A String of Pearls
Chapter Eleven
Author's note: I'm going to be an obnoxious git and spam the link to my novel on Amazon here, for a limited time it's free (and knowing it's there is giving me more motivation to write than I've had for a long time) : dp/B07BGSPPBY
With that out of the way, back to our regularly scheduled angst.
…..
Needs
She had been impressive, once.
She had been a shining beacon on the battlefield for a long time, it was even said that if it wasn't for the four Diamonds being there at the right time she might have become a Diamond herself. An unlucky swipe of a zoatox's serrated tail had been enough to keep her out of the climactic battle and gem history was made without her.
Still, Emerald retired with full honours, more money than she could have ever earned in peacetime and a small measure of political power that she hardly used. A small sector of Homeworld's manufacturing district was under her control, and it was enough for her.
The crack in her gem made her nervous, but she never did anything about it, preferring to pretend it wasn't there. At the start of her retirement, it had only been a scratch, but it deepened every orbit. It ran under her manifested form, where it couldn't be seen without special tools. It was easy to ignore, for a while.
It's just an old war wound. Nothing more. We all have them.
She made a huge mistake on the budget for the orbit quarter, one that sent the factories she had under her control struggling to catch up with the rest of Homeworld. A Kunzite was dispatched to look over the accounts, and she did so shaking her head and muttering under her breath, to Emerald's utter humiliation.
"These are a mess," Kunzite grumbled. "Half of the spreadsheets aren't filled in and the data that's here doesn't make any sense. How have you been operating all this time?"
"A few things were overlooked," Emerald shrugged, trying to appear casual.
"Overlooked? This is more like willful blindness," Kunzite retorted.
That hit a nerve, because Emerald's vision had been warped lately. Everything was hazy and numbers floated when she tried to look at them. She'd thought she had done a good job of hiding it.
"Look, not everyone's got a good head for number-crunching," said Kunzite. "But Homeworld can't afford these kinds of mistakes. Just get a pearl in to do the spreadsheets and data work, it'll pay for itself in efficiency. You don't even have to get a new one, just a working one."
"Okay, that's not a bad idea," Emerald agreed, though she barely suppressed a shudder.
Like many veterans of the zoatox war, Emerald had a visceral dislike for pearls. It only intensified when she heard rumours that they could carry zoatox spawn without being harmed in the process. But really, what choice did she have?
She picked up a second-hand pearl, one that had ended up in the impound and had been resold instead of being liquidated. She couldn't see it particularly well given her vision problems, but she saw enough to know she wanted to be as far away from it as possible. She gave it a dank little alcove to work through the data banks and tried to ignore it.
She still had to bring it home in the last quadrants though, and it was harder to find a corner to banish it to at her apartment, so she left it outside on the balcony until they had to go to work again.
At first, everything seemed to be going well. The pearl's number-crunching got the factory back working on schedule, and it was on alert for any mistakes Emerald was making. But less than an orbit had passed before Emerald realized that it wasn't just her vision that was affected by the crack, but her hearing too. She misheard multiple reports from the assembly line supervisors and the Kunzite was back again, muttering at the data readouts.
"I don't understand...kshhh...happening again, and not even...tpschieeee...checked the pearl, it's working just....kshchiiiitschop...it must be coming from somewhere else," she told Emerald, half-heard through the haze.
Now, Emerald was afraid. She knew what happened to gems with cracks that couldn't be repaired. Homeworld couldn't afford to let her maintain her lifestyle when she was basically defective. She would be sent to one of the veteran's homes until her gem could no longer support her mass. That was if they didn't decide she was a waste of resources and shatter her right there and then.
She convinced her higher-ups to let her work from home, under the pretense that the pearl was able to crunch the numbers more efficiently from there with better access to the mainframe database. It worked.
For a while.
Then her vision and hearing weren't the only things affected. Her legs were starting to shake as she walked, and her talking was becoming slurred and unintelligible. When she received a contact request from none other than Yellow Diamond, she thought she was finally doomed.
Except, at the last possible moment, the pearl toddled in from its dank little corner, froze the contact image on Emerald's face and imitated Emerald's voice so perfectly even Emerald herself was convinced for a parsec that she was the one talking. The pearl smoothly apologized for any mistakes made and assured the Diamond that her work would be flawless from now on.
It was as good as its word. It took over Emerald's job with an efficiency that was frightening. Emerald didn't even have to speak to anyone anymore, or even appear in public. The pearl ran the entire operation from its little corner of the apartment without fail.
At the start of every cycle, it lifted Emerald gently out of her rest pod, set up her screens to keep her occupied and brought her anything she needed, and at the end of the cycle it put her back in the rest pod. It kept her clean and nourished to the best of its abilities.
Towards the end of her life, Emerald was prone to crying and asking the pearl why it had been so good to her.
"You needed it," was the only answer she ever got.
…..
Wants
She had always wanted a pearl.
Not just any pearl, because she would have been able to afford one from the black market, or a battered second-hand one from the impound auctions. She wanted the latest one, the best one the market had to offer.
The newest ones were smaller, shinier, more efficient and less likely to break down than any that had come before. Ametrine passed the pearl shops on her way to the factory and on her way back, even though that was a walk that added a good half-quadrant to her journey.
She took to standing in front of the shop window looking in when the newest pearls were released and she spotted one she wanted more than she had ever wanted anything. It was pale yellow with threads of gold running through its long straight hair, and its eyes were a blue so dark they were almost black. It was ruinously expensive, even by pearl standards because it was part of a limited edition.
She could make enough to buy it. She had cut back on almost everything to save money. It wasn't impossible.
Except, the next cycle the pearl had been sold. She'd never really had a chance.
Worse still, she saw it a few cycles later, on the luger with its new owner. It would have to be a Larimar, wouldn't it?
If there was a gem type she could say she hated, it would be Larimars. She had never met a single one that wasn't vain, spoiled and stuck-up. They lived off of the hard work of other gems and their own beauty. They were no better than the zoatox really, at least the zoatox had no choice but to be parasites.
This Larimar was particularly bad, because she was well known to be attached to a Kunzite that had won accolades during the zoatox war and a healthy lifelong pension. That pension was now being spent on keeping this Larimar in gaudy apparel, gallium smoke and expensive trinkets (including the limited-edition pearl.)
"Just forget it," her neighbouring Spinel on the assembly line told her, after hearing Ametrine complain about it over and over. "What would you do with a pearl anyway? You could barely fit it in your room."
That was somewhat true...all the assembly workers lived in the factory accommodations in the outer districts, which were just big enough for a rest pod and not much else. The luger brought them in at the start of the cycle and back out at the end, but Ametrine preferred to get up early and walk.
"The new pearls are smaller," she mumbled by way of an answer. "It would fit."
"Just barely," Spinel said. "And the database connection is really weak there anyway, so it would just be like a really nice statue. Seriously, why not just get one second-hand if you want one that badly?"
Ametrine clenched her jaw and refused to speak for the rest of the day.
As luck would have it, the Kunzite who had been partnered with that same Larimar visited the factory to look at their accounts, and as it was just before clocking-off-time, Ametrine was able to follow her home. Strangely enough, Kunzite didn't live in the fancy high-end district but near the docks.
It was almost too perfect. Gems were mugged down at the docks all the time.
She trailed them for twelve cycles, trying to figure out Larimar's routine and when she would be most likely to let her guard down. The chances of her getting away with the pearl were very slim, but it was better than nothing, right? Sure enough, Larimar had a blind spot; she stopped for a smoke of gallium with a friend every two cycles in the same district. She usually left the pearl sitting with another pearl in the quadrangle.
There were holo-recorders mounted around the quadrangle, that's what made gems like Larimar leave their pearls out in the open with no fear that they'd be stolen. But Ametrine had made holo-recorders before in another factory; she knew well how to jam them.
She disguised herself as an off-colour Jade; they were around the same size, and many off-colour Jades were known criminals. After setting up a signal to jam the holo-recorders, it was simply a matter of stabbing the pearl through the stomach to get it to retreat into its gem and pocket it. It all went off without a hitch, nobody even tried to stop her (perhaps just the sheer shock of having something stolen from the quadrangle paralyzed the witnesses.)
The pearl was even prettier up close, when it manifested its form again back at Ametrine's apartment.
"I have been stolen," were the first words the pearl spoke. Ametrine was taken aback.
"Uh, yeah, I guess," she responded. "I was going to buy you anyway, though, and that Larimar would have gotten tired of you after a while, so I kinda did you a favour..."
The pearl blinked. Its stillness was a little unnerving, come to think of it.
"Our processes are usually wiped when we are stolen," it told Ametrine bluntly. "Otherwise there's a chance we can be traced."
"Right, I'll get around to that, thanks," Ametrine spluttered. It was a real novelty to be given tips on how to be a thief from the object you stole.
The novelty wore off fast. Ametrine didn't really know what to expect, but she got the feeling the pearl...disapproved of her, somehow. It never said anything unless it was asked, and it did exactly what it was told to do, but there was always a glimmer of something underneath, something that sent Ametrine's skin crawling.
She had committed a criminal act that usually resulted in a shattering, to feel like a nobody in the presence of a damn pearl?
The worst part was when she brought it along to social gatherings and there were other pearls there. (She had to disguise it as a regular edition pearl, which took a lot of the joy out of limited-edition.)The pearls sat on the sidelines and didn't talk, but Ametrine still got the feeling they were communicating somehow. Occasionally they would move, just a hand or even a finger, and then she got the feeling they were laughing at her.
In the end, she dumped it outside the impound centre wrapped in a polychrome sheet, and tried to put the whole sorry mess behind her.