by Jeff Edwards
“They said it wasn’t their fault. It was a computer virus. Maggie... Maggie’s body was on ice, in deep freeze. Her file was supposed to have been marked ‘hold.’ But they said the virus scrambled a lot of their data. Somehow, Maggie’s file got re-flagged.”
“Re-flagged?”
“For... organ barter. An organ clinic bought her whole body while I was lying unconscious in that hospital bed. I tried to track it down, but the clinic broke up her body and sold it for parts before I got there.”
Sonja hugged me tighter. “Oh, David. I’m so sorry.”
“They wouldn’t even give me the names of the organ recipients. They said it would be illegal. The hospital was terrified that I was going to sue, or drag their name through the media. They offered me a big settlement. I didn’t want their damn money, but their lawyers kept after me until I accepted it. I didn’t want their goddamn money. I wanted to say good-bye to my wife and the bastards even took that away from me.”
I was sobbing uncontrollably now.
Sonja rocked me until my sobs faded into quiet breathing.
After a long while, I slipped into the temporary oblivion of dreamless sleep.
My room was still dark when I woke again. I followed a slow path up the mountain from oblivion to waking. Someone was touching me. I had an erection. A gentle scraping of teeth on skin and the feather light flicker of a hot tongue told me that Sonja was also awake.
I heard the hissing rush of waves washing up on a beach, quietly at first, but growing until the sound became the pounding of surf.
Sonja’s fingers danced on my skin.
The walls of my room cycled slowly from darkness to an indigo suffused glow. The projection unfolded until the bedroom was invisible behind a starlit beach.
I felt a sharp pang in my chest. House was running our favorite program, Maggie’s and mine. The one she’d always liked to make love by.
I mumbled something, trying to tell House to stop the program, to shut it off, but I was not quite awake enough to speak.
“Shhhhhh...” One of Sonja’s hands came up to cover my mouth. “Go back to sleep.” Her weight shifted as she moved to straddle me. Her hand slid away from my mouth. Her lips replaced the hand.
The tip of her tongue parted my lips and slipped into my mouth at the exact instant that she impaled herself upon me. She froze for a second, totally motionless and then her body shuddered almost as strongly as mine did. She began to rock back and forth, slowly to begin with, then gathering speed.
At first, I attempted to match her rhythm, meet her thrusts with my counter-thrusts, but she used her thighs to clamp my legs to the bed.
The message was clear. This was her ride. I was a passenger.
I experimented and discovered that Sonja’s unspoken rule against movement didn’t seem to apply to my hands or mouth. I began a journey of exploration across the unknown landscape of her upper body.
My hands discovered and cherished a myriad of wonderful things: the tiny ridge of bone between her shoulder blades, the shallow dimples at the small of her back.
Her nipples awoke and hardened under the attentions of my tongue and fingers.
It couldn’t last long; there was no way. I hadn’t been with a woman in years. Besides, she was a professional. Surely her techniques and instincts would coax an orgasm out of me faster than any amateur could.
But it did last, longer than I would have dreamed possible and then, longer still. She wasn’t teasing me; she was trying with all her heart to push me over the edge, but something in me resisted. I couldn’t quite turn loose. She kept me dancing on the razor’s edge for longer than I would have dreamed was humanly possible.
Her own breathing became faster. She began to make little self-concerned grunts, the kind of sound you never make when you think someone else can hear you.
She didn’t squeal when she came, or yell, or moan, or any of the things you’d expect from someone whose job depended on a flair for theatrics in bed. Instead, she gripped me tighter than I have ever felt before and continued to ride me as she ran through a series of unbelievable contractions.
Then, she leaned down and bit my shoulder. Hard.
The dam gave way. Four years of sexual repression reached up and broke free like a butterfly tearing its way out of a cocoon.
Her lips fused themselves to my mouth as we both rode our orgasms down to a dizzying stop.
She lay her head on my shoulder and fell asleep on top of me. In a little while, I drifted off for the third time that night.
CHAPTER 13
Sonja stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the frame. She yawned and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She was wrapped in one of my old robes. Her hair was a mess, her face swollen. She looked beautiful.
I tried to smile. “Morning, sleepyhead. What are you doing up?”
She stretched languidly. “I smelled bacon frying.” She yawned again. “What time is it?”
I forked a couple of strips of bacon out of the pan and onto a plate. “Breakfast time. Why? Got an appointment?”
She shook her head, throwing her mop of auburn hair into artful disarray. “I don’t do appointments anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
She picked up a slice of bacon, looked at both sides of it and nibbled the end off. “It means what it sounds like.”
She swallowed the bacon. “I figure it like this: you’re either going to solve this case, or you’re not. If you do, Michael’s insurance will pay off his indenture. With my savings, what’s left over should be enough for me to retire on, if I’m careful. If you don’t solve the case, I’m going to have a steady job for at least the next decade, so there’s no point in maintaining my clientele.”
She shrugged. “I’m betting on you. I think you can solve this thing.” She took another bite of bacon.
I picked up both of our plates and moved them to the kitchen table. “I appreciate the vote of confidence. Would you grab a couple of glasses and that pitcher of O.J. from the fridge?”
While Sonja poured the orange juice, I went after coffee and silverware.
We ate in near silence. A half-dozen times I thought of something to say, only to chop it off a second before I opened my mouth.
What was she? A client? My boss? A new friend? A lover? How was I supposed to feel towards her? How should I act?
The heat of her body burned fresh in my mind, the flutter of her eyelashes against my cheek. Half of me wanted to rip that robe off her and screw her brains out on the kitchen floor.
The other half of me whispered that what had happened last night had been a betrayal, an act of unfaithfulness to Maggie’s memory. And that this woman had no right to be sitting in Maggie’s chair, wearing my robe the way that Maggie would have done.
Sonja watched me from across the table, chewing slowly. She swallowed. “I have some things to take care of this morning. Can I come by later? Say, early evening?”
I had a mouth full of egg. I nodded and swallowed. “Of course.”
I hesitated a second, then made a decision. “House, Sonja has the run of the place when I’m not here. Store her in your permanent files.”
“Certainly, David.”
Sonja looked startled. “You don’t have to do that.”
“What if you show up when I’m not around? This isn’t exactly a good neighborhood. I’m not worried; House is smart enough to keep you out of serious trouble.”
She looked up at the ceiling. “I won’t give you any cause for alarm, House. I promise.”
“I appreciate that, Ms. Winter.”
“Call me Sonja. Please.”
“Very well, Sonja.”
I stood up and went in search of cigarettes. My quest led me to the hall closet and my jacket. When I returned, I leaned against the kitchen doorframe the way Sonja had earlier.
I lit a cigarette. “I’m not sure what my plans are this morning. At this stage of the game, I’m basically waiting for a couple of people t
o return my calls.”
Sonja started carrying dishes to the sink.
“Don’t worry about those,” I said. “House will get them. Won’t you House?”
“Of course, David.”
The door to a service alcove slid open and House’s kitchen drone rolled across the tile on soft yellow neoprene wheels, and began clearing away the dishes and loading them into the dishwasher.
The drone looked nothing at all like the anthropomorphic metal-man robots in adventure vids. It was about three-quarters my height, topped with two vid cameras mounted on a gantry crane. Its tubular alloy arms were long and multi-jointed. I’d always thought that it looked clumsy, but House guided it through its work routines with an economical grace that rivaled a zero-g ballet.
Sonja stared at the remote. “House is quite the talented fellow.”
“Absolutely.”
“Are there more of those around?”
“Several.”
Sonja’s eyebrows drew together. “Why haven’t I seen any before now?”
“House is programmed to keep his drones out of sight. Unless I tell him otherwise, he’s very careful to clean rooms only when they aren’t occupied. If you did happen to walk into a room where one of his remotes was working, House would stop it where it stood to avoid distracting you.”
“Why did this one come out now?”
I shrugged. “House probably interpreted my last remark as an order to get off his butt and do the dishes now.”
House spoke up. “I’m sorry, David. Have I misinterpreted your instructions? Shall I put the drone away?”
I shook my head. “Don’t sweat it, House.” I put out the cigarette. “I’m for the showers.”
Sonja looked at her watch. “I need to get dressed and get going.”
We were both making excuses to put some distance between ourselves. There was an awkward tension between us that needed time to iron itself out.
Something had happened last night, something important. I had closed a few old doors and, maybe, opened a few new ones. I just wasn’t sure that I was ready to take out my soul and examine it in the bright light of day.
After Sonja had dressed and collected her things, I walked her to the door. “Thank you.”
She looked up into my eyes. “For what?”
“For last night,” I said. “For understanding. For a lot of things.”
She kissed me lightly on the lips and smiled. “Any time, David. Thank you.”
The instant the door closed behind her, I realized that I didn’t want to be alone after all. I stared at the door and listened to the soft click of her heels against the sidewalk, a gentle cadence fading into the distance. There was still time to catch her, to ask her to come back.
She would come; I was almost certain of that. She didn’t have any appointments; she’d already told me so. Her list of things-to-do was a polite fiction, intended to give me the solitude she’d seen me groping for.
I tore my eyes away from the door. There were things to do. Not big things, or important things, but things that would keep me busy. With any luck, I could occupy myself enough so that I wouldn’t feel the emptiness she’d left in my house.
I skipped my shower and spent the morning shooting trids of No Resurrection. I chain-smoked two-thirds of a pack of cigarettes while House played Wolf Cooper’s Iron Horse Blues over and over again. The alternating growl and croon of the old man’s voice was loud enough that I couldn’t hear the sound of my own breathing.
When I finish a new piece, I usually shoot a dozen or so trids, and forward a couple of the best to Susan Blayne, at Blayne Galleries. This time, I couldn’t seem to stop. I would shoot seven or eight frames, shift my position, and then shoot another set. When I’d shot from every angle I could think of, I would order House to adjust the lighting, and I’d start again.
The electronic bleat of the holo-camera’s discharging condensers punctuated Wolf’s syrup-coated sandpaper vocals.
“Whoa... Cold steel rails...” [BLEAT]
“Takin’ me for one last ride...” [BLEAT]
“Lord, I just can’t stop cryin’.” [BLEAT]
I shot a chip full of images, loaded another chip in the camera and kept going. My shots started coming faster, closer together, until they began to lose any semblance of composition, or planning.
Some part of me heard the phone ringing over the pounding of the blues tune and the staccato bleating of my camera. I ignored it.
I orbited the sculpture like a predator circling wounded prey. The button beneath my finger became a trigger. I fired the holo-camera at my helpless target again, and again, and again.
Some unknown time later, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor of my workshop. The holo-camera dangled from my right wrist by its strap. At least a dozen data chips lay scattered across the floor. Some of them were damaged, crushed and ground into the tile by the heels of my shoes during my insane little dance around the sculpture.
My ears were ringing from the unaccustomed silence. The music had stopped. At some point, I must have told House to shut it off, but I couldn’t recall having done so. The skin on my cheeks was stiff from the salt of dried tears that I didn’t remember crying.
I climbed to my feet; my knees were a little unstable at first. I walked out of the workshop without looking at the piece on the pedestal. “House?”
“Yes, David?”
“Take care of the mess in there, will you?”
“Of course, David.”
“And sort through the data chips on the floor. Some of them are damaged, but you should be able to salvage the others. Have a look at the trids that I shot and see if you can find two or three good ones. Don’t worry about composition; just look for shots that are well lit, well focused, and are close enough to being centered that you can crop the edges to center them up.”
“Of course, David. Anything else?”
“Yeah, transmit holos of the best shots to Susan Blayne. Maybe she can sell that damn thing and get it out of my house.”
“Of course, David.”
Susan was pretty much a one-horse setup, but she seemed to have a knack for finding buyers for my pieces. My work never sold enough to make me rich or popular, but it sold often enough to make me feel like an artist. Susan had worked pretty hard for me in the past. She deserved better than whatever House could rustle off the floor, but I didn’t want to look at the piece anymore.
I might never look at it again. I recognized it now for what it was: a symbol of my own weakness; tangible evidence that I couldn’t lay my past to rest.
“By the way, David, you have a phone message. Shall I play it back?”
“Not right now. I’m heading for the showers. You can do something else for me, though. When you’re transmitting those holos to Susan, shoot copies to Rico Martinez at Falcon’s Nest. I think the piece is garbage, but I promised Rico that he could get a look at it.”
“Very well, David. What shower program shall I run today?”
“No program, House. No illusions. Just turn on the hot water. My brain can use a dose of reality for a change.”
CHAPTER 14
After my shower, I fixed myself a cup of coffee. I had puttered away the morning feeling sorry for myself. Now it was time to turn my attention back to the case. I decided to start with the phone message. I asked House to play it back, and project it on the wall. John’s image appeared, a grin on his face. “Sarge, I was hoping to catch you at home. You’ve got to come see me... today!” His grin got even bigger. “I’m serious! When you get this message, drop what you’re doing and come see me. I’ve got something to show you.”
He reached out to terminate the connection. My wall sizzled with static.
I left the Zone and caught a taxi to Dome 17. Neuro-Tech Robotics occupied a five-story office block on Hawthorne Boulevard. Almost exactly as wide as it was tall, the building was a nearly featureless cube of cement. Its windows were small, widely-spaced rectangles of bulletproof
polycarbon, designed for industrial security rather than beauty.
The overall effect was not just boring, but industrial-strength boring. John had tried hiring an architectural firm to give the building a face-lift, but the simulations for every design proposal came out looking like a cube with fancy do-dads glued on.
John often cited it as proof of one of the basic truths of life: You can’t polish a turd.
Short of huge investments and major construction, during daylight hours, Neuro-Tech’s headquarters would remain a big, ugly cube. After the sun went down, it was a different matter entirely. Holographic-facades were cheap; once John had projectors installed, changing his building’s image became a simple matter of swapping software. At night, it could become Cinderella’s castle, if he wanted it to.
Right now, though, the sun was up and John’s building was as ugly as a mud fence.
I walked through the front doors and into the lobby. It was very nicely furnished: plush emerald carpeting, and teak furniture with brass fittings. John’s attempt to compensate for the building’s dowdy exterior, I guess.
Ms. Carlen, the receptionist, sat behind a curved teak counter. She looked up when I walked in, smiled, and waved me straight through to the elevators. “Good afternoon, Mr. Stalin. He’s in his apartment, if you’d like to go up.”
I nodded and smiled as I walked by. “Thank you.”
I stepped into the elevator and asked it to take me to the top floor.
As expected, I was greeted by the flat mechanical voice of Mainframe, John’s AI. “You have requested access to a controlled area. Please stare at the black glass data plate set into the wall to your left. There will be a brief flash of red light. You will feel no pain or discomfort.”
I complied.
The burst of red laser light startled my eyes. You can brace your body for a punch, but there’s no way to steel your pupils against a sudden change in lighting.
“Retinal imaging and pattern matching are satisfactory,” the computer voice said. “Please place the palm of either hand against the glass.”
