Karen vs Alien Read online

  Karen vs Alien

  Possessive Aliens

  Loki Renard

  Copyright © 2020 by Loki Renard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Human Wanted

  2. Down The Hole

  3. Under New Management

  4. Revenge

  5. Suits

  6. Galactor

  7. The Final Manager

  Foreword

  Timesplosion

  In the beginning (or maybe the end, time is tricky), everything exploded.

  This was an accident, brought about by a misguided attempt to save the planet. It was complicated.

  Humans kept in simulated reality were safe, but those with the misfortune to be on Earth at any time whatsoever, found themselves blown into thousands of alternate realms, realities, and planets. Many of them died. Many of them did not. And those many did what humans always do rather well, and replicated their little gametes off.

  The timesplosion stories are disparate at times, vicious and brutal in some places, sweet and amusing in others, quite often sexy (because gametes gonna gamete.)

  They can be read as stand alones, as due to the nature of the timesplosion, continuous narrative becomes tricky anyway. When effect precedes cause, can we be blamed for anything? The answer, of course, is no. There are cliffs, but no cliffhangers. They all fell off in the big bang.

  This is the story of Karen, a human woman who just discovered that what she thought was the world she lived in is actually an advanced simulation run by aliens who kept humans inside a zoological garden of sorts. Those aliens have since been run off by a much more brutal race called the Scythkin, a species driven to galactic conquest one clutch of fearsome blade ridden monster males at a time.

  You are now up to speed.

  Human Wanted

  Tyank

  I’m reading to pass the time. My interstellar tablet picks up publications from across the universe. Most of them are stupid. But maybe I’m stupid for reading them. No. It’s not me. It’s the publications who are wrong.

  Idle thoughts aside, my gaze drifts over the digital page.

  Fifty Sentient Creatures To Sleep With Before You Die

  #1 - The Human Female.

  This listing shall come as no surprise. It is a universal truth that there is nothing more desirable than a human woman. The way she moves, the softness of her curves, the tight and supple interior of her body, the place made to pleasure man and spark life. If one has the opportunity to mate with one, I urge you to take it. It will leave you both forever changed.

  Scythkin Explorer, Tyribal

  I close the article. “Goddamn dickbait," I growl under my breath. I am bored. I am also very, very horny. It has been far too long since I mated with anything, desirable or not. At this point anything with a temperature of more than thirty-five degrees is fair game.

  I’m left here, cleaning up after a mess not of my own making. A scythkin was not made to sit and read. He was made to go forth and conquer. But what we’ve conquered here, a captive human colony of many thousands of people, all of whom were very offended to discover that their world was a simulation, and who have demanded to have their minds wiped of that inconvenient fact, is not the sort of thing one can leave on its own.

  The first hatched of our clutch, Krave, was supposed to be in control. But he fell for an insolent human female and now he’s making as much trouble as anybody else.

  What Tyribal fails to mention in his article of general fuckability, is that human females are trouble. Not the explosive, obvious kind of trouble, but the insidious, worm their way under your skin until you forget who and what you are kind of trouble.

  Fortunately, I don’t have the problem of having been seduced by one of those human sirens, because I have everything a scythkin needs. Nothing. And nobody.

  Down The Hole

  Karen

  I am dangling very high in the air.

  This is not how my day began. It started with a cup of black coffee and a newspaper which told me everything was more or less well. That may very well have been true at time of printing, but by mid-morning, it was not.

  I have been plucked from chaos. One moment, I was following the official directive to assemble in the city square with all the other inhabitants of our fair city. The next, the very fabric of our reality was crumbling around us as an alien beast took the podium and told us that our world was a lie.

  All around me, people panicked and fled. I knew better than to run. I strode forward, chin high, shoulders back, and I spoke to the monster on the podium, the one at the center of the madness.

  He looked at me with burning eyes, but I was equal to the daemon. I had an incantation capable of banishing all evil. It was made up of eight simple words - eight is a cosmic number, and every sound in the universe holds great power. Especially these ones, all strung together just so with the correct intonation, not too angry, not too nice, just the right level of firmness and yes, perhaps even passive-aggression.

  “I would LIKE to speak to your MANAGER.”

  I spoke the words of power and was transported instantly from the chaos in the streets to the great sky above.

  Under New Management

  Tyank

  “Uh, Tyank? Bit of a mess to clean up.”

  Krave’s words float to me from the top layer of the simulation where he has just spectacularly fucked absolutely everything in the proverbial, if not literal, ass.

  The simulation is in chaos. Humans are panicking, retreating to their homes, desperately diving into whatever passes for entertainment so they don’t have to look outside and see cold, hard reality staring them in their faces. I was worried I’d have to send in forces to contain them, but they're pretty good at containing themselves.

  Krave told them the secret they should never have been told. It was his human mate’s idea, and like most human ideas, it did not go well. He told them that they lived in a simulation, and that outside that simulation, all manner of evil had befallen their kind. They did not take the news well. They don’t want knowledge. They want safety, and if they cannot have safety, then the illusion of safety will do.

  Fortunately, we have an ability to control the minds of humans. In the heart of the mechanics of the simulation lies a reset button which restores them to their last stable state. We’ve picked the previous Tuesday as being a solid sort of day.

  "Are we ready to reset?” I ask the question of a slippery little murketeer. These are the elves in the machine, the alien workers left behind by the previous regime. Their faces are perpetually locked in great grinning smiles, but this one doesn’t look happy at all, and that is quite the trick.

  Having been left in charge of aliens who are not my kind is difficult for me. My instincts are to murder them brutally and leave their carcasses for hatchlings to devour, but I have been strictly ordered to keep essential staff intact, and that means this goofy looking little creature and all his equally goofy friends.

  “We are ready to reset,” he says. “In an hour, none of them will remember this having happened.”

  INCOMING HUMAN

  A voice blares officiously through the subterranean machinery.

  “What the hell? Incoming human?” I glare at a murketeer, as if it is his fault.

  “They’re sending a human woman to you, Mr Tyank,” the murketeer says, tapping away at his little electronic pad. They live and die by those things.

  The mu
rketeers insist on calling me Mr. I loathe that. Mr is a prefix for human men. I am not human. You’d think the blazing eyes, body covered in serrated ridges of pure hell and the horns which lay back over my head in irritation every time they call me Mr would be a clue.

  “Why is she being sent here?”

  The murketeer taps away again.

  “Says she was grossly insubordinate. In need of discipline, containment, and possession.”

  “So she’s for… me?”

  “Yes, Mr Tyank.”

  I’m so surprised by that piece of information that I barely notice what I am sure is another insulting, “Mr.”

  I have been left babysitting a simulation of a hundred thousand or so humans, but I did not imagine I would be given one of my very own. Human females are rare, delicate, beautiful, winsome creatures. Several of my clutch have taken their own. It has become something of a trend since the species went basically extinct.

  Scythkin clutches travel together, powerful males going from planet to planet, destroying everything our paths and claiming it for our own.

  That has changed with the taking of the simulation. We cannot simply conquer and destroy it. It must be tended to. And that means I am stuck here in the office, taking care of inventory and watching over the humans who live inside a generated reality based on a mish-mash of cultural elements from the continent of America during the 1980’s and 1990’s, commonly regarded as the second most comforting period of human history.

  It felt like a punishment when I was left here. I know Krave felt the same way when he was first obliged to act as simulation manager. He was restless and frustrated for a long time, and ended up installing an authoritarian regime which was swiftly overthrown by his rebellious little mate.

  Maybe this is Krave rewarding me for my service. A woman, for my own. A woman to keep. A woman to bury my flesh inside and feel the ripples of her pleasure. Human women are a delicacy, a prized possession. Being guardian of a simulation with over fifty thousand of them and not being able to be with any of them has been torment beyond torment. But perhaps my time has come.

  “Bring her to me,” I say. "As soon as she arrives.”

  I begin to make plans for her arrival. She may be frightened after her ordeal. I will have to be sensitive that. I will have to hold back my natural lust and ensure that she is not broken in any way before I embark on a sensual conquest of my first human female.

  “Initiate the simulation reset,” I order. “Prepare my quarters for a female guest.”

  “She should go into the cells, Mr Tyank,” the murketeer says. "She's being removed from the simulation population under a disciplinary code. That means she has proven to be a problem. She should be punished.”

  “I’ll punish her in my own way.”

  “Copulation is not punishment. Not to human females. They are ravenous in their sexual appetites, Mr Tya….”

  His sentence ends in a squeal as I drag him up off the ground and bring him toward my snarling face, my clawed hand wrapped around his weak neck.

  “Call me Mr Tyank again, and I will snap you like a fucking twig," I growl.

  “S…s…. sir?” He tries again.

  I put him down. Gently, so not as to break him. “Tyank will do. Now. Bring me my woman.”

  Karen

  “WOOOOOOAHH!”

  I scream as my metal wings detach and let me plummet toward the ocean. Terror fills my body, panic, adrenaline, all completely useless because there is nothing that stops falling. I can’t do anything but sink through the air like a balloon doesn’t. Complaining will get me nothing. It strikes me that I perhaps should have thought more carefully about antagonizing a massive alien beast telling me my reality was a lie, but that insight comes too late as I fall at terminal velocity toward the uncaring ocean…

  Is that a hole?

  It is a hole. A big black spot of nothing in the middle of the water, opening me up and swallowing me down. I could swear I hear a leviathan gulp as it takes me into the blackness, where I still fall toward a pin prick of strange light at the end of a tunnel I don’t want to exit.

  Go toward the light, they said.

  Fuck that, I screamed.

  But it’s coming toward me. I can’t stop the inevitable. I can’t fight my destiny.

  FWUMP!

  I land on something soft and pillowy and find myself staring through thick plasticy bars. When I look up, I see that they curve gently away from me. There is a sign nearby, visible through the bars.

  WELCOME TO THE LAUNDRY BASKET AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  There's another sign tacked on at the bottom.

  (now under new management)

  I have landed on an endless pile of socks. Not a single one of them has a pair. They are all unique individuals, lying in laundered smugness beneath my body. I never thought lost laundry would save my life, but here I am, unharmed, though very confused.

  Maybe I’m tripping. Maybe that neighbor girl of mine slipped some tweak, or tang, or whatever it is the kids these days are calling their wacky-backy.

  I sit in the contained area, feeling very much discombobulated. I see no managers here. I have been discarded, just thrown away like an old sock. Or, a new one… looking around, I get the impression that these socks have likely only been worn once before disappearing to this part of the void.

  “Hello?” I call out. “Hello? I’m stuck!”

  I would try to un-stick myself, but it is hard to stand up on the socks. I keep slipping through them, and find myself afraid of sinking through them, like a fabric quicksand of sorts. Who knows what horrors are buried in this basket. I cannot be the first person to have been tossed into it.

  In addition to being terrified and confused, I am fuming. Not only has the entire city gone insane at the feet of a mad creature with knives for knees and a cheese grater for a chest, but I have been thrown down a hole in the middle of a disconnected ocean and now I sit inside a plastic container, waiting to be retrieved by whatever horrors might wait for me outside. This is unacceptable.

  A door opens. I hear it slide and then I hear the pitter patter of feet approaching swiftly. I know immediately that these are not the aliens I anticipated. There is nothing large and seething about them. They are small, wide eyed, massive mouthed. They pad up to me with big smiles and little hands.

  “Karen?”

  “Yes. I’m Karen.”

  Their voices are squeaky and slightly nasal.

  “Karen, you have been removed from the simulation for disruptive behavior. You will now speak to the manager.”

  Finally. About damn time.

  “Are you going to let me out of this cosmic sock pile?”

  “Yes, yes. One moment.”

  They take hold of some levers outside the basket and begin manipulating what I can only describe as a claw hand which descends from above.

  “To the left,” one squeaks. “No. To the right. The other right! Back! Back! Left….”

  The claw grasps at me, but does not make full contact with my body and instead grazes off me and slides away without catching me.

  “Let me out! Cut this open! Make a door!” I begin making demands in the hope one of them works.

  “One moment please,” the little alien says. “We’ll try again.”

  He tries again, with much the same success.

  "Maybe she’s too heavy,” one says to the other.

  “She likely weighs more than the socks do.”

  Of course I weigh more than socks do. This is what has been lurking under our world the entire time? Small aliens with a very poor grasp of basic physics? This explains a lot. Or actually, nothing, but thinking it explains a lot makes me feel as though I understand something, and right now, the feeling of understanding is very important because absolutely nothing makes any kind of sense.

  “Get me out of here this instant!”

  “How many socks do you think she weighs?”

  They ignore me. If anything sparks my ire, it is be
ing ignored. I stand up as best I can and I raise my voice to an authoritatively shrill tone.

  “Bring me the manager!”

  They stop and look at one another.

  “We could bring him here.”

  “But he said to bring her to him. That’s the other way around. He won't like that.”

  “Oh no he won’t like that at all.”

  “But the claw’s not working on her.”

  “Tip the basket over?”

  “Can’t do that. Then what’s at the bottom would come out.”

  “Oh, right. Can't have what’s at the bottom coming out.”

  “What’s at the bottom!?” I squeal the question, only to be further ignored.

  “Let’s get him. We’ll tell him she's not cooperating. He’ll believe that. Humans never behave.”

  “He’ll expect us to deal with her.”

  “She's been sent to him to be dealt with. Let him deal with her.”

  “Whenever I see him, I’ll be sure to tell him, whoever he is, that he's being represented by utter morons,” I interject.

  "What is taking so long?”

  The question is snarled by the massive beast who just strode in through the door. I take an instinctive step back behind the pile of socks, putting more fabric and material between me and the monster manager.

  “We can’t get her out of the basket, Mr…. sir… Tyank.”

  “Damn stupid system," he growls. “It should be a cage. With a door. Not a basket.”

  “The basket is from the Galactor period,” the little alien stammers. “They never removed humans from the simulation. They only removed their socks from time to time. It’s the scythkin who repurposed the ocean hole to remove humans.”