Suddenly, the chamber was flushed with green light, and invaded by the usual series of consonant tones, indicating safe passage from the craft into the dock. Lance stood up, feeling the sag in his muscles from the weightlessness, but nonetheless happy to be moving beyond the limits of his orbiting solitary confinement cell, and its brutal anti-masturbatory intravenous medicobots. The door split in two along an invisible seam, and he clopped down into a vast aphotic cavern, leaving a path of dimly lit hexagons behind him, that traced his route glibly through the dark before fading sharply back to nothing. Various tiny lights called out from the distant womb-lining of the subterrane, and Lance could feel the silent heat of complex machinery through his bio-electron suit. The guards walked briskly ahead of him for what felt like many macro-seconds until they guided him into a scuffed chrome elevator hidden at the back of the room. Inside he began to feel the rapid ascent to the higher levels of the space station; his intestines seemed to float in his gut endlessly, and that repressed anxiety quickly began to flow to the fore of his mind like some viscous avalanche.
‘Remember Nymphopolis,’ he said to himself, trying to ebb the nervousness. ‘You have nothing left to lose, Lance.’
They arrived at what must have been the highest point of the station, and the elevator doors bisected to reveal a woman standing alone in a spacious, well-decorated office. She turned toward Lance and silently beckoned the guards to bring him into the room. Taking the opportunity, he began to assess her head to toe. She was tallish, with nutty brown hair down to the curve of her spine, and her face was alluring and soft, like the bio-engineered grass on Rigon 12. Her lips were big enough as to look swollen. Her breasts pushed relentlessly against the fabric of her tiny blouse.
‘Mr. Bodega, I’m glad you’ve finally arrived. I take it you’ve been informed as to why you’re here?’ Her voice was too smooth to be human, and he supposed she had had her voice box upgraded. Each word was a perfectly distinct unit, and it emanated like a bright melody from an un-pedalled piano.
