Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171288 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Shurla looked shocked.
“I don’t want to go back to that awful place!” she exclaimed. “It was dark and dirty—not nice and clean like the Compound.” She smoothed the bright white pillowcase beside her lovingly, as though admiring the cleanliness all around her.
“What’s wrong with you?” Penny hissed. “Last night you couldn’t wait to escape! In fact, you were the one who came up with the plan!”
Shurla opened her eyes wide and stared at Penny as though she was crazy.
“Why would I make a plan to escape paradise?” she asked, sounding honestly bewildered. “I must stay here and fulfill the Glorious Leader’s will for my life. Soon I will be united with my Forever Mate and after that, I shall breed for his glory—for the glory of the Shining Star…”
She clasped her hands to her triple bosom, a beatific smile wreathing her face. She looked like a saint who had caught a glimpse of Heaven, Penny thought. There was nothing forced or fake about her expression—she seemed to honestly believe everything she had been saying.
“I don’t understand this.” Penny shook her head. “What happened to you, Shurla? Why are you acting like this?”
“She’s just responding to the hypno-whispers and if you don’t want to be recycled, you’ll pretend you are too,” murmured a voice behind Penny.
Penny gasped and jerked around to see the woman with the straight black hair who had brought their protein shakes yesterday. She had a hover-cart filled with trays and more frosty glasses of the same milk-shake-like liquid which she was handing out to the other prisoners.
“What do you mean?” Penny asked her. “What whispers?” Then she remembered the way her pillow had seemed to be whispering to her when she woke up, though she couldn’t understand very much of it.
“You must have heard them,” the woman murmured, as she served Penny a tray which had a covered plate, a glass of the frosty white stuff, and a flavor stick and a few utensils on a napkin.
“Well, yeah.” Penny nodded. “But I only understood about one word in ten.”
The woman looked at her shrewdly.
“Either you’ve got a language implant or some other kind of translation device on you. Standard isn’t your first language and you didn’t learn it naturally, did you?”
“Uh, no.” Penny shook her head. “English—English is my first language.”
“Never heard of English, but it’s a damn good thing for your sake that you don’t know Standard. Else you’d have been hypnotized too.” The woman shook her head.
“But—” Penny began.
The woman shook her head.
“Not here. Out in the exercise yard I’ll tell you more if I can. In the meantime, act like all the others and when Mother Toone asks if anyone wants to leave the Compound, don’t say a word. Understand?”
She gave Penny such an intense look that she felt her stomach fist in fear.
“All right,” she murmured. “I won’t.’
“Good.” The woman nodded. “Now here’s your breakfast. Whatever you do, don’t eat the flesh.”
“The flesh?” Penny asked, bewildered. But the woman had already passed on and was giving out breakfast trays to the other prisoners.
Penny looked down at her own tray and saw something that looked like blue scrambled eggs and a piece of pale purple toast. There was also a bowl full of pink chunks in some kind of white custard and a few strips of crispy brown meat.
The meat looked like the best of the lot but Penny remembered the woman’s words and didn’t touch it. The way she’d called it “flesh” instead of meat seemed significant—Penny was afraid to ask where it had come from.
Instead, she tasted the other things on her tray but found them all extremely bland. Her eye fell on the flavor stick, though, and she had an idea. Picking it up, she placed it against her tongue and thought about scrambled eggs. Then she swirled it through the fluffy blue chunks on her plate and tried them again. This time they tasted exactly like perfectly cooked scrambled eggs with just a hint of cheese and salt and pepper.
“Mmm, perfect!” Penny murmured to herself. She did the same thing to the purple bread—thinking of hot buttered toast with homemade strawberry preserves and then transformed her bland protein shake into a frozen mochaccino. The pink chunks in white custard was a little bit more difficult, but after a moment, Penny thought to transform them into pineapple in a kind of custard cream sauce. To be honest, this last transformed food wasn’t very good but she was still hungry, so she ate it anyway.
All around her, the other prisoners were cleaning their plates and drinking their shakes with no questions. Penny wondered if all of them were hypnotized as Shurla apparently was. The looks of quiet contentment and peaceful happiness on their formerly worried faces seemed to answer her question—every one of them had gone straight down the rabbit hole—presumably from listening to what the woman had called “hypno-whispers” the night before.