— Brilliant. The woman of my dreams. Do it now.
— Two further conditions.
— More? What are they?
— I want him, the Warden. I want to play a game with him.
— Done. The other?
— Fuck me like a boy.
— Your price is my pleasure. Like a rich man with a whore.
Mira relaxed her muscles, let the chafing mesh of strands lower her onto the filament that had just cleared her mouth. Slicked with her spit and the acids of her stomach, the burning member pushed into her anus. It throbbed with compression waves, bristled with small silia like an inching catepillar. It was mercifully thin, but the pain of its passage seemed to be splitting her. She bit her tongue for concentration.
Given this stimulation, calling forth one of her more infrequently used languages was a challenge. But it gave her a heady sense of power to push the intense pleasure/pain down and force the juvenile pidgin onto her tongue. Even the harsh pleasures of this infinitely distracting man could not keep her from a kill.
There it was:
"Full stealth," she began, the mellifluent syllables of dKinza mVakk hidden in a babble of pig-Latin additions. "Implement a wide-band paralysis field around all armed individuals within the residence. Stasis any… ohmygod!"
She bit her tongue again. Darling was a bastard. A Darling bastard.
Mira counted to twenty in her mind, re-established her control.
"Stasis any concentrations of explosive materials in the room. Cut off all communications. If any countermeasures present a problem, kill him in the chair."
An internal chime came seconds later, her devices proclaiming victory. Somehow, the sound snatched away the orgasm that had been lingering at the periphery of her awareness, patiently waiting for a way in through the pain. Fine, she thought. She could finish her pleasure with the Warden, now her prisoner.
Mira turned toward the little man. She laughed, leaning back in Darling's web, pulling the burning member a few centimeters from her bowels. The Warden didn't seem to realize that he'd been paralyzed. He was by nature still and lifeless, and had not yet felt the subtle grip of her weapons. Well, she would find the life in him and wrench it out. She hated these humans become machines, less than people. In an era when inanimate matter could become an individual, they chose to cross the Turing boundary the other way. If anything was a sin, it was that, an abdication of selfhood.
Here was darling Darling in her arms. He would understand her hatred, having pulled himself across that threshold into humanity with nothing but his own faith that he could become real, a person. She embraced him, her tongue greedy for the cool stone of his cheeks, the glassy heat of his eyes. A thread of strand they'd used to communicate secretly had pulled from her eye, leaving in its wake some sparkling anesthetic that blurred her vision on that side. But even without the direct neural connection, she could still sense Darling's thoughts. The two lovers moved as one to disentangle: her muscles relaxing as if voiding when he attenuated the member in her ass, a shift of weight to one knee as he left her vagina, the bright needles of returned circulation in her legs as he lowered her onto the divan.
Mira waited for a moment, touched herself to cultivate the unspent energies inside. Darling blinked away her saliva and smiled.
"Thank you," he said.
"Anything," she answered, and was immediately embarrassed. That was unlike her, that unctuous, unconditional tone. But as much as she hated the Warden, she loved Darling.
Mira sometimes wondered about her utter contempt for programmed, mechanistically governed humans like the Warden. Perhaps, she allowed herself to think, it resulted from doubts about her own free will. Her relationship with her gods was perilously close to that of slave and master. They commanded her, just as the Warden's implanted imperatives and protocols governed him. But perhaps not so completely. She came to the gods freely. She worshipped them; if that was a weakness, it was surely a human one. And they didn't define the limits of her thoughts; she often contemplated leaving their employ, finding a new religion. Surely no Warden or sub-Turing AI ever doubted its mission.
But the nagging lack of childhood memories disturbed her; her mind now worried the gap like a tongue searching for a missing tooth. Perhaps she should ask the gods about it some day. Maybe they would simply tell her. She wondered why she never had.
At least she was real, human, flesh and blood. She was not the gods' construction, only their willing creature. And Darling's rough intrusions had threatened even that surety.
She was more than this Warden, more human by every measure. And now she had him.
Mira stood, pleasure-wrenched muscles complaining, and leered at the Warden. Now she noted a glimmer of panic in his eye. He must have tried to move and recognized his paralysis. But could a paralyzed face show panic? Perhaps Mira had imagined the expression. It might be simply the filmy look of eyes that cannot blink. Her weapons, even when non-lethally employed, were cruel in that regard. His vision would be dry-edged and blurring by now, until the prism of tears formed on his eyes.
Mira walked over to the Warden and straddled his frozen form, one knee to each side in the spacious chair. She looked down at her own body, crisscrossed with lines from Darling's meshed embrace, abrasions. She'd thought his strands had hurt worse than usual.
"You bastard. Every time it's something new," she said sweetly, looking over her shoulder at him.
Darling reclined there on the bed, strands still splayed, hard and huge and full of sin. "I made the surfaces of my sensory array complex, the better to dazzle the Warden's scanners."
"Like a cat's tongue."
"An apt simile."
She laughed, tipping the Warden's head down so that his immobilized eyes could see her abrasions. The eyes looked definitely filmy now. She slapped him three times, hard, and peered into them. Tears appeared, wetting their surfaces.
"I can see you in there, frightened little creature," she whispered. "I'm going to pull you out, play with you."
She pushed one finger down his throat. It reached the glottis, surely triggered the gag reflex. Of course, an autonomic reaction of that size would be paralyzed by her devices.
What would that feel like? she wondered. To feel the wrenching need to gag, the surging imperative to reject an intrusion into one's throat, and for the reaction to be thwarted by an invisible hand? The thought gave her a pleasant tickle deep in her stomach. It was a feeling she often had when her profession called on her to torture.
"I don't like you—understand? You're ugly, and you gave your soul away," she said. She used the intimate mode of Diplomatique, her voice pitched as if to a child.
She played with his glottis for a few more moments. Something was happening: the tears were flowing freely now.
A touch spread across her back, soft as a cool draft. Mira smiled. It was Darling, extending a few strands to monitor her pleasure. She felt them take up stations at her neck, her temples, along the pathway of her spine and at the expressive muscles around her eyes. Perhaps he was probing the Warden, too. Mira imagined tendrils creeping into the little man's unresisting orifices: anus, glans, perhaps piercing the skin to link raw to his nerves. And the poor dear, feeling it all, but unable to struggle, to whimper, even to breathe the deep breaths that carry one's mind away.
Surely she could break this murderous toy: this mockery of an assassin, so offensive in the inhumanity of its design.
She touched one of the eyes lightly. The slight film over the pupil was surprisingly soft, as if she had probed the surface tension of some child's hardy soap bubble adrift on the breeze. Again, how strange it must be for the Warden. To watch a fingertip grow, expand beyond all scale, without the interruption of a blink that should certainly have come.