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Our Bodies - Book Three of the Rogue Star Series
Out Now!
Jolan Tibidad and his fellow people on Deck 5 live in constant fear of the Originals, who boarded the generation ship Lennis Maifa – the Gen – 7500 years ago. The Originals have isolated themselves on the upper decks and harvest the Deck 5 people for their bodies. They transplant their personalities into them, so that they can live long enough to see the day when the Gen will reach the Sky Wheel galaxy after its 10,000-year journey.
Jolan is devastated as the Originals take his friend Anwa for disembodiment. Jolan thinks him dead, until he gets secret messages from Anwa, telling him of mad Originals and that the upper decks of the Gen are not the paradise that the Deck 5 people think them to be. Together, the friends decide to start a revolution against the Originals, unaware that they are triggering a series of events with terrible consequences.
Book Three of the Rogue Star Series
Excerpt
EVERYONE ON DECK 5 knew the picture. It wandered from hut to hut and was their most treasured possession. Every hut was allowed to keep it for a hundred days. Jolan and Liria had it for ninety-eight days now. In another two days the picture would go to their neighbor Anwa Moriens. The faded picture showed what Deck 5 had once looked like: a curved meadow with cows grazing on it.
Jolan didn’t want to give the picture away, but he had to, it was tradition. He had no clue why or how this photo of green grass with five black and white cows on it had survived for thousands of years. Of course, the print wasn’t that old. Maybe it was sixty or seventy, or even a hundred years old. Nobody knew where it came from, who had made this and past prints, or why. Legend said that they had bred cows on the Gen for twenty-five hundred years. The last cow had died five thousand years ago. The last mammal, a cat, died five hundred years ago. Now there were only a few fish left.
Jolan lay in his bed, arm in arm with a sleeping Liria, caressing her hair, and waited for the alarm to ring. He hardly ever woke up before the alarm rang, but the past few nights he had woken up half an hour earlier, today even an hour earlier. It had to be the anxiousness about losing the picture. There was not a single reason why else he should be awake to worry about things. He frowned at his cynicism.
Liria stirred, sighed and woke up.
“Morning,” he said.
“There ain’t no mornings around here,” she said as she always did and kissed his cheek. She groaned and stretched. Jolan yawned.
Liria sat up and looked at him. “You’ve been lying awake again?”
“A little.”
“You okay?”
“Yes, honey, don’t worry.”
Liria looked at the picture at the wall next to their bed and sighed. “Two more days. It’s not gone yet and I miss it already.”
“We can still see it at Anwa’s place.”
Jolan had always liked Anwa, but their friendship had become so much deeper since Jolan had the picture, because it had given Anwa a reason to visit him.
The wake-up alarm bellowed through the entirety of Deck 5.
“So fucking loud!” Liria shouted, as every morning.
✜✜✜
Anwa lined up in front of Liria and Jolan at the dispenser station of their section. Jolan smirked at his broad grin of happiness.
“You’re welcome to visit me as often as you want, you know that, right? Every day, twice a day, any time,” Anwa said in his pleasant bass.
“Thanks, Anwa, we’ll take you up on that offer,” Liria said and cuffed his arm.
Anwa made a mock bow, then it was his turn and he took his damp, hot towel out of the dispenser, next his water bottle and his breakfast pack. He waved at them as he entered the men’s privacy unit.
“Were we that annoyingly happy when it was our turn to get the picture?” Liria asked, keeping her voice low to prevent the dispenser from hearing her.
“Probably,” Jolan said. He kissed Liria’s neck while she got her breakfast ration and hot towel.
“Aren’t you overdue?” Jolan whispered into her neck.
“Maybe,” she answered, then grinned at him as she headed for the women’s privacy unit.
Jolan’s pulse rate increased as he waited for his towel and breakfast pack. They had tried hard to get pregnant the past one hundred days under the good omen of the picture in their hut. The increased amount of sex, despite losing some sleep, had actually been very good for their relationship. Love was rare on Deck 5. Couples were brought together to keep the genetic mix as broad and healthy as possible. Nobody expected to find true love on Deck 5. Jolan had been quite neutral about Liria in the beginning and she had been neutral as well. Both had been pleased that the other had decent looks, decent bodies and decent characters. They had gotten along well in the three years since they were declared a couple, but the past three months, man, he had enjoyed them and she had as well and now, maybe they had managed to get pregnant? That would be great, because it would save them both from the threat of depersonalization.
Jolan entered the men’s privacy unit after he got his hot towel, expecting Anwa in the small antechamber where you undressed and redressed, but it was empty. There were no clothes on the gray bench, the only furniture in the room, either. Jolan opened the door to the cleaning room.
“Anwa?”
There was no sign of Anwa.
“Fuck!”
A wave of fear hit him, but despite it, he undressed because that was what he always did and because there’d be trouble if he didn’t and he most certainly did not want trouble now. When he was naked, he took the hot damp towel, which had already cooled considerably, and quickly wiped his body in long practiced swipes, starting with his face, head, arms, upper body, legs, genitals and finally the feet. Then he threw the used towel into a chute and hastily redressed.
Anwa. Deck 1 had taken Anwa, two days before the planned handover of the picture. What a blessing that they hadn’t taken Anwa after the handover of the picture. Anwa. Jolan would never see him again. He was on the way to Deck 1 now. He’d live in luxury at Deck 1, but not as himself. Anwa would be depersonalized.
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