Captain's Quarters Tour

Finding himself alone with the robot again, Aaron felt both the relief and the incredible anxiety of being separated from his transformed friends and coworkers as they teleported away. However, Daisy’s presence was enough of a source of stress that the relief mostly won out. Her presence still caused his mind to replay the moment that he’d had handcuffs put on him by police who didn’t speak his language, the days he’d spent in jail as he’d prayed to every god he could think of that the police would discover the truth, the horror he’d felt when he finally returned home only to discover that she had attempted to start a smear campaign against him, and finally the anxiety of having to deal with years of threatening letters from her new fiancé.

He still lived his days wondering how many of his coworkers had believed her stories, how many of them had had their view of him permanently poisoned by the false accusations. He was glad that, of those members of the staff that had been forced into this vile mockery, they so far consisted mostly of people who had confirmed their faith in his side of the story. If it had been any of his other coworkers, he suspected that the combination of Daisy’s tales and this whole nightmarish scenario likely would have confirmed all their worst ideas about him and led to them being certain that their abduction was some secret plot of his.

He remembered what C2 had told him during the challenge, about how he was planning to add more members to this strange crew/harem hybrid he was apparently trying to create, and wondered if any of his other coworkers would find themselves abducted by the sadistic robot as well.

Hell, part of him was wondering if possibly he had done something to bring this down on all of them. Had one of his prayers for companionship or escape gone awry and ended up in the ear of these mysterious Producers? Had his life gone off the rails enough that some extra-dimensional entities had felt the need to intervene in his wasted existence? Was this just another act of his own crappy karma coming around to haunt those closest to him?

The logical part of his mind desperately tried to remind him that there was no possible way that he could be responsible. That being abducted into an erotic reality show in another galaxy was the sort of thing so far outside of any reasonable reality that any attempts to try and make it happen or prevent it both would have been the acts of a madman. Still, he found himself wracked with guilt, unable to convince himself that the others weren’t blaming him and hating him for their situation, and even more unable to convince himself that he wasn’t somehow responsible.

It took a robotic cough to break him out of his introspection.

“Ahem, if you’ve perhaps reached a good stopping point in your self-pity party, we should be moving to the Captain’s Quarters. Do me a favor and try and put the self-flagellation on hold until after you've shown the appropriate wonder and awe at the luxurious space I have created for you.” C2 admonished him.

“If you wanted me to be happy about this situation for even a moment, then you probably should have gotten that in before you abducted my coworkers, transformed them, forced them to play some perverted game, and then transformed them again. If it had just been me you had abducted, I’d be happy to play whatever role you wanted me to play. Hell, I’ll put the offer on the table myself. Put them all back to the way they were and send them home, and I will do anything you want. You can erase me from the minds of everyone on the planet, and I guarantee it will make the world a better place. After that, you can do whatever you want to me. Torture me, transform me, give me impossible challenges, and punish me for failing. Let my coworkers go, and I’ll do it all with a smile on. Just let them go.”

“No can do. Unfortunately, a Master needs a harem and a Captain needs a crew. One man, alone in a spaceship, being tormented until he eventually dies of loneliness is no fun for anyone. So, now your choice is to play the game or tell your coworkers to start making themselves presentable for the auction block. It’s your choice, but neither option is going to benefit from you drowning in self-loathing.”

Aaron wanted to refute the robot, but the sadistic eyeball had a point.

“Fine. Show me whatever gilded cage you’ve put together for me.”

With a flash of light, Aaron and C2 appeared in a chamber that instantly broke Aaron’s oath to himself not to be impressed by whatever C2 showed him. He tried and failed to keep his face still and unimpressed as he looked into the space. For a man who had spent his days working in a tiny back office where he’d carved a den to work in out of stacks of game boxes and his nights in a two-bedroom apartment where nearly every square inch was taken up by bookshelves full of books, movies, games, souvenirs, and collectibles, the luxury and sheer amount of space was stunning.

He was standing in what he assumed was the suite's entryway, a round room with soft carpet and large arches leading into the other rooms. Immediately in front of him was a long obsidian bar with a line of plush bar stools. The wall behind the bar was a combination of back-lit shelves filled with liquor bottles, both familiar and strange, interspersed with large, semi-transparent glass panels displaying various moving patterns. To the side of the bar was a ramp up into a room that took his breath away.

The first thing he saw was the window. It wasn't a window so much as an entire wall of the ship, an unbroken curve of transparent alloy arcing from floor to ceiling, and beyond it the black was scattered with more stars than he'd ever seen without a screen between him and them. The purple planet and the rotating space station were merely a fraction of the planetarium-like view of a wall of stars denser than he’d ever imagined, a nebula visible along one edge of the view, filled with vibrant colors unlike anything that could be seen from Earth’s surface.

In the middle of the room, the floor dropped away into a massive conversation pit sunk a few steps below the rest of the room, ringed in low cushioned seating deep enough to disappear into, arranged so that no matter where you sat, the great window was the thing your eyes found first, with several small tables for placing drinks or snacks. Soft light pooled from unseen sources. It was, he thought, the kind of room built for people who liked each other's company, which made it, on paper, the last room in the galaxy he had any right to.

And ringed around the whole space, tucked into alcoves between support struts and along the low walls flanking the pit, were the display cases.

He stopped walking.

They were empty. Rows of them, backlit, glass-fronted, waiting. They were perfectly sized for hardcovers, figures, and all the oddly shaped souvenirs he picked up on his travels. He understood, with a lurch he tried not to let reach his face, that someone had studied him. Had looked at a tiny apartment stuffed floor to ceiling with board games and paperbacks and convention badges and decided that whatever else this ship intended to take from him, it intended to give him room to keep the rest.

"The cases are calibrated for humidity and light exposure," C2 said, already moving on. "Your belongings are currently being held in stasis and can be accessed through your terminal at any time you would like to decorate."

He said nothing. He was extremely busy trying not to gawk, and doing a very poor job at it.

To the right side of the entry room, there was a large arch and a small step up into a dining room with a large black meeting table with enough seats for a small army and, on the other side of an obsidian breakfast bar with another set of comfy stools, a kitchen that Aaron knew Jacqueline and Serena would drool over, filled with all sorts of appliances that Aaron couldn’t have begun to name or even guess at their functions. Like in the Crew Quarters, C2 spent a moment introducing him to the food synthesizer and explaining its functions. Just to the side of the dining room, there was an entrance to a small hallway that appeared to curve back behind the dining room, but whose entrance was blocked by a wall of light that, when Aaron pushed against it, he found to be as solid as stone.

“That leads to the Concubine Quarters. Once certain conditions have been met, your harem members may petition you to relocate to private quarters down that hallway to allow them to share in the luxury with you and so that you can have them more easily at hand.”

The bedroom lay beyond a second arch opposite the dining area, with a pair of frosted glass doors that slid shut behind him as he entered the space with a soft, decisive click, sealing the space off from the rest of the suite entirely. Another window, full-length, positioned so that the bed, a truly massive thing clearly made to sleep a dozen, if not more, faced the stars instead of a wall. Recessed shelving, more waiting glass cases, smaller, more private, the kind meant for the things a person didn't necessarily want guests handling, lined the other walls. There was also a door to a walk-in closet capable of holding several times as many clothes as Aaron had ever owned in his life.

The bathroom nearly finished him.

It wasn't a bathroom. It was an onsen; sunken stone-textured tile, a deep soaking pool large enough for a dozen people at least, steam curling off water that was already, somehow, exactly the right temperature. Wooden slat flooring led to a washing area with low stools and handheld fixtures, all of it open on one side to, of course, another floor-to-ceiling window, so a person could sit shoulder-deep in hot water and watch the stars drift past.

There were three more doors off of the entryway. The largest, a curved elevator-like door, C2 explained, was a lift system that would transport him anywhere he wanted to go on the ship. The other two led to two small office-like areas. One, which C2 described as his ready room, was clearly designed for entertaining or having meetings with the crew, and had a door that, C2 explained, led to the bridge. Aaron's request to inspect the bridge was immediately rejected. The other led to a small, relatively sparse room, which C2 explained would be his personal lab and workroom and could be fitted with any tools or equipment Aaron thought necessary, but for now had only a glass display resembling a computer monitor. C2 took a moment to explain the rules of the suite again, reiterating the rules regarding crew access to the Captain’s Quarters, the date nights, and the differences in curfew for himself and the crew.

Before he left, C2 guided Aaron back to what he was beginning to think of as the living room with its massive window and conversation pit. He handed Aaron a remote, which he instinctively turned on. A section of the gigantic window the size of a movie theater screen turned dark before resolving into a menu that allowed him to search through, if C2 was to be believed, all the media available on Earth or anywhere in their new galaxy. It even had options for every game he could imagine, causing the corresponding controllers to appear on the tables in the center of the conversation pit. C2 briefly showed Aaron how to resize, reposition, or even duplicate the screen so it could be seen from anywhere in the intimate pit, and Aaron had to work very hard to suppress his urge to swoon at how perfect the setup was. When C2 finally reached the end of his tour, which he assured Aaron was only the beginning of some of the suite’s functions, he informed Aaron of the mandatory meeting the following morning before teleporting away and leaving Aaron to continue exploring the space on his own.

Aaron took some time to continue his nighttime explorations, using the food synthesizer to make himself a cup of tea, barely repressing the urge to ask for “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” and instead settling for a chamomile herbal blend. He explored the bar a bit, discovering a compartment that appeared to include, among other things, a small collection of joints, edibles, and other cannabis products as well as a collection of mind-altering substances that he was less familiar with, some of which he suspected were not of Earth origin. He resisted the urge to light himself a joint, choosing instead to clean himself up in the beautiful bathroom, denying himself a soak in the massive tub as the guilt sank in.

He reminded himself, once again, that this was a gilded cage, that this paradise of a space had come at the cost of his friends and coworkers being abducted from their homes and lives, only to be trapped in a perverted game where he was, somehow, the prize. He tried desperately to hate the space, to look on it with loathing and see all of the bells and whistles, perfectly tailored to his preferences and desires, as the deadly strings they were. But every time, he ended up finding some new feature, some hidden quirk of the space that made it even more perfect for him, and felt a surge of excitement only to be slammed by a wall of guilt. When the guilt, shame, and exhaustion of the evening were finally too much, he settled into the massive bed and fell asleep; fear, shame, and a guilty excitement warring in his mind as exhaustion finally claimed him.