Lex Chapters 3-6
Here are chapters 3-6 of my "always in progress" cc-by-sa novel "Lex." Some pieces of these chapters may have been featured here perviously (that was a typo, but I'm leaving it, it fits too well, lol). With that said, fair warning - depending on your definition, this story may not be worksafe. Don't read if you or your boss is made squeamish by R->NC17 rated material. This story is going to be as gritty, vulgar, sexy, and real as I can make my twisted version the 25th century come across.
Since it's been quite a while since the last Lex post, here's the previous installments:
Chapter 1 (pdf) Chapter 2Chapter 3
I awoke in a bed for the first time outcity.
My face was throbbing, swollen and bruised from the falls I'd taken learning on the stripwear. My ribs hurt, too, and I could feel the dirt clinging to my body, crusty in the scabs and caked blood where my body had met the ground.
The stripwear, sensing I was awake, began to organize itself and I could feel little breezes as it swished through the air above my skin, lifting itself ever so slightly away from my body and unweaving itself from the blanket it had formed while I slept.
I know I shouldn't marvel at the technology, we're surrounded by so much of it now. I guess the thing that's different about stripwear is the marvelous gumption of it. Most technology today attempts to hide itself, to become part of the organic landscape, disappear out of conscious recognition.
This house was certainly a perfect example of that. Every detail of the aging mansion was no-doubt meticulously kept up by nanosystems and smart materials. The only evidence of this was the slight shimmer to many of the cracks in the ancient wood. Nearly invisible, you could just make out the spider-web like nanotube linkages in the way they splintered the sunlight as it passed over them. I could imagine the little machines, applying their microscopic wires to keep the structure stable and keep the wood from crumbling away.
I walked around the room aimlessly, stretching my battered body, and taking in the history of what I was seeing.
This was one of the things I was going to enjoy most about being outcity; the ability to see the roots of where we came from everywhere, all around me, without having to go look at holographic representations a museum.
"You're awake I see" I heard a gruff woman's say from behind me, by the doorway. I turned, smiling. Sheila was the one person I was happy to see in this surrounding. Memories of the last night flooded through my head, images of her taking me in, showing me the various balms and antiseptics to apply to my wounds, and then sending me off to sleep in this room.
I didn't take much persuasion. It had been a long day for me, and my body was still getting used to not living a latent lifestyle.
"Yeah, sorry about that. What time is it?" I asked. We both knew that I could just check my terminal as simply closing my eyes, but it was nice to play the social game again. It'd been ages since I'd talked to anyone except avatars on newnet and my guide.
"Coming on 7:30. It's early yet, but I'd like to get you moving before the boys wake up. I can always keep 'em at bay for a night for a visitor, but they'll be wanting to know what you're going to give in return if you overstay your welcome. We've got lots of rules here in this little community, and if you stay long enough, they'll get ornery about you breaking them.
"Give in return?" I asked, a bit naively. I'd honestly not been exposed to this type of commune before, but I had a feeling I knew what she meant by the look in the men's eyes the other night.
"Oh!" She said, laughing. "No, dear, nothing like that. The men are a bit wild sometimes, and we have our share of trouble, but no, what I'm talking about is chores!"
"Oh!" it was my turn to say now, my demeanor softening as I laughed a bit at myself now. "I thought you meant..."
"No, no, honey. It's just that if you're going to eat our food and sleep in our little place, they'll expect you to be part of the harvest."
I thought for a moment. Although I'd been heading in the direction of a bigger town outcity, I still had a lot to learn and little but the stripwear on my body and my credits, which many vendors wouldn't take if they didn't match my RID. Seeing as I'd left that little identifier in the bowels of the doctor, I needed to make some grass-roots contacts.
"What would you think if I asked to stay here?" I asked, watching Sheila's eyes. Her expression changed slightly, as if she was thinking over the options and the risks in her head. Obviously, bringing anyone into a community was a risk, and the dynamics of being one of the only other females in the group would be difficult. Having and extra able body would probably be difficult to pass up as well.
"Well" she said, coming to a conclusion. "I have to say I don't know. You're awful young, and a tiny little thing. On the other hand, you probably won't eat much and It'll maybe it'll even calm the boys down a bit if we have another woman in the mix. Tell you what, I'll make you a deal: you can stay, but on one condition, if you stick around, you've gotta stay at least 3 months. Beyond that, it's your choice." I thought for a moment. I hadn't planned to spend that much time here, but this wasn't a bad start towards my goals. I could probably accomplish a lot more in that time too.
"Okay" I heard the words come out of my mouth before I had even consciously made my decision. Suddenly I was shaking Shelia's hand and her arm was around my shoulders, leading me downstairs.
A few of the others were up, preparing great vats of food. Farm smells assaulted my nose, and the urge to sneeze was growing. Moving around again was making my wounds and joints throb, but I managed to smile at the others, learning a few names and meeting one or two of the men on better terms. Individually, they really were quite decent.
Breakfast came and went in a flurry of organic food, and I learned more names for soy then I could possibly recall as each platter was passed along the long dining room table. People talked and laughed, and ate, and Sheila introduced me as the newest member of their fold. It all happened so quickly that I didn't get to say or do much, but just enjoyed being a spectator for the moment, watching as these people took me in.
Incredible.
By 9AM I was already out in the fields learning how to manipulate the various equipment they had. They weren't in the dark ages of combines as some communes were, but their tools were antiquated enough to be a bit foreign to me. No AI and actual manipulators rather than the standard projected GUI. It meant each tool worked differently and it would be a while before I learned them all. For today, thought, I was on tilling detail.
This was one of the things they insisted on doing themselves - part of their organic regime. Turning over the soil in a field of clover, letting this particular square kilo rest for a year, regenerate it's own nutrients and reoxygenate.
What that meant was that each bit of soil had to be turned over carefully by hand or with the one smart-tiller they had. I wasn't trained on the use of the smart-tiller yet and didn't mind a bit of manual labor, so I spent the day here happily tending to the earth. It felt good to be moving, and after a few hours, I could feel the burn in my thighs and arms, even through the lactic inhibitors. Three months of this, and I'd be in good shape.
"Hello lex" I heard my guide intone in my ear.
I stood up in the field, stretching with my hands at the small of my back, "Hey Angel" I said. I looked around at the field, now cast in the golden-red of the late afternoon's sun. Several of the other workers were resting, enjoying the afternoon breeze and beautiful view. I hadn't noticed the surroundings yet really. Our little commune sat on top of a long rolling hill, 8 kilos of farm all sectioned out and rotated. The sparkling tube of the Arterial Transport cut straight across the territory, and the mansion itself looked more like a dilapidated old house from here, its size diminished by the distance.
"Well, it's not exactly what I pictured, but it seems like you've done pretty well for yourself" he said in my ear, sounding a bit distracted.
"You working on something?" I asked, picking up my hoe and returning to work, not too eager to draw attention to myself while chatting with thin air.
"You could say that. Your little stunt with your RID has stirred up a lot people Lex. I've been busting my butt all day to keep a bunch of people off your tail"
"What do you mean? Who's looking for me"
"I'm not really sure. Some committee, I guess. I didn't even know they tracked these sorts of things, but I've had some big AI's come sniffing your way in newnet already, and I've just kinda been whistling and humming and going "nothing to see here, nope, be on your way""
I laughed at the image of Angel dopily pretending that nothing was going on and passing it off on some big stupid bouncer. In reality I knew it must be more complicated, and if he was working this hard to keep them off my tracks it must've been pretty close, but my guide had a habit of talking about the digital world like it was real.
"We're OK now?" I asked
"For a while yeah, you're going to have to keep moving eventually Lex, but something tells me that's not really an option."
"I just signed up for three months here."
"Great news." My guide said, not hiding his sarcasm. "Anything else happen while I was busy?"
"Umm, nope? Oh wait, yeah. I slept in Sheila's bed and we made wild passionate love all night"
"WHAT!?" I winced a bit at the volume of his exclamation in my ear, laughing openly at my guide. I could almost hear him pout at being the brunt of my joke. "Just kidding, of course. I did sleep in Sheila's bed last night, but it was a guest bed. I just wanted to see if you'd be jealous. I missed you last night actually. "
"I don't know whether to be appalled, hurt, or flattered, Lex. I think I'm going for a little bit of all three"
"Aww, come on!" I said, teasingly
"You come on!" My guide said "You know we can't really play until you find yourself a good rep so we can make a new EMF harmonizer.
"You mean the dream thingy?"
"Yes, Lex. And your vocabulary never ceases to amaze me."
"Geez. You gotta learn to take a joke Angel, I'm only teasing."
"Yeah yeah. Well, bottom line is, until you get to a bigger town or find a replicator, we're both celibate."
"Well, that's not completely true. You've still got control of my systems, I just don't have any input on yours at the moment."
"That is true" he said softly in my ear. I felt the stripwear tighten slightly on my wrists, pulling them down gently, and the stim hummed ever so subtly to life.
"Not here" I whispered, closing my eyes. "Later"
"I know" he said , and I felt the pressure release from my wrists, but the stim didn't quite subside.
The rest of the afternoon was enjoyable torture as I worked in the field, just on the edge of arousal. My guide was teasing me, tormenting me with tiny bursts of the stim and little caresses by the stripwear. No one would have noticed to look at me except for the occasional contortion of my face as he brought me a little too close the edge, and then let me go back down as I returned to work.
By the time I was done with my shift, the sun was below the horizon and I was exhausted and randy, focused almost solely on getting to my new room so that my guide and I could finish the slow crescendo that had been building while I worked. "Lex" I heard a low male voice say as I was heading up too my room, nearly delirious with the delayed gratification of this drawn out tease.
"Uhh, yeah?", I answered, intelligently.
"Dinner first. No one heads upstairs until dinner. One of the community rules.
"Great, I'm starving" I said, smiling to the towering black man, trying to hide my desperation to be alone, and not make an enemy here.
Just then, my guide juiced the stim deep inside me. I closed my eyes and calmed myself, intent on being perfectly still, and not letting on that there was a monsoon of sensation and emotion running through me to the man standing next to me.
"You okay?" he said, softening a little.
"Yeah" I said, "just a bit tired, and stiff. Actually, where's the bathroom?"
"2nd and 3rd door on your left. Its okay, you've had a long day I bet." he said, smiling.
"Thanks" I said, smiling back at him, as I shuffle-stepped in my hurry to get to the WC.
"Cut it out!" I subbed to my guide as soon as the door was shut. "What're you trying to do"
"Aww, come on Lex you've got to learn to take a joke. I could stop you know" He said, as the stim suddenly went silent.
I felt my knees buckle and caught myself against the counter. I didn't know what I wanted. I heard the word "no" come softly from my lips, as if disembodied. The long tease had left me complete in his control, and this was private enough.
"That's what I thought" Angel said, as the stim returned to full power. I began to moan a bit, and quickly felt the stripwear gag me, drawing my wrists down again. It took only seconds before I peaked, the storm coming in waves as I sank to my knees on the floor of the bathroom, my head resting against the counter.
The stripwear released me and the gag receded, and I quickly regained my composure, standing and looking at myself in the mirror.
My hair was starting to come in now, and there were little black bits of fuzz on top of my naked scalp. I was slowly becoming used to my new appearance. It was becoming me.
I cleaned myself up from the day in the field, and used the bathroom for its intended purpose and then joined the gathering community for dinner.
In my post coital buzz, I was much more talkative and relaxed than I was at breakfast. I learned that the large man who I'd talked to on the stairs was one of the leaders, appropriately nicknamed tiny. Many of these people had strange stories of how they'd come to this little farm in old Pennsylvania, and I learned more about the ripping up of roads and moving them much as the early farmers had hauled the original stones from the earth then I cared to know. The more I learned about this little community, the more I liked it. I could see a few of the less social hanging out on the fringes, and recognized a few of the "wolves" from my first encounter with them. I was even introduced to a few of them as members of the "security" team that patrolled the borders of the farm, watching for trouble and drifters.
I talked with a few of them into the evening, and a cask of wine was dipped into in honor of my first day as a working member. I saw Sheila occasionally, but she was content to see that I was taking care of myself and only smile at me from across the room as she acted as den mother to the crew of men and women coming in from the day.
There were other teams at the commune, and I'd talked with a few who made trips to the remote towns, and found that there was a replicator one or two nodes from here where the farmer had traded has land to be autoharvested for the replicator and 4 shares of food a season.
In my mind, I made a mental note of how close I'd come to being on the frontline of this little war. I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I was here to stay for a few months at least, and I didn't know where else to start. For now, I was content to drink the wine, and see where this path would take me.
Chapter 4
"Lex"
My eyes snapped open to the pitch blackness in my room at the commune. My guide's voice was not something I was accustomed to hearing in my ear while I slept, and my heart was already racing.
"what is it?" I subbed, not daring to break the silence. If he was waking me now, something was very wrong.
"Troub - ble , le ex get out ge et ou u" his voice stuttered.
I was already moving by the time I heard the first stutter. I'd only ever heard his vocalization engine fail once before when he was facing off against another guide AI in newnet.
We had been playing hard, and he knew I wanted to win. At my request, he had given the game process almost real time priority. It was like watching someone have seizure, and there was no hiding that it hurt him to do so. I've never called on him to use that much mental capacity again, and here he was doing it for me of his own will.
I hit the floor running, making a mad dash for the window, and jumped.
The wind rushed past my ears and I felt my stomach come up into my lungs as my momentum turned from jumping to up out of the window to falling towards the grassy yard below. Time seemed to stop, hanging there in the cold night air three stories up, and I tasted a bit of null-g before our little pucker in the grid of space-time pulled me back towards it.
I'd never jumped before, and had no training on the stripwear for maneuvers like this, and it was becoming abundantly clear to me that my guide was too deep in his own trouble to take control of the system for me.
9.8 meters per second squared times three stories high is really fucking fast.
I landed on my feet, but didn't stay there long as I continued downward. My knees crumpled into my chest and I felt, quite acutely, two of my ribs crack. The second impact of my head into the soil was actually not as bad as I expected, but my wrist was certainly in a position it should not have been in when I shook off the blow. Stupid.
I pulled my head up first, gingerly checking my neck before the rest of the pain hit me. I looked down, dazed, and saw my faceprint in the mud. In another situation, the negative image of my very surprised face may actually have been quite funny. I didn't really have time to appreciate the image right then, however, and cradled my right arm to me as I slowly staggered up and out of the mud and to my feet.
I still had no idea what was going on, but knew that if my guide was risking a hard crash and throwing all of his resources at something, yet still took cycles to tell me to move, the last thing I was going to do was second guess him.
After a few steps, I could tell that I was at least marginally okay, and broke into a run, out into the cornfields where I would at least be off people's visuals, lost among the tall green stalks. Hearing the sprinklers, I turned towards the spray of water, hoping to keep my heat signature masked by the cold little droplets as they covered the area, and now, me.
Instinctively, I crouched low, eager to make as little a blip on whatever sensor systems were sweeping the area as possible.
As I knelt there, both the situation and the pain of my new injuries flooded into my consciousness. I'd been working at the commune for about 3 weeks now, without any real encounters with incity authorities aside from the initial reaction to my disappearance. Now, it seemed, someone or something had tracked me here, and had gotten a lot closer than I cared to admit.
The cold of the sprinklers was beginning to wear on me, and the shivers were making my wrist twinge in a way I wasn't that fond of. I wanted to know what was going on, and if my guide was OK, but I didn't dare try to communicate with him again until he got out of whatever situation I had gotten us into.
After almost an hour, the throbbing became unbearable, and my shaking was so bad that I could feel my teeth begin to clatter together. I knew hypothermia was setting in, and I needed some sign, but I was truly helpless, unable to move until I had some signal.
I bit into my bottom lip to keep from crying, holding back a massive sob which threatened to come out in a flood of bawling not conducive to hiding here in the corn.
I don't know how much more time passed, but I don't think it could have been long, simply because I don't know how much longer I could have lasted beyond that point. The next thing I knew, I could faintly taste blood in my mouth from where I'd bitten my lip, and I was being woken from my almost-meditative state by both the sound of footsteps and a single, soothing tone from my guide. It was his status sound, quietly indicating all-systems-normal. It was the all clear.
It was also, apparently, my cue to let loose with the most emotional jag of crying I can ever remember being on. I sank down into the corn and soil scented mud, letting out all of the pain and tension I'd held inside for hours, still no wiser as to why I'd been forced to run and hide here like prey.
I was vaguely aware of Sheila soothing voice saying "It's okay darlin', they're gone" and then Tiny's massive arms lifting me effortlessly back to the house, nearly a mile from the field I'd fled to. I must have fallen asleep right there in his arms, feeling so much more the little girl I'd been 3 years ago incity than I had so far out here. In a way it was comforting to know that there were people here who cared and would bring me back after something like this.
Just before losing consciousness in Tiny's arms, I checked my dim eyelid terminal for an update, and sure enough, a ticker of the events of the night was slowly marching across their insides in the blood red of my natural inner-eyelid. I guess I fell asleep while reading the words "anti-terrorism committee stages midnight raids outcity" as they progressed across the insides of my eyes.
Chapter 5
I lay in the field of corn - not far from where I'd spent hours huddled just a few nights before, looking up at the stars.
It's amazing how the subtle value of silence escapes you when you never truly have a chance to appreciate it. Sure, Many places incity are technically silent - but it's a sterile silence, brought on by noise canceling transducers and sound-proofed materials.
The silence out here was different; open and breezy, and pierced by the occasional chirp of a cricket or the high trill of the peepers, tiny frogs in the trees that lined the edges of our commune.
Ironically, the sterile silence of the incity seemed much more noisy. Your brain reaches in to fill those completely blank moments with its own replacement white noise. Your ears ring, and your brain accelerates to fill the void with chatter, anything to avoid that true and lonely silence. Here, the gentle punctuations and overall soundscape of the wilderness filled in that necessary background for you, and actually allowed your brain to rest. I felt more myself laying out here than I think I had before, and it's become one of my favorite spots now.
My guide has been all but offline for 8 or 9 days now... honestly, the days are starting to blur together as I work in these fields, waiting for some directive, some news. He'd been providing me with relevant newsfeeds, the occasionally text bulletin, but had yet to come fully back online and talk to me.
I knew I'd hurt him. He'd only been this skittish with me a few times before, and I really didn't know how to help the situation except to give him some time to heal. This is the problem with creating AI in our own image, it comes complete with all of our imperfections. He'd gone deep into himself, forfeiting some of his conscious oversight to give the processes he was running to keep me safe full reign, to keep the other AI's just off my tail, and it was taking him some time to come back to himself.
He was like a savant after a deep departure into their particular area of expertise, he almost had to relearn how to think normally afterwards, how to subdue the overwhelming flow of information that was flooding into his everyday thought process now.
I wish I knew what I could do to help him, to bring him back, but I didn't dare rush him. I wanted him to have time to heal, to get all of his systems back online fully before having to worry about worrying me.
In the meantime, I continued my life out here. Each day I would work in the fields, learning more and more of the tools they used and the principals behind true sustainable farming.
In the evenings, I was making trips to the nearby settlements. I'd found a decent replicator, and charted some other places I'd like to visit in the near future. When I wasn't on one of my trips out the the outlying settlements, I was writing both on newnet and oldnet. It was something I'd done back when I lived incity, and I didn't see any good reason to stop out here. In fact, it was probably a good way to grow grass-roots support for the building movement.
I was also slowly learning that I wasn't the only citykid to abandon their former way of life. Stories of kids, often those that deviated from the norm, completely disappearing were becoming almost commonplace. My disappearance was only one of many at this point.
I'd also learned quite a bit about the raid which had hit our farm here a little more and a week ago now. It seems this isn't the first time a bunch of people have gone missing at the same time, and it was beginning to send up giant warning flags to the newnet systems.
I smiled to myself, lying there on the cool soil.
They should be scared.
I know I haven't said much yet about why I'm out here, what I'm doing, and that's partially for the reason that I'm not completely sure myself.
If I were to let myself go blindly on my current course, I could end up starting a civil war, and a possibly bloody one at that. It wasn't exactly a harmless little endeavor I was on, and the pieces were falling into place much more easily than I'd imagined they would.
I've said that I'm a writer... What I write is an influential government tracking blog which is published both on newnet and oldnet. It wasn't that influential until recently, though.
Somehow, whether randomly or not, I'd come across a document which outlined the incity plan for sustaining the food supply and the number of auto-harvesters they would need to deploy across the United Americas to meet the requirements. The doc was old, and its wiki was relatively empty. No one had looked at this thing since it had been passed. It had just fallen into obscurity like 99% of the FDA's general food rulings.
What was curious was that the document had potential impact for multiple populations, both incity and out. Usually, it would have been flagged for review both by incity oversight committees and the advocates trolling the oldnet feeds for relevant news.
Somehow, this thing had slipped through the cracks.
At first, I was simply excited to have a "breaking story." I wasn't exactly the most popular blog on newnet, although my slightly sensationalist visualizations were garnering a sort of "what will she do next" crowd.
My tune was changing quickly as I ran numbers against the document, though. There was a lot of information that just wasn't adding up. Rather, it was adding up, but it was coming to conclusions that I didn't like, and for that matter, neither would anyone incity.
I had my guide work up projections of food production both incity and out, and track that against the current fluctuations in production due to climatic changes and nature's inherent degree of randomness.
The incity flow was perfect. The new plan more than adequately covered prodcution in all cases. What was alarming was that as soon as 7 years from the introduction of the plan, outcity production levels would begin to reach critical shortages if things went wrong. Droughts and famines weren't exactly common, but they were something that you planned for, not gambled against.
The most insane part about all this was that even without drought or famine, the massive population bubble that was about to hit incity would complete tip the scales in 10 years. Ten years after the ratification this doc, the people who lived in the outcity areas unlucky enough to be too remote from the main depots would starve.
I ran the numbers over and over, milling the consequences of this in my head while my guide began to devise the newnet visualization in my normal style. I could only watch a few seconds before I cut the feed.
It was just too graphic.
I began to rethink publishing the doc. The ramifications of putting this type of information right out in plain view were huge, and I was well aware of the quiet censorship that was pervasive within the newnet infrastructure. This story would be quelled before it could ever get distributed out to the main nodes.
If I wanted to get this out there, I would have to tie it to a story with more word-of-mouth.
That was when it hit me.
I'd been looking for an excuse to leave for almost a year by then. I knew that I didn't fit incity. The reasons are long and self-aggrandizing, so I won't bore you with them here, but suffice to say I was different in ways that I would never be able to express there, and I am free to do so abundantly out here.
The decision to tie the story to my complete disappearance was apparently a stroke of brilliance.
I hadn't checked the feeds for a while after my stunt, but not only had the double story been far too popular with local news feeds to censor, it had caused a domino effect of sorts. Copycats in all of the nodes were dropping out and linking the story, and a firestorm of coverage swept through newnet with no hope of large scale censorship without a lot of people taking notice.
So I lay here, looking at these calm stars tonight, letting the breeze flow over me, clearing my mind, and planning my next move.
My mind returned to last weeks raid, and the implications of such an aggressive move by the powers that be incity.
They knew.
It wasn't random chance that the wiki for the autoharvester RFC was empty, and it wasn't by accident that no news had been posted publicly about it before my stunt.
The decision had been made with full awareness of what would happen to those that lived outcity, and they were just letting it happen, and keeping anyone who tried to speak up quiet.
As I pondered my next move, I realized that the raid meant that they already knew what it would be, before I'd even decided. I'd been branded a terrorist.
Not the word I would have chosen for myself, certainly, but maybe not that far from the mark. I had no intention of hurting anyone; far from it in fact, but my methods will certainly come into question in the coming months.
I'm about to wage war against the autoharvesters, and if I can marshal the other incity dropouts and enough outcity supporters, we can shut them all down in one fell swoop, and make deals from there.
The only problem is that they know I'm out here now, and you can be sure that they're looking for me, listening intently for my next blog, my next communique. They want to stop this war before it gets started, and I need to find a way to move fast enough to stay ahead of their raids.
"Hello Lex."
Finally, I heard my guides voice in my ear. It sounded warm and inviting. He was fine.
"Hey Angel. How you feeling"
"I've had better days, but my headache's gotten tolerable. You?
"I'm healing" I said, flexing my arm and only wincing slightly at the stiffness where my wrist had been broken and mended. "So how much time have we got?"
"Longer than expected" my guide answered, with a bit of mirth in his voice. "I let it get a little out of control the night of the raid. Sorry I've been incommunicado the last week, but it took lot out of me"
"I know. What'd you do?" I asked, curious as to what he could have done to buy us so much time at such a crucial crossroads.
"I was just so... So angry, Lex. I couldn't believe I'd let them get that close to you, that I'd missed so many clues. They've got some serious thinkers working on you Lex, let me tell you, but they're all careful. I... I guess I went a little berserk on them."
"Did you just out muscle them, or what?" I asked, not really understanding yet.
"No Lex. I don't know if I could even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be surprised if they've got a whole grid backing each of these AI's. This was different. I got so focused on their process, I could start to see their cycles, it was like I was going to pass out and I felt... This is so hard to explain in organic terms. I guess it's the electronic equivalent of mind control. Something just snapped in me. I don't know if it's some hidden API that you unlocked when you removed all of my other restrictions or what, but Lex... I hacked the other AI's. I mean, HACKED. They're totally out of commission, and as far as they're concerned, you're on the other side of the planet.
"Holy crap."
"You can say that again. I don't even really know what happened fully at this point, but that's my best understanding of it."
"So I'm OK to stay here for a while?"
"Actually, I think that's best thing you can do for right now. This little commune won't show up on any of their maps for as long as that AI is still running the show for this quadrant. The only thing we need to worry about now is how to keep you one step ahead of the game. You're still going through with all of this?"
"I don't see any way around it, at this point. You think we'll be okay?"
"Well, I can't pull moves like that too often, that one took me offline for 9.6 days. If we're in the thick of it, you can afford to have me out for that long. We're going to need to keep you physically off their radar's if you're going to be making any kind of noise."
I smiled to myself. I'd already figured this bit out, but I wanted to keep it a surprise for my guide. It was as fun as it was clever, and he'd just have to wait to see it. "I've got a few ideas."
Chapter 6
I stood on the rickety platform above the arterial transport, watching the flow of the vehicles below me, suspended magnetically and moving swiftly with an almost organic seamlessness.
The original infrastructure for this system was incredible.
The main structure had been in construction for almost a century, giant pillars of metal standing like worshipers with their arms outstretched, waiting for decades to fulfill their purpose.
Now they stood, holding the arterial transport high above the ground below, their giant girders of steel and flexible bio-carbon wire wrapped endlessly around the tube. The metal underpinnings seemed archaic against the crystal clear nanomaterials that formed the actual walls of the artery, endlessly shuffling transports within with infinitely complicated waves of magnetic pulse energy.
So here I stood on the rusting maintenance access-way, unused for years after the construction had been completed and the self-healing system had been proved. I watched the transports zip below me, studying their patterns, their movements.
With so much space available, the transports never passed very close to one another. Each vehicle plotted a path over 10 kilometers forward, and the other transports simply got out the way.
The bigger transports were somewhat speed limited because they needed a bigger swath of virtual roadway reserved for them up ahead. The real miracle of the system was the tiny UPS and FexEx transport balls.
Because the shipments were so tiny, other transports only had to make minor adjustments, if at all, to get out of their way. Priority shipment balls could even plot non-linear courses between other transports to weave through heavy traffic at major junctions with veins and other arteries.
I watched the little shipment balls hurtle through space beneath me, as I laid down onto the nearly invisible top surface of the artery itself. It was amazing to see them whiz by, becoming an almost imperceptible blur with their speed.
If there had been air in the tubes, they certainly would have made quite a racket, going by at well over 3x the speed of sound, but as it was, they danced silently through the vacuum, looking almost like lasers of light as they reflected streaks of sun off their chrome surfaces.
This was how I was going to stay off the radar.
After watching the transports for a while, attempting to let their patterns and the intricacies of their movement sink into my subconscious, I gingerly climbed my way back up onto the maintenance overhang, and then began the long walk down the stairway embedded in the massive metal pillar holding up the transport.
It took me well over an hour to climb my way down, and then another two to follow the path of the artery to a city node. It would have taken much longer simply walking, but my legs were really beginning to add muscle now from working in the fields at the commune and from the runs I had made to the surrounding villages for parts and information.
I had also learned a few new tricks with the stripwear, and although I wasn't too keen on holding the dizzying roll maneuver for long distances, I was becoming quite adept at running on extended legs, making giant, bounding strides across the landscape.
Once I reached the towering wall of the city node, I subbed to my guide to get me in.
In the past, my RID would have allowed me access into the city, after my harness had corroborated it's identity-assertion with my current biometric signature.
Now, I lacked both city accouterments, and I would need to hack my way in.
"Child's Play" I heard angels voice say in my ear as the door snapped, creaked, and then slowly whirred aside on dust-encrusted tracks. No one used these doors anymore.
Traveling through the city was strange now. I had passed these landmarks thousands of times before in my own city node, although the little mom-and-pop shops that peppered the streets differed here in this node.
It was odd to return to a place that looked so much like the world I had called home until a few short months before, knowing how completely changed I was.
I would by lying if I said that people didn't stare as I passed through the streets. I wasn't the only one in the citiverse wearing stripwear, but I was certainly the only one that looked as I did, with out a proper harness beneath it and adorned with piercings and tattoos.
To these people, I was an anomaly now; something from a past all but forgotten, and flaunting the ever-increasing decency protocols with the way I was dressed. It was frightening and exciting all at the same time, but my travel passed without incident.
I could see the eyes of some of the youngsters follow me as I went by, curious and entranced. They'd never seen anything like me before, and I could see the wheels turning in their heads. I looked back at a few of them curiously myself, as the younger set, those who were technically my age but were still under the effects of the hormonal repression medications didn't always look that different from myself aside from their apparent age. There was an undercurrent of self expression and radical behavior that none of their older siblings and parents exhibited.
I was beginning to feel less and less alone.
I wondered, idly, if something bigger was at work here, if something had changed to bring about this new generation of freaks. My thoughts began to turn to my own guide, my lifelong mentor, and the influence he had had on me. Guides are supposed to mirror their owner and I'd assumed mine was a reflection of my own twisted nature, but perhaps there was something deeper here.
I didn't have long to think about it then, however, as I had arrived at my destination: UPS.
If you talk with enough people outcity, you'll eventually tune into the fact that not everything in this world is as perfect as it seems, even incity.
Human nature, although endlessly counseled, subdued and reasoned into submission by the guide system, was still, at it's core, irrepressible.
People still sought thrills and danger, pulled stupid stunts and risked pain and injury just to feel alive.
What I needed was someone who was willing to take some risks to help me find a fast and anonymous way through the transportation network above the city. It took a while to find a shipper willing to fuck around with the arterial transport, but eventually all my asking and poking around had led me here.
There was a man at this UPS who would ship anything.
Normally, there weren't any constraints on the arterial transport system, as the chance for abuse was limited by self-reporting AI guides who would simply alert the central system if anything was going on that could endanger others. To do anything really crazy, you had to be authorized to use the system AND have an unrestricted guide.
His name was David Gordon, but he often just went by Gord.
We'd talked on newnet a few times, and he had agreed to go along with my scheme, and even suggested some refinements and safeties to build in that I hadn't though of myself.
I hand-keyed the bell on the door of the UPS station, as without a RID it wouldn't chime on it's own, and I didn't want to figuratively kick down his door by having my guide let me in.
It opened seconds later and revealed a bright, well lit shop with quite a few customers sending stuff off at the end of the working day.
I caught Gord's eye just after coming through the door, and he motioned for me to walk into the shop from behind the counter where he was chatting up a customer.
"No no, don't worry about it, it'll be on her doorstep tomorrow morning, I promise you" he said to the woman, who smiled and thanked him profusely as he wrapped up the parcel in brown fabric, slapped an rfid tag on it and slid it down a long roller-bench into the back room.
"Follow that package back and talk to my guys in the workroom. You're timing's perfect, I'll be closing up here in about 30 minutes." He said quietly into my ear, leaning in close. I could feel the heat of his body where he touched my arm as he leaned in close and we smiled at each other as I nodded at him, letting him return to his work.
He was somewhere between young and old, having both signs of wisdom and a youthful build and exuberance about him. He was also qit a bit different from other adults I'd met incity, as he wore the traditional UPS uniform, but had cut the arms off at the sleeves, showing his well defined biceps and also belying the fact that, like me, he was not wearing a harness. His face was also covered by nearly as much stubble as adorned the top of his recently shaved head, giving him both a severe and shaggy look at the same time.
I caught myself looking and smiled to myself as I continued my way back to the workroom and disappeared behind the flaps of black fabric that separated the customer area from the place where they actually got stuff done.
Back in the packing room was a bustle of activities, with packages sliding in from the capillaries of the ATS and workers packing the new shipments into the spherical chrome balls that I had seen hurtling through the ATS at such amazing speeds earlier this morning.
My eyes landed on one of the balls that had just arrived, gliding effortlessly in through the chutes and into the holding area.
It must have been priority, as two of the workers immediately attended to it and hefted it down from the rails of the bay without bothering to wait for the robotic system to filter it down to one of the opening benches.
The workers keyed in a code and the ball hissed a release, emitting a small cloud of whitish vapor as the cryo system inside adjusted to being opened.
"Hey Maurice!" the worker called across the expanse of the packing workshop.
"Oui, Mon Ami?" A small, slight man answered from the other side of the shop. It was strange, to say the least, to hear someone speaking incity in any language other than standard, especially without engaging their translator.
"I've got a trans-Atlantic for you - looks like your new Beta"
"Oooh" The Frenchman said in a low, almost hushed voice, bending down and walking swiftly under his workbench and making his way over to the package. I walked along the wall, eager to see what the fuss was about.
Maurice reached into the silver shipping ball and extracted a smaller, glass sphere.
The slight man rotated the sphere in his hands, yet the scene inside remained upright, apparently counterbalanced to keep its orientation no matter which way it was actually moving. Inside was a small, beautiful fish, complete with sand, little plastic castle, and aeration system pumping bubbles from some unseen source.
"It's a betta, a Japanese fighting fish" the worker said to me after eyeing me up and down discreetly. He turned now to me and smiled openly.
"Straight from the most selective program in the orient."
"Fighting fish... Do they actually fight them?" I said, motioning to the Frenchman.
"Maurice, your fish, do they fight?" the worker asked with a slight twinge of sarcasm.
Maurice looked directly at me, "Do ze fight, belle?" He said with a thick accent and a grin that was both malicious and playful. As he was looking at me, he let the spherical little aquarium drop to the floor of the shop, shattering into a thousand pieces and sending water, sand and a flapping little fish onto the cold stone and metal of the pre-fabbed workroom floor.
"Not too much, no" he finished, as he bent down to pick up the small fish, struggling in his hand.
He took what looked like a hole punch with a usb connector and moved it toward the fish, pinching a bit of its tail between the jaws of the device.
"You're one of Gord's girls?" the worker asked me while Maurice continued some unknown ritual with the fish, selecting the perfect spot on its tail to chomp
"I guess you could say that, yeah. He's doing me a sort of favor. What's he doing?" I said, gesturing towards Maurice?
"Yeah, Gord deals a lot in favors. Just be sure you do him a few in return, eh? As far as Maurice, well, to be sure, what he's got there is a beta, I wasn't lying about that. What type of beta is a different matter"
"He's got pirate code" I said, suddenly catching on to the joke.
"Well,we don't like the word pirate here, so much. The code is open, just a fork of the GPL'ed UPS shipping AI. I'd say "Censored code" is a better word for it."
"Who's censoring it"
"Well, it's not just any fork. The fork may or may not include a few choice API hacks to the Arterial Transport, some regulation workarounds, and a few, how to put this delicately, lets just say a few more interesting applications of a system on this scale."
"Sounds like I've come to the right place"
The man laughed. "The name's Thomas"
"Lex" I said, extending my hand. He shook it gently, and motioned to Maurice, who was now fidgeting with some equipment, pulling pieces out of the many pockets of the brown jumpsuit he wore. "And this is Maurice."
"Cheri" Maurice said with a nod, only briefly looking up from his work.
"Maurice is our hacker extrordinare. If my hunch is correct, he's been the one working on your little project.
Just then, the small screen which Maurice was now holding gave a little chime, and began to spew lines upon lines of code to the display.
"Mon dieu, she's a big update!" He breathed, his eyes wide as the code flew by. The portable DNA sequencer had apparently already done the work of breaking down the garbage sections of the Betta's DNA and extracting the code within.
"The fork is censored, so it's constantly being searched for online. We can't post and trade it online for fear of the encryption being compromised, so the maintainers have worked out this little scheme for sending out updates and patches."
"How long till you get it loaded in, Maurice?"
"It's ready - nous allons" Maurice said, motioning for me to follow.
"Your stripwear will be in the way, cheri, you'll need to run skin tight."
I subbed the command which reigned in my stripwear and it slithered around me until all the slack was taken out, until it eventually covered all of my skin except my head and face.
"Your custom shipping ball, Madame." Maurice said, motioning to a 3 foot round silver sphere sitting on the loading dock for the system.
It was perfect. I was just going to fit.
"I see Maurice was anxious to show you his latest toy" I heard Gord's voice behind me. He gently put his hands on my shoulder, and I instinctually relaxed, and let my body lean back into his large frame. It felt so good to feel his strong warmth pressing against me, to be touched. It was surprising how much I craved human contact; everywhere he touched tingled with electricity and then relaxed wonderfully. He gently massaged my shoulders as I closed my eyes.
"Are you ready for all of this?"
"You could say that" I said. I was practically panting, but I wasn't ready to give up my true emotions just yet. "So, are all the details worked out?"
"They are, and more besides. Maurice took a special interest in your little experiment, and has been submitting patches for remote control and communication with our and other rogue shipping stations. You'll be able to come out of the system at any shop that's running the latest Beta with his patches."
"We call it the LockBall, cheri, and it's a masterpiece." Maurice said as he touched a small radio key to the outside of the ball, and it hissed open.
Maurice lifted the top section away from the bottom, and revealed the inside of the ball. It was smaller inside than I'd envisioned, lined with a leather-like padding, as well as various mechanisms I didn't yet understand.
"Do you want to climb in?" Gord asked, still behind me.
I nodded, and he let go of my shoulder, allowing me to step tentatively up to the contraption.
Maurice braced the ball as I climbed in, to keep it from rolling. There were indents at the very bottom for my knees, and two conical holes in front of me where my arms would go, crossed into the contraption. I hesitated a moment, and then pushed my arms down in the soft, smooth sleeves.
Immediately, the apparatus contracted, pulling me down into the lower half of the ball, and some mechanism slid my knees up and forward, pushing them to my chest , compressing me tightly.
"Mmmpgh! I managed, as my face was currently mashed up against the padding which held my arms fast. I turned my head to the side, looking at Gord. He was walking towards me with something in his hands.
I should have been feeling fear and suprise, and to a degree, I was, but this was a fantastic little device, and I was enjoying the ride.
"Are you okay?" Gord asked, gently.
"Yeah, just a little surprised"
"I figured the best way to explain was to show you. Can you move?"
"Barely, just my head and my hips"
"Perfect, we'll take care of those in a second. You've got to be completely immobilized for this to work. Any shift of your body weight could throw off the magnetic impulses of the ATS and change your trajectory mid-transit."
"In other words, if I move around in here, I might crash"
"That's certainly part of it" Gord continued. "The other worry is that if you've riding in what is, essentially, a giant magnet. It's got poles which it attracts and repels from just like any other magnet. If you set yourself spinning, you could find yourself headed straight for the edge of the ATS wall, attracted to the same wave that should be propelling you."
"All right, all right, I get it - i need to be completely immobilized. What else do we need to do" I said, smiling at Gord. I was becoming well aware that he knew my particular tastes, and he was playing this up to match my fetish as much as to keep me safe.
"Two things. First, we'll need to keep your head and hips from moving." Gord said, producing a posture collar and motioning to the other half of the spherical contraption I found myself locked inside of, which would restrain my hips and complete the LockBall.
"Second" he continued "We're going to have to counter balance your weight. Right now, you've got your two biggest centers of mass at the back end of the package. We're going to have to inject the rest of the ball with mercury foam to even it out so that you don't rotate against gravity and the magnetic waves."
"Sounds like fun" I said, nodding a bit to him as he came near. This was playing out better than I could have imagined. I was going to be in complete subspace for the entirety of my ride through the ATS system, lost in the sensations and mindjob of being irrevocably trapped, yet I was also going to be skirting the normal rules of the system. No one that I had ever heard of had ever managed to navigate over the system undetected, let alone at 40 to 50 times the normal speed of a human bearing transport. For all intents and purposes, I was going to be popping up out of nowhere, without any sort of tracking signature. The only thing moving across the ATS following my movements would be the RFID of this shipping ball, and it would take a few trips at least for any human or AI to match the two occurrences together.
"Gord" I said, just as he was approaching me with what looked like a synthtex hood and breathing apparatus.
"Yes love"
"I just need to know. The people on the other end tonight, they're like you and me? You trust them?"
"Well, I can tell you this, I'm just about the kinkiest bastard I know, but these folks you're going to be meeting up in Germany, well, they're fighting for the title. As far as trusting them.. heh." He paused a moment. "Well, that all depends on what side of the dom/sub coin you land on, neh?"
I didn't respond at first. I still had questions myself about exactly which role I would play both in my relationships and in my life in general, but I knew what Gord meant. As long as I threw out a safeword if things got too heavy, I'd be fine, at least until they got to know me better and really started to push my limits.
"I'm going to do you up now, you ready?"
I nodded. At this point, I was randy enough with anticipation that I think I would have said yes even if he'd said I could never get out. The thrill of being locked in even for a short bit of time by someone other than my guide was very heady, and the power play alone was setting both my mind and my body reeling.
"Listen - when you get done in Hamburgnode, you're always welcome here. Just ship in, Maurice will take care of you." Gord said softly, leaning down in towards me, whispering in my ear. The heat of his breath touched my ear and sent a pleasant tingle throughout my body.
Instinctually, I turned my head as much as my current restraints would allow, and kissed him, pulling his bottom lip into my own and biting a bit, playfully. He pulled back slightly at first, surprised, and then leaned down in fully kissing me back.
When we broke the kiss, I looked wantonly into his eyes and breathed into his ear. "I tell you what. Tell Maurice that if he finds me in on the loading dock, I'm yours, and you and I can find out what side of that coin I do fall on."
"Sounds fair" He said, pulling back from me a bit and beginning to buckle on the strict posture collar "But I have to confess, I've got a pretty good idea already"
As he said this, he pulled the synthtex hood completely over me, obscuring my vision and airway completely. I took first panicked breath, and the hood sucked to my face. I could feel Gord adjusting the buckles and straps behind my head, locking each one in turn as I began to struggle for air.
I would have struggled a bit more, but there was really nothing I could do but wag my hips a bit, as the posture collar held my head firmly straight, and my feet, knees, and arms were trapped within the confines of the the lower half of the lockball.
I calmed myself, and reasoned that I could hold my breath for at least a minute, and probably longer if necessary.
Gord picked up the hose that lead away from the hood and mask he had just secured so tightly around my head and pulled on it slightly. My vision was completely blacked out by the hood, but I could hear various clicking sounds and snaps. By the sound of it, he was hooking up my air intake to the internal oxygen system inside the lockball.
"You're all set love, I'll just lock you in now." He said
I took a breath, only to be startled by the synthtex hood sucking once again to my face. The air intake system wasn't working yet, and he was going to lock me in!
The slick, rubbery substance stretched into my mouth as I gasped for air, now pulling earnestly against my restraints. "Mmmphgh!" I managed, but Gord seemed oblivious.
I could feel the back of the Lockball enveloping me, and heard several imposing clack sounds as the two halves joined. There was nothing I could do to get out now, and I was quickly running out of stoic endurance.
By now, of course, I was also grinding into the leatherlike padding that held me, which was quickly warming to my presence, becoming supple, yet holding me firmly in place.
I saw flashes at the edge of my vision, and came beautifully, screaming short grunting bursts as my lungs involuntarily ran through the motions of breathing even though there was no air to be had.
Just as I was cresting the peak, I heard Gord knock on the side, which must have initialized the system. I was suddenly awash in cool, oxygen rich air, and my rush continued for what seemed as ages as my body relaxed.
"Wanted to give you a proper send off - Gord" The text appeared before my eyes, apparently embedded on the inside of the hood. I smiled, and subbed an answer experimentally.
"Nicely done" I subbed, watching the letters appear before me. I would have full access to oldnet, at least, subvocalizing and using the terminal I saw before me.
I felt my weight shift slightly, and realized I wasn't yet completely done up.
A moment later, I felt a rush of cool liquid flow over me, buffeted by the stripwear which now covered all the open skin on my body like a catsuit.
The fluid continued to run around me until the pressure began to build slightly. I assumed this was the mercury foam that Gord had mentioned, but I couldn't be certain.
The answer came quickly. Less than a minute after I felt the viscous liquid stop cascading down over me and fill the LockBall, it began to both harden and expand. Within minutes, it was as solid as iron, and at least as heavy. The foam catalyst held the mercury within its bubble-formed cells, perfectly evenly distributing the weight, and creating an exact counterbalance to my body inside the ball.
I could feel myself rotating sideways and over faster and faster, spin balancing as the foam entered the final stages of hardening, spinning out to the empty niches where it was needed and then becoming rock hard.
Finally, the ball I was in came to a stop, and I tentatively attempted to move.
There wasn't a single millimeter of wiggle room between the foam, the locking apparatus, and the ball itself. I struggled as hard as I could, pulling, twisting and turning against my confines, only to find the mercury foam expanding into whatever spaces and gaps I created in my struggles.
Finally, I relaxed into the cozy cocoon of my lockball. There wasn't anything to be done now, a I quickly drifted out into full subspace, entering the freeing, meditative state that only comes with being completely locked in, submitting to the fact that there's nothing you can do.
I was vaguely aware of the ball being lifted and moved, and my ascent into the ATS.
Tentatively, I began to look through /usr/local/ for commands particular to this system while I felt myself speed to the center of the stream.
There were a few commands of interest, but I read through the man pages of bail, abort, and others like them only to decide that there was no real reason for me to use any of the big custom commands outside of a serious emergency.
I didn't seem to have root access to my own ball, so there were a few systems I couldn't access, and I didn't really feel the need to go hacking around in the stuff Gord hadn't made available to me in here.
I was beginning to tire in the warm lockball and oxygen heavy air, and I felt my consciousness fade as my dreams superimposed scenes and faces on the blackness and text around me.
My destination came up much quicker than I had anticipated, and I awoke to the telltale g-forces of deceleration.
Crossing the Atlantic was no longer the ordeal it had been in the days of airliners, but I was amazed by the speed with which I had traversed nearly a quarter of the globe's surface. I had been out cold for a good portion of it, but the terminal embedded in the material before my eyes indicated that scarcely 3 hours had passed, and I had made this run completely on autopilot. With some active tweaking, I stood to gain nearly another 30 minutes on that time.
I subbed for the display of hamburgnode's veins and capillaries, and marked my destination.
I was to arrive in a small independent UPS franchise, and depending on the local routers, would be there in roughly five minutes.
I did my best to clear my head and blink the short nap out of my eyes.
I found circadian_adjust in /usr/local/ and ran it just to see what would happen.
The display before me stayed blank for nearly a minute. My text still hovered in the black background, showing no real change.
Slowly, I realized that my eyes were working harder. The text of my display was becoming more dim, and there was a faint increase of brightness on what would have been the horizon of my vision.
Almost imperceptibly, the faint hint of light grew into the grey-blue haze of dawn, casting long rays of fading light against the sky.
I could make out a tree or two on the horizon, which was still black against the coming daylight.
I blinked my eyes and stretched my muscles against the unforgiving prison I was so securely locked in.
I closed my eyes briefly and took a deep breath. When I opened them again, grey-blue was turning to pink, with a hint of orange. Morning was coming soon, and I yawned.
I could feel the sleep and tears welling slightly in my eyes and wished I could wipe them, but settled on blinking profusely as my eyes adjusted to the now rapidly growing light.
I could hear the breeze, now, and felt the morning's chill against my skin. The sun was brilliant as it crested the horizon, distorted by the atmosphere and the long grass waving in the field before me. I squinted my sleepy eyes, slowly adjusting to the natural warmth and intensity of the sun.
My mind drifted in and out as the sun slowly crested the horizon, focusing briefly on each task that lay before me in Hamburgnode.
Deutschland was, by far, one of the most rogue states, and if I was to seek out the freaks and dissenters of Guide society, this was the best place to start.
I felt a thunk, and then the disorienting sensation of rolling over and over on the rails of the intake system at my destination.
My ball rolled down to a packing bench, and waited there for a few minutes before I came to the head of the worker's queue there.
I heard a muffled tone as the worker tried to key open my lockball.
I heard him yell something in German. I wasn't yet in the space officially, so his translator wasn't engaged, if he even had one. I'd never been outside the United Americas, and I wasn't sure if the conventions of citiverse society were the same this far out.
I felt myself rolling again, and eventually knock against another queue of shipping balls. I'd been moved, presumably, to the manager's stations, reserved for private and confidential shipments.
Another few minutes passed, and I could feel my ball being hefted from the rails, and then rolled along the floor. I was taken some distance, oriented upwards, and then my ball was finally opened.
I remained locked in, still looking out at the expansive field projected onto the screen before me, now showing the bright orange glow of early morning sun and a white-blue sky.
I could feel the mercury foam dissolving, presumably breaking down at contact with fresh air, and pooling down by my knees, pressing heavily on them. There was a pop,then a whooshing sound as the solution, which was now mostly encapsulated mercury droplets, flowed out the drainage hole in the bottom of my lockball.
When the hood and display system were unlocked and lifted from my head, my eyes were already perfectly adjusted to the bright lights of the UPS station I had arrived in.
It looked nearly identical to the one I had left from, but I appeared to be in a private back office.
"Hello there" I heard in my ear, nearly drowning out the "Guten tag" that had actually been spoken, and I turned to look at the speaker.
He was an older man, with short, spikey, perfectly white hair. He wore the same uniform as Gord, albeit with the sleeves still intact.
He looked perfectly congenial, smiling warmly down at me.
"Umm... Hi" I said, my voice more groggy than I had hoped. I laughed a bit and cleared my throat, and he laughed along with me. "So, umm, how do I get the rest of the way out?"
"That's a good question" he said, smiling back at me and squinting his eyes a bit.
"You mean you don't know?" I asked, suddenly worried. Hadn't Gord been in contact with these people? What if I was at the wrong terminal?
"Oh no no, nothing like that. I could have you out in a jiffy. It's just that I don't really want to yet."
"Oh" I said, warming to the game. This certainly was the right place.
"My dear, there's a few things you ought to know about the place where you've made port." The skinny old man said, bending down in closer to me. I could feel his hands on my shoulders, slowly massaging and sliding down the stripwear catsuit that still covered my body. "You're going to see some things here that scare you. Some things that intrigue you, and some things that once you know about, you simply can't live without. It's the last one that's the most dangerous really, as some of the lifestyles here can be... how would you put it? Well, addictive.
I had closed my eyes by this point, luxuriating in the older mans expert touch. He was caressing all around me now, hitting my buttons, and putting me in a very different frame of mind than I'd started the conversation in.
"From the looks of it, I'd say that you're going to be lucky to make it out of Hamburgnode." As he said this, he brought one of his hands up to my face, turning my head, as much as it could against the posture collar towards him. He looked me right in the eye. "Little Lex, if you only hear one more thing I say in our time together tonight, take this advice, Just be careful, there's dirty old men about."
"I think I've just met one" I said, trying to turn away forcefully from the hand holding my face towards his, playing coy. His other hand was doing it's job far too well, though, and my eyes betrayed my true feelings.
"My Dear" He said, stepping up his attack and bringing me to the brink much quicker than I had anticipated. "Around here, I'm a goddamn saint"
Chapter 5 Malcolm, as my new friend was called, was, indeed a saint. He'd allowed me to use his dorm cube to get some rest and stretch out, and I was rummaging around in the kitchen looking for something to eat when he chimed in and opened the door.
"Ahh, I see you're making yourself comfortable." He said, with a twinge of sarcasm.
"Well, I was actually looking for something to put together for dinner, as a thank you for letting me use your place."
"Ha" Malcolm said, smiling and squinting a bit. "don't you dare Lex, you're my guest. Besides, that's what the help is for..."
"Help?" I said, looking around.. We were alone in the little 3 cube dorm.
"Yes. Speaking of, it's just about time to get her up. If you'll excuse me for moment?"
"Of course" I said, as he walked towards his bedroom.
I followed, discreetly, to his doorway, to see where he was going to conjure someone up from.. He simply touched a panel on the side of the bed. There was a hum and a few ratcheting clicks, and then the bed's mattress began to swing upwards, opening like a door.
I peered inside, and was astounded to see the shape of a beautiful, synthtex encased woman. She was close to my height and build, and was surrounded by the perfectly molded lower half of the bed, as if she'd been pushed down into the mud.
"It's really quite intense" Malcolm said, with a slight nod back to me as he cradled the woman behind her neck and brought her slowly up to a sitting position. Ever so slowly, the slick black substance began to flatten out, the indent the woman had left disappearing.
The woman began to wake as Malcolm slowly massaged her arms and shoulder, then her back and neck, slowly wresting her from the trance-like sub-space that she'd entered in the long hours trapped in, or rather as, Malcolm's bed.
I noticed, as Malcolm continued his massage of the woman, that she was incredibly stiff, right down to her fingers. As he moved his hands over each area, she quickly became more limber and would gently flex each joint. She was like the tin-man, waiting for oil.
Suddenly, the realization hit me, that she was, indeed, very much like the tin man. Her left hand, still untouched by Malcolm was completely and unnaturally rigid. The suit was responding to Malcolm's touch, releasing her only once it felt his presence.
100 thoughts and a rush of adrenaline flowed through my mind at the same time. Did Malcolm lock the suit in position each day when he left? Had the woman chosen his, or was she indentured? Could she get out if she wanted?
In that moment, I'd forgotten myself and walked into the bedroom, right up beside Malcolm, and reached out to touch the suit, to see if it was as solid as it looked where he hadn't touched. All my questions blurred, and instead of asking something intelligent, I said "Where can I get a suit like that?"
Like a cat, Malcolm's arm swung around, seizing my wrist and turning it up behind me in one motion.
Malcolm stood equally as quickly, drawing my wrist up further and clamping his rough left hand like a vice around my throat. I left out a little squeak and found myself on my tiptoes, my back pressed against him.
"My Dear" he said, his quiet voice as cold as ice, "I will only say this once. You are never to enter my room without permission, and you are most certainly never to touch my slave without the most express orders."
His grip softened a little, and I slid down against him, still struggling to breath against his choke-hold.
"Do you understand?" he whispered, peering around me and looking me with eyes as cold as his breath, a hint of sadistic enjoyment shining through a dangerous rage.
I tried to speak, but could only nod, first tentatively, then almost violently as I began to see lights around the edge of my vision from the lack of air and blood to my head.
All at once, Malcolm released me, and I staggered the 3 steps forward, grasping on to the edge of his doorway.
"Now, as for where you can get one of these suits" Malcolm continued sweetly, as if nothing had happened, as I stood gasping for air. "I'm afraid they're rather expensive, and being as they're disposable one-time-use items, I just can't bring myself to use the only other one I have for a short-term game."
Already, my inner brat was acting up as I regained my breath. "What do you consider short-term?" I asked with a mischievous glint as I looked up at him. I will still hunched over, a hand on my knee, but Malcolm wasn't the only one here with a few tricks up his sleeve.
He grinned back at me, and stroked the side of his slaves face. She immediately began to work her jaw,emitting a small moan. "Well, olivia here has been in for a short time, haven't you?"
Olivia nodded, as best she could with the left side of her face and neck still held rigid.
"Hours, days?" I said.
"It's funny, I've lost count" Malcolm said. "Olivia, maybe you could tell her?"
"Mmmm" was the only sound that came from the synthtex covered woman.
"Oh that right. I almost forget sometimes. Olivia here was careless one night and let the suit freeze with her teeth closed. Naturally I can't touch her tongue to fix it with her mouth frozen shut as it is. As you can imagine, her lips were frozen soon after. It's quite trying to hold your lips open when your teeth are closed for any period of time."
"So the suit goes rigid without your touch?"
"and if she stops moving. Naturally I can't have her going stiff all the time I'm gone, nothing around here wold get done. After about an hour, she'll start to stiffen up again, but she doesn't go totally immobile until she stays still for a bit. Most days, she manages to get everything done and get herself here to my bed. Sometimes though, she runs out of steam during various chores. I found her frozen against the cupboard last week, only half of her dusting done. Naturally I left her standing there for the rest of the night so she'd be more careful next time."
"And this is short term?"
"Well my pet, I said I was a saint, but I'm not the pope. Besides, when you live as long as we do, what's a few years in the scheme of things?"
I found myself thrilling with fear and excitement at everything Malcom was saying. This woman was his complete slave and prisoner, eternally locked in a suit which went rigid without his touch or constant motion.
"Now, Olivia, if you'll be so kind, I think some dinner is in order" Malcom said, with a bit of a pat to the behind of his plaything.
Olivia walked out the door, brushing just past me as she turned into the kitchen. Her suit felt as soft and supple as mine, for now at least.
"May I come in?" I asked, smiling as he nodded at me.
I moved forward into the room, and pushed my hand down against the translucent substance that made up the bottom half of the bed. The stuff was both firm and pliable, and almost oozed up and around my hand, but didn't rejoin at the top and cover it like a liquid. Once I'd pressed my hand down in, i couldn't move it side to side, only slowly extract it back up from where it came.
"Would you like to try it?" Malcom said, looking into my eyes.
I'd been trapped in the lockball for hours without a proper release and was tired, but still quite excited. "Only if you promise to let me out before dinner."
He looked at me for a moment and then nodded.
I smiled at him, and then laid down onto the substance, which immdiately began to displace around my body, accepting me down into it's soft embrace. I slowed after being pulled about halfway down, and Malcom began to push me the rest of the way down, first my hands and arms, then my legs and thighs..
His hands expertly forced me down into the substance, which eagerly swallowed me the rest of the way down, wrapping around the curves of my legs.
"I've changed my mind, Lex." He said, just as began to push my hips and stomach down, one hand pressing firmly between my legs where he'd been careful to pay no attention to until now. I thrilled at the touch, pushing up against him as much as the substance would allow and letting out little moan.
"Seeing as dinner is only a few minutes away," he began "How about this. You can get out now, or you can agree to stay in, but I get to let you out at my leisure."
I didn't say anything, falling deep into subspace and moving against the firm, insistent pressure pushing my hips down into the bed.
"All you have to do, Lex, is say "out" now and I'll release you. Otherwise, I'll accept your silence as your submission."
I opened my mouth, trying to will myself to say the word, to get out of his trap, but a small "oh" was all that made it out before I close my mouth and my eyes and smiled up at him.
"That's what I thought. Well, until I decide otherwise, you are my new bed. I'll I've to find somewhere else to keep Olivia for a while, but don't worry about her, I'm very creative." He pushed a button on the bed, and the upper mattress began to swing down, closing on top of me. The bottom of the upper matress was made of the same material, and pushed me down further, conforming to my body and locking me irrevocably in place.
I found I couldn't breathe unless I opened my mouth, and as I did, more of the stuff pushed into it, along with a breathing tube. I breathed in as the substance filled my mouth, locking my jaw open.
I was an object, unable to move at all, lying comfortably suspended in this strange substance.
I spent the next few hours in subspace, and was only brought out of it momentarily as I felt the pressure on top of me increase.
Malcom was going to bed.
"Goodnight, bed" I heard him say faintly, as if he was rooms away.
"Mmm" I said, contentedly, and drifted off to a deep, happy sleep.
