A String of Pearls

Chapter Twelve

Author's note: I'm afraid regular readers of my stuff are going to have to get used to me spamming the link to my novel in all future updates, just knowing it's finally published has kick-started my writing gene into overdrive, so while my schedule is no less hectic than it's always been, I'm writing a lot more and more often.

US link: dp/B07BGSPPBY

UK link: . /dp/B07BGSPPBY

PS: The second part of this is very dark, even by my standards. I would advise proceeding with caution.

…..

The Memory Keeper

All things considered, she was lucky. She was a bargain basement pearl, an old model whose price had been reduced multiple times as the new models had come out. She would have been liquidated if the local impound hadn't needed a new pearl to crunch the numbers for them, but were unwilling to spend much money on it. She was dragged out of storage after seventeen orbits and put to work.

The impound was always busy; with every new pearl release came an influx of the unwanted ones to be recycled, as well as the ones that had been lost and not reclaimed, the counterfeits seized from the black market raids, the ones whose owners had been shattered, and what was left of the ones who wound up in the barracks.

She didn't have much contact with the world outside of the compound, she'd gone straight from shop to work. She was still wearing the plain sheath they all left the clutch in, no gem could be bothered trying to change it.

There was a scrap of regret in her, what little the nothing allowed for, that she would probably work the impound right up until she was no longer useful without making a single good memory. She supposed she was grateful, as her owners mostly ignored her and there were pearls that would give anything to be in her position. But still...

Will you take my memories for me?

Pearl gesture-speak was still new to her, but she understood at least that much. The pearl sitting on the process machine was serene, just moments away from being destroyed. She was in near perfect condition.

I will, but why give them to me?

The other pearl's eyes swiveled towards the door, where the Sodalite manning the machine was filling out the paperwork.

My owner kept me indoors. I have not met many pearls, and I have not given away my memories. I would like you to keep them, if you will.

Being given a memory was a generous gift on its own. Being gifted a pearl's entire lifetime of memories was just about the highest honour a pearl could bestow on another.

Watching the door, the impound pearl crossed the floor and held the pre-process pearl's hand, stood rigidly still as the memories drained from her.

Oh!

What memories these were! This pearl had lead a life of mostly joy. Her owner had treated her with respect, as a beloved companion. A hundred warm glances, kind words, sweet embraces, she experienced them all in a fraction of a parsec.

The pre-process pearl was happy to go to her death now, knowing she had been so loved. The impound pearl scuttled back to her workstation, Sodalite marched back in and turned on the machine.

In the aftermath, word seemed to spread somehow among the pearls. She was asked to take memories again and again, from pearls in mint condition to badly malfunctioning wrecks. It was so easy, when the process workers barely paid her any mind and she could go about the impound plant as she pleased. She started collecting the memories when the process workers had gone home, when she was supposed to be resting on her charge pad.

She gesture-spoke to them all, though they could have spoken aloud with no gem around to hear them but gesture-speak was much preferred. She asked them for their most treasured memories and these were the ones she held close to the surface of her own gem. Sometimes she projected them from her gem to the impound wall, so they could experience the memory one last time together.

From the impound plant, she lived a thousand lifetimes. She was loved, pampered, shown off and respected. She was loathed, punished, struck and disposed of. She was broken, abused, humiliated and tossed aside. She was admired, maintained, polished and never touched. She took the bitter with the sweet, and though there were a great many more bad memories than good she honoured the lives of the pearls that had lived them.

Many orbits passed, Homeworld endured catastrophe and terror and through it all she collected the memories with all the diligence she possessed. She was getting older, and was probably going to be processed soon herself. She bundled up all the memories she had, even her own scant few of the pearls she had met, to give to a worthy pearl when she came across one.

…..

The Remodeler

Remodeling was one of the most profitable underworld activities a gem could take up, because how difficult it was to get right directly correlated with how much money a gem was willing to spend to have it done.

The penalties ranged from three orbits in isopod to instant shattering.

Naturally, Orthoclase was the only remodeler in her district, because she'd managed never to get caught. She received her clientele's pearls through a half dozen different proxies, and her workshop was designed to be packed up and spirited away at a parsec's notice. Plus, knowing probably more about pearls than just about any other gem, except perhaps the one that invented them in the first place, she was able to hide or disguise every new pearl she was working on as something completely different.

Her own pearl, a modified all-purpose she'd gotten from the black market in the early cycles of her operation, carried the mid-procedure-pearls around in her subspace. Outside of the workshop, they looked like any other random Orthoclase and pearl.

"I got parts to spare," Orthoclase offered on a regular basis. "They're yours if you want them."

"No thank you," the pearl always replied serenely.

Orthoclase sometimes wondered about what was going on in her pearls' mind. She had personally removed the pearl's spike the cycle after getting her, and since then she was careful to treat her with some basic respect. She sat in the corner of the workshop watching Orthoclase operate on her fellow pearls, cycle in cycle out, without so much as a flinch.

And even Orthoclase herself sometimes flinched when she learned what her clients wanted done to their pearls. Limbs permanently removed, extra limbs grafted on, behavior chips added to make the pearl sound extra subservient, sad or afraid.

She never turned down a job, though. The money was too good.

One of her most recent jobs was a particularly tricky one; disguising the pearl as a Larimar. She could do it, certainly, but it was going to take a while. She picked up the pearl at one of her contact points, stowed it in her own pearl's subspace and brought it back to the workshop, grumbling mostly to herself all the while.

"This is going to take up all of my blue pigments," she moaned, as her pearl nodded along. "Let's hope we don't get any cheap recolour jobs any time soon, I hate turning those down..."

"I can order more, if you want," the pearl offered.

"Not right now," Orthoclase warned. "I just made an order five cycles ago, too much and they'll start looking into it. You can look for some other sources though, somewhere far out."

Once back at the workshop, the client pearl was removed from the subspace, reformed and inspected. Orthoclase swore under her breath.

"Damn," she muttered darkly. "I really hate these ones."

The client pearl was badly damaged, probably from multiple below-surface hairline cracks. It was off-coloured and there were chunks missing from its mass. It had been bought for one purpose, and it was one of Orthoclase's least favourite jobs.

"Right, so we have to make this poor scrap look like a Larimar," she told her pearl, who had brought up the schematics and reference pictures. "Sick freaks."

The pearl was clearly destined for the 'destruction' market. Normally those gems were satisfied by watching a pearl get ruined in as many ways as possible, but the novelty factor was increasingly in demand. Since Orthoclase had just cracked the method of making pearls look like other gems, at least temporarily, she'd gotten a lot of these requests.

"At least it'll be over quickly," she muttered, gently adding spare nacre to the gaps in the client pearl's mass. "I hope, anyway."

Included in the client's notes were instructions to alter the voice box, to sound like a Larimar, and to tweak its pain and fear receptors. That required removing the spike, as it rendered both fear and pain as a minor annoyance. Orthoclase's pearl was downloading vocal clips from the mainframe.

She wondered what kind of gem had placed this order. Was it for private use, a gem that had some sort of grudge against Larimars? She thought maybe a Chalcedony, but what Chalcedony in Homeworld could afford these kind of mods?

Perhaps it was a jealous Emerald, or a Kunzite. Perhaps they had been recently spurned, or had a bad break-up. Or maybe it was some nebbish Sodalite in the database centre who had just enough money and just enough spite to carry it out. But these were just theories, and in boring truth it was probably just a Hematite looking to make some fast money out of gems that disliked Larimars.

She ended the cycle with the spike removed, the mass patched and the colour half-done, and resolved to do the behavior mods at the first quadrant.

She was alarmed to find that some mods had already been done when she arrived at the workshop the next cycle. There was only one gem that could have done them.

"What are you playing at?" she hissed, dragging her pearl out of the workshop, away from the modded pearl. "Do you even know what you're doing?"

"Yes," the pearl answered serenely. "I have picked up most of the popular modification techniques."

"That's not what I mean," Orthoclase growled. "I had specific instructions. If the client sees what you've done..."

"They won't," the pearl insisted. "I've buried it under code. The voice modules will do the work, the client will not know there's anything missing."

"Behavior mods," Orthoclase emphasized. "It's not the voice they paid all this money for, they want it to act scared."

"She will."

"How do you know?"

"She will," the pearl insisted, clenching her fists. Despite herself, Orthoclase was startled; she'd never seen a flicker of emotion deeper than a faint smile from her pearl in all these orbits.

"She will cry and beg as she's supposed to," the pearl continued. "No-one will know the pain receptors are blocked. Please don't reverse it."

Orthoclase sighed, ran her hands through her hair. This was a disaster; if it was discovered, it would lose her clients, damage her reputation, maybe even get her caught and shattered if someone decided to report what they knew to Homeworld authority.

On the other hand...

Her pearl had watched for orbits as Orthoclase systematically mutilated her fellow pearls, messed up their programming and sent them back to their owners to be treated as lower than common dirt. She had sent countless pearls to an unpleasant end, and her pearl had never so much as blinked an eye.

But...how many times has she done this? Why did I only see it now?

Even knowing much more about pearls than the average gem, Orthoclase had assumed her pearl would be nothing short of obedient at all times. She had also assumed the pearl had no real thoughts or feelings of her own, despite the evidence.

"Fine," she mumbled at last. "We do the colour and send her out as is. But we should pack up and get ready to run."

The pearl was finished, packed up and sent away. Two cycles later the holovid circled around the private viewing rooms, and nobody noticed anything untoward. They all seemed satisfied that the faux-Larimar was as scared and suffering as she was supposed to be.