Island Girls 2 Read online

  Delilah hesitated. I got the impression that was information that she was hoping not to have to reveal. "Guidance," she eventually said.

  "What does that mean?"

  "Plot twists. Changes in direction for the story. Scene selection. I had a say in those things."

  "You were also a character on the show," I told her. "As a queen in the simulator, then later to get us to board the shuttle. How many times have you appeared on the show?"

  "Many."

  "As a host? Or as a character?"

  "The term is not quite accurate, Joah," she told me. "But I would say that most of my on-screen participation you would consider to be as a character, if I had to choose between those two options."

  "You interacted with other humans before us?" She answered to the affirmative. "How many other groups of humans?"

  "At least twenty," she said. I was expecting a much lower number and was a little surprised that she revealed this information so easily. I hid my reaction from her as I contemplated what might be her agenda now. She could be leading me through this interrogation instead of the other way around. Best way to keep control was to mix up the line of questioning.

  "Do you know if Jayla came from Earth like us? Was she in a stasis chamber?"

  "I do not know Jayla."

  I needed to rephrase the question to something that she would answer. "To your knowledge, are there humans in existence that did not come directly from deep sleep?"

  "Yes."

  "People that lived their whole lives elsewhere?"

  "Yes."

  "You told us before that the entire human race was purchased in the preservation state. Would you like to revise that story?"

  "No, Joah," she replied, completely free of emotion. I couldn't tell if she had been trained for this or if it was a common trait of her people. "Some were awakened and placed on a planet to start a new civilization."

  "How long ago?"

  "Over thirty years ago."

  "Why?" I asked, then realized that I needed to be more specific. I had two versions of the question in my mind, so I asked both. "Why were they put there? And, why did you not tell us earlier?"

  "They were placed on the planet for the entertainment of my people, of course. Several shows, as you prefer to call them, were focused there. I did not reveal this to you before because it had no bearing on your situation. I had no idea that they would send Jayla here. It has never been done before."

  "So, you already know that Jayla is from that planet?"

  "No, I did not," she answered with no sign of the panic I was hoping to see. "This line of questioning since her arrival simply suggests that she has told you about her past. How else would you know to ask these questions?"

  Yeah, I apparently wasn't as smart as I thought I was. My military training did not include instructions on how to be on this side of the interrogation table.

  "Can I ask a question?" Jayla asked. I nodded. Facing Delilah, she queried, "Why are you here? I mean you individually. I have never seen one of your kind alone without your guardbots. Why are you risking your life? Joah could kill you any minute now. Or, I could."

  That question yielded the first emotional response from our prisoner. Her face pulled back as she blinked, almost as if she had been punched. We waited a few seconds until she finally answered.

  "My position has been terminated," she said in a softer voice.

  "What does that mean?" I asked.

  "Though your popularity, Joah, is very high," she answered with body language that signaled discomfort in a human, maybe even embarrassment. "Mine has dropped considerably. I have been pushing for less loss of human life despite the blood thirst of the majority of my kind. Additionally, I was cutting sexual scenes out of the show to provide you with more privacy."

  I took a moment to contemplate that. As I did, Nancy asked, "How popular are we with your viewers? Are we like celebrities?"

  "Yes, Nancy, you are. Thesphilians are heavily focused on their entertainment programs. There are several services that rank humans by popularity. Since the program that you participated in is incredibly popular, you are all very well known."

  "Where do I stand?" Nancy asked. "Do you know?"

  "Not currently," Delilah replied, regaining her calm state. She seemed happy with the change in topic. I was second guessing my allowance of Nancy to interfere. "Your personal popularity spiked after each sex scene between you and Joah. To my knowledge, you peaked at fourteenth."

  "Is that high?" Lin asked. Delilah nodded. "How about the rest of us?"

  "You, Lin, made it as high as number four. Twice. Once after you had intercourse with Joah in the private room, then again during your escape sequence. Shira has never ranked in the top fifty, despite my fondness for her. My manipulation of the sexual exposure in your show was in part meant to improve that."

  "What about Joah?" Nancy asked.

  "Joah was ranked number one at the time that I was dismissed."

  "Whoa!" Nancy said, making a big fuss over it. I was astounded by the revelation, too. Was I really that popular among the alien species? "Is it because of his big cock?"

  "Nancy!" Lin screamed out.

  Jayla bust out laughing, before saying, "I’ve seen it. It's big alright!"

  "Penis size is only appreciated by a very small segment of our people. They are not a respected group, so I would venture to guess that it had little to no bearing."

  "Come on, Delilah," Jayla said with a smile. "You haven't thought about having sex with Joah? I have been told that some of us are kept by your people for sexual reasons."

  "No!" Delilah replied with the biggest emotional outburst that I had ever seen from her. "Joah's sexual organ would not be able to enter my body at any point without causing an enormous amount of damage."

  "Should we test that theory?" Nancy asked with her eyes wide. She couldn't possibly be serious.

  "No, absolutely not!" Lin answered her first. "Let's be thankful that we won't have to share our man with her. There is enough competition already." Lin gestured toward Jayla.

  "Our man?" Nancy asked.

  "If you are referring to me, don't worry about it,” Jayla said as she made a funny expression. “I won't be sticking around long enough to drop this fine ass on that thing of his. I mean, it has been real nice getting to hang out with celebrities, but I have no desire to play house with you people. I'm going to get out of here."

  "How do you plan to do that?" I asked. I had no reason to doubt her ability to escape. I knew very little about her or the world around us. If she had a plan, I was eager to hear it.

  "I'm going to kill Delilah if she doesn't call for another ship to take me home. I don't believe any of this garbage about her being cast out from her people. They don't do that. These alien overlords act like they are the gods and we are not even worthy of any respect. We are just here for their amusement. She's lying to you all."

  "I am not lying, Joah," Delilah pleaded, that sense of panic that I was looking for finally showing up. It took Jayla's threat to get it. The woman knew me too well to think that I would kill a defenseless woman.

  "Let's take a break," I told the group. "This is a lot to process. Jayla and I will talk some more. No one threatens Delilah's life again until we get this figured out. Agreed?"

  I grabbed my rifle, determined to keep it out of unsafe hands. When I stepped out of the house, Shira came running up from the west side with the pistol. It needed to be protected as well. "Joah! There is another ship coming!"

  I stayed close to the building as I observed the craft's descent in the dim light. Instead of heading to our meager land mass, its target was the small island to the west. It was the one that we did not visit since we assumed that it was identical to the one that we did.

  Details of the ship became more visible as we got a side view. It was distinctly different than the small shuttle that we or Jayla arrived in, or the one that crashed on North Island. Larger, boxier, and louder as its jets fired like
a brake to slow its fall. It landed on the southernmost section that must be the common landing pad on all three of these small pieces of land.

  The other women joined me as we watched. Delilah was among them, at Lin's side. Lin no longer carried the pistol since it was used for guard duty. Instead, she had a large kitchen knife. Delilah cringed away from it every time it came near her. Based on the alien's mobility from our limited experience, I seriously doubted that she would try to combat us physically.

  "What kind of ship is that, Delilah?" I asked.

  "It is a constructor unit."

  "Is it going to build a house over there like ours?"

  "Yes, and no," she replied. "It will become the house. Anything unusable will be buried below it in a metal section that was already built. Natural components that were not brought with it will be stripped from the island to finish the building and furniture to match the ones found here. The plan before I was expelled was to replicate both islands like this one, then recruit more players."

  "Will there be an arena to compete in somewhere?"

  "No. Unless the plan has changed significantly, which I doubt, you will be fighting each other like rival tribes."

  No arena sounded good at first. But only one person died each day there. In an all-out battle between tribes there could be several casualties. We would need to avoid that.

  "Why would you doubt that things have changed in this regard?" I asked.

  "One of the reasons that I was dismissed was due to my advocating a more peaceful arrangement. It is unlikely that those in power have adjusted to a less aggressive script."

  "What if we don't fight each other?" Lin asked. "Not all humans are natural born killers. We might ally with each other instead."

  "They will find a way to make you fight,” Delilah insisted. “New arrivals will likely be shown videos of you killing humans and Thesphilians alike. They will not trust you easily just because you are of the same species. Humans are very easily brainwashed."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  Sounds of construction carried across the calm sea to us during the night. Delilah assured us that there would be no life forms over there during the noisy building process. Without any visible evidence to suggest otherwise, I chose to believe her.

  Everything was quiet by morning and we could make out the form of a structure that appeared to be the same as ours. The ship was gone. Though our minds told us that it must have launched while we weren't looking, Delilah claimed it had deconstructed and buried any parts that weren't needed to assemble the habitat under the building. If that were true, those same parts could be found beneath our house.

  None of us were rocket scientists. Building a ship out of those buried components was out of the question. We also lacked an efficient method of retrieving those items. Digging away with tiny shovels would be a fruitless endeavor.

  "So, Jayla, did they tell you that you would be joining our team here on the island?" Nancy asked during breakfast.

  "No, but I got that impression from watching the episodes that they showed me. It made sense. I was shocked when they tied me up on the shuttle and told me that I was going to die."

  The ladies talked about Jayla's experience for a while. I paid attention enough to pick up on anything useful. There wasn't much. She had been kept for days in a room, provided the necessities of life and shown videos of us in action. She was taken by two security droids to the shuttle.

  A Thesphilian male supervised the transport. He was blue skinned, and nearly as thin as Delilah. His skirt and top had a more masculine cut as Jayla described it. Tall boots covered his legs and feet, which were common in her experience. Jayla referred to them as colored aliens since they came in so many different skin colors. I was barely old enough to remember when people of Jayla's race were called colored back on Earth before I was cryo-ed up.

  "Were you surprised by the microwave?" Nancy asked. It seemed like a silly question to me, but she was not conducting an interrogation. It was a simple conversation between two women. I remembered Nancy’s fascination with the cooking box my first day awake.

  "What is a microwave," Jayla replied.

  "The thing we put the food in to cook it," Nancy said as she pointed toward the kitchen. "I was surprised by its efficiency when I first used it."

  "Oh," Jayla said. "We simply call it a cookbox. No, we have those where I live. It is part of our everyday life."

  That bit of information piqued my interest. I asked her, "The Thesphilians built your homes there?"

  "Yes, I believe so," Jayla answered. When I asked her to describe them, she continued, "I lived in a town that was completely manufactured by them. Our house was very similar to yours. I stayed there with my parents and my younger sister, Tamira. We had two beds, but they were in the same room. There were twenty-four houses like that, plus a large community building where supplies were kept. That's where we went to get our food and new clothes, too."

  "They provided your whole town with food?" I asked.

  "No, we had farms to support ourselves. We ate a lot of fish, too. Clean water for drinking came from the pipe, though. Just like here. That is something that we couldn’t do for ourselves."

  "What about power?"

  "It was provided. I guessed that it was from solar energy like I saw in television shows, but some thought there was a power source in the ground. We never went without energy. Any attempt to cut apart their construction brought some sort of punishment. I was actually trying to figure out what we did wrong for them to come and take me."

  "How much contact did you have with the aliens on your planet?" Lin asked. She had just finished a patrol round and took a seat on the ground beside Delilah. The rest of us were sitting on the swings. It was Jayla that suggested that we treat our alien guest like a prisoner and force her to sit at our feet. Lin and Nancy were of like mind, so I agreed. What harm could it do?

  "Not much really," Jayla answered Lin’s question, not the one in my mind. "They came around enough to make sure that we knew who they were and that we should be indebted to them. Anytime something got broken, they brought their droids to repair it."

  "Did you guys break a lot of shit?" Nancy asked.

  "Shit?"

  "Stuff," Nancy reworded her question. "Did you bust up the things that they built?"

  "Not much," Jayla replied. "We tried to take good care of things to keep them from coming so often. But the cameras irritated a bunch of people. They got torn up more than anything else. Sometimes kids vandalized stuff beyond our repair capabilities."

  "So, they had cameras on your people, too?" Nancy asked.

  "Yeah, I think that part of Delilah's story was true. They were watching us for their own entertainment. However, I didn't know that before I was taken. We just thought they were keeping track of us."

  "Did any of you ever try to escape?" I asked.

  "I heard of some trying it before I was born," she answered. "They died. Some were killed by her people," she gestured toward Delilah sitting quietly on the ground. The demeaning position had reduced her conversational input. "Others drowned at sea."

  "At sea?"

  "Our town was on an island, too. It was a lot bigger than this, though. Maybe by a hundred times. I’m not very good with distances. And we couldn't see any land in any direction. That discouraged us from trying to get away as much as anything, I think."

  After a pause in the conversation, Lin asked, "What should we do about that other island? I mean, they are obviously planning on putting people there. We are told that they will not be friendly. Is there anything that we can do?"

  I pointed at our prisoner and asked, "Delilah, is there something that we can do to protect ourselves against this new team that will be coming soon?"

  "I don't know," she replied in a low voice. She was obviously not used to being treated as a lesser one. "We are not able to think like humans. You surprise us with your aggressiveness and ingenuity. That is part of why we find you so fascinating."


  "Maybe we can boobytrap their place," Nancy suggested.

  "Booby trap?" Jayla asked with a confused look. It was evidently not a term that she was familiar with.

  "Yeah," Nancy replied. "You know, rig things up to hurt them when they arrive. Or maybe just take their shit. Their stuff, I mean."

  "Nancy," I said. "These people will be just like us, hoping to survive as long as they can. They are no more deserving of a boobytrap than we are."

  "What do you suggest then, husband?" Nancy asked, feigning offense. All eyes turned toward me. "Play fair? Take our chances like we had to do in the arena? Risk our lives for no reason?"

  "No, I actually had a better idea." Everyone waited for me to reveal my thoughts, even Delilah turned to face me. "We could communicate that we have no ill will toward them. If we could get them to cooperate with us, we have a better chance of gaining freedom. Or at least living longer."