Timecaster: Supersymmetry

by Konrath, J. A.

  Then her faux-leather pants began to disintegrate. A little hole formed in the thigh, then spread out until she wore only a thong. Alter-Vicki’s butt was more sculpted than my wife’s, and defied gravity in a way that only implants could. While I preferred the natural look, her’s wasn’t without its charm.

  I stuck a group of guards to each other, then onto the wall, and my smiley prison shirt began to fall off me in clumps.

  “What’s happening to our clothes?” I said, above constant barrage of crackling lightning.

  “The nanomite gel on our bodies is programmed to eat heavy solids, sir. They ingest metal, glass, and polymers, which is why the taser rounds don’t stick to us. But when they nanomites have exhausted their supply of consumables, they start eating synthetic fiber.”

  I tried not to show my alarm. “Will they eat us?”

  “Nothing organic, sir.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I found little solace in that as my pants fell off.

  Two hallways and four locked doors later, we were outside and completely naked. Naturally, we were surrounded by cops, all firing at us like crazy. The nanomite gel continued to repel the bullets, but getting thwacked in the junk was decidedly uncomfortable.

  Sooner or later someone was going to show up with a carbon nanotube net, and I doubted the gel would be able to eat through that. Which meant we needed an escape route, and quick. But I didn’t see any way out. All I saw were more cops and guards running at us faster than I could stick them together.

  Then Alter-Vicki put her arms around my neck and straddled my waist in a way that went beyond casual familiarity.

  “Don’t you remember the plan, sir?”

  “Is the plan having sex while surrounded by cops?”

  That sounded like a crummy plan, but not entirely without merit.

  “Shoot us, then up.”

  I followed her ordeIt’s too late.”at3 seconds

  Talon

  I Grs, pinging us with the magzer beam, then firing directly overhead. Within a millisecond we were weightless, rocketing up into the air, and I was seriously questioning the intelligence behind this course of action.

  Then, just as abruptly as we accelerated, we stopped, sticking to a pad of soft grass growing on the underside of a heliplane, which hovered forty feet overhead. My back wound up flat against the foliage, and Alter-Vicki smushed on top of me, which was actually below me because I was facing the ground. Her thighs fell over mine in a natural straddle, and her bare chest pressed hard against my naked skin. Though our position was odd, it was also intimately familiar.

  She wasn’t my real wife, I reminded myself.

  But her breath on my cheek smelled like Vicki. The way she locked her ankles around mine and ground into me was also pure Vicki.

  “Base!” Alter-Vicki yelled, giving a voice command to the heliplane over the roar of Tesla lightning exploding all around us.

  The vehicle banked sharply to the right, then reversed direction, G-force pressing our bodies tighter together. This wasn’t the right situation, or woman, for me to become aroused. But I had little power over my own biology.

  Alter-Vicki noticed my response, and with a slight, expert shift of her pelvis, I was suddenly inside of her.

  Though my wife (and my Alter-wife, apparently) were SLPs, I preferred to remain monogamous. Though Vicki made a damn good living having sex with other men (and sometimes women), and insisted it was a simple biological need with no necessary emotional connotations, I had an old-fashioned streak in me that made me avoid situations where I would stray. In four years of marriage, Vicki was the only one I technically had sex with. At least, sex to conclusion.

  Alter-Vicki, just like my real wife, was a consummate pro, even hanging upside from a heliplane, cruising over the city streets. Milwaukee, like Chicago, was a no-fly zone. But it was also a no-escaping-from-prison zone. I had no doubt we were being tracked and pursued.

  But my mind wasn’t focusing on that at the moment. It was focusing on Vicki’s gyrations, and my own poor attempts at self-control.

  “Turn me on, sir,” she moaned hotly into my ear.

  “You already seem pretty tuned on.”

  When I uttered the word on, an incredible thing happened. Alter-Vicki’s nether regions began to vibrate. My arousal rate shot from pleasurable to somewhere near unbearable.

  I’d known about things like this, but never experienced it first-hand. My own wife had even looked into having the procedure done, but I’d talked her out of it, preferring the traditional way of making love.

  I might need to rethink my position on that.

  The sensation was so strong, so overwhelming, that the self-control I was usually able to maintain was seconds away from eroding, along with my promise to remain faithful.

  I pushed, hard as I could, and managed to break the suctiEbooks by J.A. KonrathE immediately son-like hold Alter-Vicki had over me. She gasped, frantically trying to attempt reentry.

  “Please stop it,” I said, which may have been one of the most difficult things I’d ever had to say in my life.

  Incredibly, she listened. But she still hung tightly to me, her vagina buzzing against my thigh, her moans becoming throaty screams that drowned out the sound of the heliplane’s dual propeller wings. The city rushed by below us, a blur of green buildings and trees. After her sixth or seventh orgasm, I was still painfully aroused, and becoming more than a bit annoyed.

  “Don’t you have an off button?” I asked.

  At the word off, she stopped buzzing.

  “Thank you, sir,” she sighed, her muscles relaxing, her weight crushing against me. I watched the streets buzzing past below us, and then the land disappeared and we were soaring over Lake Michigan.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “The hide-out, sir. I’m doing what you told me, just like you planned.”

  Apparently Alter-Talon had figured the law would one day catch up with him and had been planning this escape for a while. I hated the SMF, but I had to give him some credit. Breaking out of jail combined with upside-down aerial sex was pretty ballsy, in every sense of the word.

  It was also breezy. The heliplane—which I assumed had a pre-programmed flight path—was a drone, not meant for human occupants. Riding on the outside of an aircraft in the buff while speeding along at roughly forty miles per hour was a drafty experience.

  “How long until we arrive?” I asked Alter-Vicki.

  “Five more minutes, sir,” she said, nuzzling my neck. “You told me you would seem confused.”

  I processed her words. Perhaps this break-out wasn’t really a break-out at all.

  “When did I tell you that?”

  “An hour ago.”

  Warning bells went off in my head.

  Trap. She was leading me to a trap.

  “Vicki, I don’t want to go to the hideout.”

  “It’s the only safe place, sir. Right now the satellites are tracking us.”

  “I’m not really Talon.”

  “You said you’d say that, sir.”

  “Look at my hands.”

  With great effort I broke the magnetic force sticking me to the padding and brought my hand to Alter-Vicki’s face. Immediately she latched onto it like a starving child, putting it into her mouth, sucking on my index finger. But she did more than simply suck. It felt like she was trying to swallow it. applause.

  &osd at the same time.

  et

  I pulled away, but she moaned, sucking harder, her whole body trembling. When I understood what was going on, I gave up fighting. Part of me felt sorry for her, while another part was getting extremely aroused again.

  Alter-Vicki screamed around my finger, her face turning bright red, and I went from being excited to shocked when I saw how quickly we were descending. In just a few seconds, we were going to crash into the water. I was a strong swimmer, but we were miles from shore and I was stuck to a heliplane and a stat
e-licensed prostitute. I didn’t care much for my chances of making it back to land.

  Then, with a popping sound, Alter-Vicki released my finger and yelled, “Shields!”

  Some sort of clear polycarbonate dome closed around us, sealing us inside a protective bubble just as the heliplane hit the waves. There was a jarring splash, jiggling Alter-Vicki against me, and we were plunged into a green and white cataclysm of foam and froth. The vehicle canted left, then right, leveling itself as it sank. As the bubbles cleared, the environment grew dimmer. I knew parts of Lake Michigan were almost a thousand feet deep, and wondered if this protective shield would be able to take that kind of pressure. Alter-Talon’s escape route seemed carefully scripted, but incredibly risky, and my limited interaction with the guy showed him to be psychotic. Not the type you trusted making good plans.

  Before the rays from the sun completely disappeared, I noticed a dark shape on the lake’s bottom.

  A dark shape that seemed to be coming up at us extremely fast.

  Chapter 6

  There were no whales in the great lakes. The biggest fish prowling these waters were genetically engineered salmon, bred to control the overpopulation of lampreys. They reached weights of several hundred kilograms, then began to eat swimmers, and the scientists who created them were given some very stern lectures by protest groups. But the dark shape coming into view was many times bigger than a whole school of man-eating salmon, or even a pod of whales.

  As we sank, I noticed the object was long and relatively symmetrical. It was also stationary, and I quickly realized I wasn’t looking at something nature had created.

  “It’s a shipwreck,” I said.

  Alter-Vicki snuggled against me. “The SS Wisconsin, sir. Sank in 1929. Sixty two meters from bow to stern. Can you shoot us free, sir?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Reverse the polarity on the magzer. Then demagnetize us, sir.”

  The magzer, incredibly, was still in my hand. With everything going on, I’d forgotten about it. The only switch on the weapon was on its side, above the grip. I’d assumed it was a safety of some kind. With great effort I extended both of my arms and flicked the switch back, then aimed the beam at Alter-Vicki’s finely sculpted rear end.

  I fell on top of her, pinning her naked body to the curved polycarb bubble. I half-expected the poor Rick Schieve.”

  ow watch the dissyI pu girl to wrap her legs around me, but she’d gone from sex vixen to all-business so quickly there was no mistaking passion for love. Even in the low light, I could see that Alter-Vicki’s eyes shone with obvious venom.

  Which made me more than a little paranoid. If her intention was to do me harm because she mistook me for Alter-Talon, who had treated her cruelly, now was a good opportunity to do so. Of course, she could have just allowed me to be executed by the state if she hated me so much.

  But that would have taken some of the fun out of revenge.

  “I’m not your husband,” I said. “I’ve never met you before today. I’d never do anything to hurt you. And thank you so much for breaking me out of prison.”

  I touched her cheek, tucking her red hair behind her ear. Her return stare contained zero warmth.

  I was in some serious trouble.

  “When I open the bubble, we’re swimming to the hatch on the Milwaukee’s stern.”

  We were at least ninety feet deep. “And what’s inside the hatch?”

  “The hideout, sir. Surveillance satellites can’t penetrate this far underwater. Even if they send a dive team, all they’ll find is wreckage of the heliplane. They’ll assume the salmonsters got our bodies.”

  “What about out chips? They can be tracked.”

  “There are obfuscation disks on the ship.”

  “The hideout is inside the ship?”

  Alter-Vicki squinted at me. “You really don’t remember any of this? What did they do to you in prison, sir?”

  “Please stop calling me sir. And I don’t remember this, because I’m not your husband.”

  The heliplane hit bottom a few yards from the shipwreck. We lolled to the side like a teeter-totter, and Alter-Vicki fell into my arms. Looking at her, smelling her, she was so much like my wife that I couldn’t get my mind around the fact that she was actually an entirely different human being whom I’d never met before. Vicki—my Vicki—was the most charismatic person I’d ever encountered. Though I’d never admit to mushy feelings, she was like a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds on a rainy day.

  I sensed Alter-Vicki also once had this aura, under the surface, before Alter-Talon had turned her into his personal property.

  Then she opened her mouth and removed her entire top row of teeth. The bridge was pearly white, perfect, except for a black molar on either end. She broke the molars off the falsies, and handed me one.

  “Salmon repellant,” she said. Though the s in salmon was spoken with a th sound, the result of her teeth being out.

  My Vicki didn’t have false teeth. Again I felt a stab of pity for this poor sexual goddess with the great rack. applause.

  &os. That meant et

  She swallowed her pill, and I managed to get mine down. As I did, a nine meter salmonster cruised by the bubble. It had the typical hook-shaped mouth common to the species. The triangular shark-like teeth were unique, as were the fangs jutting from the upper jaw that recalled saber-toothed tigers. Scarier still were the eight tentacles that encircled its head like a Victorian collar, covered with hooks embedded in suction cups, each one capable of lashing out like a two meter whip. Not only did these bioengineered monsters reduce the lamprey population by nine-tenths, but the few lampreys left were starving to death, afraid to come out of their holes.

  I couldn’t blame them. This thing was so frightening, I felt my manhood shrink just looking at it. There was no way I was going to ever leave the polycarb bubble.

  “I’m opening the bubble on three,” Alter-Vicki said.

  “I’m going to veto that idea.”

  “One…”

  The salmonster swam back around. It might have been my imagination, but its eyes seemed to be glowing red.

  “Two…”

  “Vicki, I really don’t want you to—”

  “Three! Open!”

  I took a big breath just as the bubble split in half, cold water slapping me up against the underside of the heliplane. The raw panic I felt was all-consuming, blocking my ability to react, the thought of being in salmonster-infested waters with one so close I could touch it was among the most horrible feelings I’d ever experienced. I didn’t see how it could get any worse.

  It got worse two seconds later, when the salmonster wrapped a tentacle around my neck. I felt the hooks dig in, watched as a plume of red blood puffed up around my head, and screamed out half my air as the salmonster opened up its toothy maw, dragging me toward a horrible death.

  I looked for Alter-Vicki, but she was swimming toward the shipwreck. The salmon repellant was obviously FOS. Still clutching the magzer, I raised it forward, squeezing the trigger as the fish hyper-extended its jaws to accommodate my upper body.

  The magzer didn’t do dick. It apparently didn’t work underwater.

  I dropped it, reaching both palms out toward the creature’s snapping saber teeth, planting my hands on them and bracing myself, all the while thinking that there was no way lampreys were such a nuisance they deserved this.

  Then, abruptly, the salmonster released me. It abated its attack as quickly as it had begun, swimming past, swishing its massive tail and disappearing into the green.

  Not pausing to dwell on my good fortune, I beelined for the SS Wisconsin, placing a palm on the cold, rusty metal. The upside-down hull was rough under the thin layer of slimy algae, and I kicked frantically, following its length, not sure I was going in the right direction. By my best guess, I had thirty seconds of air left. Not enough to reach the surface. And not enough to search the entire ship, looking for a portho the antidote for the nanopoison to g
et . That meant etle that Alter-Vicki might have already closed and locked.

  Movement, out of my peripheral right. I put out my hands, expecting the salmonster, back for another try. Instead I saw a pathetically skinny lamprey, its round mouth sucking at the bloody plumes of water in my wake. I swatted it away, and then tapped my right eyelid. There was still enough of a battery charge in my AVCL to switch my vision to infrared. I stared at the ship, looking for heat sources. Not finding any, I turned around and looked in the other direction.

  There. A portal, glowing faint red.

  I swam for it. After a few breast strokes, I got light-headed. My lungs felt like two burning paper bags, desperately craving air. I kicked with everything I had, dragging myself along the hull, cutting my palms and breaking my fingernails while scraping against zebra mussels and barnacles. Then I felt a light tug on the back of my neck, and pink filled my All Vision Contact Lens.

  The salmonster. It was back.

  I spun onto my back, ready to kick at the creature, but then its tentacle came free of my neck, and I watched it pull a lamprey into its mouth—a lamprey that had apparently been sucking my blood.

  Fucking lamprey. They ought to do something to rid the waters of those damn things.

  While I was preoccupied with that, something grabbed me from behind, shocking me so badly my lungs emptied. The urge to inhale was so strong now I knew I couldn’t resist it, and I opened my mouth, trying to brace myself for pain and death, realizing there was no way to brace myself for pain and death, then finally realizing that was a pretty stupid last thought to have.

  Then something forced its way past my teeth. Something soft yet stiff.

  Another lamprey, trying to eat my tongue as I drowned?

  I couldn’t fight my body anymore, and sucked in, expecting the choke of lake water.

  Instead, I breat

  hed air.

  Gasping, amazed, confused, relieved, I turned around and saw Alter-Vicki. She held a metal canister with two tubes coming from the top. One snaked into her mouth. The other led into mine.