Brought to you by the letter J

Note: this is not my story. Nor My Chareters. All cedit for this story goes to Alex F. a talented artist and a terrific writer. So please if you read this story E-mail her a reveuw at CoffeeSwirl23@hotmail.com and beg her to contiue to write \'The life and Times of Hugh O\'Donovan

Warning: Contains - Rape, Extreem Violence, Morality issues and Implied torcher

* * *

Renald Walker\'s hands shook as he punched up the data on the planet Effan\'s
core.
Graphs filled the flickering screen to reflect eery lights on his youthfull
violet face. The tremors were slight, almost imperceptable from where he sat in
his office at the geological research center, but now almost constant.
The only sound in that moment was the hum of the moniter and the long sound of
him shakilly exhaling.
He didn\'t bother shutting down his pc as he half stumbled, half ran to where his
young wife and baby daughter slept in their modest home.
He shook the sleeping woman awake, barely allowing his wife time to grab her
dressing gown, as he picked up his daughter from the crib and placed her into
her mothers arms she began to wail.
He ignored his wifes increasingly panicked questions as he dragged her, his pale
violet hand gripping hers like death itself, roughly toward the shuttle pad.
As they boarded a small, barely spaceworthy craft, he punched in the escape
trajectory first, followed by a single word broadcast on all frequencies...
It read :

EVACUATE.


Cathryn Walker waited, sitting bolt upright on the pristine white bed in the
medical bay of the spacedrifter colony mother ship. The twenty three year old
woman fingered her smooth violet belly nervously as Doctor David Kryshire and
her father, Renald Walker, examined the read outs of her scan.
She could scarecely contain her nervous exitement.
Cathryn was born with a defect that, although she could carry a child in theory,
she was unable to naturally canceive due to a low rate of egg fertility - a
problem as far as the survival of the dwindling Effani population went.
They were all concearned about the limited life span of their species after the
explosion of their homeplanet, Effan, some twenty two years ago.
Cathryn\'s father had come to her with a proposal.
Doctor Kryshire was infamous for his unpopular research on the posibilities for
artificial means of propogating the Effani race.
He was widely thought of as an imoral man, eager to grow \'super babies\' in
tanks.
The purists of the survivor generation argued that this was not so much
preserveing the race, but creating a new breed of mutants.
Kathryn didn\'t care about Kryshire\'s reputation.

She just wanted a baby.

Her father had told her that, as the babies father was an anonymous donor, the
child would take the surname \'Walker\' after its mother.
He didn\'t tell her that the only DNA material she would share with her cloned
son, would be those she herself inherited by chance...
from her father...


Jordan Walker was three years old.
His chubby hand clasped around one of his patient mother Cathryn\'s long purple
braids as she carried him around the ship.
Cathryn was worried.
The Effani survivors had split into two factions; the purists and the cloners.
Diplomatic attempts to reunite the two struggling groups were rapidly decending
into open hostility.
She cradled her son close.
He tugged on the fistfull of her braids imperiously to get her attention, and
expressed a desire to have hair as pretty as hers someday.
She flashed him a set of white pointed teeth in a loveing grin that didn\'t quite
melt the cold of distant worry in her grey eyes.

Jordan crawled through the ventilation shafts, peering down at the security
monitors in the room below him.
The green air was spreading.
The blurred purple shapes of the people on-ship crumpled to the floor whenever
it went near enough their faces.
Jordan took a short cut.
He rumaged through a box in one of the scientific storage rooms, one of his
favorite haunts, untill he found two gas masks.
He pulled the first over his short, tightly curled purple hair, fastened it
clumsilly in place and, pleased, took the other with him to give to his
mother...

Cathryn lay on the floor in one corner of the mess hall.
Her bloodshot eyes wide and her cracked lips parted.
She was not the only body in the room, but her determined son only had eyes for
her as he todled over and pulled the gas mask over her stareing face.

The only sound was his breath through the filter of his mask for the longest
time.

He waited, crouched in front of her, unable to mentally graple with the events
that had occured, untill his eyes would not stay open.
He curled up next to her still-warm body, pulling her lifeless arm over his
shoulder for comfort.
One chubby hand curled on a stray fistfull of her thin violet braids.
He closed his eyes, and slept.

Rosalee Walker lived on the purist Effani colony.
She was a plump, goodnatured and simpleminded woman with ten children of her
own.
She had little interest in politics, unwilling to believe the beastly rumours
about her familly, friends and co-workers, anxious only to reassure her
children.

One day a small boy was bought to her.
It was explained that, loosely speaking, this boy was her nephew.
And also her brother.
And her uncle.
Prehaps. Sort of.
They explained that if no-one was willing to foster him, they would have to
concider killing him, because he was an unaturally conceived child.

The one thing that filtered through to Rosalee was that this boy was without a
mother. She consented to adopt him and treated him as if he were her own son.
She tried to encourage him to play with her other children. And to refer to her
as \'mother\'.
But he tended to ignore his foster sisters and brothers and they soon gave up
paying attention to him.

For he spoke not a word.

Renald Walker seemed to have a talent for narrowly avoiding scenes of disaster.
He wasn\'t on the cloner station at the time of the sabotage.
His ultimate plan was to find a new planet for the Effani to inhabit. He dreamed
of reuniting the two factions, terra forming a new home and thereby recreating
the planet and culture he remembered from his childhood.
Those of the purists who had guiltily sent a rescue team to the cloner\'s ship
had long since rebooted the sabotaged air purification system, makeing breathing
posible. Ranald returned from one of his long voyages, searching for planets, in
his one-man flier.
The ghost station awaited him.
He contacted the purists. They greeted the fact that he was living just short of
hostile. He was forced to wait in silence in the place where his wife, daughter
and friends had died while the purists conferred on wether he would be allowed
to board the station that harboured their murderers.
He was denied.
The new christened exile, Renald, was torn and enraged.
He lived alone on the dead ship, his purpose stripped from him.
After the destruction of their planet his only thought had been to save his
species.
Were it not for his warning, would they not all be dead?
Still they hated him, for it was his face that the first generation of cloned
children bore.
His very DNA was concidered sub-class, even though he himself was born on pure
Effani soil.
He despised himself and his forsaken race. Regretting the cloning programme more
feircely even than at the point where the factions had split.

Jordan Walker was seven and, due to his affinity with ventilation sytems, was
often difficult to keep track of. He was an expert at avoiding almost everyone,
everyone that is, except for his mother Rosalee.
Eventually, she would track down all his lurking-holes and poke her head in to
tell him it was time to eat or brush his hair or tell him to do his chores.
So he had to find new hiding places often.
Scouring the ship for possible candidates, he came across a room full of escape
pods. He got inside one and pondered the large red button that said \'launch\'.
When faced with a big red button, what could one do but push it?
It wasn\'t as though it said \'self destruct\'.
Nevertheless he was suprised, and a little concearned, when the pod succesfully
jettisoned into space.
He watched the space station, his home, drift away and felt uncertainty knotting
his gut. He reassured himself that Rosalee would eventually notice his absence,
probably when it was time for him to clean something, and somehow bring him
back.
He pondered space.
Aware that, in theory, space contained stars, planets, other space stations and
the like; it still seemed strange to be so encompassed by the star speckled
black that really only ought to dwell in windows.
Looking down at the trail of the single rocket jet on the bottom of the pod and
then at the distant station, he wondered why they hadn\'t picked up his energy
signature. He felt afraid.


Fourty seven year old Renald lounged on the bridge of the ghost station. His
space boots on one console, packets of food (with negligable nutritional
content) and an illicit substance known as crystal meth on another.
He scratched his stuble as the screen below his feet beeped a lifesign
detection. He bleerily swung his legs off the console and leaned in close to see
the display.
It showed an Effani life signature in a space pod.
He remarked on the fortuitous occasion of having visitors to the silent ships
computer and managed to clumsilly activate tractor-guidence to the station\'s
tiny docking bay.
He emerged from the lift shaft and made his way over to the pod.
He stared at the boy.
The boy met his gaze openly, his expression faintly curious.
Renald looked in horror at his unatural child that had split the Effani and led
him to his current position.
His first thought was to kill the child. Irrationaly, he fixed on the idea that
somehow if the evidence of the entire cloning saga were erased, he would be
accepted at the purist\'s station. Able to continue his work.
He took opened the pod and fastened his hands around his younger-self\'s throat.
His grey eyes gleaming manicly.
Jordan clutched at the larger fingers, as if trying to pull them off. He
struggled and kicked, gasping, untill he eventually began to still.
The sound of his laboured breathing echoing horribly.
Renald dropped the child like a rag-doll. His hands shook.
He became angrier, his own inability taunting him. His weakness.
So he took out his anger and frustration on the weakly struggling boy the only
other way he could think of.
Jordan was raped, packed back into the escape pod and prepared to jettisen.
Huddled and shivering in the bottom off the escape pod, drifting back towards
the purist colony, the last thing Jordan saw before he finally lost conciousness
was Renald.
The pod drifted slowly in the general direction of the purist station and a
speck of light drifted slowly closer and closer untill it came up against the
plasti-glass front of the pod with a bump.
It was the snap frozen body of Renald Walker.

Jordan Walker, a short-for his-age boy of twelve frustrated specialists.
In-so-far as anyone could tell, there was no physical reason he was mute.
He simply would not talk.
It was suggested that he spend some time in an institution.
This was of little concearn to most, rumours of his unnatural heritage grew more
and more far-fetched in the social confides of the ship.
He spent as much time as posible away from everyone else, useing the
artificial-intelligence education programs on out-of-the-way consoles during any
part of the day where he wasn\'t eating, sleeping or daydreaming.

Rosalee Walker loudly burst into tears in when the decision was voted on,
against her wishes, in favour of his depature.
She argued hysterically that if the doctors could find nothing wrong with him,
that surely if he spoke now; before everyone gathered, he could be allowed to
stay aboard under her care.
The boy was bought before the assembled Effani.
His grey eyes swept curiously over the older members of his species.
The thought that he might leave this place circled exitedly through his head as
the expectant silence rang in his ears, broken only by the quiet sound of his
breathing.
He spoke not a word.

\'The Brig\' was an obese, wallowing, rusted hulk of a ship.
It strongly resembled the Hindenburg.
Jordan\'s short purple curls were shaved off.
He wore a straight jacket.
Lived in a tiny grey cell.
He was electrocuted, beaten and starved.
It did not take him very long at all to realise that in this intitution, indeed
prehaps in any such places, nobody gave two hoots weather he was insane or not.
This place had a system, and that system was, that anything that was good or
moral was to be concidered a collosal joke by the propriotors.
He often lay awake at night listening to the other patients.
He mouthed along to the wretched sounds they made and feined epiliptic fits to
himself, half to pass the long hours and half because he nursed a secret
jealousy of the oblivion that the truely insane enjoyed.


When Jordan was fifteen, he was moved into a different area of the ship.
This area was converted as an after thought, a sort of add-on bit to The Brig,
it was a boarding school for boys with criminal and/or terroristic tendencies.
There was a different brand of abuse to be had here.
But Jordan was overjoyed.
In a room laughably called \'the library\' there were many rows of booths
containing uncomfortable stools and archaic consoles with outmoded AI
educational software.
He adopted booth number twenty three as his home-away-from-bunk.
There were many other boys of all walks of life, many of them older than Jordan.
They snickered when his name was called;
\'J. Walker\'
And imitated the thump he made with his hand on the table in front of him to
indicate he was present.
On many occasions late at night he was cornered in the badly patroled coridor on
his way to bed by one such particular gang.
He was beaten.
Jordan spoke not a word.
The boys were emboldened.
Over time, they spat on him, defecated on him and raped him.
He spoke not a word.
His eyes would be distantly fixed on a point on the wall as he silently mouthed
physics equations to himself.
The infinity theory.
Hyperdrive jump trajectory sums.
The best ways to crack the security codes on the arcaic system of doors,
monitors and alarms the Brig used....

Blood ran stickilly over the coridor floors the day the Curator of the Brig flew
in to oversee the \'continual smooth running of operations\'.
Jordan listened to the rumours, whilst sitting and stareing off into space,
pretending that he were invisible.
Jordan knew that the Curator must have arrived in some kind of small ship.
He licked his lips and stared hard at his hands.
It was either stay here and feel as though he would die at any given time,
prehaps very slowly and painfully, or make a mad dash for freedom and risk his
miserable neck; all-in-all probably a nicer and quicker way to go.
He didn\'t remember what happened next.
The biological spines that the Effani could sprout like freakish purple
razor-blade-covered-men in times of great rage were just an abstract idea to
him.
Much like his home planet, where such things evolved.
It wasn\'t untill many years later when he hacked into the system to see if he
had a criminal record did he see the images of the carnage.
Even then it seemed so very surreal.
Fourteen, utterly unprepared people stood in the path of a fifteen year old
utterly silent killer on his way to the launch pad.
Fourteen people fell almost instanly.
A ship bearing the Curator\'s own personal id wobled drunkenly into the distance.
An hour later, the belated wail of the alarm rang out.


Jordan joined another drifter colony shortly afterwards.
They were criminals, addicts and ne\'er do wells of various species and creed.
His speeder was repainted, re-id-coded and re-sold.
The men and women in charge of the rogue colony soon discovered the mute fifteen
year old stranger among them.
One, a burley man called Mikail, took pity on him.
When questioned later about this by his team members, he would joke that he
\'trusted the boys silence\'.
Mikail staged a sort of request and pantomine mixed as one as he tried to convey
to Jordan with elaborate hand gestures and slow speech, that Jordan could
smuggle drugs and, in his spare time, help the stations\'s elderly mechainic in
exchange for safe lodgeings and basic food rations here.
Bemused by Mikail\'s antics, Jordan agreed.
Mikail smiled widely and nodded v e r y slowly to show that he was pleased.
Then, experianceing a brain wave, Mikail fetched a data pad and tried to convey
that Jordan should type in his name perhaps some information about where he came
from.
Jordan typed in an uppercase letter J.
Mikail seemed to expect more so he added a full stop.
He was thereafter known to one an all as Jay.
This suited him just fine, what better way to start a new life than with a new
name, as he thought himself.

Jay, sixteen, found himself with a disposable income. He had his own room aboard
the rogue colony and also a tank, containing small irridecant fish.
He bought a razor, even though he did not really need to shave yet.
Every now and then, he would find himself alone in his quaters late at night.
His constant nightmares made him wary of sleeping.
He would ponder the razor.
Over time, he began to draw it lightly over his skin.
Eventually getting the nerve to make small cuts on the backs of his arms.
He didn\'t really know why he did this. The pain seemed to make him feel real.
Less numb. Less desolate.
Everytime his gut lurched in horror and his self preservation, the fear of
death, caused him to pull the blade away he silently rejoiced.
For he knew that he was truely still alive.
As a result he began to dress entirely in black, allowing only his face and
hands to show, unwilling to allow others to think him as suicidal or attention
seeking.
It wasn\'t that unusual to wear black on the Rogue station, if his sudden change
was remarked upon at all, the terms used were \'cute\' or \'phase\' as he strode
darkly past in the coridors, his hands in the pockets of his black trenchcoat.

When Cavalier, the old mechanic on the Rogue station died, a eighteen year old
boy with short purple dread-locks began filling in indefinately.
Cavalier had taken to him straight away; he was hard of hearing and Jay did not
speak. It was a fine arangement.
Jay was quick to learn and Cavalier adopted him as an aprentance, teaching him
all he knew of mechanics and engineering, although sporadically Jay would run
illegal odd-jobs for Mikail and be away for a few days.
Jay was saddened by the old man\'s passing and offten read through the old man\'s
log at night when nightmares of his much-supressed past kept him up.
To the casual observer it was incredibly dull, for it was a log of timetables
for machines that needed fixing and parts that needed ordering,
but for Jay it held precious memories of days gone by.
It was on one such night, however, that Jay stumbled by accident on the old
man\'s will.
It was adressed to Jay, leaveing him a small sum of money and an apartment on
Coruscant...

Twenty three year old Jay, with thick dredlocks that almost reached his
shoulders, sat cradleing an ale moodilly in one corner of a dingy bar that bore
the tired neon title of \'The Bronze\'.
He had come to live on coruscant at the impetuous age of eighteen.
He had never thought of himself as naive.
And then he came to coruscant and learned differently.
One of the early discoveries he made, was the sheer number of bounty hunters
that frequented the lower levels of coruscant near where he lived.
This was not much of a problem really, he thought to himself, as long as he kept
out of their way.
The second discovery had been that the Effani colony had some how run into a
great deal of money, and there was a massive cash reward for bonafide \'missing
Effani survivors\'.
Or, indeed, BITS of Effani anatomy that could be sold to anyone with an illegal
garage cloneing set-up so that a trickle of mysterious Effani babies could be
fed back to a gratefull, simpering (and fast growing) spacestation that had
built up around the floating Effani drifters.
Now, the survival of his species was all well and good, but Jay didn\'t
appriciate being hunted one bit.
Thinking you are being followed is perturbing enough without being right.
So he rarely went more than three places.
His apartment, The Bronze and the local supermarket.
Incidentally, after he made planet-fall on Coruscant, Jay discovered many ways
that a person can be killed that he wasn\'t previously aware of and also many
mind altering substances that he wasn\'t previously aware of.
Life, on the whole, was good.
Or at least less traumatic than some bits and more interesting than the rest of
the bits.

Jay was twenty three and sitting in the corner of The Bronze cradleing an ale.
A fight broke out between a very-large pinkish gentleman with horns and a
blaster, and some poor Corellian pretty-boy who happened to spill his drink in
passing.
Jay instinctively ducked under the table at the first hint of blaster fire.
Everyone else in the bar broke into smaller fights over who was in the right,
and eventually it was one large bar fight squashed into one small bar.
The Corellian landed with a crash, up-ending Jay\'s table.
The Corellian began to laugh and Jay recognised fleetingly that the man\'s leg
was bleeding profusely. Probably because of the metal dart embed in it.
Jay simply couldn\'t see what was so damn funny.
He sighed and decided to drag the Corellian with him on the way out, prehaps as
cover or something.
Once outside, the man struggled onto his good leg and held out his hand.
He introduced himself as Hugh O\'Donovan in a heavy accent Jay couldn\'t quite
place, a grinned in an oddly charming sort of way.
Jay slowly shook the proffered hand, wary of physical contact, and opened his
mouth as if to introduce himself back. For a moment he was convinced that no
sound would come out and that he would merely stand there looking foolish....

\"I\'m... Jay...\" He said simply, in a voice that sounded alien to him.

\"Good-o\" replied Hugh O\'Donovan and fainted dead away due to blood loss.
Jay stared at his unconcious companion.
With a heartfelt sigh a stooped to see about getting this person to a
hospital...

THE END???