by Ruth Owen
“No, you don’t see. I can tell by your voice that you don’t.” Ian rose to his feet and started to pace the rug, his fierce steps betraying his frustration. “It’s got nothing to do with you—it has to do with love itself. It’s just not realistic to assume that two completely separate and distinct individuals will spend the rest of their lives together. The statistics bear me out—one out of two marriages end in divorce.”
“And one out of two doesn’t,” she offered quietly.
“Well—harrumph—that’s true, but it’s still an unacceptable percentage. No intelligent scientist would enter into an experiment with that kind of success rate. Marriage in today’s society is—” He halted before the sliding glass door, running his hand through his thick, damp hair as he searched for the right words. “Marriage is just not logical.”
Logical. The scientific word lashed her like a whip. She looked up, searching Ian’s profile for a trace of the man she loved. But all she found were the cold, remote features of the emotionless Dr. Doom.
“Truthfully, it’s a miracle when two people do stay together,” he continued. “And I don’t believe in miracles.”
Jill closed her eyes, hearing her mother’s voice.
Promise me, her mother whispered.
She shivered, feeling the chilling hand of reality push away her golden dream. Too clearly she recalled what “logical” relationships had done to her mother’s life. Never settle for half of a man’s love.
Opening her eyes, Jill glanced at Ian’s severe profile. Even now she sensed the ache inside him, conscious of the wonderful, terrible awareness that linked her to him in ways she couldn’t understand. She knew she’d love this outwardly stern, inwardly gentle man until the day she died. She also knew that it didn’t make a bit of difference to him.
Slowly she uncurled herself from the couch and rose to her feet. “It’s getting late. I guess we’d better get to the lab—”
“Bugger the lab,” Ian stated. He swiveled around and strode across the room toward her, his long shadow cutting a dark swatch across the sun-bright carpet. “I want to be certain you understand me.”
“Oh, I understand, all right,” she said coolly. “You want me to become your mistress.”
The word stopped him mid-step. “For God’s sake, Jill, it’s not like that at all. What I’m offering you is a mature, honest relationship—”
“What you’re offering me,” she said, raising her chin proudly, “is the same thing all those men offered my mother.”
Ian froze. His jaw pulled into a tight, thin line, and his eyes took on their most frosty metallic sheen. His steely gaze collided with her determined brown one, sparking fire. They stood in absolute silence, two diametrically opposed forces, separated by several feet and a light-year of philosophy. The tension sizzled between them.
The doorbell shattered the silence.
“Who the—?” Jill began.
“Rogers,” Ian replied tersely. “I called him earlier, when I didn’t think you were coming to the lab. But he wasn’t supposed to pick me up until—good Lord!” he said, glancing at her mantel clock. “Is it that late?”
He started for the door. Jill watched him go, trying to tell herself that she was glad to see the back of him, but the ache in her heart told another story. Then the ache gave way to panic as she realized that Ian was about to head out of her front door half dressed. Angry and hurt as she was, she couldn’t let him show up at the lab like that. The techs would never let him live it down.
“Ian, wait!” she cried, hurrying to catch up with his long-legged strides. “You’ve at least got to put your sweater on.”
“Jillie.”
She knew that tone. It melted her resolve like butter. Helplessly she turned toward the kitchen and the garage beyond. “I’ll get your sweater. It’s in the car,” she muttered, beginning to move away.
She didn’t get far. Ian moved behind her, circling her with his arms. “Dammit, Jillie,” he breathed against her ear, “you’re always running away from me.”
“I have to. Staying with you would kill me.”
“And losing you would kill me.” He pulled her close, burying his face in the sensitive curve of her neck. “Talk to me, Jill. That’s all I—”
The doorbell rang again.
“Bloody hell.” He reluctantly loosened his hold on her and started once more for the door.
“Ian, your sweater!”
He glanced back, flashing her a winning smile. “No need, love. I asked Rogers to bring a change of clothes.”
Of course he would, Jill thought bleakly. Dr. Doom was never caught off guard. He planned and plotted all his undertakings in a thorough, logical manner. “You’re always prepared for everything, aren’t you?”
His smile sobered. For an instant his eyes lost their hardness, showing her a glimpse of the real, vulnerable man beneath the confident exterior. “I wasn’t prepared for you, Jillie,” he stated softly. “You took me completely by surprise.”
Me too, she thought as she watched him leave.
After he’d gone, she started up the stairs, trying to concentrate on the simulator and her mission to find Einstein. She made it three steps before she sank to the carpeted stair, exhausted. Once her cozy condominium had been a haven where she could escape from her desire for Ian. But after last night there wasn’t a square inch of the place that didn’t hold his memory. Even these stairs reminded her of the first time he’d made love with her, and claimed her heart in the process. In that instant she’d pledged herself to him, body and soul, forever. She’d thought he felt the same.
“To have and to hold, for as long as it’s convenient,” she said, blinking tears from her eyes. Her mother had been right—less than twelve hours into their affair, and it was already tearing her apart.
Once they found Einstein, she was going to turn in her resignation and get as far away from the doctor and his simulator as possible. It wasn’t the smartest career move, but it was the only one she could make. She had to get out now, before his halfway love destroyed every ounce of her integrity. Before his rational arguments and irresistible kisses convinced her to stay.
Before their passion had the opportunity to produce another unwanted child.
Ian fell. He tumbled like a rag doll through the layers of bright and dark, a black backdrop populated by matrixes of light. Weird shapes flashed by—neon trapezoids, laser-etched polygons, squares cut with impossibly intricate patterns of sizzling circuitry. He watched it all with clinical interest, unconcerned with his rapid descent or the strangeness of the kaleidoscope shapes around him. He’d been here before, many times. This was raw cyberspace, the first and most primitive of all the topologies generated by the simulator. It was the only overlay his cybertechs could use for the low-core processor sector that Einstein’s equations had pointed to. It was also the most dangerous.
His fall slowed as he approached the light-veined surface of zero core. Still, his landing was less than pleasant. He hit the ground belly-first, with enough force to drive the air from his lungs. “Bloody hell,” he cursed, rising to his elbows. “Parker, I told you to fix—”
His breath cut off by the force of another body landing on top of his.
“Ohmigod!” Jill cried as she scrambled off him. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll live,” he said, omitting the fact that his backside ached like one big bruise. He rolled over and sat up, ignoring his discomfort as he took a quick scan of her bodysuit. To his relief, her suit’s wire-thin crimson light-lines—the virtual representation of her life-sustaining node connections to the simulator—were still pulsing with unbroken power.
“Ian!” she whispered urgently as she raised a finger to point at something. “What’s that!”
Ian tensed, then relaxed. “It’s only a grid bug,” he told her, rising to his feet and watching the little crablike creature scuttle away across the neon-scored plane. “They can’t hurt you, but there are plenty of things in here that can. I want yo
u to stick to me like a second skin. That’s an order from your boss.”
He reached down and pulled her effortlessly to her feet, bringing her against him in the process. “It’s also a request from your lover,” he added, his rough whisper making the words a caress.
“Ian, don’t,” she pleaded, pressing her palms against his chest. “I can’t deal with this now … I mean, we’ve got to concentrate on finding Einstein.”
“And I thought I was the practical one,” he grumbled, reluctantly releasing her. “But I intend to continue this discussion as soon as we’re back in real space. Understood?”
“Uhm, right,” she said without meeting his gaze. “As soon as we’re back.” Turning, she looked out at the vast cyberplane and its jumble of shifting shapes and ever-changing data arrays, all defined in striking laser light. “Wow, this place looks like an amusement park on a bad hair day. Are you sure we’re in the right sector?”
“We are according to the digital information in the data dumps we gleaned from the Casablanca airport. We should be within a hundred yards of—watch out!”
Ian grabbed her and yanked her to his side. He was just in time. A small pink meteor sizzled past Jill’s head, close enough to singe her hair. “Good Lord,” he cried, “I’ve never seen anything like that before. Control! What is that thing?”
“We’re not sure, Doctor,” Felix’s voice replied. “It whizzed in from another sector at the speed of sound. We could barely get a fix on it before—look out, it’s coming back!”
Ian twisted around, and found the thing barreling straight for them. There was no time to escape. Acting on instinct, he shoved Jill behind him, determined to protect her with the only shield he had—his body. “When this thing hits you, run like hell,” he commanded.
“Ian, I don’t think—”
“Just do it!” He wanted to say more—so much more—but there wasn’t time. He braced his legs for impact, thinking how absurd the situation was. I’ve bested an orc and a Nazi, only to be taken out by a powder-pink fireball—
The fireball stopped dead a foot from his breastbone.
Startled, Ian staggered back as if the thing had hit him after all. “What the—?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” Jill said as she came around beside him. “I don’t think she’s dangerous.”
“She?”
“Yes, she.” Jill swung her gaze to the pulsing pink fireball. “PINK, is that you?”
The fireball pulsed brighter.
“The prototype.” Ian rubbed his aching temple, coming to grips with the astonishing fact that he and Jill were going to live. “Well, she certainly knows how to make an entrance.”
“An entrance she wasn’t supposed to make,” Jill said, looking disapprovingly at the suspended fireball. “PINK, you know you shouldn’t be in here. It’s dangerous. I want you to go back this instant.”
PINK didn’t budge.
“I mean it,” Jill continued. “I want you out of here right—” She stopped, distracted by Ian’s deep chuckle.
“Looks like there’s more than one disobedient female in this cyberplane,” he observed with a decidedly unscientific smile. “Anyway, as long as she’s here, she might be able to help us locate Einstein.”
PINK blazed nova bright. She took off like a rocket toward a large yellow-veined obelisk, then halted and backtracked a few feet. Then she was off again, disappearing from their view, only to reappear, pulsing impatiently.
“I suppose we’d better follow,” Ian said, taking a step in PINK’s direction. “Remember, stay close. I’m not entirely certain what’s out there. But whatever it is,” he added as he took the hand of the woman beside him, “we’ll face it together.”
For now, anyway, Jill thought bleakly.
She’d lied to Ian. He expected to take up where they left off as soon as they left the simulator. She hadn’t told him that she’d already faxed her resignation to the human resources department at Sheffield and had deposited a copy on his desk just before she’d gone to the lab. When she left the simulator this time she intended to keep right on walking, leaving the company and Ian behind for good.
She’d done the right thing—the only thing she could do considering the situation. But as she walked beside him in this uncharted topology, his strong hand clasping hers, facing danger as his partner, she felt more miserable than she’d thought possible. Every step she took in this virtual reality meant a step closer to the end of their mission—and the end of their love in the real world. The nearer we get to finding PINK’s love, the nearer I get to losing mine.…
The terrain changed. Mammoth shapes rose up around them in scattered, broken chunks, like the remains of city buildings after an earthquake. Light lines snaked and hissed like severed power lines, and the air was full of the throat-scarring smells of smoke and ash. The temperature rose, making Jill feel hot and uncomfortably sticky in her skin-tight bodysuit. “Can’t we have Felix whip up an iceberg or something?”
“Jillian,” Ian sighed, “one doesn’t just ‘whip up’ something in cyberspace. Topology generation is an intricate and exacting science. Physical laws have to be adhered to, just as they are in the real world.”
“I guess there’s no law about neatness,” she said, glancing at the devastation around her. Despite the heat, a cold chill shivered up her back. Someone just walked over my grave.
As they walked on, the landscape became even more perilous. Toppled shapes lay across their path, boulders crisscrossed with sputtering, fading light. PINK flew past the obstacles, but Jill and Ian had to climb over the rubble, slipping and skidding on the loose, treacherous talus. Wide fissures opened in the ground, and more than once Ian’s anchoring grasp saved Jill from plunging into one of the dark pits.
Finally, they reached what appeared to be a stable plateau. Jill sank down against a broken half-sphere, exhausted beyond words. Ian was just as winded, but instead of resting he knelt beside what appeared to be a severed cobalt-blue power grid line.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” he muttered as he stared at the cut grid line. “The simulator matrix is supposed to prevent this kind of disintegration. It goes against every law of cyberphysics. It’s not … logical.”
Jill was quickly growing to hate that word. “Well, logical or not, it’s happening. Apparently someone’s taken ‘raping the environment’ into the virtual plane.”
“It’s more than that. Someone’s warping the fabric of cyberspace itself. Someone … or something.”
Ian stood up, his tall form towering over the broken shapes on the plateau. Jill couldn’t take her eyes off him. Against the black backdrop, the crimson lines of his bodysuit pulsed like hellfire. He’s part of this world, she thought as she watched him move confidently through the weird landscape. A sorcerer in his magic realm. Once again a shiver crept up Jill’s spine, but this time for the man, not the environment. “What do you mean by ‘something’?”
“I’m not sure,” Ian said, shooting his silver gaze back at her. “But I am sure that you’re leaving. Now.”
“Not unless you are,” she answered as she got to her feet and raised her chin defiantly. “And if I have to step into one of those stupid blue lines again to stay, I will.”
“Dammit, Jill.” He strode over to her and grasped her by the shoulders. “This isn’t a game. This isn’t even an experiment anymore. Something very evil is going on in here, and I’ve got to find out what it is.”
“We’ve got to—”
“No,” he said with devastating softness. “Not this time.”
She tried to pull away, but his firm grip prevented it. Too late she realized he’d trapped her, preventing her from moving into one of the nearby lines. “This isn’t fair,” she cried as she struggled against his hold.
“Yes, well, we’ll argue about ethics later,” he said smoothly, turning his gaze heavenward. “Sadie, I want you to—”
“There’s not going to be a later,” Jill interrupted furiousl
y. “I turned in my resignation.”
Ian’s whole body went stone still. “You what?”
“I’m quitting,” she replied, words rushing out of her like wine from an uncorked bottle. Tears pricked her eyes, but whether from frustration or despair she didn’t know. “I’m not one of your simulations. You can’t order me around. You can’t make me do what I don’t want to do, even if a part of me wants to do it.…” Her words dwindled off, ending in a sob. “I can’t take it anymore, Ian. I can’t take you.”
If she’d run a broadsword through his heart, he couldn’t have looked more shocked. “Is that what you honestly believe?”
“Yes. No,” she said, the pain in his eyes tearing her apart. Suddenly Einstein, the voyeuristic cybertechs, even the bizarre world around them, ceased to matter. She lifted her hand to his cheek, caressing him with a bittersweet tenderness. “I love you, but I can’t be with you. If I stayed, I know I’d give in to you on everything—and it would eventually destroy me. I’d be going against everything I believed in, and … and if we ever made a child—”
Ian’s grip tightened almost painfully. “I would never allow that to happen to you.”
“Darling, there are some things even you can’t guarantee,” she replied, smiling sadly. “I can’t live without a commitment, and you can’t live with one. It’s better if I leave. It’s … it’s the only logical solution.”
Emotions burned in his eyes, but Jill couldn’t read the nuances in his virtually synthesized features. He started to speak, but at that moment PINK began buzzing around them like a miniature comet. She made several passes before flying over to a nearby pile of rubble and beginning her circuit all over again.
“She must want us over there,” Jill said, welcoming the distraction from her own troubles. “Perhaps there’s something in the pile that will lead us to Einstein.”
She started to move, but Ian held her back. “Jill,” he said quietly, his gaze riveted on the heap, “that’s no ordinary pile of rubble.”
