‘The Absolute enjoys originality; violence can be a short cut. If you were to duel Scoular or assassinate him, both of which are beneath you, then you would need to do so in an original way.’ Even to Dracup she would not admit how she had distilled her views of what the Absolute wanted down to pure sensation – after all, he was another player. She had no doubt that the Absolute enjoyed good gamesmanship, but he/she/it must have seen it all now in the thousands of years of Game’s existence.
‘I… I am trying to learn,’ he said haltingly.
She turned to look at him. ‘There’s nothing attractive to either the Absolute or myself about weakness, do you understand?’
Dracup nodded. Like everything in the Game, she felt like she was playing out a scene, but she had worked hard enough for the Absolute this night. She wanted something for herself just now. Do you hear that, Absolute? Ride me if you will, but I need to let go. Maybe this is what he wanted, less artifice, more feeling. No, she didn’t want to think like that.
It was bad form to reward an underling with something he wanted after he had disappointed you. The problem came when you wanted the same thing. Zabilla grabbed the back of Dracup’s head and pulled him closer into her, exchanging a long kiss that became more urgent as it went on. She felt his hands sliding her skirt up and she jumped up onto him, wrapping her long legs around his waist.
With a thought, the baroque luxury G-car rose into view at the end of the jetty. It bobbed slightly on the four ball-mounted AG motors at each of its corners before docking. With another thought, the doors to the car split open. Another thought turned the plush interior red like her thoughts in the arena.
Dracup carried her, mostly blind, mouths meshed together, to the G-car, falling onto the soft carpet. The door closed behind them as the G-car took off, the AI pilot banking the vehicle towards Zabilla’s abode.
Zabilla wriggled out from underneath. Dracup’s hand snagged her underwear and dragged it down. She pushed herself onto one of the seats, spreading her legs, hunger written over her normally emotionless face. This was for her, to forget herself, the Game, the Absolute, the audition. This was for her only. Later she would test the limits of the heightened nerve endings she’d had grown in Dracup. Later she would feed the Absolute, later she would play the Game, lose herself in it, but not now.
In a distant chamber something started to pay attention to one of its favourites. Again.
The ride home had been sublime – dangerous but sublime. She had let herself go when her Game play was about control. She knew that many were good at feeding the Absolute sensation with abandon. Zabilla had always found the need to work at it.
When they arrived home they had worked at it, each little act designed to maximise either pain or pleasure, the whole thing designed as a beacon for the Absolute. She thought she had felt it in her experiential ware but the scientist in her knew that was her imagination. The Absolute was a silent ghost in their pain and pleasure centres. If people knew when the Absolute was present, then the heads would not be as effective as they were at rooting out the anti-social losers who played against the Game itself.
Like most players she’d had her rebellious phase when she had been a student. She had sworn that she was never going to play the Game, engage with it, never earn her second name, and like everyone she found herself inexorably drawn into it. Then she found that she understood it, found that she was good at it. Now she realised that rejection of the Game was just an excuse that losers made.
Zabilla had studied biophysics, specialising in Seeder biotech, how it interacted with Quantum phenomena and how it applied to Red Space and exotic entanglement. Though she had to be careful studying Red Space applications because anything that even remotely looked like research into bridge technology was heretical. The Church audited her research on a regular basis and she had received more than one censure. On one occasion a line of research she believed had been encouraged by the Absolute his/her/itself had resulted in a threat of excommunication. It was a serious threat. She had wondered why the Church felt they needed the Seeders as a religion. Progenitors they might have been, but their time was gone, and now they had the Game and the Absolute. The Absolute had the powers of a god, and after victory in the Art Wars the Absolute even had god-like killer angels to do his/her/its bidding.
Zabilla’s apartment was a handsomely appointed three-storey nook high enough for her to make out stars through the canopy of bioengineered leaves. The bottom level was her lab, steel and glass, the wood grown around it and redesigned to be non-porous and support a sterile surface. The upper two storeys were open plan, a catwalk running around the top floor. Through the large window opening in the wall she could see the light-speckled shadows of the other trees. The bed was on a raised plinth that grew from the floor and the wall. A small waterfall and pool provided a water feature/bath/shower combination. Discreet sound-dampening projectors took care of the constant noise of water.
They experimented. They gave her apartment’s sound-dampening properties a run for its money as they pushed Dracup’s heightened nerve endings to their limits. Afterwards, exhausted, Zabilla had to carry Dracup up the wooden steps to her bed. She laid him down trying to decide how she felt about him. Was he anything more than just a handsome, if severe, game piece? More to the point, what was she to him? A lover? A mentor? A stepping-stone to a better thing for an ambitious player? If so, then he was a much cleverer player than she had so far given him credit for. When she was younger it had been easier to differentiate between Zabilla the person and Zabilla the player.
She looked down at him. He looked peaceful, more innocent, when asleep. She wondered if that was the only time they could be themselves. It wasn’t the first time she had thought this. But dreams contained sensation as well. Even when they slept they were not alone. There was something in the back of her mind. Some sense of disgust at this violation of her sleeping mind, an alien feeling that she hadn’t felt in so long. She tried to suppress it. She had no idea why she was feeling this way. Not when she was so close to winning the audition.
She released a potent anti-anxiety drug into her bloodstream, then a less potent sedative. She had time to climb into bed and roll next to Dracup, feel his warmth, before fatigue and the sedative overwhelmed her and took her where she could be herself.
It was like a sting, a tiny pinprick but it felt deep. She shouldn’t have felt it, but she was a light sleeper and had paranoia routines written into her neunonics. Even then she probably wouldn’t have felt it if it hadn’t been for her heightened nerve endings. She had forgotten to send a chemical signal to dull them before she fell asleep.
She sat up in bed feeling vulnerable and frightened, dragging the sheets around her. She hadn’t felt like this since she was a child. Where was all the fear coming from? she asked herself.
Almost immediately she turned to look at Dracup. He was deeply asleep in a way that was difficult to fake. She confirmed this with physiological readings provided by the medical applications of her nano-screen. Her first thought had been that Dracup was playing some kind of gambit.
She checked her internal systems. There was nothing as far as she could tell, no biological or nano-agent. She checked her nano-screen and the apartment’s security systems. Neither of the systems had detected any kind of foreign presence in the room.
Zabilla was beginning to convince herself that she had been dreaming when the banging on the door started. She jumped and turned to stare at the closed aperture in the wood. Her security systems should have warned her the moment somebody turned into the corridor that led to the door to her apartment. The fact they hadn’t meant that they had been overridden. That and the sound, that particular knock, the sound from a thousand immersions and a million newscasts, meant that it was the heads outside.