Paladin could see from Eliasz’ posture that he was wary. From context, he guessed she was inviting him to try some kind of hacked-together molecule, probably designed to release inhibitions and generate an intense emotional response: pleasure, fear, sadness, amusement, rage. “What are you guys playing?” he asked, his tone appropriately light.
“A little thing Frankie cooked up after reverse engineering some Ellondra.” It was a common stimulant-euphoric. Eliasz relaxed.
“Just let me tell my friend to wait for me,” he told Mecha. Pulling Paladin aside, he whispered to the bot in a voice too quiet for any human ear: “I’m going up with Mecha to see what I can find out about Frankie. I’m patched against the drug they’re using, so it should be fine. But if I don’t come down in an hour, get me out.”
At that moment, Frankie opened the door a crack, motioning furtively at Mecha. It was her cue. Mecha tapped Slavoj and Eliasz. “Go on up. I’m going to get the others.” She made her way through the crowd, the sensors on her body winking in the strobes. As she circulated, she gave a subtle nudge to first one person, then another. After she’d tapped about twenty of them, she gave Paladin a little wave and ran upstairs, pulling the door shut behind her.
His sixty-minute counter decrementing in nanoseconds, Paladin idly tuned a few different segments of the radio spectrum, looking for local networks that might yield information. There was an open network called Hox, attached to a local server with a few scientific papers and videos on it.
While the bot explored, the man with wings turned to him and asked, “What do you think?” Paladin replayed recent audio, and discerned that he’d been standing in the middle of a debate over regulations on tissue engineering. Under a new set of rules proposed by the Free Trade Zone, all body modifications created with patented scaffolds would have to be implemented by a licensed practitioner.
Paladin knew that ownership regulations weren’t exactly valued in this crowd. “It will give patent holders more control over what you can do with your body,” he said, quoting verbatim from an anti-patent text repo whose feed he’d quickly plundered.
“Exactly! Do you think I could have these wings if the Zone pushed the other economic coalitions to bend to its puritanical will?” The man stretched the beautiful but useless wings over his head. “I’m Casey, by the way.”
“I’m Pack.”
“What do you do, Pack? You don’t look much like a lab assistant.” Casey tapped Paladin’s carapace. “Feels military grade.”
“I am indentured to Aleksy. We’re looking for gene development work.”
“Oh, you’re slaved to that guy who went off with Mecha?”
Paladin had nothing to say to that, so he decided to pry. “What do you do?”
“I make custom penises.” Casey tapped the palm of his hand, beaming Paladin the address of a server packed with information on how to design and order the sex organs you’d always wanted. “Good money in that. But now I’m thinking I might get into consulting with companies that want to implement open tissue scaffolds. You know, to get around this new regulation.”
“Interesting,” Paladin vocalized, scanning the room. Eliasz had been gone for almost half an hour already.
“Actually, you look like you could use my services, friend,” Casey laughed, patting the smooth alloy between the bot’s legs. “Why didn’t they build you with a dick?”
“Are you completely stupid?” giggled Mecha, who had been slinking down the stairs behind them. When she arrived, she clung heavily on Paladin’s arm. “Don’t you know anything about bots, Casey? This pretty bot here…” she paused, her skin profoundly flushed and her body trembling with a wave of chemically induced pleasure. “This pretty bot has something better than one of your dicks. He’s got a brain right here.” She tapped Paladin’s carapace over the chamber where his human brain quietly processed facial recognition data.
Before Mecha swooned again, she wriggled hotly against the bot’s left side, her thumb drawing a streak of sweat down his torso, moving from one covert weapons system to another. “I’ve been inside your model,” she whispered. “In RoboCity.” As she named the popular game world, her knees began to buckle. Paladin knelt slightly, lifted her quivering, ecstatic body, and carried her up the stairs to the loft. She would fare better on the cushions there, among other people who had been drugged.
Paladin was beginning to feel a strange dread in this human network, where everyone seemed to know he was military issue. Pretty soon, somebody would actually care. It was very possible that he and Eliasz were about to have their covers blown. This party could get dangerous.
As Paladin shouldered into the loft with Mecha, he immediately perceived Eliasz and Frankie talking in the corner, behind a puddle of bodies filled with blood that bore molecular traces of Ellondra.
As he let Mecha down, she briefly achieved lucidity and pointed across the room at Frankie. “See her? I love her.” Mecha addressed herself to Paladin’s upper arm, focusing on an area that contained a small constellation of sensors. “Did you know she named herself after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who discovered the structure of DNA? That was her pseudonym when she wrote for The Bilious Pills, too.”
By the time Mecha sank into the pillows, Paladin was accessing fragments of saved and cached versions of The Bilious Pills. “Frankie is just so… amazing. You should talk to her.” And then Slavoj reached an arm out from the edge of the human drug puddle, and Mecha flowed back into it.
Frankie and Eliasz walked over to where Paladin stood in the doorway, skirting the pillowed area.
“Aleksy has been telling me about your gene-hacking skills,” Frankie said, looking at the hollows in Paladin’s face that most humans perceived as eyes. “He said the two of you always work together.”
“We do.”
“He also explained to me how he’s patched against Ellondra. Very impressive.”
“That’s just a taste of what we can do,” Eliasz replied, a calculated boast.
“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea of just how smart you are.” Frankie grinned and slapped a dermal injector on Eliasz’ neck before he could react. She winked at Paladin as Eliasz’ pupils dilated. He reached out an unsteady arm to the bot. “Looks like your master isn’t patched against this.”
Eliasz sagged against the bot’s frame. Paladin lifted him the way he had Mecha, quickly sending a command that disabled part of Eliasz’ perimeter system. The man’s skin temperature had risen, and a quick blood sample revealed what Paladin had suspected: serotonin cascade, dopamine levels rising. Eliasz writhed, senses focused inward on some kind of hallucination that his brain processed as pleasure.
Frankie opened the door and barked a laugh. “See you later, kiddies.”
Paladin held the man and stepped lightly down the stairs, powering up his head-mounted lasers as he crossed in front of the bar to the elevator. He didn’t bother with the buttons, relaying a command directly to the building’s systems that overrode all other requests and brought the elevator down to Basement 3. He was in high-defense mode as he entered the car. Had anyone interfered, he would have shot to kill.
Luckily, all the revelers were focused on who was arriving rather than who was leaving. And nobody paid attention to a bot carrying his master, moaning and sighing with obvious intoxication, through the warm streets of early morning. A molecule lookup revealed the drug wasn’t deadly, but Eliasz would be incapacitated for hours.
At their hotel, Paladin laid Eliasz on the cot and stood at full alert in the center of the room. The problem was that the man wouldn’t stay still. Frankie’s drug had filled him with restless energy. He crept from the bed to curl around the cool, segmented carapace of Paladin’s legs, breathing raggedly around half-formed sentences. Then his entire body tensed up and he lapsed into a soft groan, hostage to an enforced gratification.