Mortal Protection Services Chapter 18: VI.A: Abstainer

Read chapter 18 of Mortal Protection Services by B.T.Skull on NovelPedia.

VI.A: Abstainer I'd been sent to hell. This was my ultimate punishment for not voting. Vote or die? I wish I was dead, but that didn't seem like an option either. Read the whole handbook he said... sure. The full employee handbook was a million pages long. I had once loved Hyperspace for being able to stop time and do whatever... But now that I was detached from The System and all I had to read was this tablet with a million pages of dense, legalese I'm not so thrilled with the prospects here. And this was Hyperspace Legalese, so... somehow so much more complicated than regular legalese. I'd studied up on all the ships and doctrine of each branch of the children of Sol. Their rules and regs felt like coloring books after trying to wrap my head around MPS rules and regs. And, yes, I am aware of the regs for space marines that literally ARE coloring books, I meant compared to the regs the rest of the space military reads. I was happier before, I didn't need to eat, or drink, or sleep, and The System had every video game ever made by any species in the universe. There was some interesting shit in there I'd yet to explore... Dammit. Why didn't I waste more of my time playing video games when I had the chance. I sighed and continued reading. Page 9004: multi-form exception clauses for non-euclidean energy entities... Oh my Jims and James and Jesuses... this shit was dry, and confusing, but I trudged on through it, frequently rereading the same bland passage over again trying to fit it into my mind, or even just make sense of it. The whole point was to find a loophole that helped, but most of these loops in the language were hole-less. Left my mind feeling tied in knots more like. I felt like ages had passed, but I was only on page 12004. "AAAAAaaaaaaAAaaaAAaaAAaaaaAAAAAaaaaaa." The occasional scream at the void had even stopped helping about a thousand pages ago. Dammit. I had frozen time with the image of Jim in his borrowed body, all sudsy in the Vagrant-Washer 9000. There was a flash of light, quite the surprise, because thought I'd been fully severed from the rest of Hyperspace. Clearly a lot I still didn't understand about how all that works. "Mafdet!" She'd appeared in my office now and again during my 1500+ years here, apparently whenever the hell she felt like it. Jim's cat, always a delight. Normally Jim comes to get her before too long if she sticks around. She must have been lonely without him. It had been almost a half hour in the real world since he went down. I scooped her up and nuzzled her face with my own. She seemed duly annoyed, but still gave me a little active nose to nose boop before insisting she be set down. Fair enough Ma'am, you are my senior by a few thousand years, down you go. He said he made her by spinning up a fresh, empty mind and running it through a custom made cat setting on the experiencer a few thousand times. By all accounts she should be the cattiest cat that ever catted. As if to prove the point of my inner monologue, she pushed the remote I used to control the view out the video-wall off my desk, and pounced on it, batting it around wildly. Additional windows opened, channels changed, she activated picture-in-picture mode, this was all well and good until she resumed the flow of time... in fucking in fast forward. I scrambled after her, catching cat and remote after a few seconds to me, but several hours of real time. I pushed the pause button. "Naughty cat, Mafdet! You've wasted precious hours!" "Mrrrow?" She wasn't looking at me. She was looking out the window in the wall, the one that showed Jim; he'd just stress-chewed his bottom lip open. He was not in the best state of mind, it seemed. "I know you want to help him, but what-" She didn't even let me finish asking her what we were supposed to do about it, she just turned, and jumped from my arms into the window. I... did not expect her to go through it. I was so shocked by this turn of events that I decided to let a few more precious se