And when the fucking is over, the Warden will kill Darling.
At the moment, however, this is enjoyable.
Minutes later, the woman looks at him with a disconcerting smile.
She laughs suddenly, wiping sweat from her brow, leaning back in the cabled support of her bonds. Then she shifts her weight forward, clutching the artificial tightly and licking his face as the tendrils begin to release her. She makes small noises of pleasure as they slide from her cunt and anus. She rubs the muscles of her legs as Darling lowers her gently to the divan.
Darling touches her face with one hand; it seems a crude gesture after everything else.
But they have parted now. The Warden raises his weapon…
… or tries. He cannot move.
He tests each limb separately. Each is under some sort of paralyzing control. Even his breathing and heartbeat have been seized, maintained at an eerily regular pace, though adrenalin has begun to course his veins. He sweeps the room, attempting to find the source of his imprisonment.
The strange fractal object on the wall has changed, its formlessness resolved into a highly sophisticated weapon. The Warden sees it now, how the deadly potential was masked by a nearly infinite spiral of self-similiar structure. But there is no defense, now that it's taken him.
He must impose the sentence in the only remaining way.
The Warden wills the Last Resort, signals a centigram of high explosives in his belly. It will surely destroy the artifical, the woman, himself, and possibly compromise the structural integrity of the hotel. But sentence must be served. The impulse travels down a hardwire from his brain to the Last Resort's fuse.
And nothing happens.
The explosive has been stabilized by the woman's fractal weapon; for the moment rendered as inert as clay.
He is defeated.
And worse than his frustration, his anger and humiliation, is another reaction that he hears deep inside himself. The last shreds of his humanity—besieged by concentric rings of jailers official, criminal, and finally this new compelling force—find hope in his predicament.
The old voices are laughing.
Chapter 14
SEXUAL TRANSMISSION
A slender thread:
Part of its length was an exotic form of carbon, capable of conductivity, movement, and possessed of local intelligence subservient to Darling's own true AI. The other segment was composed of metals, ceramics, in a sheath of organics to assuage its host's immune system: it mirrored Mira's nervous tissue, a center for direct interface reception and narrowcast. Together, the two formed that ancient method of connection, the direct linkage of matter, a wire between two people…
A conversation:
— Ah! Yes. How pleasing to be inside you.
— Fuck, yes. A little to the right. My right. Perfect.
— There: harder?
— As hard as you like. Your friend requires distracting.
— Can you deal with him?
— Of course. But perhaps you should explain. An interesting scrape for an art dealer to be in…
— I am sworn to discretion.
— But without my help, you won't complete your mission at all. A necessary improvisation. Ah! Yes, that too.
— Your price for assistance is information?
— Information… and that you go deeper… no… yes.
— I suppose I must. A necessary improvisation, well within my brief. Here it is: An unknown sculpture of one Robert Vaddum was discovered. It was determined to be less than a year old. But Vaddum died in the Blast Event, seven years ago. I was sent here to determine if Vaddum was still alive. Another dealer, a competitor, is using this Warden to eliminate me from the bidding.
— An interesting tale. It seems we both have stories to tell each other. You and I may be here for the same reason. But free my mouth and let me deal with this unwanted voyeur.
— Be careful. This Warden is very alert.
— They always are. I can command my weapons in 68 languages. I doubt he will understand dKinza mVakk. (Ah, now that is hard. But pray don't stop.)
— But he'll recognize that you're saying something…
— I won't use the adult dKinza. I prefer the male childhood tongue; it sounds like gibberish, even to the mVakk themselves.
— Brilliant. The woman of my dreams. Do it now.
— Two further conditions.
— More? What are they?
— I want him, the Warden. I want to play a game with him.
— Done. The other?
— Fuck me like a boy.
— Your price is my pleasure. Like a rich man with a whore.
Mira relaxed her muscles, let the chafing mesh of strands lower her onto the filament that had just cleared her mouth. Slicked with her spit and the acids of her stomach, the burning member pushed into her anus. It throbbed with compression waves, bristled with small silia like an inching catepillar. It was mercifully thin, but the pain of its passage seemed to be splitting her. She bit her tongue for concentration.
Given this stimulation, calling forth one of her more infrequently used languages was a challenge. But it gave her a heady sense of power to push the intense pleasure/pain down and force the juvenile pidgin onto her tongue. Even the harsh pleasures of this infinitely distracting man could not keep her from a kill.
There it was:
"Full stealth," she began, the mellifluent syllables of dKinza mVakk hidden in a babble of pig-Latin additions. "Implement a wide-band paralysis field around all armed individuals within the residence. Stasis any… ohmygod!"
She bit her tongue again. Darling was a bastard. A Darling bastard.
Mira counted to twenty in her mind, re-established her control.
"Stasis any concentrations of explosive materials in the room. Cut off all communications. If any countermeasures present a problem, kill him in the chair."
An internal chime came seconds later, her devices proclaiming victory. Somehow, the sound snatched away the orgasm that had been lingering at the periphery of her awareness, patiently waiting for a way in through the pain. Fine, she thought. She could finish her pleasure with the Warden, now her prisoner.
Mira turned toward the little man. She laughed, leaning back in Darling's web, pulling the burning member a few centimeters from her bowels. The Warden didn't seem to realize that he'd been paralyzed. He was by nature still and lifeless, and had not yet felt the subtle grip of her weapons. Well, she would find the life in him and wrench it out. She hated these humans become machines, less than people. In an era when inanimate matter could become an individual, they chose to cross the Turing boundary the other way. If anything was a sin, it was that, an abdication of selfhood.
Here was darling Darling in her arms. He would understand her hatred, having pulled himself across that threshold into humanity with nothing but his own faith that he could become real, a person. She embraced him, her tongue greedy for the cool stone of his cheeks, the glassy heat of his eyes. A thread of strand they'd used to communicate secretly had pulled from her eye, leaving in its wake some sparkling anesthetic that blurred her vision on that side. But even without the direct neural connection, she could still sense Darling's thoughts. The two lovers moved as one to disentangle: her muscles relaxing as if voiding when he attenuated the member in her ass, a shift of weight to one knee as he left her vagina, the bright needles of returned circulation in her legs as he lowered her onto the divan.
Mira waited for a moment, touched herself to cultivate the unspent energies inside. Darling blinked away her saliva and smiled.
"Thank you," he said.
"Anything," she answered, and was immediately embarrassed. That was unlike her, that unctuous, unconditional tone. But as much as she hated the Warden, she loved Darling.