Company

S I X

James
. . .

It's dark outside. It's 1:32 AM right now, Shriden and Michael we're supposed to be back over twelve hours ago. They still haven't returned. Peter told me their names when I asked who had gone on the mission. Healso told me where they were, the Company. Of corse I already knew that, but I had to act like I didn't. I asked questions like, "Why would they go back to the Company?" Pretending to sound horrified and confused. I already knew why. To get Jackie. He told me this anyways, so now I know for sure that was their plan. Turns out, Shriden is Peter and Jackie's daughter.

D1 hasn't contacted me either, so I have no Idea what's happening.

Sighing, I toss my thin sheet aside and swing my legs out of bed. They set me up on the bottom bunk closest to the door. I guess they still want to keep an eye on me, I haven't earned their trust yet. I silently throw on my jacket, which I had set aside before I lay down, and lace up my boots. I grab my T4,000, from under my pillow and squeeze through through the open doorway.

Open doors is a policy here, the bathroom doesn't work, so you have to go outside, about half a block away they dug a latrine. I asked Ben why we don't smell it, and they said that they use fat dissolving sugar packets. Fat dissolving sugar packets are packets of sugar that were developed about a thousand years ago by the humans, and are still being used today. You put them in your food or drinks and when it enters your body, it dissolves all unnecessary body fat. Some come with flavors, like lemon, so you could put it in some water and have lemonade. Of course, there's no longer such thing as lemons any more, so those have been used up.

The droids put them in the humans rations to ensure that they remain under weight. If you have them all the time, you don't just lose fat, you also begin to lose muscle. This may make it harder for them to work in the factories, but it also makes them too weak to fight against the droids.

Being the "son" of the head droid, I don't get the packets, which means I have to workout if I don't want to gain extra weight. Working out also means I have much more muscle than any other human, which shows everyone in the Company that I'm D1's "son". They all know that he's experimenting on me and that he doesn't actually care about me, but they still can't harm me in any way because D1 fears it might ruin the experiment. This allows me to get away with a lot of stuff, because the droids aren't allowed to hurt me either.

I slide along the wall of the hallway because the floor boards are less likely to creak there, and make my way into the kitchen. I look around. Directly in front of me is the girls room, to my right is the sliding door to the backyard, and to my left is the kitchen, where the stone oven remains cold. I'm the kitchen is a twelve seater table, it's a square, with three seats on each side.

I walk over to the table and run my hand along the worm, wooden backs of the chairs, tracing the cracks with my fingernail. I don't have any purpose in mind, i just wanted to look around. My brow furrows as I stop at one particular chair, which is a little more worn out than the others, the brown of the wood has faded to a shade just slightly lighter than the other furniture. I run my hands along the wood. It could just be that this chair has been here for longer, but all the chairs are mostly identical, worn out in the same way, except for this one. I crouch down, aware of my blaster tucked into my waistband, the cool metal pressing agains my back.

I stand back up and go to pull the chair out to look at it closer, but it won't budge. I try again. It's stuck to the floor. The distance between the chair and the table isn't enough for someone to sit down, so if someone went to pull the chair out, and it didn't move, that would cause suspicion. Why would they leave it like that?