in the back half, not by a huge amount, but comfortably enough that it was certain. He was also near the middle from side to side within the cordoned area, although that part was purely by chance. Throughout the whole testing process, Alex had managed to stay on the edge of the cordons, which had afforded him a clear view of the action, but now he had no such luxury. Over the heads of the people coiled in front of him, he could barely see the single smaller alien standing on its raised tile in the center of the chamber--with Jonathan's dismembered remains floating in space next to it. Alex's view of the other aliens in the center, as well as of the women's cordon, was obscured entirely. Something was going on in the women's cordon. Many shrill protests were emanating from that direction, and some of the men in front were reacting dramatically and making exclamations, but the exact utterances were lost amongst each other. Alex had no idea what was happening, but whatever it was it dragged on well after the men had finished ordering. Finally, there was another announcement:

"Males will now choose in order, starting with 1! Only the superior half are get selections! Numbers 1-40 are get four selections, 41-400 are get three selections, 401-10000 are get two selections, 10001-22000 are get one selection!"

Yep, Alex thought glumly, superior half. He hadn't missed it by a lot, but he had missed it; he wasn't going to get anyone. He heaved a deep sigh and stared at his shoes. Perhaps he would still be quartered with other men, so at least he wouldn't be entirely deprived of human contact? In some ways that might actually be better--it would eliminate the possibility of sexual tension, which Alex knew he would do a poor job of handling, regardless of the chances of it amounting to romance (which themselves seemed negligible given the circumstances)--but he refused to let himself hope for it. He would not set himself up to be disappointed.

He also had time to think--22000? Does that mean there are 44000 men in here? There were definitely a lot, but he wouldn't have guessed that many--before the announcement continued:

"However, because he volunteered to be the first tested, number 26130 will get 1 additional selection and will choose first!"

Alex's heart skipped a beat. Surely that couldn't refer to him, could it? He had been the one to volunteer...the only one, as far as he knew. He frantically re-checked his wrists: They still bore the same symbol. Did that mean 26130? A slicer was pushing its way through the men, heading straight towards him. The line immediately in front of him made way to let it through, after which the Slicer stopped...and began guiding Alex back up to the front.

It was him.

He couldn't believe it. When he'd volunteered, he'd assumed he was volunteering for something unpleasant. Admittedly, he hadn't considered very thoroughly what that might have been, but there had always been that underlying assumption. Except as it turned out, the testing hadn't been that bad, and now the aliens were rewarding him on top of it? This was better than he could have ever hoped for, and he knew of course who he was going to pick.

When Alex reached the front boundary of the men's cordon, the Slicer led him straight across the line, and seeing the women supplied Alex with a guess as to what the aliens had been doing there. All of the women were naked--every single one--which would also explain the exclamations he'd heard from both the women and the watching men.

Another announcement blared.

"Choose a cellmate by touching her!"

The Slicer then stepped aside, and the crowd of women parted as Alex approached alone. Most turned to continue facing him as he penetrated the group, some trying to cover their charms from him, while others prioritized obstructing the view of the rest of the men still behind, but Alex didn't see anyone who looked like they wanted him to choose them. Some even continued facing those other men, possibly hoping that if they ignored Alex, he might return the favor.

He spared second glances for a few, but mostly he just kept walking. He knew who he was looking for. Upon finally finding Miranda, she recoiled, looking mortified. Her arms were plastered across her front and her expression was a portrait of indignity, but Alex thought little of it. This was the right thing to do. He was fulfilling his vows--all of them, the one he'd made to Jonathan a lifetime ago as well as the ones he'd made to himself. He had been gifted a second chance to protect her, and he was absolutely not going to waste it.

His face breaking into a broad grin, he reached out and took Miranda's hand.