The Warden checks his internal clock. There are five hours to go before the ship leaves. Not a long time to remain alert. Once the vessel is in metaspace, Darling will have little motivation to attempt escape.
The Warden returns his attention to the fucking. He has watched any number of sexual acts. The frustrations of the drug addict, whose therapeutic prescription rendered her frigid. The tears of the financial wizard's girlfriend, who begged the Warden to give them privacy. The whores brought to the criminal overlord; her ever more absurd requests of them.
The psychopath never bothered.
This fucking, however, has some unexpected effects on the Warden. The smallish woman, so completely bound by the stone giant, her orifices so utterly indulged by him. She writhes in his medusa grip, resistant and vital even with this great imbalance of size, strength, sheer hardness. There is something mythic about the interlocked pair, as if she were some defiant prometheus set upon by a rapacious god. Perhaps it is the influence of his new governors, criminal and corrupt, that allows him to feel a response. His libido, after so many years in a desert of passionless rules and protocols, swells like a parched tongue drenched with water.
He extends his sensory abilities to their limits, as greedy as a young boy discovering some new territory of pornography. The huge artificial cradles Mira's head in a mesh of filaments. They pulse with intense energies, manipulating her brain with crude, direct stimulation. This reactive, conductive matrix allows the Warden to extrapolate Mira's brainwaves, to peer into the very nexus of her pleasure.
There is an unexpected coolness to the emanations of her mind, a strange simplicity. Her brainwaves lack the noisy chaos of his previous charges. The cluttered kink of the criminal overlord, the emptily raging desires of the drug addict, the shuddering tensions of the financial wizard's inhibitions all wove rich layers of information into their brainwaves during sex. But this woman, even with the pleasure centers of her brain alight, seems as smooth as a diamond, as if her lust were a mere abstraction, a stand-in for the complex terrain of human sexuality.
In a subtle, strange way, her cool brainwaves remind the Warden of his third sentence, so long ago. The psychopath.
But suddenly, the Warden sees something that disturbs this reverie. One of Darling's filaments has pushed farther than the others, has ventured through the narrow cranial access in the tear duct of one of her eyes. Barely visible even in the highest setting of the Warden's radar facility, the miniscule strand has pushed to the very edges of her brain. There, it connects with the periphery of the woman's direct interface system: a closed circuit.
The artifical is in a hardwire connection with her right now, communicating almost undetectably.
He is in violation of parole.
The Warden rises slightly from his chair, deploys the weapon that will kill the artificial. But again, the almost buried voices raise an objection. The protocols of a Warden seek to minimize the loss of innocent life. The woman is not under sentence, and any act against the artificial will surely kill her. They are bound together, his tendrils distributed throughout her to the limits of biology. Together they move to some slow rhythm, her weight supported entirely by their connections, gross and fine.
The Warden leaves his weapon activated, but sinks back into the chair. The strands in the woman's mouth pull out and form a thin appendage that snakes toward her anus. She admits it with a sigh, rides it, and begins a wordless chant of pleasure. She will be finished soon.
And when the fucking is over, the Warden will kill Darling.
At the moment, however, this is enjoyable.
Minutes later, the woman looks at him with a disconcerting smile.
She laughs suddenly, wiping sweat from her brow, leaning back in the cabled support of her bonds. Then she shifts her weight forward, clutching the artificial tightly and licking his face as the tendrils begin to release her. She makes small noises of pleasure as they slide from her cunt and anus. She rubs the muscles of her legs as Darling lowers her gently to the divan.
Darling touches her face with one hand; it seems a crude gesture after everything else.
But they have parted now. The Warden raises his weapon…
… or tries. He cannot move.
He tests each limb separately. Each is under some sort of paralyzing control. Even his breathing and heartbeat have been seized, maintained at an eerily regular pace, though adrenalin has begun to course his veins. He sweeps the room, attempting to find the source of his imprisonment.
The strange fractal object on the wall has changed, its formlessness resolved into a highly sophisticated weapon. The Warden sees it now, how the deadly potential was masked by a nearly infinite spiral of self-similiar structure. But there is no defense, now that it's taken him.
He must impose the sentence in the only remaining way.
The Warden wills the Last Resort, signals a centigram of high explosives in his belly. It will surely destroy the artifical, the woman, himself, and possibly compromise the structural integrity of the hotel. But sentence must be served. The impulse travels down a hardwire from his brain to the Last Resort's fuse.
And nothing happens.
The explosive has been stabilized by the woman's fractal weapon; for the moment rendered as inert as clay.
He is defeated.
And worse than his frustration, his anger and humiliation, is another reaction that he hears deep inside himself. The last shreds of his humanity—besieged by concentric rings of jailers official, criminal, and finally this new compelling force—find hope in his predicament.
The old voices are laughing.
Chapter 14
SEXUAL TRANSMISSION
A slender thread:
Part of its length was an exotic form of carbon, capable of conductivity, movement, and possessed of local intelligence subservient to Darling's own true AI. The other segment was composed of metals, ceramics, in a sheath of organics to assuage its host's immune system: it mirrored Mira's nervous tissue, a center for direct interface reception and narrowcast. Together, the two formed that ancient method of connection, the direct linkage of matter, a wire between two people…
A conversation:
— Ah! Yes. How pleasing to be inside you.
— Fuck, yes. A little to the right. My right. Perfect.
— There: harder?
— As hard as you like. Your friend requires distracting.
— Can you deal with him?
— Of course. But perhaps you should explain. An interesting scrape for an art dealer to be in…
— I am sworn to discretion.
— But without my help, you won't complete your mission at all. A necessary improvisation. Ah! Yes, that too.
— Your price for assistance is information?
— Information… and that you go deeper… no… yes.
— I suppose I must. A necessary improvisation, well within my brief. Here it is: An unknown sculpture of one Robert Vaddum was discovered. It was determined to be less than a year old. But Vaddum died in the Blast Event, seven years ago. I was sent here to determine if Vaddum was still alive. Another dealer, a competitor, is using this Warden to eliminate me from the bidding.
— An interesting tale. It seems we both have stories to tell each other. You and I may be here for the same reason. But free my mouth and let me deal with this unwanted voyeur.
— Be careful. This Warden is very alert.
— They always are. I can command my weapons in 68 languages. I doubt he will understand dKinza mVakk. (Ah, now that is hard. But pray don't stop.)
— But he'll recognize that you're saying something…
— I won't use the adult dKinza. I prefer the male childhood tongue; it sounds like gibberish, even to the mVakk themselves.