Evolution's Darling

by Scott Westerfeld

  In a subtle, strange way, her cool brainwaves remind the Warden of his third sentence, so long ago. The psychopath.

  But suddenly, the Warden sees something that disturbs this reverie. One of Darling’s filaments has pushed farther than the others, has ventured through the narrow cranial access in the tear duct of one of her eyes. Barely visible even in the highest setting of the Warden’s radar facility, the miniscule strand has pushed to the very edges of her brain. There, it connects with the periphery of the woman’s direct interface system: a closed circuit.

  The artificial is in a hardwire connection with her right now, communicating almost undetectably.

  He is in violation of parole.

  The Warden rises slightly from his chair, deploys the weapon that will kill the artificial. But again, the almost buried voices raise an objection. The protocols of a Warden seek to minimize the loss of innocent life. The woman is not under sentence, and any act against the artificial will surely kill her. They are bound together, his tendrils distributed throughout her to the limits of biology. Together they move to some slow rhythm, her weight supported entirely by their connections, gross and fine.

  The Warden leaves his weapon activated, but sinks back into the chair. The strands in the woman’s mouth pull out and form a thin appendage that snakes toward her anus. She admits it with a sigh, rides it, and begins a wordless chant of pleasure. She will be finished soon.

  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-similar 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 artificial, 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 cilia like an inching caterpillar. 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.

  Mira sometimes wondered about her utter contempt for programmed, mechanistically governed humans like the Warden. Perhaps, she allowed herself to think, it resulted from doubts about her own free will. Her relationship with her gods was perilously close to that of slave and master. They commanded her, just as the Warden’s implanted imperatives and protocols governed him. But perhaps not so completely. She came to the gods freely. She worshipped them; if that was a weakness, it was surely a human one. And they didn’t define the limits of her thoughts; she often contemplated leaving their employ, finding a new religion. Surely no Warden or sub-Turing AI ever doubted its mission.

  But the nagging lack of childhood memories disturbed her; her mind now worried the gap like a tongue searching for a missing tooth. Perhaps she should ask the gods about it some day. Maybe they would simply tell her. She wondered why she never had.

  At least she was real, human, flesh and blood. She was not the gods’ construction, only their willing creature. And Darling’s rough intrusions had threatened even that surety.

  She was more than this Warden, more human by every measure. And now she had him.

  Mira stood, pleasure-wrenched muscles complaining, and leered at the Warden. Now she noted a glimmer of panic in his eye. He must have tried to move and recognized his paralysis. But could a paralyzed face show panic? Perhaps Mira had imagined the expression. It might be simply the filmy look of eyes that cannot blink. Her weapons, even when non-lethally employed, were cruel in that regard. His vision would be dry-edged and blurring by now, until the prism of tears formed on his eyes.

  Mira walked over to the Warden and straddled his frozen form, one knee to each side in the spacious chair. She looked down at her own body, crisscrossed with lines from Darling’s meshed embrace, abrasions. She’d thought his strands had hurt worse than usual.

  “You bastard. Every time it’s something new,” she said sweetly, looking over her shoulder at him.

  Darling reclined there on the bed, strands still splayed, hard and huge and full of sin. “I made the surfaces of my sensory array complex, the better to dazzle the Warden’s scanners.”

  “Like a cat’s tongue.”

  “An apt simile.”

  She laughed, tipping the Warden’s head down so that his immobilized eyes could see her abrasions. The eyes looked definitely filmy now. She slapped him three times, hard, and peered into them. Tears appeared, wetting their surfaces.

  “I can see you in there, frightened little creature,” she whispered. “I’m going to pull you out, play with you.”

  She pushed one finger down his throat. It reached the glottis, surely triggered the gag reflex. Of course, an autonomic reaction of that size would be paralyzed by her devices.

  What would that feel like? she wondered. To feel the wrenching need to gag, the surging imperative to reject an intrusion into one’s throat, and for the reaction to be thwarted by an invisible hand? The thought gave her a pleasant tickle deep in her stomach. It was a feeling she often had when her profession called on her to torture.

  “I don’t like you—understand? You’re ugly, and you gave your soul away,” she said. She used the intimate mode of Diplomatique, her voice pitched as if to a child.

  She played with his glottis for a few more moments. Something was happening: the tears were flowing freely now.

  A touch spread across her back, soft as a cool draft. Mira smiled. It was Darling, extending a few strands to monitor her pleasure. She felt them take up stations at her neck, her temples, along the pathway of her spine and at the expressive muscles around her eyes. Perhaps he was probing the Warden, too. Mira imagined tendrils creeping into the little man’s unresisting orifices: anus, glans, perhaps piercing the skin to link raw to his nerves. And the poor dear, feeling it all, but unable to struggle, to whimper, even to breathe the deep breaths that carry one’s mind away.

  Surely she could break this murderous toy: this mockery of an assassin, so offensive in the inhumanity of its design.

  She touched one of the eyes lightly. The slight film over the pupil was surprisingly soft, as if she had probed the surface tension of some child’s hardy soap bubble adrift on the breeze. Again, how strange it must be for the Warden. To watch a fingertip grow, expand beyond all scale, without the interruption of a blink that should certainly have come.

  Then, with her tender rear, she felt the hard mound in his trousers.

  She laughed again.

  “Dirty bugger. You were enjoying all that, weren’t you? And here I thought you were a cold fish.”

  She lowered one foot to the floor and pulled the Warden’s trousers free. He was red, erect, veins standing out an angry purple. The scope of her device’s paralysis had encompassed whatever muscle or sphincter would let his penis return to flaccidity. The blood was trapped, the horrible little cock forcibly engorged like some morning’s piss hard-on.

  Mira looked into his eyes again.

  “Yes, that’s right, you poor bastard. I’m going to fuck you now. Because I don’t think you’ll be able to get it up. Stuck halfway, poor eunuch.”

  In that moment she felt she could see deep inside the man. The Warden’s eyes shone through their veil of tears, illuminating the shadow-puppets of his many layers: the crazed beasts of reflex who fought the rictus of paralysis; the cold intelligence of his governors, still plotting how to escape and complete their mission; and deepest of all, the remaining shreds of humanity in their caged dance.

  These last might be happy, in a way, she thought. For the first time in many years the little man’s personhood must be on equal terms with the overlays of programming: all helpless together. But at least his humanity would feel some lust, enjoy a moment of pleasure, however hopeless and thwarted. She didn’t desire revenge upon the unfeeling mechanisms that had tried to kill her lover; there was no pleasure there. It was the person part of him she wanted to torture, if only by making it remember for a moment what it had been.

  It was more than an hour later that the glimmer faded completely from the Warden’s eyes. Blood was everywhere (fucking had only amused her for so long), but the man was still alive.

  She knew, however, that he was no longer a threat.

  “Release him,” she told her weapons.

  The square object mounted on her wall shifted a little in color, and the Warden slumped with a whimper.

  Mira turned to look for Darling. But he was gone.

  “Oh, dear,” she said to the empty room. (She’d been talking out loud to the Warden through the whole affair.) “I hope he understands.”

  Duke Zimivic tugged happily at the sleeves of his jacket. This view really was spectacular. The suite cost more than he usually
spent on backwater rocks like Malvir, but it was well worth it.

  And besides, now that that abomination Darling was out of the way, Zimivic was sure to make the acquisition of a lifetime. Without another bidder to contest for the prize, he could get it for a pittance. The idiot local who had discovered the piece would be all too happy to take a tenth of what it was worth. But sheer profit was a fraction of the deal’s value; the discovery of a new sculpture would be the best thing for the price of his Vaddums since the Blast Event.

  Zimivic allowed his reverie to be interrupted by an annoying thought, Where was that champagne? What was the value of room service’s inflated prices if they didn’t ensure immediate gratification. He considered going to the Tower Bar, but the fabulous view there was free, and he’d paid for the one here, damn it! And that pathetic piece of statuary might still be there, trying to stare the Warden into submission.

  Zimivic glanced happily at his watch. (An ancient analog Haring: an absolute fortune.) Darling would be off-planet in three hours, if he hadn’t already submitted to the hopelessness of his situation. Zimivic tugged the jacket sleeve over the watch again.

  Bringing the Warden had been genius. At first, Zimivic had toyed with the idea of offering the ugly little man as a gallery piece. Some idiot performance artist somewhere would be happy to have it tag along for a year or so, enforcing some obscure sentence that would keep the critic’s chins wagging. “The Failure of Cadence: Askar Cunes goes for a year without completing a sentence!” or “Vampire Nouveau: Rodge Hammish must stay out of the sun or die!” Good stuff, and then sell the little man when the piece was over. Or even better, if the unlucky artiste should slip up, the supreme sanction would be imposed. A bonanza of publicity!

  But a grim hour with the lawyers had convinced him otherwise. Apparently, there were laws about having purchased another human being, especially an induced-psychosis killing machine from the twisted and barbaric NaPrin so-called culture. But the little creature had paid for itself already. The expression on Darling’s face alone had almost been worth it! And now, sole access to the new Vaddum.