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YEARDAY: 389, 4119 A.D.556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQhZtBtG0ux
OOMKA 47, 610 GENRICHIAN556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ22dMQDp6Be
SECONDOS 23, 2677 ROMANOVAN
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BAD NEWS, BAD NEWS TO THE WOODSJACKS BOLD,556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLWLzIabmUV
BAD NEWS FROM BLACK GENRICH CAME556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXEa3IMKUQW
THAT THEIR DEAREST SON HAD BEEN MURDERED MOST FOUL,556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkpl2z0NERU
FOUL,556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlucz0pePCZ
FOUL,556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3TZegw5OwT
AND DARK DISHONOR BROUGHT UPON A GOOD NAME.556Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKi8RGMSLqt
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Wheels of vaccuformed pneumoplastic rolled along the carpeted corridor beneath a pale blue perforate ceiling of acoustic insulation. Nor did the techs, laboring by twos and threes in dozens of little bays upon either side of the corridor, look up as the wheels passed them by. They represented an accustomed presence in this place.
The figure folded into the wheeled chair gave a nod in signal to the burly servant-thing pushing it, almost the sole physical gesture of which his wasted body was capable. Suspended upon a silken ribbon about his graying tuft, he wore a mask---an unprepossessing flesh-toned fleming---which, by contemporary convention, should been held upon a wand that it might be whisked away in moments of disarming truthfulness. Yet he was as incapable of the gesture as he was capable of the candor. The servant-thing, unmasked save by a countenance frozen into perpetual neutrality, man-shaped, man-colored, yet well in excess of the height and bulk an ordinary man might have attained, paused---the sole response of which it was capable being obedience---and brought the wheels to a halt.
"This has a familiar look, what do we have here?" The cripple figure spoke to blue-smocked workers in a bay to his right, regarding the nude body of a young human male, by look a peasant, stapled through the bones of his arms and thighs to the spoinium surface of an examination table. With precise care---the man in the chair tolerated no inelegant butchery here---the youth's fingernails had been removed, the outer layers of skin at the fingers, hands, and wrists slit and flayed back, the better to expose more sensitive tissues beneath. Upon a freestanding tray beside the table, an array of probes and palps of various sizes, shapes and substances lay ready to explore this sensitivity. But the chairbound figure's eyes gazed upon a scene beyond this, visible through a broad transparency behind the techs.
No dank basement is this, the man in the chair thought with proprietary satisfaction. Others of the Oligarch glass might choose to skulk about in cellar and attic as if there were something about their amateurish pursuits to feel bad about. His facility was the finest in private use upon the planet, unequaled by anything available to official intelligence, and lay upon ground level, where the sun of a rare beautiful Genrichian afternoon shone in through great windows reaching floor to ceiling. Outside, his artfully landscaped personal gardens were to be seen, with their exotic trees and flowering bushes collected from a hundred million planets, kept in balance by skillful and expensive labor. Birds and colored insects whirred and fluttered among them, although nothing of their activities could be heard. This wing was soundproofed to 300 decibels. It was often necessary that it be that way.
Upon a tiled wall, just like in each of the other bays, was displayed a fancy poster representing a man, its head gigantic, fingers, toes, nose and lips swollen in hideous proportion to arms and legs which, in comical atrophy, illustrated the relative occurrence of nerve endings thought the body. The poster was for the visitors' benefit---ladies nattering and titillated behind fashionable masks and strutting popinjays sick but afraid to admit it before one of his position---always shocked at the insignificance afforded the genitalia, as well as the absence of sensation in the brain. The techs needed no such reminder, knowing their discipline as they did and having benefitted from much opportunity to practice it.
Movement caught the invalid's eye as the aesthetist left her valves and tanks of pain-enhancing gases to peer over her own mask---no mere social convention this, even her station in life allowed it---at floating lines of barcode from a datafile inserted in a reader at the table's foot. Muttering inquiry to a smock-garbed assistant bent over a cautery intended to stanch unplanned bleeding, she got a single word in answer and gave the data brief attention again before looking up.
"A Genrichian peasant, Oligarch, discovered traveling without sponsorship and diverted here as you ordered all such should be. You put the question to him yourself, sir, yesterday, a week."
A nod. "And so I did." He was a busy man with many duties here upon the capital of the grandest civilization in recorded history. He couldn't expect to remember everything, even regarding personal schemes as long in preparation as these. "I had purposed rescinding the order, as, thanks to this youth, amongst others, there is no further need. It slipped my mind." The boy's brown eyes were desperate above the temporary gag forced into his mouth upon the chairbound man's arrival. He'd long since betrayed such data as the names and duties of key servants, geography and plans of strategic sites, movements of products and supplies, transportation and communication, and, most vital, descriptions and characterizations of principal members of the family in question. The man shook his head as if in dismissal of an errant thought. "Ah well, what glimmerings have we won from him today, then?"
"More personal information, your excellency," replied the aesthetist. "You may remember he calls himself Yvan Dragomilov, 17 Cosmopolitan years of age, colonial bondsman and stowaway, bored with home and harvest, looking for adventure." The aesthetist shook her head, brown curls bobbed beneath her surgical cap. "That last, sir, corroborated by the captain of the Minsk, a hauler of eleven projectiles out of the Autonomous Oligarchate of Vladivosk. What our poor Yvan got, in place of adventure, was the blast of a pressganger's stungun and a free voyage to Genrich. A runaway, under death sentence by rights, though it says here suchkind aren't prosecuted upon Romanova." Pause. "What kind of barbaric backwater will not punish runaways, excellency?"
Behind the chair, the servant-thing gasped, startled from its torpor by the directness of the question. Indeed, thought the crippled man, it bordered upon insubordination, coming from one of the aesthetist's class. Yet she, like all of the others garbed in his surgical livery, were superlative techs. And the patron to whom they gave much gratification pampered them, making allowance for artistic temperament.
"That," he answered, "is but one of many arguments with Romanova's Oligarch-Hereditary which we will settle before the year is over." He gave a different nod this time, one sensible to mechanisms within the chair proper, the being which had pushed it here mostly serving purposes of ostentation appropriate to its master's class and, in rare need, acting as bodyguard. The chair's servomechas emitted a thin whine and trundled closer to the table, so that, through the wise and benevolent eyeholes of the mask he wore, its owner might better witness proceedings. "Prod him a little," he ordered, ""I wish to hear the villain speak for himself."
"Excellency." In dutiful---and compensatory---acknowledgment, the aesthetist resumed her position at the subject's head and replaced the gag with one of her transparent algesic masks. She signaled her assistant. Gases began flowing, amplifying sensations, as the exacting treatment afforded the subject's upper extremities was repeated upon his toes and feet.
"Kill me and be done with it!" The boy's scream tore through the mask, which had been designed not to muffle words. His breathing would have been ragged but for the flow of oxygen. "I'll say whatever your ears wish to hear!"
Another nod, and the chair's owner leaned closer to the boy's face, mask, as it were, to mask. "Dear lad, you mistake me. If I wished to know anything more from you, I would merely have you kept awake 3 days and nights as I did before. As you know, you would tell me anything, anything at all, in gratitudinous exchange for one hour's sleep." Servos whined and the crippled figure backed up. "'Tis the very fact that this procedure is unnecessary which transforms it into art. I am having this done to you for nothing more than the pleasure it gives me." He looked upon the table, past the helpless form which lay upon it, at the aesthetist. "I have an appointment within the hour and cannot wait for things to be done in proper sequence."
"Excellency?" Failing to take his meaning, she looked a question at her master over her pale blue mask. In answer, she received a frightening scowl.
"Do his eyes now, while I can watch!"
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