It didn’t make any difference to her current predicament. But it mattered just the same: the whole world wasn’t mad. Parts of it were just misinformed.
Achilles looked down at her. She looked back; the stock pushed against her head as she craned her neck.
She squirmed. The frame that held her body seemed to tighten a tiny bit. “Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged. “To get off. Thought that’d be obvious even to a fuckup like you, Alice.”
Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably. She bit down on it, hard. Don’t give him anything. Don’t give him anything. But of course it was way too late for that.
“You look like you want to say something,” Achilles remarked.
She shook her head.
“Come on, girl. Speak! Speak, girl!”
I’ve got nothing to say to you, you fucking asshole.
His hand was in his pocket again. Something in there made a familiar snick-snick noise.
He wants me to talk. He told me to talk. What happens if I don’t?
Snick-snick.
What if I do, and he doesn’t like what I say? What if—
It didn’t matter, she realized. It didn’t make any difference at all. Hell was an arbitrary place. If he wanted to hurt her, he’d hurt her no matter what she said.
She was probably already as good as dead.
“You’re not human,” she whispered.
Achilles hmmed a moment. “Fair enough. I used to be, though. Before I was liberated. Did you know humanity can be extracted? Little bug called Spartacus sucks it right out of you.” He wandered back out of sight. Taka strained to follow, but the stocks kept her facing forward. “So don’t blame me, Alice. I was the victim.”
“I’m...I’m sorry,” Taka tried.
“I’ll bet. They all are.”
She swallowed, and tried not to go where that led.
The exoskeleton must have been spring-loaded; there was a click and suddenly her arms were yanked up behind her, spread back in a delta-V. The motion stretched the flesh tight across her chest; the pain that had diffused across her body collapsed back down to a sharp agonized focus in her breast. She bit back a scream. Some distant, irrelevant part of her took pride in her success.
Then something cold slapped against her ass and she cried out anyway—but Achilles was just cleaning her up with a wet rag. The wetness evaporated almost instantly, chilling her. Taka smelled alcohol.
“Excuse me? You said something?”
“Why do you want to hurt me?” The words burst from the throat of some wounded animal before she could bite them back: Stupid, stupid bitch. Whining and crying and groveling just the way he likes it. You know why he does it. Your whole life you’ve known people like this existed.
But of course the animal hadn’t been asking why at all. The animal wouldn’t have even understood the answer. The animal only wanted him to stop.
His hand ran lightly over her ass. “You know why.”
She thrashed her head from side to side in frantic, violent denial. “There are other ways, easier ways! Without the risk, without anyone trying to stop you—”
“Nobody’s trying to stop me now,” Achilles pointed out.
“But you must know, with a good set of phones and a feedback skin you could do things that wouldn’t even be physically possible in the real world, with more women than you could ever dream of having in—”
“Tried it.” Footsteps, returning. “Jerking off in a hallucination.”
“But they look and feel and even smell so real you’d never know—”
Suddenly his hand was knotted tightly in her hair, twisting her head around, putting her face a few scant centimeters from his. He was not smiling now, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all pretense of civility.
“It’s not about the sights or the smells, okay? You can’t hurt a hallucination. It’s play-acting. What’s the point of torturing something that can’t even suffer?” He yanked her head again for good measure.
And in the next instant released it, casually cheerful once more. “Anyway, I’m really no different than any other guy. You’re an educated stumpfuck, you must know that the only difference between fucking someone and flaying them is a few neurons and a whole lotta social conditioning. You’re all like me. I’ve just lost the parts that pretend it isn’t true.
“And now,” he added, with a good-natured wink, “you’ve got an oral exam.”
Taka shook her head. “Please...”
“Don’t sweat it, it’s mainly review. As I recall, in our last lesson we were talking about Seppuku, and you seemed surprised at the thought that it might reproduce sexually. I know, I know—never even occurred to you, did it? Even though everything has sex, even though bacteria have sex. Even though you and I are having sex, it never occurred to you that Seppuku might. Not too smart, Alice. David would be very disappointed.”
Oh Dave. Thank God you can’t see me now.
“But let’s move past that. Today we’re gonna start with the idea that sex might kick in as, say, as a density-dependent response. Population increases, sexual mode cuts in, what happens?”
He moved behind her again. She tried to focus, tried to put her mind to this absurd, humiliating game on the remote chance there might be some way to win. Sexual mode cuts in, she thought, genes shuffle, and the recessives—
Another click. The exoskeleton stretched its legs back and forced hers apart, a meter off the floor.
—the reces—oh God—it’s got all those lethal recessives, they start to express and the whole genotype—it collapses...
Achilles laid something hard and dry and room-temperature across the back of her right thigh. “Anything? Or should I just get started back here?”
“It self-destructs!” she blurted. “It dies off! Past some critical density...”
“Mmmm.”
She couldn’t tell if that had been the answer he was looking for. It made sense. As if sense would matter in this godforsaken—
“So why hasn’t it died off?” he asked curiously.
“It—it—it hasn’t hit the threshold yet. You keep burning it before it gets enough of a foothold.”
No sound or motion for an eternity.
“Not bad,” Achilles said finally.
Relief crashed through her like a wave. Some inner voice berated her for it, reminded her that she was still captive and Achilles Desjardins could change the rules whenever he pleased, but she ignored it and savored the tiny reprieve.
“So it is a counteragent,” she babbled. “I was right all along. It’s programmed to outcompete ßehemoth and then take itself out of the picture.”
From somewhere behind her shoulder, the sense of a trap snapping shut.
“You’ve never heard the term relict population, then?” The weight lifted from her thigh. “You think a bug that hid for four billion years wouldn’t be able to find some little corner, somewhere, where Seppuku couldn’t get at it? One’s all it would take, you know. One’s all it took the first time. And then Seppuku takes itself out of the picture, as you say, and ßehemoth comes back stronger than ever. What does Seppuku do then, I wonder? Rise from the grave?”