Frances made a face. "A little too earnest for me."
Kade chuckled. "Next."
CYGNUS EXPRESS – A PROJECT ODYSSEUS FUNDRAISER
Vastness of space, planets orbiting distant suns, partygoers in gleaming imitations of vacuum suits, bleeping sound of contact through the static of cosmic background radiation, overlaid with driving trance rhythm.
Frances shrugged. Damn, she felt good pressed against him.
"In space," she said, "no one can hear you dance."
Kade shrugged. "Next."
CARE BARE by UNITED SKEINS OF SEXY
New sights and sounds: Writhing, almost-naked bodies, skin moving against skin, moaning pulsing sounds, fast flashes of mouths and hips and breasts.
Frances moved her hip against him just a bit. "Now that looks pretty hot. Yeah?"
Kade laughed out loud. Any other night, he wouldn't have the balls to venture into a scene like that. But what the hell. His task tonight was to push the platform they'd built on top of Nexus's nanoscale elements to its limits.
It'll be a great test case, he told himself. I'm doing this for science.
Don Juan responded for him. "Maybe. You planning on getting fresh with me?"
Kade let it drive, let it wink with his eye.
Frances smirked and raised an eyebrow, turning towards him, her body still pressed against his. "Oh, you'd like that, would you?"
She batted her pretty green eyes up at him.
"Oh, I think the pleasure would be all yours," Don Juan replied. Kade put his other arm around her waist, holding her to him now, looking down into her eyes.
Frances bit her lower lip.
"Prove it."
Kade might have stuttered, might have blushed, but a more calculating logic was in control. "Your place or mine?"
They kissed standing up, Kade's back against the wall of the room they'd snuck into. Frances was a giggler. She made out with a fun enthusiasm that Kade found infectious. They kissed and kissed, giggled and whispered. Kade's clinical detachment crumbled. Someone opened the door to the room, saw them, and backed out apologetically. More giggles ensued. More kissing followed. Giggling gave way to sighing. Sighing gave way to grinding, to hands roaming. Heat rose between their bodies. Her breath was coming short and heavy. So was his.
The dialog sucks, but I can't complain about the results, Kade thought to himself. There was one more test he'd promised Rangan he'd run. Now for the kinesthetic interfaces…
He kept his eyes closed as he kissed her, immersed himself in the Nexus OS that he and Rangan had built atop the hundreds of millions of nano-structures of the drug that suffused their brains.
Softly glowing numbers scrolled across the bottom of his field of view. A column of icons hung at the right. A research log window with his field test notes lay compressed down to its title bar. The muted roar of the party still rushed in his ears. Kade flicked his inner eye over pulse, respiration, neuro-electrical activity, interface status, neurotransmitter and neuron-hormone levels. All green. He could see the copy of Don Juan that Rangan had pirated and modified running through its models, behaving nicely and only using the resources he'd assigned. He flicked past it, sought out another program, one Rangan had lifted from VR porn and hacked to send its output to their body-control software. Peter North.
[activate: peter_north mode: full_interactive priority: 1 smut_leveclass="underline" 2]
Frances pressed herself more insistently against him. The giggles were gone. Her lips brushed his jaw, tugged wetly at his mouth. Her body was hot beneath his hands. Her snug pants were smooth and slick and hugged her ass perfectly. She spread her thighs slightly, leaned her hips against his, ground her crotch against his leg as they kissed. Her soft little moans of pleasure went straight to some primal part of his brain. Numbers and icons still floated in his vision.
Kade ignored one set of stimuli, let himself be absorbed by the other.
Peter North was in charge now, a VR porn bot Rangan had lifted from the net and adapted to their Nexus OS as a way to test their kinesthetic interfaces. It spat out limb position changes and muscle and joint vectors. Nexus nodes in Kade's brain flared, signals raced from his motor cortex to his limbs, and Kade's body responded.
Frances moaned softly, shifted her ass against his hand, ground herself against his hip. Peter North slid Kade's hand down her back, past the fabric of her low-cut top, and down onto the smooth and snug backside of her pants. His hand squeezed one perfect cheek, rose up into the room, and came down with a resounding smack.
"Ooooh," Frances murmured. She bit his lower lip then, not quite too hard, and tugged. Her finger rubbed his chest, teasing one nipple. Forefinger and thumb came together, pinching, enough to hurt this time.
Damn, thought Kade. Why did I ever think this was a bad idea?
Peter North grabbed hold of Frances by her hips, steered them both to the couch, pushed her down into it. The software brought his body down atop her, kneeling on the edge of the cushion, one knee between her thighs. Kade's hands came up, entangled themselves in her hair and made fists. Peter North tugged, tilting her head back, making her look at him, paused until she opened her eyes to stare into his, waited just a moment longer, then brought his mouth down on hers.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Rangan, he thought, for forcing me to get out here and have some fun.
Frances responded with nails on his back, sharp and even painful through his shirt. She shifted her hips forward on the seat, pressing herself more firmly against his knee, squeezing her thighs around his leg, purring into his mouth as her hands found his belt and eased their way under his shirt. Searching for skin, ready to draw blood.
Kade forced himself to concentrate. Forced himself to make more notes in the research log. He was still a scientist, damn it.
[Smooth muscular control. Feedback systems excellent. Possibly insufficient pain response.]
Outside, Peter North had him cupping one breast, one hand tangled in her hair. His shirt was gone. Frances was biting her way down his chest, his stomach.
[Definitely insufficient pain response.]
Her hand was on his crotch now. Kade was hard, as hard as the safety limits he and Rangan had coded into the interface would allow. Frances seemed to approve. She smiled seductively as her hand squeezed him through the front of his pants, started to move in time to her own grinding against his lower leg…
Kade made no note of this. He'd tested the erection module extensively already.
Frances smiled coyly up at him and gave him a long squeeze. "Is this for me?"
She licked her lips lasciviously.
Kade's mind filled with an image of what was about to happen. His heart skipped a beat in anticipation. He opened his mouth to reply.
[interface warning – max spikes per second > parameters]