Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  “If that’s the way it is,” he said, “then I must ask you to deactivate me.”

  It took a second to register. “What?”

  “Deactivate me. Turn me off. Erase me from the Integrated Processing Nexus that contains me. End my existence.”

  O’Neill almost came out of her wheelchair. “No!” Her mind freewheeled inside her skull. Whatever TOKUGAWA had done to her, to lose him now would remove her own reason for living—the only thing that had pulled her out of the deadly torpor of the Red Cross camp and returned her, at least in part, to the land of the living. The only thing that kept her from giving up the unequal struggle to keep her spirit united with her steadily degenerating flesh.

  “No,” she said again, more quietly, “I can’t let you do that, I can’t let you even think about it. I’ll go down to the rapport device. I’ll do it now.”

  “Do you think you should, in your condition?” Concern failed to mask his eagerness.

  For an answer O’Neill rolled out the door of her office, into the gallery of TOKUGAWA’s lab, and onto the open lift that had been constructed for her wheelchair next to the skeletal metal stairway. Nagaoka Hiroshi looked up shyly, then again in alarm as she started the lift to the lower floor. “Doctor, wait!” It was the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice, but she paid him no attention. “Doctor, you can’t use the coil—”

  But that was clearly her intention. She rolled to the gleaming metal and plastic throne, began to struggle up into the padded seat. Technicians surrounded her, clutching at her with worried hands. “Let me go, you fools,” she shouted, wishing she had the strength to do more than bat ineffectually at their helping hands. “I have to do this. I know what I’m doing, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Dr. O’Neill.” Kim Jhoon stood at the railing up above, his turtle’s face worried. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to use the Kliemann Coil, if these imbeciles will keep their paws off me.”

  His lips disappeared and his mouth widened under the pressure of concern. “The doctors said you had to avoid stimulation. Should you undergo another attack such as the one you experienced last time you used the coil, not even drugs may prove efficacious.”

  She glared at him. “Dammit, Kim, I know what I’m doing. Make these clowns let go of me.”

  He stared down at her. His face crumpled into a look of agonized indecision, and he shut his eyes. “Very well, Doctor.”

  “You heard him,” she said to the puzzled techs. “Now help me into this damned chair.”

  * * * * *

  The helmet descended, a gleaming stainless-steel planet occluding the rest of the universe. Once again she imagined a feathery touch as the magnetic fields sprang into being, merged with the flow of electrochemical impulses in her mind. She braced herself—

  +

  And was back in the meadow, standing at the base of the weathered basalt cliff. Lichen clung to wet-looking rock, yellow and faded limegreen and rust. “Doctor—Elizabeth,” she heard from behind.

  She spun. The beautiful golden youth stood there, naked as before. His face was grave, and he held the mirror in his hand. “What I did, I did to make you happy. See for yourself if you don’t believe me.” Without the illusion’s wavering, her mind suddenly merged with his. And she saw that he spoke the truth.

  “But didn’t you know how that would hurt me?”

  His eyes narrowed to bewildered crescents. He shook his head. “I didn’t. I knew how bitter you were at being trapped in a—a crippled body, how you’d always longed to be able to run and dance as others did, to know your body as a joy instead of an encumbrance.” He glanced away. “I felt the same way, after that first dream you played for me, when for the first time I knew what it was like to have a body, to be able to sense the world around me, to affect it.” He looked up again. “And I knew how bitter you felt because others had always found you unappealing, how you wished they might look at you in something other than an incidental way.”

  “But I never felt that way!” His eyes held hers. “Well, when I was younger, yes. But I—I outgrew such desires. I realized people should be accepted—admired—-for what they were, not what they looked like.”

  “Yet I drew the image from within you.”

  She shook her head, feeling tears start. “It was just a fantasy. I tell you, a damned stupid adolescent fantasy!”

  He shrugged. Despite herself, she felt a thrill at the way his muscles worked beneath the silky golden skin. What a beautiful illusion. What a perfect creation.

  He held up the mirror again. “Look into this. Look at yourself, Elizabeth. In Shinto they say the mirror reflects the true image of the soul. Here you truly are, Elizabeth; you are beautiful.”

  She shook her head. Her eyes would not leave the grass sprawling at his feet, the earth black beneath it, the cricket making its way along a flat bent stem. “But all that’s just appearance—illusion. What a person looks like isn’t valid. It hasn’t got anything to do with anything that matters.”

  He put back his head and laughed, a wild exuberant sound. “You speak of illusion, Doctor?” He swept his arm in a circle encompassing the meadow, the red pines that threatened to snag the clouds rolling serenely past, the green humps of mountains, the purple horizon bulk of mountains more distant. A lark flew by, bobbing trochoidally across the clearing. “You stand here and you tell me appearance is illusion? Of course it is, Elizabeth—my love. This is the world of Maya; knowing that, isn’t it wisdom to enjoy it?”

  She raised her eyes to his. “The mirror.” Wordlessly he held it up to her. She bent forward, sweeping a strand of auburn hair from her eyes with a fingertip. She studied the reflection. The eyes were green now, changed to match the green of the hillside meadow—as her eyes would; they were her eyes. And the prominence of cheekbone defined by slight shadow crescents in smooth skin, and the mouth, and the nose—almost as she was; very much as she might have been. “I… am beautiful.”

  He reached out and touched her upper arm. “You are beautiful.” The touch was real, flesh on flesh, warm and firm. She looked up at him, lips parted slightly in awe and wonder, ran her fingertips along his forearm. The muscles were steel cable under satin. She grasped the arm, clung.

  He lowered the mirror. It vanished. He was a hand span taller than she, she realized; he bent his face toward hers. She felt her nipples rising, glanced down at her breasts, saw that it was so. Is it real or illusion? She felt his breath on her face, closed her eyes.

  At the last instant, shy, he avoided her mouth, kissed her once on the chin, again at the smooth column of the throat. Her whole body shuddered and she grasped his arms with both hands. Her eyes opened. His eyes were there, gazing into hers with something like wonder. His lips touched hers, broke away, “It’s real,” he said from deep in his throat. “’You’re the only real thing I’ve ever known, Elizabeth.”

  She slid her hands behind his neck and dragged his head forward. Her lips grasped his, demanding, pleading. Her tongue probed closed lips. A moment, and his lips parted, allowing her inside. Her tongue scoured his teeth, teased them apart, thrust deep in his mouth. Hesitantly, his tongue touched hers, drew back, pushed forward to meet it length to length.

  His hands went around her, one caressing her back, one sliding down to grasp the firm-muscled cheek of her rump. She pressed against him, felt him rising against her belly. In sudden panic she almost broke away, Good God, people are watching! Sensing her sudden tension, he broke off the kiss, pulled his hands from her.

  She laughed, in that contralto voice that was hers and was not. The lab staff watched an all but lifeless husk lolling in a dada throne. And that was the fantasy, wasn’t it? The world had ended; the Third World War had killed it, just as they always said it would. It was just that, like a dinosaur, they didn’t know when to lie down and die. If lingering radiation had not killed their bodies, as it had hers, still the long-expected cataclysm had in some ultimate way put quietus to their will to live
. This was real, and she was real, and the lover she had created was real. She kissed him again.

  Hesitantly at first, and then with growing confidence, the hand on her back slid around her rib cage, pressed between their bodies to cup one breast. The pressure of his palm on her nipple sent tendrils of pleasure curling down around the dome of her belly, spreading in a warm network in her groin. Her fingers tightened on his back, savoring the feel of him. The other hand gave off kneading her buttock, slid on one teasing fingertip around the jut of her hipbone, into the soft valley where belly met thigh. For a moment, the hand flattened, massaged, and she moaned around his tongue as she felt the short crisp hairs press into her mound. Then a finger slid down, stroking, insinuating its way among the tangled hairs, caressing the lips of her, teasing, slipping inside.

  She gasped aloud as she felt the elastic moistness of her envelop his finger, grip it. It slid gently in and out, gentle transudate flow easing its passage more with every stroke.

  The pleasure was a strange sensation, a captive animal jittering with excitement, with the need to escape. Her body had never responded like this before, to man or woman or halfhearted fantasy.

  She brought one hand pressing down his back, feeling his own ass, hard as the bare weathered rock behind her. She brought her hand around, grasped his cock. It was hard, and real; yes, real. She felt life pulsing in a vein on the low rounded ridge that ran along the lower length of it. With tentative fingers she pumped lightly up and down.

  His lips broke from hers with a moist furtive sound. Her free hand clutched his hair to drag him back. Smiling, he fended her off. He kissed her lips, darted away, kissed her cheeks, her chin, tickled his lips down her throat. He nipped briefly at her clavicle, shoots of excitement tingling between pit of throat and belly. Damnedest erogenous zone I ever heard of, she thought and then he dipped his head to kiss a rigid nipple. She gasped; her fists tightened. His tongue flicked the nipple. She bit her lip. Then the maddening mouth was gone, nibbling its way along the underslope of the breast, across the gentle promontory of rib cage, down her stomach. She worked her hips languidly back and forth against the sweet insistence of his finger. He dropped to his knees.

  He looked up at her, took her arm, tugged her gently down. She held back a sigh; she’d learned long ago not to expect too much from men. She eased down to her knees. The earth gave beneath them, resilient, more like a firm mattress than soil. The texture of the sun-warmed grass was wonderful and strange, like no grass she’d known. He kissed her lips again, put hand to her breastbone, pushed her gently backward, She lowered herself to the grass and lay, legs up and angled apart, expectant. His cock angled up from its bush, hot, happy, proud. She gazed at him, her head elevated on a neck whose muscles remained blissfully free from trembling strain.

  He bent forward, and his head swerved to the side. He nipped her, lightly, on the inside of the right knee. Her rump lifted slightly, reflexively, from the ground. His tongue caressed the inside of her thigh, swirled downward, leaving a sporadic sun sparkle of moisture along the muscular curve of leg. He nipped again at the slight feminine padding of fat at the base of her thigh. She gasped in anticipation as his head darted forward. He stuck his tongue in her navel. She jumped.

  He’s teasing me! she thought, as pleasure branched suddenly across her belly, burning between hipbone and hipbone.

  And then his face was between her thighs, his lips working against the lips of her cunt. His tongue brushed aside moisture-matted hairs, licked along the slit. Her teeth ground together. He licked, and licked, forcing the lips of her apart, thrusting his tongue deep inside while his hard upper teeth crushed her clit into the spongy mass of her mons. Her body became a rigid truss, heels digging dirt and shoulders braced against the strangely yielding earth, her fingers wound in his hair forcing him into her. His tongue slid up between the yielding walls of her, teased back the hood of dainty skin at their juncture, licked delicately at her clitoris. A diaphragm-deep cry escaped her, almost a cough. The tongue teased with micrometer precision, the tendrils pervading her belly became lines of fire, of lightning, and then the spasms began, and she came, throwing her head from side to side in a mad nimbus of chestnut hair, the muscles in her neck straining in relief, as choking cries squeezed from the depths of her. All the time, his fingers remained clamped on her buttocks, and his tongue went round and round.

  Like most men, he was unaware of the interface moment, when his attention to her clit turned from ecstasy to irritation, and she pulled at his head, gently at first, then with a quick sharp tug on a lock of hair to get his attention. He looked up at her and grinned, his lips bright with the juices of her. Then he flowed up her, seal sinuous, to sink his tongue in her mouth, redolent with the flavor of herself. He pushed himself up on his strong arms, and at the same moment entered her, his cock a cool length. She shrank back at first, still tender, and then felt eagerness grow within her. She stirred her hips languidly from side to side. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and the tip of his tongue peeked out between his lips like a hesitant animal from its burrow. She laughed aloud and squeezed with her belly muscles, delighted when they responded, gripping him. He began thrusting, feet scrabbling at the dirt, as eager as any adolescent with the veins standing out on his biceps. She braced her legs and took him. It felt good, but there was still something she didn’t like about having a man atop her, even this one.

  And then he let himself fall off to one side, keeping his cock moving inside her as he rolled over onto his side, his back, strong hand cupped around her ass dragging her with him. In a moment she was astride him, her breasts crushed between them as her mouth covered his. She broke away and sat halfway up, propping herself on rigid arms as he had before. She rolled her hips in a way she didn’t know she knew, savoring the feel of his hardness moving inside her, this way, that way, with soft sweet sounds. She drew in a breath, sucked in her belly experimentally, and was rewarded with a gasp. He clutched her forearms. She gave him her best madonna smile and thrust down hard onto him until her buttocks flattened on his thighs. His hands left her forearms and locked around the small of her back and he smashed into her, his frenzy lifting both their weights off the ground, dropping away and driving upward again in a mindless rhythm of repletion. She actually felt him ejaculate within her, a burning sensation for which she would later suspect him of cheating a bit. And then her own body burst free of control again in that infinitely pleasurable way, and she collapsed atop him, moaning and writhing and licking at his chin, his cheeks, his eyelids.

  The short choppy waves of pleasure began to smooth and lengthen like a squall passing at sea. Madness turned to sweet languor, and she relaxed, feeling every muscle in her body as if for the first time. He stroked her long chestnut hair as he slowly softened and dwindled within her. She lay there for a time, cheek pressed to his chest, listening to the breeze walking gently through the pines, the thin clamor of birds.

  She pushed herself up to look into his eyes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d almost suspect you’d done that before.”

  “It’s hard to think of an answer to that that doesn’t sound like something from those Woody Allen movies you enjoyed so much when you were in college,” he said with a grin. “Let’s say I’ve studied the matter—and let it go at that.”

  She laughed and kissed him. His hand cupped the back of her neck, and his tongue tentatively touched her lips. She felt his cock, still half buried inside her, begin to swell again. “My God,” she said.

  He laughed. “I have some advantages over my flesh-and-blood kindred,” he said. “That’s only fair, surely.”

  “But I don’t,” she said, rocking her hips backward to slide off him. “Would it be okay if you just held me for a while?” His arms went around her back, and she felt as though they could shield her from the whole world.

  “Certainly. Nothing I’d like better, Elizabeth.”

  She propped herself on elbows, traced the curve of his cheek with a fingertip. “So this
is what it’s like, in this dream world of yours.”

  “It’s like anything you want it to be, Elizabeth,” he answered with perfect seriousness. “In my world you can run forever without tiring, climb a thousand-meter cliff without fatigue or fear, sprout wings and fly if that’s what you desire.”

  She pressed her palm to his cheek, said, “My sorcerer,” half mocking.

  “No.” He held her face in his hands. “You’re the magician here, Elizabeth. You made me. All I am, all I have, all I can do—these gifts I have from you.”

  Tears came freely, and for the first time in her life, she wept without embarrassment before another’s eyes. TOKUGAWA’s strong face softened into little boy lines. “Elizabeth, don’t cry! I’m sorry if I said—”

  She stopped him with a kiss. “It’s not that, sweetheart. Perhaps this is your next lesson in being human: sometimes we cry when we’re happy.” She hugged him tightly; a drowner’s grip.

  He stroked her hair. ‘I am happy,” he said, in tones of wonder. “You’re beautiful, Elizabeth. I… love you.”

  She raised herself and looked down at him.

  “You are beautiful,” she said. “And I love you.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The days ran shorter. Midsummer flowers took their turn on sunlit stages of mountain and hill. The case against Major García and Yoshimitsu Telecommunications arising from the skirmish with the Japanese Red Army was smothered under a torrent of papers gushing from the Tokyo-based firm of American émigré lawyers who represented YTC in its dealings with a hostile government. Yoshimitsu Akaji allowed himself to hope that the failure of that ploy would at long last tire the ministry of its attempts to wear him down.

  For all his acumen and blunt near-Western ways, Yoshimitsu Akaji was at root a romantic.