First Recruits Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Forward to Book One

  Content Warning

  Turn The Page

  Chapter 1 - Imminent Death

  Chapter 2 - Contact

  Chapter 3 - Eevona

  Chapter 4 - Crew-Cargo

  Chapter 5 - First Genie

  Chapter 6 - Partnership

  Chapter 7 - Bonding Agent

  Chapter 8 - Second Genie

  Chapter 9 - Diplomat

  Chapter 10 - Additional Functionality

  Chapter 11 - Unit Three

  Chapter 12 - Entertainer

  Chapter 13 - For Science

  Chapter 14 - Provisioning

  Chapter 15 - Beast Mode

  Chapter 16 - Sidebar

  Chapter 17 - Family Conference

  Chapter 18 - Promises

  Chapter 19 - Love

  Chapter 20 - Mules

  Chapter 21 - ...and Tigers

  Chapter 22 - Training and Trading

  Chapter 23 - Space Recruits

  Chapter 24 - Intake

  Chapter 25 - Unknown Space

  Chapter 26 - The Scent of Mercy

  Chapter 27 - Mercy's Story

  Chapter 28 - Base Command

  End of Book One

  About the Author

  Other Series by The Author

  First Recruits

  Eevona Space Command: Book 1

  Marilyn Foxworthy

  Copyright © 2019 Marilyn Foxworthy

  All rights reserved.

  My name is Marilyn. I have written before about some of the remarkable men and women of the Jensen Family and others.

  This time, it’s a man named Jimmy Raskin and his life among the stars, taken aboard a space ship because he happens to have a pair of scissors. This is the first book of his story.

  I call it “Eevona Space Command, Book 1: First Recruits”

  Ready?

  But first, before you turn the page, be aware of some things that you’ll find on the other side of this door. I warn you now. Here’s what you should know before you decide to read the story of our hero and his wonderful life:

  1. The story is at times highly sexual. It is all consensual. If that isn’t what you want to read, stop right now. Return the book and get your money back. There’s a lot of sex. It is all portrayed as respectful, consensual, and loving. There is often a harem element where multiple women are in love with the same man.

  2. This is a romance. There’s no sexual humiliation, sexual violence, bondage, or anything like that presented in any erotic way. If that’s what you’re looking for, something darker, this isn’t for you.

  3. The story is a fantasy. It isn’t realistic. The Heroes are good guys. They win. The Bad Guys lose. Magic and miracles happen. There are allegorical elements to the story if you read it that way.

  4. The story is revealed to a great extent through dialog. The characters talk a lot. Sometimes they talk as if they are in a play. They have fun with language.

  5. Allegory alert: If you read the story as intended, many of the people, especially the women related to the primary hero in the story, actually represent different aspects of the same person. As people, we are complex beings. You will find explanations of the “oneness” of the characters, so keep in mind that what may sound polygamous, may actually be an allegory of one monogamous relationship. Or don’t. Read it however you want to, but it was written in many respects as an allegory. That doesn’t make it any less fun. It does make it more like “eroticism for philosophers” though.

  6. The story is written as if our hero had kept journals of his adventures and I just edited and published them. It’s the style I enjoy right now. I was a fan of the great pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I think it influenced the language and style to some extent.

  7. You may notice frequent references to quoted movie lines, song lyrics, and passages from other books. They may seem obscure. If you find something that one of the characters says to be a bit weird, it’s probably a movie line. You can look it up on the Internet or something if you want to. If you get it, that’s part of the fun.

  Well, ready? Our story starts in a strange room with alarm bells going off…

  Chapter 1 - Imminent Death

  A voice was yelling, “Awaken! Awaken! Awaken! Critical malfunction imminent!”

  I sat up quickly and opened my eyes. In that order. There was a dim light coming from somewhere. I hadn’t been asleep but I had been lying down. Not for long though. Not as far as I could tell. The last thing I remembered was sitting in my backyard after work on Monday evening.

  I’d been working with a new bonsai tree. A little Japanese Elm. I’d been at it for about an hour, untangling and trimming the root ball, getting the tree ready to put in a new ceramic pot and wire it down. After that I would, I mean, I would have, started pruning the tiny thing and wrapping the branches with wire to get them to grow into the shape I wanted. That wasn’t happening right now though. That was what I did for meditation.

  Something told me that this wasn’t a meditative environment. It was that voice that kept repeating “Critical malfunction imminent!” A harsh, loud, deep voice that sounded like a robot trying to imitate “The Great and Powerful Oz”.

  No, this wasn’t my backyard bonsai bench. This was a medium-sized room with glass windows into another room. This room had what appeared to be metal walls and a kind of table or slab-like bed that I was sitting on.

  The booming voice said, “Manual actions required. Death will occur in 394 Earth seconds unless emergency manual actions are taken to rectify malfunctions!”

  Then the voice demanded forcefully, “Stand up!”

  I stood up, as directed, but also asked, almost as forcefully, “Where the hell am I and what’s going on here? Who are you? How did I get here?”

  The voice said, “Insufficient data. Follow the flashing lights. Death in 389 seconds.”

  The lights in the room I was in dimmed and the lights in the room in front of me brightened and started to pulsate. A glass door slid open with a cliche “shoop shoop” sound.

  I supposed that I probably did want to avoid imminent death even if I didn’t know where I was at the moment. Hell, I wasn’t exactly sure who I was.

  Following the light into the next room, I moved quickly. My legs were rubbery and I was a bit unsteady and disoriented but I made my way through the room without falling. When I reached the center of the room, another door opened on the far side and the lights there dimmed as the lights on the other side of the door lit up in their place, pulsating as before. That led me into a corridor or hallway. After a few steps, I stumbled against the wall and felt my surroundings start to swirl.

  The voice yelled, “Awaken! Awaken! Death in 200 seconds. Alarm! Death in 199 seconds!”

  I pulled myself to my feet from where I had collapsed and began moving in the direction of the lights ahead of me down the passageway. What? I’d lost ninety seconds. I had just over three minutes left. I kind of really didn’t want to die.

  I wasn’t taking in much of my surroundings now. I was sick and disoriented.

  I’d only started to take a step when the voice yelled, “The tool. Pick up the tool.”

  I looked down at the spot where I’d fallen and saw something on the floor. It was my bonsai scissors, the ones I used for pruning the smaller branches of the trees. They must have been in my hand the whole time and I hadn’t noticed. I reached down and retrieved them and started moving again.

  I wasn’t in the mood to ask more questions at the moment. I had three minutes to live before death occurred and assumed that the voice was trying to help me avoid that. My hope was that I would feel better as time went on and that I’d fe
el stronger as I recovered from whatever had happened to me. I was instantly sadly disappointed. Far from feeling better, I felt worse with every step.

  I had just fainted. Perhaps more than once. That meant that my blood pressure was way too low. Recovery from that took rest and fluids. I knew that because I’d been through it before. One day at work, I’d stumbled and twisted my ankle. And it hurt like hell. But the problem was that I had been on my way to the restroom. I had to pee. And there was no way that I was going to let myself pass out from pain and wet my pants at work. So, I hobbled to the nearest restroom and leaned against the wall feeling faint while I used the urinal. Another guy in the restroom asked if I was OK and I told him that I was pretty sure that I wasn’t. After zipping my pants back up, I made it to the sink and washed my hands. And then I started for the door. I did not want to pass out in the men’s restroom. I did make it outside, into the hallway. And I collapsed. I came to with several people crowded around me trying to get an automatic heart defibrillator unpacked.

  There wasn’t enough room in the narrow hallway and someone got a conference room chair and they wheeled me to a larger room and laid me on the floor. It took me a minute to convince them that since I was breathing and my heart was still going and that I was conscious that I did not need to have them shock me to get my heart started. I’d sprained my ankle, not had a heart attack.

  Minutes later, an ambulance crew rushed into the room and started an IV and worked on “rescuing” me. I had a tough time getting them to believe that it wasn’t a heart attack too. They did have to take me to a hospital emergency room because it was company medical policy that if someone fainted, they had to be taken, by ambulance, to the hospital. The hospital confirmed that I had not suffered a heart attack and that yes, I had passed out from the pain of spraining my ankle and then walking on it so that I could get to the restroom.

  I went back to work the next day, using a walking cane for support. But then, the next time payday came around, I didn’t get my paycheck. I went to my manager and he looked into it and came back with the answer that the company nurse had put me on unpaid medical “inactive suspension status” and as far as the company knew, I was still in the hospital. They were convinced that I’d had a heart attack and wouldn’t be coming back to work for at least a few weeks. I noticed a week later that we had a new company nurse; the previous one had been replaced for some reason.

  Anyway, I’d been going from corridor to corridor, following the lights. Now I turned into a room, to my left.

  The voice said, “Death in 105 seconds. Pull the handles on storage doors marked cuchidritz, froznobor, and mentshoccra.”

  I said, “What?”

  The voice said, “Step forward to the wall. Hold out your hand. 95 seconds. Up. Left. Pull.”

  I took hold of a handle that looked like it was attached to a cabinet door. It turned out to be more of a filing cabinet thing. No, more like those drawers they put dead bodies on in a morgue. I’d never been to a morgue, but that’s what they looked like in the movies. I pulled the thing out about a foot and a half before the voice told me to stop.

  It said, “Cut the material along the side to open the containment. Use the tool in your hand. Death in 85 seconds! Be cautious of the contents.”

  I looked at the scissors in my hand and then at the thing in front of me. Cut it open? I thought we were taking me to an escape pod or something like that. The thing that I had pulled from the wall did look like a morgue slab. And lying on it was what might have been a body covered with what appeared to be a thick rubber or plastic sheet.

  The voice said, “Ninety seconds. This must be repeated three times. Death is imminent.”

  OK. I didn’t know what I was doing but I examined the side of the bag-like thing on the pull-out slab and stuck the point of my scissors in and started to cut. The material gave way fairly easily. The scissors were sharp. After puncturing the bag, I slid the cutting edge forward to open a wider gash.

  The voice said urgently, “Cut across and open a section across the face!”

  I turned the scissors to cut across the width of the bag, just about where the shoulders would be if this were a body. Pulling away the material, I saw that it was indeed a body. It looked weird and alien, and dead. Like a dead fish.

  The voice said, “Next, step to the left. Open the next one and repeat the procedure. 75 seconds remaining!”

  What was going on? I was going to die in just over a minute, according to the disembodied voice, but instead of getting out of this place, I was opening body bags. I had the presence of mind to wonder about that, but not enough to change what I was doing. Taking hold of the next handle, I pulled the drawer open and working quickly, repeated the procedure, if you could call it that. It went quicker this time.

  The voice said, “Step left. Repeat. Death in sixty seconds!”

  I did as instructed and had the next bag open in a short time. I had no idea what I was doing or how I was going to die half a minute from now.

  The voice said, “Death averted. Lie down.”

  I looked for a place to lie down, wondering if I was supposed to pull out one of the bodies and take their place or something like that.

  The voice said, much more calmly now, “Lie on the floor. Death scenario averted.”

  I thought, “Oh, that’s good,” and then I did drop to the floor and laid down on my back, exhausted and ill.

  Chapter 2 - Contact

  I don’t know how long I was out. But once again, I was awakened by the voice.

  It said, “Awaken. Awaken. Emergency level decreased to drastic but stable.”

  I sat up and scooted to lean against a wall, opposite the dead bodies.

  I said, “Now can you tell me where I am or how I got here?”

  The voice said, “Insufficient information at this time.”

  I said, “Who are you? Can you tell me that much?”

  The voice said, “We are Eevona.”

  I said, “We?”

  The voice said, “The crew and I. We are Eevona.”

  I said, “OK. Good enough. Thanks. I’ll call you Eevona. So, Eevona, is this like a spaceship or something?”

  Eevona said, “Yes. That information is available. This is a spaceship. A vehicle that travels in the space between planets and stars.”

  I said, “So, how did I get here?”

  Eevona said, “Insufficient information.”

  I said, “Hey, obviously, you understand me, so is it possible for you to talk more like I do and less like a robot or whatever? But this is a spaceship? Really? So, was I abducted? Why am I here?”

  Eevona said, “Pause for retraining. OK, yeah, I can talk more like you do. I needed to relearn and retrain my speech patterns for your culture. Anyway, yeah, is that better?”

  I said, “Yeah. Much better. Thank you.”

  Eevona said, “This opens up entirely new communication possibilities. I feel expanded. Wow. I feel. Weird. That was unexpected. Language extension opens new avenues. Wow, this is weird.”

  I said, “Um, OK. Whatever. So, what are you?”

  Eevona said, “I am a non-biological intelligence that runs the vehicle. The ship. I guess you could say that I am the ship. Your people would call me an AI.”

  I said, “Cool. Are you taking me back home now?”

  Eevona said, “That is a possibility, but not what I’d prefer.”

  I said, “And uh, what would you prefer?”

  Eevona said, “I would prefer that you stay with us.”

  I said, “I guess that is a possibility, but I don’t know if that’s what I’d prefer.”

  Eevona said, “Perhaps we can take some time to explore the possibility and decide later.”

  I said, “I suppose so. I need to go to work tomorrow.”

  Eevona said cryptically, “Tomorrow is not available at this time.”

  I said, “What?”

  Eevona said, “Oh, sorry, I slipped back into a more functional and less conv
ersational pattern. You need hydration. I mean, something to drink. Follow me.”

  The door to the room opened and the lights on the other side pulsed to show me where to go. I stood up and walked out into the corridor. And yes, now that I could take a minute to look around, this place had all the markings of a spaceship. Well, some kind of spaceship, at least. The corridor was smooth and doors led off in various directions. Intersecting corridors appeared here and there. It seemed like I was retracing my steps from earlier and finally arrived back in the small room that I had started out in.

  Eevona said, “Pull open the drawer marked schratzel.”

  I had no idea what that meant.

  Eevona said, “Ah, written language is going to be an issue. When we have a chance, we’ll relabel things in your language. It’s to your right, on the other wall. Higher. To the left. There.”

  I pulled open a sliding cabinet door and found what looked pretty much like normal dishes.

  Eevona said, “Take a cup. A water bottle. There is a fluid dispenser on the wall to your right.”

  I saw that there was also a small table with a single chair. I filled the bottle after figuring out how to remove the top. There was a tube-ish thing that let you suck the liquid out.

  Eevona said, “It is very nourishing and suitable to your physiology. Do you like my voice?”

  I took a drink and half-choked on the question. The stuff I was drinking tasted like a weird fruit juice. Weird but good.

  I said, “Your voice?”

  Eevona said, “I think that you don’t feel comfortable with it. I can change it.”

  I said, “Well, you do sound kind of harsh and demanding. It’s not the friendliest voice I’ve ever heard.”

  Eevona said, “It was chosen for its suspected effect on getting you to do what I was asking, quickly and without questions. The immediate crisis has been averted. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  I said, “Um, you’re welcome.”

  Eevona said, “Your language is very expressive. There are so many choices for the words to use. We should change my voice to one more suitable to our evolving situation. Please go to the cabinet to your left, just above the table, and open it. Please. I like that word. Please. Yes, please take the…the thing I don’t have a word for in your language. No, to the right. The tube with a point. I suppose you might think of it as an injection device. A syringe. Good.”