by Jean Johnson
Needing to think, he sank onto the edge of the bed, staring at the tapestry-covered wall across from him.
“Shen?” the woman lying next to him prompted after several moments had passed. “Hey, if you’re going to sit and think for a while, can you at least untie me? I know I’m only bound in virtuality and all, but if you’re not going to do kinky things to me anytime soon, I really don’t think there’s a point in keeping me tied up like this. I’d rather not break your programming or myself in trying to get free, so there’s no reason. You’ve only turned off the security measures in one sector out there in reality. You haven’t done anything to the security measures here in virtuality.”
Shen turned to look at her. An idea formed in his mind. “You say all these things are being offered by this Raider Clan . . . but the only person I know from the current era is you. What are you going to promise me, to hold as a bond that all these things you’re offering are true?”
She blinked, considering his words. “Well . . . lessons in modern tech, I suppose. As a fellow electrokinetic, I can teach you what you need to know in ways that a non-Psian couldn’t.”
Bracing his hand on the other side of the mattress, he leaned over her. “What about tangible benefits? You offered me an opportunity for ‘kinky things’ in virtuality. Would you be willing to try them out there in reality, once I’m free?”
Her brows rose at his suggestion, but it didn’t take more than a moment for her to smile. “Well, if I get to do kinky things to you in return, out in reality, then I think that could be arranged.”
Another thought crossed his mind. “What about that offer to explore all the ‘archaic tech’ of this place? Would you be one of the people working on it?”
“I suppose, if the Raider Clan extends my contract.”
He wanted to kiss her again . . . but a virtual kiss was nothing compared to a kiss in reality. A kiss and much, much more.
“Tell them to extend your contract. I’ll accept the offer of amnesty and six months of rehabilitation. They can have access to the physical tech of this place, but not the research files. Not that it would do them any good. I destroyed most of it long ago, physical and virtual,” Shen stated, lifting his chin a little.
“I would’ve been surprised if you hadn’t. Most Project escapees tended to destroy or steal away their creators’ research notes. Now, are you going to unbind me and help me get safely to your inner sanctum out there in the real world?” Leo asked him, smiling slightly. “Or are you going to take advantage of my virtual vulnerability and do some preliminary kinky things with me?”
Tempting as her offer was, the thought of doing kinky things to her in reality was too compelling. A simple sweep of his hand dissolved her bonds. Shen shifted back to the edge of the bed so she could have the room to sit up now that she was free. “It’ll take me over half a day to disable the security measures between sector C and my location. If you’re still in that bathroom, go out the door, turn right, and enter the second room on the right; there’s a couch large enough to sleep on and a sink with still potable water. You’re out of luck for edible food, but otherwise you should be comfortable.”
“I brought nutribars. They probably taste as old as the age-powdered packets of food that used to be in the staff vending machines I’ve seen, but they’ll keep me going. And I can always head outside and go back to my ship if necessary. Sector C has an emergency exit tunnel that emerges not far from where my shuttle is parked.”
Curling her legs to the side, Leo leaned forward, braced her palm against his thigh, and swayed almost close enough to kiss him. But she didn’t. Shen frowned in disappointment.
Pulling back, she grinned at him. “Oh, no. I still need to motivate you. You’ll have to wait for a real kiss, with real lips. Go on. You’ve got a lot of work to do. I can’t rescue you without your help on the inside; I’m good, but I’m nowhere near as good an electrokinetic programmer as you.”
Her smile was too tempting. To hell with it. I want something to tide me over while I wait for that rescue. My Princess Charming will just have to deal with it.
Cupping the back of her head, almost dislodging her tricorn hat, Shen pulled her close enough for a very thorough kiss. It wasn’t completely satisfying, but it was enough for now. Releasing her, he stood up and vanished, taking himself back to the main corridor of the research facility’s virtual systems.
Now, where the hell did I put those release codes?
HE was, more or less, the same physical age he had projected in virtuality. There were quite a few more wrinkles on his hide than his virtual self bore, but that could easily be attributed to fluid retention, also known as the bathtub effect. And his face was seamed around the edges by what by now was probably a permanent imprint of the breather mask and headset goggles he had worn. But he had the muscles, and the eyes, and the gray-tinged black hair.
The only thing she still couldn’t tell if it was the same or not was his smile. He was too busy coughing from having to breathe dusty, unfiltered air and grimacing at the pale blue goo clinging to his fluid-wrinkled skin to bother. Smiles weren’t on his immediate agenda.
Switching to a clean towel and rubbing at another section of his body, scrubbing off the blue goo, she waited for his coughing to ease. There wasn’t much she could do to stop it, not when real air was just something his lungs would have to get used to breathing.
Besides, she thought, rubbing the age-worn fabric over his legs, he’s damnably sexy in person. What red-blooded woman wouldn’t want to get her hands all over a man like him? Well, presuming she doesn’t mind older men. Which I don’t.
That thought made her smile. He might look like he was forty-seven to her twenty-seven, but according to his file, he was closer to one hundred thirty-three. That stuff he was being injected with, the anti-aging agents . . . that’s an old tech we’ve lost. It’ll be worth a fortune if it can be redeveloped. If we want it redeveloped. The problem is, it’d be worth a fortune and a massive interstellar war.
I’ll have to warn the Raider Clan how effective the stuff is. They weren’t sure if I’d be rescuing a wizened old gnome of a man or maybe just a virtual ghost running all these machines. But if it really works to slow down aging—as it seems to—and word gets out that the tech is still viable . . . well, it won’t be the first time I’ve destroyed a bit of technology I didn’t think was safe to let loose in someone else’s hands. Even the Raider Clan’s . . .
“Hey.” His voice was rough, gravelly. Rusty with disuse, though he had undoubtedly used it in the same intermittent way his muscles had used the resistance of the fluid for a source of exercise as well as support, keeping himself more or less in shape.
“Yes?” Leo asked, curious.
“I’m waiting . . .” He gave her an expectant look. When she only returned it with a blank, noncomprehending one, Shen sighed and sagged back on the floor of the platform next to the rim of his control tank. A moment later, a strangled snort escaped him. It was followed by a second one.
Oh! She bit her lip to keep from giggling, but couldn’t stop her smile as he snorked a third time. “Don’t even bother, Shen. You may have been ‘asleep’ for a hundred years, but you fail miserably at snoring.”
Leaning down over him, she kissed him on his lips. It was soft, sweet, and he tasted vaguely of plexi, suspension goo, and recycled air. Nor did his lips move as smoothly in reality as they had in his virtual world; he still had most of the muscles of his virtual self-projection, but he wasn’t used to consciously using them in reality yet, which made his responses a bit awkward.
She wasn’t going to hold any of it against him. Practice does make perfect, after all.
Shen smiled, letting his head drop gently back to the floor. “I’m free. I’m really, truly free . . . Ow.”
“Ow?” she repeated, confused.
He frowned, but not at her. “I think I bruised my arm on the edge of the tank when you hauled me out. And my thigh . . . and this platform is disturbi
ngly hard. And, as much as it pains me to admit it,” Shen added, his voice still somewhat rough, “I don’t think I’ll be able to walk all the way out of here. I have muscles, but . . . not the memory of how to move them.”
“I guessed as much. The reality-is-stranger-than-virtuality syndrome. I get that way if I spend more than eight or so hours at a time inside a virtual program, and holoprogram addicts suffer for it when they spend weeks and months in virtuality. Luckily, it’s nothing that a few weeks of physical therapy won’t cure. Come on, on your feet,” Leo coaxed. “I found a hoverchair in the medical wing to give you a ride out to the ship, and some sheets and blankets to preserve your dignity, but that’s all down on the main floor. We have a set of steps to navigate, first.”
Nodding, Shen looped one arm around her shoulders, letting her reposition herself at his side. He kissed her cheek while she was shuffling into a sturdy squat. “For good luck,” he told her when she glanced at him. “And as the first down payment on a thank-you. I . . . would have run out of supplies in just a few more years, if you hadn’t come along.” He grimaced wryly. “I also don’t think I’ll be ready for anything more vigorous until I’ve been looked at by modern medical techs. I know I’m fine in virtuality, but . . . I have no idea if, you know, everything still works in reality.”
She smiled, and carefully did not look at his groin. “Then I’ll just wait and take the rest of those installments after you’ve had some physical therapy and regained your equilibrium. Of course, the sooner we get you out to my shuttle, the sooner the Raider pilot who brought me here can fly both of us back to the Enalia System.”
“These Raider Clan people had better be all that you’ve promised,” Shen muttered.
“They will be. If not, you can take me captive and do kinky things to me in reality—feel free to do so anyway, once you’re feeling better,” she joked. “It was quite arousing. Now, I’ll pull you to your feet on three. I can support most of your weight since I’m bred to be stronger than I look, but all that tech welded to your flesh makes you heavier than you look. So you’ll have to do some of the walking, too. We’ll just take it slow and easy, since we have all the time in the world, now that you’re free.
“Ready? On one . . . two . . .”
THE first thing Leo Castanides saw when she opened the door of her home was a plexi sword. A cheap, child-sized plexi sword, as light as a datapad and no sharper along its edge than the side of a pencil. It dangled from a string hung from the ceiling of her entryway. Next to it was an equally child-sized shield, both of them painted in fake silver and gold.
After a long day of cataloguing yet another fraction of the tech they had literally stripped out of the Borgite Project stronghold, leaving nothing behind but bare concrete walls, unlocked doors, and a note painted on a couple walls to contact the Raider Clan in the Enalia System if anyone had any further inquiries . . . a cheap toy sword and shield were not what she’d expected to see.
Pushing her tricorn hat back on her head—she loved her Minutemaid hat, even though she was firmly an Enalian citizen these days—Leo reached up and plucked the sword and shield free. The strings were easily snapped, being little more than threads. Beyond them, she saw more threads holding up more objects. Long strips of crepe and tissue paper, crudely colored in shades of brown and green and scribbled with crude approximations of leaves and thorns.
Comprehension dawned.
Grinning, Leo adjusted her hat firmly on her head, gripped the shield in her left hand and the sword in her right, and “hacked” her way through the makeshift walls of mock briar thorns. As suspected, the display of suspended barriers led through the living room, past the door to the kitchen, and down the back hall to the bedroom. Her bedroom, not his. Another telling point in this mock dramatization.
Batting aside a last bit of paper vine, she pushed the button for her bedroom door. It slid back quietly, revealing a brand-new, archaic-styled canopy bed in place of her older, simpler one. A bigger bed, she noted. A bed occupied by the recumbent form of a middle-aged man.
Three things caught her attention in the glow of the setting sun visible beyond the gauzy bedroom curtains; two of them had grown familiar over the last six weeks since his rescue. His gray-streaked black hair was somewhat longer than it had been, though still quite short by local fashion standards. His calves, thighs, forearms, and biceps were banded with fading scars where the old metal bands used to reside; more body-friendly organic transceiver nodes had been transplanted in their place, similar to the ones in her own limbs, which boosted her electrokinetic abilities.
And he was quite, quite naked, with not a trace of pale blue goo, bathtub wrinkles, or metal implants to be found. That was a new twist on the man she had come to know and love.
The warmth of the Enalian summer night at the latitude where they lived was enough to keep him comfortable as he rested on what should have been her original bed. The fact that it wasn’t her bed anymore didn’t upset her. Rather the opposite. In fact, the mere thought of all this effort on his part was doing a very good job of arousing her.
If he’s in here, re-creating how we first met, that means he’s finally been given the all-clear by his therapists for lovemaking. Good! Excellent, in fact.
Stepping quietly into the bedroom, Leo poked the toy sword at the controls, shutting the door. She set her weapon and shield on top of her dresser, then removed her hat and hung it on its wall hook by the door frame. Another glance at the bed showed what could have been a flickering eyelid, but she couldn’t be sure.
Leo toed off her cuffed, ankle-length boots and untied the laces of her vest as she stepped out of them. It looked like his eyelids flickered again at the soft flump of the leather hitting the floor, but otherwise he didn’t respond. He also didn’t try to fake a snore while she finished approaching the new bed, for which she was grateful. As much as she was pleased he was ready and willing to take this next step with her, she didn’t think giggling would be appropriate. Not after all the trouble he’d gone to, creating that fake paper briar patch and finding those silly toys . . .
It was really quite sweet of him. Loosening the ties at her wrists and throat, she sank onto the side of the bed. This close, she could see a faint shiver cross his skin at her proximity, and the tightening of his dusky nipples. Not to mention the slight twitch of his not quite flaccid shaft. A lift of her hand and a bit of concentration was all it took to tap into his organic transceivers. Shivers rippled across his muscles as she dusted his limbs with phantom caresses. With her hand ghosting several centimeters above his skin, she touched him with just her mind, preparing him for the reality ahead.
A glance at his face showed his eyes still shut, but his lower lip was caught in his teeth. A second glance at his loins showed his flesh thickening in tiny but visible jerks, tied to the blood pumping in time with the beating of his heart. Not wanting to torment him too much, she lowered her hand to the bed on his far side, leaned down over that handsome pair of lips, and kissed him.
This time, he tasted of mouthwash and man. This time, his lips parted and pressed with a lot more skill. This time, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders to pull her down closer, rather than lift himself higher. Satisfied that he was very much awake and willing, Leo kissed him hungrily.
Shen returned it greedily, until kissing wasn’t enough. Impatient fingers tugged at her shirt, pulling it up over her head. That broke their kiss, since she was forced to detangle herself from the fabric. As soon as he flung her top to the floor, he cupped her breasts in his palms. The skill he used to rub and stimulate her nipples with his thumbs surprised her a little, until she remembered just how many of those entertainment files had included romantic interludes in their programming. Grinning, Leo pushed her breasts into his hands, encouraging him.
The sight of his eyelids still shut made her frown a moment later. She could have sworn she’d kissed him thoroughly enough to wake him. A glance at his loins showed his shaft arcing up over his lower abdomen
in an inviting curve the length of her hand. Well, if kissing him on the lips doesn’t open his eyes . . .
Shifting free of his grasp, she bent over his hips and bestowed a tender kiss on the turgid tip of his shaft. His sharp inhale made her slant her gaze at his face. Grinning at the sight of his blinking brown eyes, she licked around the little head and sucked him deep into her mouth.
That snapped his eyes wide. Body tense, hands clutching at her head, Shen arched into her bobbing, inhaling, enthusiastic nether-kiss. He groaned when she swirled her tongue, and choked out her name when she rapidly flicked his tip. “Leo!”
Leo released him with a chuckle. He groaned again, this time in disappointment, but she avoided his hands. Rather than letting him drag her back down, she moved off the bed completely and unfastened her pants.
Pushing up onto one elbow, Shen watched her strip off the last of her clothes. Moving his other hand to his groin, he caressed himself lightly as she peeled off her socks and underwear. To Leo, the sight of him touching himself was erotic. So was the way he reached up and circled one finger around her breasts, then slid it down between her thighs, boldly proclaiming his right to touch her flesh. Head tipping back, eyes drifting shut, Leo rocked into his gentle, stimulating strokes.
A moment later her own eyes snapped open from the sudden spark of energy crawling like tiny nibbling mouths across her skin. His wicked grin told her she wasn’t the only one capable of invading a fellow electrokinetic’s transceiver nodes for pleasurable stimulation. Probing deep with two fingers, he hooked them in her body and gently tugged her close, sitting up so that he could meet her approaching breasts with hungry, lustful nips from his real mouth, letting the phantom ones he was projecting electrokinetically caress other, more peripheral parts.
Clutching his shoulders, Leo caressed his skin, then pushed him down. He murmured a protest, clinging to her with his free arm and lips, his right hand still occupied with a very skillful exploration of her flesh. Still, she persisted until he was lying on his back again, though it meant she half-straddled him in his wordless, insistent demand to keep her close.
