Page 3 of Spawn

"Get one roll of turf into the collection bin in the airlock and report back to me for your next task," I said, eyeing the mutated kale. I couldn't wait to get the safer plants into my kitchen and start working with them, though Sara insisted they would have to go through decontamination and be broken down into usable materials. There had to be at least one ingredient I could use as-is without removing additional toxins or heavy metals.

All I had to do was find it.

"This is just like the episode where Garlithian has to infiltrate a penal colony and ends up being assigned to work on a farm where he meets the female of the episode who is regularly beaten to unconsciousness by the overseer for failing to meet quota," Sherlock said.

I crouched down in front of the kale, pointed the scanner at it, and didn't bother interrupting him this time. Now that we both had our tasks, I didn't mind the chatter. It was only a problem if it interrupted figuring out what to do next.

"If she is regularly beaten unconscious, how is she supposed to work and meet a quota?" I asked, engaging with him on what was clearly his favorite subject. "Sounds like bad management. Unhappy, stressed, and overworked employees cost more than they make."

Edible, with traces of arsenic. said a voice in my head.

"Exactly!" Sherlock said. "Garlithian ends up doing such a good job because of how motivated he is to help the female that he is promoted to the overseer's position, and those privileges allow him to sabotage the whole place and complete the job."

"What happens to the woman who was beaten?" I asked as I gave the kale a light tug, pleased when it came up easily, roots intact. It wasn't enough to just get material to work with; I needed a proper kitchen garden.

"The entire next episode is devoted to Garlithian helping her get home, which gets really complicated because…" he continued, and I listened as I pointed the scanner at the next plant.

I hadn't noticed any of the other alien males that Sara had rescued so far being chatty. I wasn't expecting it from the silent hulk that had followed me out here onto the surface of this world, but it was pleasant, like listening to a video of someone explaining a plot of a movie I never wanted to watch while focusing on other work. If I needed to focus, I could ignore him, and he went on without missing a beat, not requiring my undivided attention for his monologuing.

This was nice.

I glanced over to see him lifting a massive roll of turf onto his shoulder, his muscles flexing in the light of the red dwarf sun as he labored to gather new ingredients for me to experiment with.

This was really nice.

TWO

SHERLOCK

I didn't know making my own choices in life could be this good.

I had stood in the mutilated processing room for a period of time, waiting for a task to be assigned to me. At the same time, I watched episodes of my favorite show to calm myself after the shock of waking up to find out that I no longer had a control chip installed and that the Vaurelcar had broken free from Plexus control. I never heard of that happening before. There were procedures in place in case it did happen; for example, my control chip would have forced me to try to recapture the core and reinstate a Plexus command, but there was no record in the system of any such thing happening.

That bothered me, because one of Garlithian's catch phrases is that the only rules that mattered were the ones written with blood. He had explained it in more detail to a female companion he wanted to mate with in episode 327. She hadn't taken his surface-level speech he gave all of them to be clear that he was a serial mater and didn't bond for life, and had demanded more information. He explained that it meant that the only rules that really mattered were the ones that kept people from being killed, and those rules were created when people were killed. HiH explaining that turned out to be him still creating emotional distance with his female companions; as in episode 422, his female companion of that episode knew all about his mysterious species and destroyed home world, and she knew his kind mated for life, and that the only way he could be a serial mater is if his original mate had rejected him. Dying wouldn't free him from the bond, as he would have just died with her, but rejection was what allowed him to rampage across the universe, forever unable to have children no mater how much he mated.

The dramatic twists and turns of the show were exciting to me, especially since mating was something I never thought I'd be able to do, but now it was an option I definitely wanted to find a mate. I didn't even know how to speak to these alien females, but I didn't want to rely on my Calicium implants for everything, so I was using details from my favorite show to help guide me through it.

But with my biological suppression system shut down, my feathers were beginning to grow back in, and so was my interest in what was happening around me. Even better, an alien female seemed interested in me, similar to the one in episode 291, where the companion was soft-spoken and quiet until she wasn't; the sharp snap of her tone indicated her 'species' desire to mate.

Noelle was a human, though, which wasn't the same species as the one in episode 291, so I couldn't be sure. I had sent my freed brothers a request for their experiences with mating habits, but most said their mates didn't wish them to share such details. The only one who provided detail was INF-GRA 32811, who was now relabeled Big Guy, and the details he gave sounded like the humans initiated mating in an aggressive and direct fashion but then wanted their mate to take control of the relationship in a performative fashion. That didn't line up with how Sigidi behaved with his mate, so there was a good chance that Big Guy's partner was not the majority, just the loudest.

Sherlock was a much better designation than Big Guy.

It indicated Noelle thought I was intelligent, and the female in episode 291 was attracted to intelligence. She only displayed mating interest after Garlithian solved a mathematical puzzle that had stumped the female's species for generations.

Perhaps Noelle would mate with me if I displayed additional signs of intelligence. I was eager to experience that, but I also knew enough about my origin species to know it carried significant risk. Garlithian didn't mate with a different female every episode because he wanted to; he did that because he was miserable and avoiding facing the truth about himself. He was both an inspiring role model and a warning of the dangers awaiting anyone who mistreated their mate.

Unlike Garlithian, I would not mistreat her if she chose me.

I dropped the rolled chunk of turf into the collection bin, and a neural filament shot out of the wall, wrapping around it and yanking it out of sight. The sight of it sent shivers through me. It could kill us all so easily. Why it hadn't was another fact I couldn't look up, because the standard knowledge was that Vaurelcars always killed every living thing on board if they broke free, but that was another thing that was out of place. If there were rules for what to do if a Vaurelcar broke free, and an expectation of sudden, immediate death, it didn't make sense that there was no record of Vaurelcars ever breaking free before. One would have had to break free for the Calicium to know what would happen if they did, because rules were written in blood, which meant that knowledge had to be completely fabricated, and the system usually purged junk data.

Except our shows were never purged despite being labeled as junk data.

There were quite a lot of mysteries to solve.

Like why that plant behind Noelle was moving.

Specifically, why the arm-sized vine was pulling back in a manner that suggested it was storing elastic potential energy in its system.