Kissing Gretyl was something else. Partly it was that she was older than anyone Iceweasel had kissed. She was also different in her presence, her bulk and mass, the frank brilliance of her mind and her studied indifference to her body’s relationship to other bodies. How many times had Gretyl boldly watched Iceweasel undress, catching her eye, not looking away? How many times had Gretyl undressed before Iceweasel with equal boldness, arranging her huge breasts like she was moving around the pillows before settling into bed?
Their bodies pressed, Gretyl’s yielding, and Iceweasel couldn’t get her arms all the way around her. She clutched at Gretyl, and Gretyl’s strong, soft arms pulled her. Her thigh pressed between Gretyl’s legs at the hot softness like fresh bread. Gretyl’s hand twined in her hair, turned her face with irresistible strength. Her mouth worked at Gretyl’s, tongue dancing on her lips, her teeth, and Iceweasel let herself moan and surrender.
Gretyl’s other hand kneaded her ass and brought her closer still. Iceweasel felt so small, as if she was a plaything to be pushed and prodded into the places where Gretyl wanted her, and she welcomed it. In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.
It was a thing that Billiam liked to say. Billiam and she had hooked up now and again, all that crew had, in an aggressively detached way that they weren’t supposed to take seriously, and all of them ended up being in perpetual heartbreak over. Billiam thought she was cold, a product of her foofiness, and knew the accusation drove her crazy with self-loathing. He’d never say it when she turned him down, oh no. Not a way to manipulate her into fucking him. No, he said it when she did fuck him, especially when she was attentive. “In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” in his ha-ha-only-serious tone as she let her tongue trail lazily around his nipple, the residue of his cum burning on her lips. She knew he meant she was the one who offered the cheek, that whatever her ministrations, it was about her, not him.
Billiam’s memory rose in her mind and wouldn’t go. The last time she’d seen him, in the blaring chaos of the Muji factory, head caved in and blood around him, Etcetera’s panic as he went through the motions of pointless first aid. Billiam, his little aphorisms and his ways of getting inside her head, but who cried after they fucked, who had done the craziest, bravest things of them all. He snuck over the border at a Quebec Mohawk reservation to meet upstate New York bio-cookers for starter cultures for their beer. He always made sure they had a getaway plan, counted heads whenever they ran out ahead of the law, once going back to help a kid with a twisted ankle. They barely knew the kid, it was her first action, and she’d been a pain, helpless on the sidelines watching other people do the work, then complaining no one told her what to do.
They’d all hated her, but Billiam went back and carried her even though she had fifteen centimeters and ten kilos on him. They were nearly caught, and she’d never thanked him or come back again. That was Billiam.
She’d left him bleeding on the floor. He’d died. Her dad told her that later. He knew about their relationship. He had dossiers on her friends, social graphs describing their relationships. He’d hinted that he knew which were rats, selling information to cops and corporates, which she’d assumed was head-fuckery, but was plausible enough that it was impossible to fully trust anyone in the group.
She’d left Billiam to die. If he’d lived just a few more years, he’d have gone walkaway. He could have been with her. He could have his head in the scanner. He could be immortal, as she would be, soon.
Salt tears and snot ran into her mouth. Gretyl gently put her hands on Iceweasel’s cheeks and stared into her eyes with her big, liquid brown eyes, like depths of melting chocolate.
“We could be dead in an hour. Or any minute. And that” – she jerked her head toward where the mercs were being deadheaded – “that’s something else. Then there’s this,” she said, and kissed her so softly it felt like she’d passed a paintbrush over her lips. “Death, sex, immortality, and immorality. Crying is okay.”
“There was a friend of mine,” Iceweasel said. “Dead.” She drew a shuddering breath, couldn’t let it out. It was trapped in her chest with her words.
“We’re all thinking about our dead. We left dead behind in the fire. That crowd in there has the fever. That Tam didn’t have a chance. No way they were going to slow down, certainly not because they might be remembered as monsters by default. When they think about how the future will remember them, they’re imagining being there in person to defend their honor.”
“It’s crazy,” Iceweasel said. “I can’t even think about it.”
“We’ve had longer to get used to it. We walked out of default because we were working on this and were terrified and excited by how the zottas treated it like the holy grail. It’s impossible to escape your environment. You can be a spocky lab-coat, but you can’t help but feel like whatever’s got zottas scared and excited is scary and exciting. Whatever they want has to be important.”
“You know that they’re just psychos, right? Not geniuses. They’ve got no special talent for making the world perfect, or figuring out the future. They’re just good at game-rigging. Con artists.” She thought about her dad, school friends, their pretense to noblesse oblige and refinement. How they’d herd-mentality into some fad but pretend it was a newly discovered, ageless universal truth – not product cooked up by one of their own to sell to the rest. That was the amazing thing: they were in the business of making people feel envy and desperation over material things and exclusive experiences, but were just as susceptible to envy and desperation.
“The reason they’re so good at making us desperate and selling us shit isn’t that they’re too smart to get conned. It’s because they’re extra-susceptible. They understand how to make us turn on one another in envy and terror because they’re drowning in envy and terror of each other. My dad knows the guy in the next yacht is a bastard who’d slit his throat and steal his empire because my dad is a bastard who’d slit that guy’s throat and steal his empire. This immortality shit? That’s not about all of them living forever, it’s about just one or two living forever, being deathless emperor of time.”
“You know more about them than I ever will, Icy, but we don’t want to hoard immortality, we want to share it. To viralize it. People who know they can’t die will be better people than people who worry about the end. How could you blind yourself with short-term thinking if you’re planning life everlasting?”
All the billions who’d died. Every one the apex of a pyramid of resources, love, thoughts no one else ever thought before and would never think again. If you have it in your power to end slow-motion genocide, what kind of monster would you be not to do it? What price was too high? She knew that this was dangerous thinking, the kind people died and killed for. Tam wanted her to stop things because Tam couldn’t make herself stop things.
It was too late. Iceweasel couldn’t help herself either.
When it was all said and done, there wasn’t much they wanted to take with. They broke down Dis’s cluster with her supervision: she ran a commentary on her subjective experience of the slow shutdown, retransmitted in realtime to other campuses, researchers, hobbyists, dying people, spies, and gossips. It was part of a dump of everything, all the notes and source-code, optimizations and logs. It was time to uncloak. They would hit the road with a lot of fanfare.