by Jean Johnson
“I still might. How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Shen demanded. He tried pushing her away again, but she clung stubbornly.
Leo kept her eyes locked with his. “Send a robot to sector B, level five, in the southwest room off the junction of corridors five and G. You will find a hardstate scholastic comm unit, one of the old Jayvisi 47s, sitting on one of the desks. I picked the Jayvisi 47 scholastic model because all it can do is transmit and receive signals from the hypercomm info channels.
“Pick it up, and do a remote search on all information pertaining to either ‘Raider Clan’ or ‘Enalia System,’ which is where the Raider Clan is based . . . or you can even do a search on ‘Borgite Project’ or the history of this colonyworld. There’s no government left on this colonyworld strong enough and rich enough to spend its resources on reclaiming this place. It’s a safe method of checking up on all of these things because there’s no way the Jayvisi could threaten your control of this facility either; all it does is send and retrieve static information. But . . . do me a favor, and don’t break it. Please,” she added as he frowned at her. “I only have two of the 47s left in my functioning tech collection.”
He gazed off over her head for a long moment, lifting his hand and gesturing with his fingers, then nodded. “I’ve sent a robot to pick it up. But I can’t examine the truthfulness of your claim while you’re clinging to me. If you’re an electrokinetic like me, you could be trying to distort my perceptions of reality versus virtuality.”
“That’s easily fixed,” Leo promised. “Take us back to the Sleeping Beauty program. It’s a far less sensitive subsection of the system. I can safely let go of you once we’re there, and from there, I can make my way back to my body with no problem—and you do want me to get back to my body with no problem for one very important reason: if I’m telling the truth, then I am here to rescue you . . . and somehow I don’t think that’s a chance you’ll want to throw away. Not when you’re the man who saved three hundred and fourteen fellow Gengins so they could have a chance at freedom. Now it’s your turn, and you do deserve your freedom.”
Shen didn’t say anything. Lifting his hand, he flicked his fingers. The long corridor they were in dissolved again, and again Leo clung tightly to him . . . until her arms were dragged free by the force of his programming. They were back in the Sleeping Beauty entertainment program, but she was the one now tied to the bed. Fully clothed, but bound hand and foot to the four posts of the canopied bed and gagged with a leather strap.
He was definitely the better electrokinetic; she hadn’t even sensed him reversing their positions in the programming. Then again, after more than a hundred years, he probably knows everything there is to know about how to program this place on the fly.
“You will stay here until I have examined the veracity of your claims,” he ordered.
His hand swept through the air over her body, making her skin tingle from the invisible layers of security he was adding. Her heart skipped a beat, speeding up with adrenaline-tinged fear. Not a lot of fear; she was fairly sure Shen Codah was taking her invasion and her claims seriously enough to investigate in full rather than just mindlessly terminate. But he was definitely the better electrokinetic.
The sight of him stepping back from the side of the bed prompted her to speak. “Heh! Ar’ hyu gomma fiff me?”
Shen frowned, confused. “What?”
Leo winced. Oh, dear stars in heaven, why did I try to say that? She wanted to berate her subconscious, but he was patently waiting for a reply. As she tried to think of a way to tell him “never mind” without the leather gag muffling it beyond all recognition, he leaned over and tugged the strap out of her mouth.
“What did you say?” he repeated.
The tingle of the security measures was still there. Licking her lips, Leo gave in and repeated herself. “I said, ‘Hey! Aren’t you going to kiss me?’ ”
The befuddled look he gave her was rather cute. “Aren’t I going to . . . ? Why would you ask that?”
“Well . . . here I am, in a romantic entertainment program, tied spread-eagle to your bed. I’m lying here at the mercy of a handsome man, prepped and ready for you to do all manner of kinky things to me . . . and all you’re planning on doing is leaving me here alone,” she stated as boldly as she could. In for a processor, in for a program, and all . . . “It’s probably just the setting stirring up the mood, but . . . well, I’m feeling a bit disappointed.”
“Disappointed?” Shen repeated skeptically.
“Yes. Disappointed. When I had you tied to this bed, bound and at my mercy, I kissed you. I was just . . . you know . . . Just because I was hired to rescue you doesn’t mean I don’t find you, the person, attractive,” she pointed out. Then she shrugged as best she could, given her tied-down status. “Because I do. I am human, as well as a Gengin.”
He surprised her by kneeling on the bed and bracing his arms on either side of her head. “Tell me, Leo Castanides . . . how much are you being paid to ‘rescue’ me?”
The question made her smile. It was a lopsided smile, but mostly because she didn’t know if he’d believe her or not. “Aside from enough to cover my operating costs? The same thing they pay a lot of the other Gengins who work for them. A priceless treasure beyond compare. There’s the sundry fees for itemized expenses, of course, plus hazardous duty and potential medical coverage . . . but the bulk of what I’m being paid, no one else can afford to give me.”
“And that is?” he prompted, lowering his head close enough to block out some of the virtual sunlight slanting in through the castle windows.
“A home.”
He blinked, visibly confused. Leo took pity on him and clarified her meaning.
“The Raider Clan has offered me amnesty and political asylum. Like a distressing number of Gengin settled worlds, my homeworld has turned a bit insular . . . and rather Project-like in its regards as to who can breed and even when. I’m just genetically ‘superior’ enough to qualify for Minutemaid status, and I’m expected to go out and be a Minutemaid, a mercenary-for-hire . . . but as a Minutemaid, I’m not allowed to breed until I’ve proven I can survive to my thirty-fifth year. Plus, once I do, if I do . . . I’m supposed to breed only with a Minuteman. While I’m sure any number of my fellow Minutemen are worthy enough individuals, I don’t like being told I can or cannot do something as intimate as . . . well, intimacy itself.
“There’s not a single government outside of the Core Worlds which could offer me a better deal than my freedom to choose my own life . . . and the Core Worlds don’t like dealing with Gengins. Particularly not ones who were bred for violent purposes . . . though at least if you look like a Normal, they’re a little more tolerant.”
“It sounds like the universe hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years,” he muttered.
“Some places are worse. Some places are better.” Leo shrugged. “But it’s reality . . . and reality will always be more interesting than virtuality. Living in a virtual world is safer than reality but it’s not actually living, is it?”
He stared at her, his short-cropped hair stained gray with middle age at his temples, his expression shuttered, inscrutable . . . and leaned down, touching his mouth to hers. Slanted it over hers, claiming the kiss she had offered. Leo lifted her chin, parting her lips and returning every nip and taste. Holographic or not, he was a talented electrokinetic, putting every sense into full play in his kiss. Touch, taste, scent, sound, and sight—for all that Leo knew she was only seeing and feeling these things inside her mind.
Breaking off the kiss, he backed off the bed, stood, and vanished. Left on the bed, tied and bound, Leo gauged her programming ability versus the tingling pressure of the security programs keeping a close eye on her virtual location. In the end, she stayed where she was. It was likely that once she left, she would have a very hard time getting back in again. But that wasn’t the reason she stayed.
She stayed because she didn’t want to break his trust. Break
ing into the entertainment subsystems had been a risky move. Hacking his defenses so that he had taken her with him into the main access command zone had been very risky. But he was searching for her Jayvisi comm set . . . and he had left the gag out of her mouth.
And he is one heck of a kisser. At least in virtuality, she acknowledged. I hope he believes me, because I’d love to know if the real Shen Codah can kiss like that, too.
It wasn’t as if she had anything else to think of, bound as she was to a bed in virtuality and crouched in a closet in reality.
SHE was telling the truth.
Shen remembered being educated on a Jayvisi 49 model; they were popular with educators because all they did was access information, ensuring that their users studied, and only studied. They were boring for students, because they couldn’t be used to communicate. But the scholastic units did connect to the archived files of hundreds of worlds in a vast, redundant library of information. The Jayvisi 47 was old and slow, but it did what it was supposed to do: collect and collate data.
The history of his colonyworld was turbulent. There were now five separate governments, none of them claiming territory within a thousand kilometers of his location, and only three of them strong enough to have reestablished interstellar trade with the other worlds out there. More worlds than he remembered . . . and many of them shattered by civil wars, including his own. The Borgite Gengins had abandoned this world shortly after his self-imposed isolation, but because he had destroyed all means of anyone gaining remote access to his systems, he hadn’t known that the old government and its Gengin Project funding had completely collapsed within the first five years.
It was a sobering thought. All this time . . . all this time I’ve been barricaded behind my briar thorn walls, sleeping my way through virtual worlds . . . and I could have been free . . .
Given the layers of security he had cocooned himself in, it would have taken a fellow electrokinetic to reach him. With the other Borgite Gengins offworld and the rest of the planet rocked by strife, no one had made a concerted effort to come back for him, beyond the three group attempts she had listed. That was in the history files, dispassionately collated by the archival programs of the Core Worlds, which even a model as archaic as the Jayvisi 47 could still access. He could even tell who had accessed and collated all that information, and from where, since that was part of the scholastic archive’s information gathering parameters.
Who was Leonida Castanides? Where was Prism Station in the Enalia System? Why . . . was not listed. But he did find a number of footnotes when searching for the “Raider Clan” she mentioned. Some rather interesting history files of their own.
She was telling the truth . . . as far as he could tell.
The question now is, what am I going to do about this information? Do I stay where I am . . . safe but running out of supplies and thus out of time? Or do I take the chance that what I’ve read is real, and risk returning to reality?
Returning to the real world meant disconnecting himself from the facility. After literally more than a century, Shen feared it would be like trying to amputate his own legs. More than that, disconnecting himself didn’t mean just freedom; it meant abandoning his sense of safety and familiarity for the unknown.
It wasn’t an easy choice to make. I can’t make it blindly. I need to know what awaits me, if I do choose to disconnect. I need something more—a lot more—than an abstract like “freedom.” I need . . .
Snapping his fingers, he rematerialized in the entertainment program. Leonida Castanides still lay on the bed where he had bound her, though she stared up at the canopy with a glazed, unseeing expression.
“Leo?”
She blinked, focus returning to her gaze. Twisting her head, she peered at him. “Ah . . . you’ve returned—you believe me, too.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked warily.
“You’re too integrated into these programs not to project your feelings; it’s the blessing and the curse of a really good electrokinetic holoprogrammer. Now that you do believe me, could you please deactivate all the security systems and robots in sector C? Just sector C,” she added quickly.
“Why?” he asked. There wasn’t much in sector C beyond some offices, though he did realize there were a lot of remote access sensors in those offices. That’s how she’s accessing my virtual zones, isn’t it?
Her answer was fervent. “Because I really have to pee, I don’t want to do it in a corner, and I’m not suspended in a self-cleaning biomaintenance tank like you are. And I’d really rather not be shot while running for the nearest facilities.”
Shen chuckled. He couldn’t help it; none of his former captors had plea-bargained for bathroom access. Bargained and threatened for other things, but not for that. Lifting his hands, he summoned the security task panels into the entertainment subprogram. “As you wish. Sector C . . . is now in safe mode. You’re free to move about the corridors. But only sector C.”
“Thank you!”
Her reply was so forceful, he almost expected her to leap off the bed in spite of her bonds, but she didn’t move beyond a few twitches of her muscles. Curious, Shen tipped his head, accessing the cameras in that sector. It took him a few moments to find her in reality, but there she was. A black-and-white-clad woman with an actual ancient three-pointed hat on her head, her blonde hair caught back in a braid, all but sprinting down the hall toward a door marked Women.
She did so, he noticed with a twinge of shame, by leaping over a trio of mummified corpses left long ago on the hallway floor, fallen where the security robots had slaughtered them under his control.
I killed all of those people. It was long ago, and it was for a good cause, or so I believed. But . . . I still killed them. Do I deserve my freedom? Do I deserve to live in reality?
Did the real Prince Charming—if there ever was one—ever ask himself if the sleeping princess deserved to be awakened? On the surface, of course she deserved to be awakened; the princess hadn’t murdered anyone. His had been a deliberate slaying of hundreds of research workers and guards. Not to mention, the whole royal court had been put to sleep alongside her, not slaughtered, so that she would awaken surrounded by familiar faces. I don’t have that option. Everyone I know is most likely long dead.
Leo drew in a deep breath, recapturing his attention. She let it out in a long, happy sigh and blinked, refocusing her gaze on him. “Thank you. Your civility and courtesy are deeply appreciated. Now. How do we go about freeing you? I know you have to have someone else physically disconnect you, and that only you can let that person into your inner sanctum to do so, but beyond that, the details I researched were rather sketchy.”
Shen was somewhat surprised; he had expected her to ask to be released from her bonds first. Folding his arms across his chest, he didn’t answer her question. He still had a few of his own.
“First, you tell me what is supposed to happen to me after I’ve been disconnected from this facility. You say you’re here to free me, but what then?”
“That’s easy. I’m authorized to offer you amnesty and political asylum in the Enalia System, under the governance of the Raider Clan. You’ll have a six-month trial citizenship, to include housing, feeding, and rehabilitation services—strictly in the educational sense,” Leo clarified quickly. “While the various civil wars have made certain advances in technology sporadic at best as governments collapsed and formed and collapsed all over again, you have been out of the loop for slightly more than one hundred years.”
“And how do I pay for this housing and feeding and reeducation program?”
“Well . . . the Raider Clan would like access to the tech of this place,” Leo admitted. “Anything deemed commercially revivable, they’d like to market on your behalf at an even fifty-fifty ratio of the profits above production costs. Plus you’d get free housing beyond the initial six months of your adjustment period, which is how long they calculated it would take you to adapt to the future. If you don’t want
to accept their offer, either of amnesty or of tech rights and split residuals . . . I’m offered to set you up with an official identity as a worldless free-spacer under whatever name you like, arrange for an account in that name filled with ten thousand Core creds—which is the maximum allowable untaxable gift by Core World law, or half a year’s minimum wage salary—and give you a lift wherever you want to go, whether on this world or to any other.”
“That’s it?” Shen asked, taken aback by the offer. “If I don’t want to work with this Raider Clan . . . I go free? With money and an identity?”
Leo shrugged. “You don’t know how the modern world works, so turning you lose isn’t exactly doing you a favor, but you’re not being kicked out the door, either. I wouldn’t advise trying to stick around here. Once you get outside the complex, the local region is a war-torn wasteland. There aren’t any farms within six or seven hundred kilometers of here, let alone towns and cities. At least with ten thousand Core creds in your pocket and a free ride elsewhere, you’d have enough money to get yourself established somewhere, with enough time to start figuring out what you want to do to make a living. The Raider Clan isn’t heartless, and they aren’t thoughtless. They give these options to all the Gengins they help set free.
“Oh—I almost forgot, I’m also authorized to offer the services of the Raider fleet in destroying this facility, if you decide you’d rather see it obliterated than allow any of its tech or information to fall into other hands. But only at your command,” she emphasized. “It’s not meant to be a threat in any way, shape, or form, just an offer of assistance if you’d like to see this place blown off the map once you’re free of it.”
If her previous words hadn’t rocked him to the core, Shen might have indeed taken the thought of blowing up this place a lot more like a threat. But her words did disturb him all the same. To start figuring out what you want to do . . . to make a living. But . . . I haven’t been living . . .
