Callista Hayes Hates You

I first posted these stories on Bluesky here   , here   , and here   . While they’re basically stand-alone vignettes, I’m grouping them together here for convenience.

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The victim is small and weak, its under-developed musculature betraying its origin in one of the outer colonies, where protein is dear and most laborers subsist on a mixture of nutrient slop and whatever insects still come to feed on their refuse. Its mottled green-and-blue skin provides a more specific origin: the slums outside Waystation 14-Widdershin, which have been plagued by a particularly tenacious fungal infection for the last two decades. Those born with the infection carry it laced through their skin and other organs, in a way that seems almost symbiotic compared to the rot it inflicts upon those who come to it later in life. As a result, the victim—and the soldiers raping it—will need to be burned, along with anything else that has been exposed to it.

These are the pertinent observations; the ones that Callista Hayes will write down in her report afterward, to explain why she will have executed the victim, the soldiers, and anyone else who might have been exposed. She will do her best to ensure that fire is only involved posthumously, but Callista has always been a poor shot.

She will not record the reasons that she is standing at a remove, watching, her left hand resting on the handle of her holstered service pistol. Her fingers are twitching against its smooth wood and steel inlays, eager, but she chooses to exhale. She chooses to wait, standing nearly silently, her feet planted firmly on the ground; and she chooses where her right hand is. Its busy fingers do not twitch at all.

It would be uncouth of her to put down in words the way the soldiers’ greasy pricks catch the light when they momentarily withdraw from the victim’s body; the strings of pearly fluid stretching between their tips and its various gaping orifices, the little involuntary twitches, the acrid sweat and the faint scent of chlorine. Nor would she linger on the way the victim’s soft skin distorts where they grab it, their unkind hands leaving painful bruises and spurring her fingers on to even greater labor. That is just for her. Trying to communicate it would only confuse things.

The last thing she will not record is the victim’s head, which is an enormous bullet, the metal blending smoothly into its infected skin. She will not tell her liege about its two bulbous sensory pods, which she is certain can do more than see, or the mouth full of sharp, metallic teeth that the soldiers have wrapped a belt around to keep closed. Callista Hayes can infer what it means, and what it means that the lights blinking around its base are red, red, red, because Callista knows enough to recognize a failed experiment, and she knows what would have happened to her if she had been deemed a failure.

In another few minutes she’ll draw her gun and start shooting. She’ll make sure that everyone involved in this is dead and burned, and that the knowledge of how to make more things like the victim dies will them—but not for a bit. Not until she’s done imagining herself in the victim’s place.

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Sleep does not come easily to Callista Hayes. It never does.

They are three days away from the front lines and a handful of her fellow soldiers have been amusing themselves with the company’s disposable asset. From the sound of things someone—probably another corporal or one of the shiftier sergeants—has snuck in enough alcohol to have fun and a handful of chemical enhancers, and the gaggle of degenerates keeping her up would rather celebrate their impending deaths than do anything to avert them. It’s fucking typical, of course it is, every deployment has a few dozen privates who see a disposable asset on the inventory sheet and assume that it’s there to amuse them. Fucking animals.

Callista knows better than to get involved. She really, truly does. Any other day she’d put on her headphones—the big ones, built to muffle out a helicopter or a battery of screamers letting loose at an unsuspecting city—but she’s not technically supposed to have those in her kit, and she hasn’t yet had time to come to an understanding with the company’s newest quartermaster, the last one having died to food poisoning, so she doesn’t have those, and her standard-issue earplugs are utterly insufficient. She can hear every single squelch and moan and grunt, the laughter, the jokes …

She lasts until just past two, which is a dreadful time for anyone to be awake. No one is at their best at two, and perhaps that’s why she brings her pistol with her when she storms out of her tent towards the party.

There are ten or fifteen of them. Callista doesn’t care about the exact number, and she doesn’t spare a glance at the ones who see her coming and slip away. They’re illuminated by two trucks’ headlights, a gross misuse of company assets and a breach of operational security. If there was a sniper in the hills they’d be sitting ducks, if they even noticed that they were being killed. Probably they wouldn’t. They don’t notice her until she pushes her way into the circle.

The asset looks about the same as it always does. A scrawny, soft thing, incapable of growing meaningful muscle. Its face is blank; its eyes are flat mirrors. It is messier than usual, its torn uniform stained with cum and piss and vomit, and the private thrusting away between its legs is certainly not a standard issue accessory, but still, about the same.

She puts three bullets into its head. Two in one eye and one in the other. Blows out the back of its skull. Blood and bone and pulped brain matter ruin the dirt under it.

The privates—and she is sure, now, that they are all privates—react as she’d expect them to. The one between the asset’s legs panics and falls backwards, his laughably hard dick waggling in the air. The air fills with distress and protests and curses, so close to flashing into anger.

“Fucking hell!” Callista yells over them. “Do you not know what you’re fucking? Look at its head, it doesn’t fucking matter! Not like the way you’re ruining my sleep, assholes, and I swear I will find the scuttiest of scut work for you if you don’t,” she glances down involuntarily, eyes drawn by the motion at her feet. She’s seen it before, though never from so close; one of the asset’s official uses is for target practice. It’s less visceral when you’re a hundred meters away. Meat is not supposed to move like that. The brain does not have tentacles, blood does not have grasping hands, chips of bone cannot grow legs—and yet the asset’s scraps reach for each other, mindlessly and implacably drawn back together into a reunion so perfect that Callista could almost forget that they were ever separated—

It squirms as its head comes back together. It can’t help it. Nerve impulses get wonky while an immortal corrects its death. That is no surprise. The part that ruins Callista is the fleeting moment of attention that the abruptness of her gunfire—and, she thinks, an appreciation for the precision of her shots—has earned her, the asset’s eyes fixed on her face. She’s never seen it focus on anyone before, and she does not like it.

“… just keep it down, okay? Or drag it away from camp. We’re not gonna get any sleep once we’re at the front, fuckers.”

She stumbles away, not waiting to see how they’ll react, and she hasn’t even made it back to her tent before she hears the wet squish and satisfied grunt of one of them returning to their baser instincts. They really are animals, Callista thinks, though her hatred is tinged with another, less pleasant, feeling. The noises are truly disgusting, and they’re making sleep impossible, yes—

But at least they tell her where the asset is.

At least they’re stopping it from looking at her.

She doesn’t want to think about what might happen when it’s deployed.

Callista Hayes Dossier

This is Callista Hayes. She hates you.

Like most of the army’s human assets, she is marked by childhood malnutrition. The allocation of resources to unproductive persons is broadly discouraged, especially in times of economic stress and austerity. She is now useful enough that her muscles are covered by a hard-won layer of fat, especially around her torso, but her skin remains fragile and prone to a variety of dysfunctions. If she still had hair on her head—or her original head—it would be thin and brittle.

Broadly speaking, height is a marker of status. Officers, who are almost uniformly born to noble families and fed an indulgent diet, see the world from inches or feet higher than the median enlisted proles. This makes them easy to identify and kill. The handful of exceptions, proles whose genetics gifted them with unusual height, are viewed with suspicion by their fellows and superiors alike. Callista is an exception among exceptions, an import from the lunar colonies; two meters tall even without the exoskeletal augmentations that shield her limbs’ fragile bones from damage. Her replacement skull adds another handful of centimeters.

Her immune system is poor, the result of a childhood spent in low gravity with little exposure to terrestrial pathogens. This was originally thought to be a useful feature of lunar imports, since it reduces the volume of immunosuppressants her body must tolerate to survive the various implants and augmentations she has been subjected to; that theory has since been discredited. Native proles are simply so much cheaper.

Callista Hayes is, as has been hinted, a special asset. She wears the trappings of her status with an emotion that she pretends is pride, though the shoulder scales and badge are hardly what conveys her rank. Everyone knows what she is long before they’re close enough to see the magnifying glass and scalpel of Research and Development, encircled by her patron’s family’s twisting tentacles; her replacement head is simply too obvious.

The scientists who made her told her that it was modeled on an old gas mask, which was itself derived from the masks worn by plague surgeons, the shape dictated by the problem of interceding between a body’s orifices and the outside world. Callista thinks it resembles an upturned teardrop, its point tilted down as if protruding from her mandible (a bone she no longer possesses) and the curve of its base arching across the empty space where the dome of her skull isn’t any more. It is shaped to deflect small caliber bullets, packed full of machinery that whispers the truth of the world into her brain’s abused sensory cortices. Her original eyeballs are also there, in the dark, seeing nothing. A handful of uplink ports dot her reinforced neck, and when she shows people her teeth they tend to do whatever it takes to convince her to put them away.

You may suspect that Callista Hayes is not a good person. This is correct. Good people do not do what she does.

Colonel Jennifer Aldridge Dossier

Colonel Aldridge is a purchased officer. This is not an insult; the vast majority of officerships in The Democratic Republic of Grand Fenwick and Its Associated Territories¹ are purchased. Merit officers are thin on the ground and rarely rise without powerful patrons, which really means that it’s the officer being purchased rather than the commission. So it does not immediately follow that Jennifer Aldridge is a loser.

She is, of course. But that’s not the fault of her indulgent family, who finds it necessary to ensure that even its least-favored by-blows are given positions worthy of their name. Nor can she blame her upbringing; her four older siblings all turned out perfectly well, and even her two younger sibs are well on their way to becoming useful members of the minor nobility (one of them is a priest; the other a clerk. Hardly honorable positions, but unlikely to shame their name as long as they don’t fall in love with a prole or some such nonsense).

She has every advantage her family could give her in life—even the service of one of the army’s precious special assets, a murderously augmented import from the lunar colonies named Hayes who murders ten soldiers for every enemy combatant or rebel it exterminates (Colonel Aldridge remains blissfully ignorant of this. She did not hire her clerk for her skill with numbers). She really can’t blame anyone else for how much of a loser she is, or the exact way in which she’s a loser, but she does anyway. It’s not her fault, you know? (It absolutely is.)

As for exactly why Colonel Jennifer Aldridge is a loser, there is no delicate way to say that she discovered her grandparents’ private library at the age of 14 and has spent nearly every private moment since taking matters into her own hands, spending time with Mrs. Palm and her five daughters, doing the five knuckle shuffle, practicing self-love, cranking her hog, or, quite simply, masturbating. Her own private library rivals the size of her grandparents’ and has long since surpassed theirs in depravity, though she was able to bring little enough of it into the field; her fantasies feature anyone and everyone around her in a parade of lurid, humiliating, and anatomically impossible situations.

Jennifer Aldridge is 26 years old, has ordered the deaths of some fifty thousand people, equally split between her own soldiers, the enemy, and civilians. She commands 1,200 soldiers and nearly five times as many support personnel, has nominal oversight over one of the army’s R&D cells, and selects her personal staff based on how attractive they are. She is living what should be her best life.

She has never had any sort of sex, and she does not know a single person who genuinely respects her.