Confessions of the Damned
“Please state your full name for the record”.
“Ulrich Lionel Stone”.
“And when and where is this interview taking place?”
“May 15th, 13205 Human Era. New York City, New York, United States, Earth”.
“When and where were you born?”
“July 23rd, 13151, Camden, New York, United States, Earth”.
“For what are you charged with?”
“Slavery, human trafficking, racketeering, smuggling, reckless endangerment, kidnapping, violation of trade embargoes and sanctions, murder, crimes against humanity, and various related stuff”.
“Why are you confessing to these crimes?”
“My lawyer says it could help me avoid the firing squad”.
“Please, begin”.
“Gladly. First of all, what I did was business. I didn’t take some sort of perverted satisfaction from it, I didn’t hurt or molest any of my cargo no matter what the politicians say, and I was a consummate professional throughout my entire career”.
“When did you first get into the trafficking business?”
“Round when I was about twenty, I needed some cash and my cousin hooked me up for this one-time gig. The money was so good I went into it full-time and eventually became my own boss. I moved my operation here twenty years ago, though. Earth was too far away and much too populated. Pluto was just a way-station, though; I never took anyone from there”.
Who were your clients?”
“Look I’m not gonna name names alright? I ain’t a snitch, and besides, you could never catch them anyway”.
“I mean, what races were your clients. Was it mainly humans or others?”
“Oh, definitely aliens. I dealt with a lot of X’fle and Gulgon. There were also plenty of Cav and Zew and Ooulid and whatnot. One time I even did business with a Hortuf!”
“For what reasons did they purchase humans? Slavery? Prostitution?”
“Oh none of that. No, I mean, there was some slavery, but it was very rare and I’m pretty sure confined to a few eccentric Gulgon. I mean, most races could breed better slaves than humans. No, the main reason was food, I think. The X’fle have a huge market for human flesh and the Cav like to use our organs in various rituals, you know, predicting the future and the like. The Zew used us for weapons testing and blood sports, like gladiator fights and such, and the Ooulid liked us for a sort of weird fertilizer for their young. They’d lay their eggs or seeds or whatever in the live person and their babies would just eat or suck or absorb the person as they grew. Look, I didn’t ask a lot of questions and this is all just stuff my business contacts on other worlds have told me. Most races wanted people for food of some sort. Sometimes they wanted dead humans, sometimes live ones. I just did what they wanted, got paid, and went home”.
“What was our profit per person?”
“About 100 burr per person”.
“How large was the average shipment?”
“A thousand people, sometimes more, sometimes less. My clients’ home worlds are pretty far away so they tended to buy in bulk”.
“What was the frequency of the shipments?”
“One a week. Of course I’m the biggest in the business so I deal with larger cargo being shipped to more clients. Most smugglers have far less shipments”.
“How did you gather a thousand people on Pluto every week, especially without arousing suspicion?”
“It’s easy! I have people on every heavily populated city on every world. We always took hobos or people from the ghettoes, you know, people that nobody would miss. On Pluto, I ran a perfectly legitimate inter-stellar trading company, so the shipments looked natural”.
“Surely if you really wanted to get leniency, you’d give up the names of your employees?”
“Ha! No way! This case has way too much publicity for me to get anything less than four hundred years, and besides, if all my people go down, that’ll leave a massive power vacuum and it’ll be worse than before. This way’s better since now my lieutenant or someone smarter will take over and everything will go back to normal”.
“Your loyalty is admirable. Now what was the average age of your ‘cargo’?”
“I’d say round sixteen. The aliens liked them young, traveled better you know?”
“When you said Pluto was a way-station what exactly did that entail?”
“Well, all the people got rounded up and sent to Pluto from their various origins, right? Then they’d all get shipped off together a rendezvous with some alien ship skulking about somewhere in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud. Always a different place, but same general area”.
“You’ve been trafficking for roughly thirty years, at a thousand people per week, and fifty-two weeks per year, you’ve smuggled approximately one and a half million people, correct?”
“Well, I wasn’t always this big, so it’s probably more around the one million mark, give or take a hundred thousand or so”.
“Right. Of course. Did you ever meet with your clients face-to-face?”
“Of course I did! I’m not an idiot! The first couple times with a new client were always face-to-face so I knew he was legit. And I always demanded the money paid in full on Pluto before any shipment went out. They could come get me, but I could never reach them on their home worlds.”
“Did you ever smuggle Oceanines or was it all original humans?”
“All original humans. It’s way too hard to get into Oceanine enclaves. I don’t think there’s one person fool enough to tangle with Oceanines just to feed them to aliens”.
“Did you ever smuggle aliens into the Federation?”
“Once or twice. Occasionally some fat cat would pay me enough to do it, but for the most part I kept to getting people out, not getting aliens in”.
“Did your clients prefer certain races or sexes?”
“Not on the whole, no. The Zew had a thing for blacks and they had to be from Africa, I couldn’t get African Americans or anything. The Cav and the X’fle liked women, boobs are a delicacy apparently, not that I disagree, but I like them for different reasons. Of course the Gulgon wanted men. Though also for our private parts. But I think it all evens out in the grand scheme”.
“Do you feel remorse for your actions?”
“No. I mean, I regret the immediate actions that led to my capture, and I know intellectually that my crimes were ‘wrong’, but I don’t really regret my decisions. I got rich and lived like a king for three decades and I guess it all caught up with me”.
Ulrich Lionel Stone was executed via firing squad on June 22nd, 13205 H.E. He would be remembered as humanity’s most notorious slaver and a rallying point for anti-alien movements for decades. His second-in-command, Edward Mueller would take over his operation before his own death thirteen years later when Federation soldiers tracked him down at his hideout on Orcus as a last revenge before the collapse of the Federation and the First Human Civil War.