by Bruce Bethke
I thought about Murphy, and the way my virtual knife felt like it was actually biting into something soft, but real. And T’shombe; the way her eyes rolled over to dead white orbs when I punched her in the temple. I sure hoped I had control of my strength and that I hadn’t really hurt her. “Yeah,” I said. “One for sure. Maybe two.”
Amber knelt before me, took my hands in hers, and caressed my knuckles. “It’s different, isn’t it? Killing people as a superuser.”
I swallowed hard and nodded. “Yeah. Realistic. Too realistic.”
“Some people get used to it,” Amber said, looking at my hands. Then she looked up at me with a gaze that speared straight through to my soul. “Please, Max. Promise me you’ll never get used to it.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t think I ever can.” I took her beautiful face in my hands and tried to kiss her again. She pulled away from me, though, and bounced to her feet. I started to form a question.
“Shhh,” she said, touching a delicate finger to her perfect lips. “Now, about those files you, er, obtained.”
I zipped open my black leather jacket, pulled out the folder, and threw it on the bed. “You mean these?”
She picked up the folder, riffled through it quickly, and nodded. “Yes, these. There’s something else you need to know about them.” She closed the folder, smiled sweetly at me, then tossed the files into a wastebasket. “I planted them.”
I bounced to my feet. “What?!”
Her smile collapsed. “Please don’t be angry, darling! It was just, I had to know. I mean, if you could really do it! Crack a system, find a needle in a haystack, blow away the opposition if your life depended on it. Believe me, the real job is going to be much harder!”
I was, I think, furious. “This was just a test?”
“Yes! And darling, you passed with flying colors!” She started to take a step toward me, then saw the blazing anger in my eyes and took a step back instead. “But you know,” she said as she looked me up and down with a coy smile, “I think what you need right now is a little positive reinforcement.” She smiled at me again, then shrugged out of her kimono.
Well, there went my anger.
Amber, naked, was incredible. Slender, athletic, sexy beyond the bounds of human comprehension, ravishing, gorgeous, spectacular—aw hell, go get yourself a thesaurus and insert your favorite adjective here: ___________________________. Amber, in that moment, was without question the most heart-breakingly beautiful woman I have ever seen.
“Positive reinforcement?” I whispered, as she took one graceful step closer.
“Positively,” she whispered back, with a hungry, sexy smile.
“A dog yummy for a job well done?” I gasped. Another step.
“I prefer mine bloody rare,” she said with an almost feline Psycho-Kitty-in-heat growl. “But someone here is overdressed.” She snapped her fingers. My clothes vanished. She took me in her arms.
“Mind if I ask a dumb question?” I asked, before she covered my mouth with hers. About the time I was starting to see blue spots from anoxia, she let me come up for air. “If you’re good enough to plant those files, why do you need me?”
“Because,” she whispered as she softly kissed my forehead and guided my face down to nuzzle her small, perfect breasts, “we all have our limits, and the real job really is beyond mine.” In that moment, she clutched me tight to her bosom, and I must admit I didn’t think about much else for a while.
In time, she pried me off again. “By the way,” she said softly, “since you and Gunnar are clearly working together, I’ve decided you need another neural interface. I’ll have it sent out tomorrow.” Then she grabbed my head with both hands, tilted my face up, and kissed me full and hard on the lips. I wrapped my muscular arms around her slender waist and tried to pull her down onto the bed. She pulled away from me slightly, put her hand on my hairy chest, and kissed me on the point of my strong, masculine chin.
“Oh, and there’s one more thing I forgot to tell you,” she whispered, as I let my head fall back and bared my throat to her kisses. “And that is,” she pushed hard with the hand that rested on my sternum, and knocked me flat on my back on the bed.
“I like to be on top!” With a wild whoop like an insane cowboy she jumped onto the bed, straddled me with her thighs, grabbed hold of my bald-headed buddy and guided him into—
KA-BLAM! The hallway door exploded off its hinges in a shower of flaming wreckage and black smoke. A screaming little bloody lump that may have been Thorvold flew across the room to crash through the picture window and plummet to the street below, and a moment later a gleaming chrome battlemech smashed through the space where the door had been, considerably enlarging the aperature in the process. Servos whining and hydraulics hissing, the battlemech advanced ponderously into the room like an angry hormonal chrome juggernaut.
Amber let go of my buddy (thank God!) and jumped to her feet to face the ‘mech. “You!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
The battlemech shimmered and morphed into Eliza. “Bitch!”
“He’s mine!” Amber screamed.
“Never!” Eliza screamed right back.
Amber’s fingernails sprouted to bear-claw length and took on a disturbingly metallic sheen. In one fantastic spring, she leaped across the room and ripped into Eliza, claws slashing furiously.
Eliza endured it a moment, then hammered Amber with a backhand that sent her flying completely over the bed and through the far wall. She left a cookie-cutter female body pattern in the laths and plaster.
I figured that was the end of it right there, but an instant later Amber came crashing back through a different part of the wall, in a perfect tuck and roll. She landed lightly on the balls of her feet, breathing hard, slightly sweaty, and covered with plaster dust, but otherwise none the worse for wear. I tore my eyes off her long enough to spare a glance at Eliza, whom I figured to be a bloody mass of shredded flesh.
Well, her plain white dress was a write-off, definitely, but Eliza herself seemed to be unscratched. She picked the last rags of white fabric off her shoulders, cast them aside, and advanced like the naked anorexic albino face of doom. Her hands morphed into giant eagle’s talons. She stopped a yard short of where I lay on the bed and raised her talons.
“I want him back,” Eliza said, with a voice as cold as Death. “You’re corrupting him.”
“You can’t have him,” Amber answered. “He’s all mine now.” I turned my head. Amber was crouching on the other side of the bed, her long metal fingernails gleaming in the pale yellow light. You know, there have been times in my life when I would have paid to be the prize in a fight between two naked women.
This was not one of them.
Eliza paused and considered her talons. “You know,” she said to Amber, “there’s no point in us continuing this fight. We’re too equally matched.”
Amber shifted her stance, but also spared a glance for her metal claws. “I suppose I could escalate. But you’d escalate right along with me, wouldn’t you?”
Eliza nodded. “And since I would never agree to let you have him—”
“Nor I you—”
Eliza shrugged and morphed her left hand back into a hand and her right hand into a long, steel, blade. “What do you say? The Solomonic Solution?”
Amber nodded. “It’s the only way.” Her hands, too, morphed to match Eliza’s.
“Lengthwise?” Eliza asked.
Amber leaned over me, gently lifted my testicles with her left hand, and touched a point beneath them with her incredibly cold steel blade. “We’ll start the cut right about here…”
Blackout.
I don’t mean I fainted. I mean, I blacked out. Flatlined. Went totally dead. Lost power.
“Oops,” I heard LeMat say. He sounded drunk.
I ripped off the videoshades, threw them on the floor, and screamed at the top of my lungs, “LeMAT!”
He was standing over by the workstation, buck naked, with a dripping glas
s of water in his hands and a couple of yards of unplugged power cord wrapped around his clumsy feet. “Sorry,” he said thickly as he paused for a hiccup. “Inge w’s leelin’ thirsty, so’s I—” He gestured at the glass of water and hiccuped again.
I just about lost my lunch, and my shit, and my blood pressure, and my bladder control. “Inge? Where?” I spun around, desperately searching for—
“Hi, Jack.” She giggled. Oh no, she was over in the direction of—
A by-now-familiar blond head popped up from under the blankets on my futon. “Boo!” This was followed shortly by, “Oops,” and a drunken giggle, when she realized that the blanket had fallen away and unveiled her admittedly rather massive freckled breasts. She fumbled for the edge of the blanket, failed to find it, and eventually just gave up and sat there.
Okay, if she could sit there with her boobs hanging out, I guess that meant I didn’t have to be embarrassed about being caught dressed like a cybernetic transvestite. But all the same…
I turned on LeMat, ready to kill.
“Now now, Jack,” LeMat said, trying to step forward and calm me, but instead tripping over the power cord and spilling the water again. “Me an’ Inge went out to a nice li’l Italian place, an’ we had a li’l wine with dinner—”
“A little?” Inge giggled. It made her little pink nipples bounce.
“Okay,” LeMat laughed, “more than a li’l. We had a lot of wine with dinner.”
“And before dinner,” Inge said seriously. “And after dinner, and after after-dinner—”
“An’ we talked about our work and all kindsa stuff.” LeMat finally got himself free of the power cord, and staggered over to the futon, to flop down on it and start nibbling Inge’s toes.
“And after that I talked Gunnar into coming back here,” Inge said, trying desperately to force a serious expression onto her face. “Because I really wanted to talk to you. So don’t get mad at Gunnar. It was my idea.” Her serious expression failed then—possibly because LeMat was tickling her feet—and she giggled and took a swat at him.
LeMat surfaced. “But when we got here, we saw you were still usin’ the innerface, an’ we saw you were kinda preoccupied. So we sat down on th’ futon, an’ one thing led to another, an’ another, an’ another—” He hiccuped.
“That was my idea, too,” Inge said proudly. “I figured you wouldn’t mind. Thought we could get in a quickie or two before you even noticed we were here.”
“And now she knows all about the interface,” I said to LeMat in the nastiest and most disgusted tone of voice I could muster. “Thanks a lot, chump.”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on him,” Inge scolded me. “I already know about the neural infuc—induc—The interface. Matter of fact,” she nodded proudly, “I got one myself.”
My jaw hit the floor and rolled across the room. “You do?”
“Sure,” LeMat said. “We’ve all met before, on th’ other side. Don’cha rec’gnize her?”
I was still trying to find my lower jaw. “Wha—?”
Inge bit LeMat hard on the earlobe and stage-whispered, “Maybe I should give him a hint, lover.” He looked up from fondling her ample breasts long enough to nod.
“Jack?” she said, looked straight at me with a deep and serious, if slightly out-of-focus, expression. “Excuse me.” She cleared her throat, shifted her voice down to a deep, hoarse, basso falsetto, and laid on an accent so thick it was probably a violation of the Ethnic Humor Elimination Act. “Or should I say, Max? It’s bad for the heart to talk business on an empty stomach. Mangia!”
Whatever was left of my sanity, it checked out then.
“Don Vermicelli?”
19: MORE FUN WITH GRATUITOUS SEX SCENES
LeMat and Inge awoke the next morning with a matched pair of death-defying hangovers. The positive side of this is that they were both feeling too sick to bother with being embarrassed by their behavior of the night before. The downside was, I had to listen to them whimper for almost the entire morning, until at long last the aspirin, Tylenol, burnt toast, and vast quantities of black coffee finally worked their slow magic.
Then they jumped into the shower together and didn’t come out again until all the hot water was gone.
We spent the rest of Tuesday dragging Inge’s VR workstation up from her apartment and hooking it into our local area network. Then, with me watching his vital signs and Inge waiting to catch him on the other side, LeMat finally felt brave enough to try the neural induction interface. (Although he did express a desire to autoclave the prod first. It took us the better part of an hour to convince him that soaking it in bleach and then running it through the dishwasher was probably hygienic enough.) When LeMat finally dove into our local test reality, he was almost terrified by the intensity of his new virtual senses.
By the time I called it quits and hit the cot, though, around 1 A.M., LeMat and Inge had been banging their virtual brains out for at least three hours straight, and they were showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
The second—third, if you count Inge’s—neural induction interface showed up around noon Wednesday. Don Vermicelli’s impenetrable web of deceit turned out to be simply Inge picking up the package at Mailboxes & More™ and reshipping it, but now that everything was out in the open she decided to save us a day in travel time and $12.49 in express charges by simply picking it up and bringing it home. There was only one surprise in the second box: an honest-to-God 3.5-inch 1.44MB magnetic diskette.
“Hi, Max,” Amber said, when I got the diskette decrypted and ported over to a media format we could read. “Nice trick, the way you vanished from my apartment Monday night. I thought I’d be able to out-bluff Eliza, but honestly, I think that bitch really would rather see you bobbitted than let you share it with another woman.” She shrugged and flashed me a weak smile.
“Anyway, here are the background files on the real job. Look ‘em over; go for it if you think you can. My apartment’s going to be offline for at least a week—God, I’m glad there are no damage deposits in virtual reality—so I’ll see you in Hell. Say, next week Friday, around 0300 UTC?” She smiled again, in the weird sort of way that people smile when they’re trying to put a good face on a really bad situation, then said, “Bye,” and pulled the window shut.
Half an hour later, I had the rest of her background files decompressed and scanned. The real target, it turned out, was Franklin Curtis.
Yes, the Franklin Curtis. The one you’re thinking of. Best-selling author, talk-show bon vivant, outrageously outspoken NRA Life Member with an indoor pistol range in the basement of his upstate New York mansion. That Franklin Curtis. The guy whose last five film adaptations made such obscenely enormous piles of money that Sony-Spielberg had to promise him his own planet in order to option the film rights on his next as-yet-unwritten book.
And that, as fate would have it, is where I came into the picture. The book was not unwritten. (Factor out the negatives: it works.) The problem was, the book that Curtis was about to deliver was not written by him. My mysterious client, according to Amber, was a struggling young would-be author who chanced to meet Curtis at a New York publisher’s party, and she was so flattered by the attention the handsome and successful older man lavished on her that it never even occurred to her his judgment might be influenced by the neckline of her cocktail dress or her lithe, athletic, still-a-virgin figure. (She was an actress/model in the spare time left over between writing, attending medical school, and doing volunteer work in the orphanage where she grew up.)
What followed next was sadly predictable. Curtis and my client had an intense, torrid, and sexually unsafe nine-and-a-half-week affair, which ended abruptly when Curtis discovered she was pregnant and she refused to get an abortion. They’d argued for a week and then, on a terribly cold and stormy day in March, he came back to his mansion in a drunken rage and physically threw her out the door into the driving snow, and tossed her few meager possessions after her. Blinded by rage and drunken
ness, he ordered his heel-clicking brownshirt security guards to shoot her if she ever so much as set foot on the mansion grounds again.
That might have been the end of it there. My client, being a deeply religious girl, accepted her unplanned pregnancy as God’s punishment for giving in to the sins of the flesh, and returned, crestfallen, to Saint Brunhilde’s Convent School, where she was determined to raise her child in the ways of the church and the paths of righteousness. My client was even determined to teach this child to love his or her father, though Curtis might deny paternity and never see the child, for even at this point, my client was still willing to forgive and forget.
Until she picked through the tattered suitcase that held her few worldly belongings and discovered that, while Curtis had even gone so far as to return the leftovers of the one and only meatloaf dinner she had ever made for him—it was still rock-solid and just as appetizing as on the day it was made—he had kept the disk!
The disk. The one and only copy of my client’s unpublished novel! The book she had labored over for six long, agonizing years, giving up meals to rent computer time at Kinko’s! The very book that Curtis himself had hailed as, “Brilliant! And possibly marketable!”
Fearing his temper, my client asked old Sister Agatha to telephone Curtis and ask for the diskette back. The aging nun was polite and most respectful, but Curtis dissed her and told her contemptuously that he’d erased the disk and recycled it for scrap plastic. Feeling further chastened, my client tearfully left the old nun’s cell and returned to her lonely room, to cry alone in the dark, gnawing on a chunk of meatloaf and praying that someday, someday, God in His infinite wisdom would arrange for Franklin Curtis’ heart to soften.
Until a few weeks later, when she read in the paper that Curtis—who’d been going through a terrible case of near-fatal writer’s block when they were together—had suddenly announced that he was almost finished with his latest book, and that it was going to be a real departure. To my client, the implications were instantly obvious. Not content merely to seduce and abandon her, he’d plagiarized her book!
