by Alex Kirko
He put a metal hand on top of her left thigh. He said, “You know, I made Aileen. She isn’t up to regulations, and she will never be. The Council got it wrong when they removed almost all emotions from their AIs except the desire to protect the suit’s wearer. Fear and anger and hope can give an edge.”
She put her other hand on his helmet grasping it from both sides. “I never wanted to be an Ascended, but I couldn’t refuse. Do you know that when two of us are together, each can cripple another in a second?”
Tara pulled back, shrugged off the left sleeve of her blouse, and unclipped a shield generator from her left forearm. She tapped the top of his helmet with an index finger. “I trust you, Blake.”
Aileen kept silent. He could imagine the talk he would get later if he survived. Blake gently took Tara by the waist and put her next to him on the bed. He stood up, walked to the door, and stood in front of the bug hidden above it. He would have some privacy even if this was a show.
“Good luck, Master.”
“If anything happens, I order the computer grab me and seal me back in. Authorize the plasma blades too.”
The world went dark as Aileen disconnected, and then Blake felt something with his own body for the first time in weeks: discomfort and nausea and burning pain everywhere. The folds of metal and plastic that enveloped him parted, and he fell out. He was sure he would hit the floor, but slim hands grabbed him as easily as if he weighed twenty pounds.
“Easy there, Blake. You’ve been in it too long.” Tara looked him up and down. “You are as pale as a dead fish. Sexy.”
There was worry on her face, and he could see strands of the original color in her hair. He grabbed a lock with two fingers and raised it in front of her eyes. She frowned, and it turned from black to red.
He said, “You sure know how to sweet-talk. I’m fine.”
“Yeah, right.” She laughed and hauled him onto the bed. “You said we have little time. We can talk later.” She sat on top of him. Her fingers traced his chest, and they felt like iron to his human flesh. Tara saw the look on his face, chuckled, and let up on the pressure. “Right, sorry. Forgot how squishy you are.”
It didn’t help him relax, but there was no retreating. Now that his body was out, and the hormones were kicking in, he could tell that Tara still had that unnerving effect that had made half the people she met become weak in the knees. “You look great,” he said and flicked open the rest of the buttons of her blouse.
She twisted out of it, exposing supple breasts barely contained by a lacy red bra. They were at least a size larger than her remembered. Blake was suddenly aware that he hadn’t been with a woman for a month and hadn’t been with a non-professional in a year. He swallowed, his throat parched. Everything hurt, and he was thankful for Tara being on top. Still, he felt himself stiffen.
“Listen, it’s been a while—”
“Shut up, Blake.” She leaned in to his chest and sniffed. “Ah, so that’s what you smell like when you are all flustered.”
She leaned in and kissed him, breaking through the barricade of his lips in a second and finding his tongue with hers. He felt alarmed for a second, remembering that every inch of her body could suck up living flesh, but then thinking ceased. He had forgotten how nice it was to be with someone who felt something for him. Her fingers trailed his front, unbuttoning the Council uniform and exposing his chest. He moved to raise her to get her out of her skirt, but Tara grinned, gripped under its hem, and ripped the fabric apart. She laughed at his alarmed look and leaned in for another kiss.
Tara was stronger but still let him fight. She bit the tip of his tongue, he yelped in pain, and she used the distraction to unbutton his pants and tug them off along with his underwear. Thank God for no sweating inside the suit. He whimpered in frustration as the silky wet fabric of her panties rubbed against him, and he thrust forward.
She leaned close to his ear and traced it with her lips. “Not so fast, lover. We have one try today.”
He liked that she said ‘today’. A different burning filled him, and Blake could barely feel any remaining pain. He reached for her back and unclipped the strapless bra. It fell on top of him, and he tossed it to the side, eager to see and taste everything.
She was magnificent. He could see where Tara had modified her body to appear less seductive, but the changes looked even more enticing to him. A bit of clumsiness, a bit of fat, and the delicious red color of her hair. He didn’t care anymore. He reached for her panties and tugged. The fabric held out for a second and then tore, and the sound made him want more.
She laughed tossing her hair behind her head, leaned in, kissed him, and then he was inside.
By this point, Blake was gone. He let her control the pace. When she was too slow, he rose and traced her left nipple with his tongue. He searched her body for points that would make her go faster. The neck, the armpits, and the chest. He grabbed her ass, but she slapped him, putting his arms back onto her breasts.
They rocked against each other, and everything was pleasure, and there was no pain. He saw her bite her lip, grin, and suck at his neck. He used the distraction to flip them over and buried himself between her thighs, now finally able to go as fast as he needed.
She growled, and her irises went dark, and her hair went black, and her breasts shrunk under his fingers, and she wrapped her thighs around him and crushed him into herself. He leaned to her neck and bit with all the power in his jaws. She gasped and arched her back.
“Come,” she said.
He obeyed.
11
Conflict of Interest
“Miss Heatsworth, are you okay?”
Moira groaned and waved her hand in Jim’s direction to shut him up. She hadn’t known Ascended could even have headaches. A drill was boring into her skull above her right eye, and the migraine flared up in crimson pain at bright lights, loud sounds—everything that stood out.
“Miss Heatsworth, it might be better if you lay down. The city won’t crumble if you allow yourself to relax a little.”
Moira laughed without mirth. She raised her head and looked at Jim. His hologram stood in front of her table. A handsome man, slender as a sapling. The angular features that looked gaunt on his real face were filled out more, and it made him look like an aristocrat. Jim stepped closer.
“Miss, you need to sleep.” He moved to touch her shoulder but froze before his delicate hand could pass through it. “You are an Ascended, you will be rested in two hours.”
She said. “Easy enough for you to say, you do nothing but sleep all the time.”
She felt disgusted with herself even before she finished saying the words. There was a flicker of hurt on Jim’s face, but he smoothed his expression into the kind of pleasant mask he wore for her enemies. His image shimmered: one of the holographic projectors must have been acting up.
He shrugged. “I suppose that is true enough, at least from your perspective.”
She sighed, grasped the console, and pushed her chair away from the terminal. It groaned and bent, and she blinked, noticing that she had dented and twisted the two-foot metal panel like a piece of putty. She stared at fingers that were as thick as her wrists were supposed to be.
Jim said, “You reverted four hours ago, miss. You were discussing backup water supply for the city at the time. I recall your guests looking rather surprised.”
Moira closed her eyes and focused. The machines inside her were sluggish. She could sense them buzzing around her brain and spinal cord, attempting to soothe overworked cells and sometimes destroying and rebuilding them outright. She had been up for a week.
After two minutes, she coaxed her blood to begin breaking down bone, muscle, skin . . . The rusty nail in her head was now joined by steel wool dragging through her body as flesh was disassembled and carried into dense packets of mass deep within her torso and thighs. She wanted to black out, but she couldn’t—the Freefolk instructors had been clear. Stopping now could lead to permanent injury or, at
worst, a system-wide crash of her nanites and that would kill her. Moira gritted her teeth and kept shrinking.
After she was done, she projected a mirror above the console. Moira was getting better at shapeshifting. She was only six feet tall in this form now, and her face was almost what she had looked like before her Secondary Ascension. She was even losing her hate for the diminutive brunette that stared back from the mirror looking so much like her biological sisters. All it took was not being that person most of the time.
She stood up and turned to her assistant. “Jim, I’m sorry. I guess running a city with an understaffed administration is getting to me.”
“There is no need to apologize, miss. My purpose is to serve the Heatsworth family.” He paused. “But I still suggest sleep. Food and personal hygiene are also quite useful, I’ve heard.”
She kneaded the muscles in her left shoulder in frustration. At least his polite tone sounded less forced now.
“Thank you, Jim. And I would appreciate it if you lightened up on the faithful butler routine.”
He shook his head. “Men with no time left—we need a path. Have a nice rest, Miss Heatsworth. I myself am tired, so I shall grab a wink too.”
She blinked. “Have you been awake all this time? Jim, you aren’t an Ascended.”
“Don’t worry, Miss Heatsworth. I sleep whenever you are in a meeting, and you seem to have an inordinate amount of those. Most pleasant dreams.”
Moira left the office, and headed for her room. She would have liked nothing more than to crash on her bed for two hours, but there was one more thing to do.
She trudged through the hallways, shaking hands and smiling until her face began to hurt. It took fifteen minutes to get to the surveillance post.
The thuds of her boots on the metal stairs reverberated through the stairway. The dim green lighting was powered by a separate generator humming from behind a maintenance door. She ignored it, instead heading for the one at the end of the hallway. Moira shivered and took two deep breaths. She and gloomy underground passages didn’t mix. She knocked on the door and entered.
Sergeant Hale was typing at two terminals to the side of the room. Under the ten-foot dome in the center another person was suspended in a gravity cancellation field.
Hale said, “Sister Heatsworth, meet Sherri. She is on monitoring duty today.”
Sherri rotated inside the cylindrical field as much as the cables would allow. She looked at Moira, and the Ascended had to force herself to stay still. Sherri was naked and seemed to be nothing but skin like translucent paper, sharp bones, and black interface ports. Moira could count every rib, and both the woman’s eyes were glowing blue cameras.
“Good evening, Mayor,” she said.
Moira swallowed. “Hello.”
Sherri nodded demurely and rotated into her former position. Black cables jutted out of every vertebra, the base of her skull, shoulders, and thighs. The surveillance specialist closed her eyes and held her hands up in front of her as if in prayer. Two dozen images of the city burst into light around her and began cycling every five seconds.
“Hello, Mayor,” said the city monitoring AI.
“Hello, Aaron,” she said, already looking for a way to escape the conversation.
“Do you want to hear a joke?” he asked. His tone was that of a man heading for his execution.
“No, thank you. I just came for a report.”
“As you wish, miss. Why do I only get to work with organics that don’t appreciate humor?” he complained. “Professor Rendall . . . now there was a man who gave as good as he took. Wish I could visit his grave, but, you know, no body. I guess I’ll just stay here. Watching over the city. Every day and every night for a thousand years—nothing wrong with that.”
“I would like to talk to Sergeant Hale,” she said. “In peace.”
The AI went silent, and she walked up to the holographic terminals. The sergeant looked at her and smiled. The soldier’s eyes were tired, and Moira had no doubt that had her sandy hair been longer than a third of an inch, it would be in disarray. “Sister Heatsworth,” Hale said. “Would you like the usual report?”
“Yes, please. And didn’t I tell you to stop calling me that?”
Hale waved her left hand in dismissal. “I apologize, but I can’t afford to start calling you miss, because I might then address another Sister like that. Your family is rumored to be trouble.”
Moira smirked. “You have no idea. Have you found anything?”
“There is still no evidence of Tara leaving the city or getting caught by one of our DNA scanners, and we now have more than sixty percent of the original detector network online. It shouldn’t be possible for her to evade all of the sensors without being holed up in one of the ruined buildings, preying on the people passing by.” She pressed a few buttons and a map of Seind dotted with multicolored lights appeared. “The red ones are food depots for the Ascended. We now have surveillance in all of them, and we caught two spies that way in the past three days. Lyndon is interrogating them.”
“On first name basis already?” asked Moira with a smile.
Hale shrugged. “He is an Ascended. But he’s easy to work with and I like his tales of Old Earth. My family has this ancient air fighter back from the colonization age. My grand-something-mother was a pilot, and her bird survived. He wants to see it next time he comes to Lankershire.” Moira smiled as the sergeant blinked and dragged a palm down her face. Hale said, “Could you please not mention that to the gossipmongers, Mayor Heatsworth?”
She nodded, and walked up to one of the terminals to examine the readout herself. Moira said, “It’s only a matter of time before we blanket the entire city except the inside of buildings.”
The sergeant said, “Problem is, there should be localized missing person reports if she is hiding. So far all we got were the ones near to where the spies we already apprehended lived.” She pointed to the map on a screen to her right. “Some people have been complaining of anemia, but the cases we looked into were simple paranoia caused by Ascended now mingling with humans a lot more. The ones responsible for the complaints call themselves ‘The Body Protection Front’ and are convinced that Ascended just come up and eat whoever they like.”
Moira snorted. “Idiots. And we have all the bars and entertainment centers monitored too, so she can’t find food there. Wait, could the genetic scanners have a backdoor built in?”
“You had them checked right after the battle, mayor. The tech people told me that with a chunk of code that simple, there is no way they could miss something.”
“Unless it’s hardware,” said Moira. “Have them take another look. We need to be sure there isn’t an alternative mode that can be activated by some special signal—I don’t know, I’m not an engineer. But she is hiding somehow, somewhere, and what we’re doing isn’t working.”
The sergeant nodded, and entered a couple commands on one of the computers. Moira put her thumb onto the DNA scanner panel and gave her personal code. Now all she needed to do was plug in her private encryption key into the console in her quarters to authorize the order.
She was about to go get some sleep when Aaron said, “I once knew some people who liked to pull resources from the city for their personal plans. You now stand in their place.”
She wished she could glare at the bodiless machine. She settled on staring at its medium Sherri. “We aren’t safe,” she said. “How would you like for some saboteur to get into this chamber and blow up your computation core, Aaron?”
“I would not mind,” he said.
Moira turned around, walked out, and slammed the door. Most AIs picked up all kinds of psychological quirks from humans, but Aaron loved to remind everyone he was just a machine.
“Aren’t we all just machines?” she asked the empty hallway. “Great. Talking to myself. I need sleep.”
Before rest, she pulled up a list of all Ascended who had stayed in Seind after the battle. There were thousands. She looked through
fifty names before her eyes started drifting closed, and she noticed she wasn’t paying attention anymore. Tara wouldn’t be able to hide as one of them anyway. Moira was growing paranoid.
She retired to her bigger bed, not in the mood to meditate for half an hour on keeping her smaller form during sleep. The frame was made from mech-grade steel, and the mattress was filled with the feathers of a Guraga—a jungle predator that could deflect a glancing artillery slug. The Freefolk gave the best gifts.
Moira took off the elastic uniform she wore. By now, her headache was a low thrum between her temples that made coherent thought impossible. A shower to burn the stress off her bones was tempting, but she didn’t have the energy.
She stretched out on the bed naked and let go of the transformation. The pockets of mass inside her dissolved, releasing the tension they placed on the surrounding tissue, and she felt the burning tingling of expanding bone, muscle, and skin. Whatever feminine curves she possessed flattened as fat turned into something useful. The face that had got her into this mess centuries ago also shifted: cheekbones moved further apart and her chin jutted forward. Moira stretched her back with a series of thunderous pops, pulled a sheet over herself and went to sleep.
She woke up refreshed and keenly aware of the sticky grime covering her body. Sweat had mixed with dirt and dead skin cells throughout the week, and her black hair was oily and smelled of dust and smoke. She groaned. Kyle was arriving today, and there was that meeting with the press, so looking like this just wouldn’t do.
“Good morning to you too,” said Laura, her voice like the clink of champagne glasses in the morning.
Moira turned her head, and there was her sister. Laura sat in a chair too large for her reading a book while tapping a rhythm on her right thigh with her fingers. Her skin was milky white, not a pore or hair in sight.
