He was going to be good. Very good.
He let her go, then pulled a blister pack from his pocket. “Here.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nanotech phenominol. Cranks everything up to eleven. Makes you feel like you’re having sex with God.” He pushed one through the blister pack and slipped it under his tongue. “It hits in a minute, lasts for an hour.” He tossed the pack over.
Cat studied it impatiently, scanned and uploaded the barcode with her implant to get the description and peer reviews. It rated 4.8 out of 5 based on more than twenty-five thousand reviews. It must be magnificent with that kind of score. She popped one out and put it under her tongue. It sat there for a moment, then started to move, wriggling down her throat like a live worm. Her hands flew up to her neck, and for a moment she thought she was going to gag, and then it was over.
Alex stood with ten long strips of the torn top sheet dangling in his hands. He laughed at the expression on her face. “Yeah, it’s freaky the first time.”
He kissed her again, then took off her bra. She let him force her back on the bed and pull off her jeans. He climbed on the bed, cat-like in his movements, and straddled her. She writhed against him as he tied her hands together over her head, then keep going, tying her arms, then legs.
In the midst of this rigging, he acquired a glow and then a halo, making him look like an angel. Then all rational thought faded from her mind as the rest of the drug crossed the blood-brain barrier.
He bent down and sucked on her nipples, and she thrashed under the bindings, feeling like she would explode. She pulled at the makeshift cords as a million nerve endings fired, a wave of pleasure and pain that caught at her breath.
She wanted him inside her. She tried to speak, but a growl came out instead. He grabbed her, rough, and she strained against him.
He opened his implant to her and before she realized what she was doing, she opened hers back. A small part of her mind, insignificant under the influence of the drug, reminded her this was a mad idea, that she’d hurt everyone else she’d ever linked with. She ignored the thought.
Their implants connected, his senses coming sharply into focus as her senses poured out to him. She was him sucking on her nipples, and she was herself. She’d had a foursome once, been nearly buried under all the simultaneous sensations of three guys on her. Linking implants, she discovered, was a lot like that.
Their senses fed back and forth on each other, building to a crescendo that threatened to drown out everything else. Suddenly the link turned bad, like acoustic feedback gone out of control, a rising shriek of that fed in on itself, growing more powerful and angry with each second that passed. Her visual field started to dim and under the onslaught of sensory overload, she slowly realized she was feeling his pain. She was hurting him, and Alex was screaming, holding his head, and falling backwards now, trying to get away from her.
Fighting the haze of the drug, Cat realized he really was going to fall off the bed backwards, probably onto his head. She reached out with her mind, guided him so that he turned his fall into ushiro ukemi, the backwards aikido roll. He rolled backwards, taking his momentum and turning it into a leap onto his feet. Cat was shocked: he executed the move in her own signature style.
She was still tied up, yet she knew that she had caught him as he’d fallen off. She shook her head, trying to clear the effect of the drug, but she couldn’t. Something important was happening.
But all that was irrelevant in the face of the phenominol. It was riding her now. She wanted the sex she’d been expecting. She willed him to the bed, one leg in front of the other, and he moved to the bed, his body movements echoing her thoughts.
He stopped at the edge of the bed, and didn’t move. What was wrong with him? She just wanted him to get on with it. She willed him forward again, and he climbed onto the bed, and then…
Holy fuck. Cat realized what she was doing with a burning, white hot clarity that finally chased away the hormone fog. Still tied down, she strained her head to look at him. She willed him to raise his right hand, and his right hand went up. She put it back down. She lifted his leg, and his leg moved.
He’d opened his implant to her, and she to him, just as every implanted couple did. This time, for the first time ever for Cat, it had worked, in a way: they were sharing their sensorium. But unlike every other implant linking, they weren’t just sharing senses. Cat was somehow, impossibly, controlling his body.
Then with a rush the phenominol hit her again. She had to have the damn sex she’d been promised. She guided him to her, not sure what she was doing and he was doing.
24
From deep in his core computing cluster, Adam tunneled through the Tucson firewall to communicate with his agent in Washington, a high-placed plant in the People’s Party. He dedicated a large portion of his processing power to the critical conversation.
“The protests are growing,” the agent said. “We hoped for twenty thousand people and we’re up to fifty thousand. We could hit a half million by the weekend. With so many out of work, far more are coming than we ever imagined.”
Adam wanted a distraction, but this was more than he had anticipated. “Is this going to interfere with the dinner plans?” The audio stream was disguised as a database synchronization and heavily encrypted, but he still kept the conversation vague. He couldn’t take the chance that stray sounds could be picked up by a nearby microphone. References to the United States President were heavily monitored by the Secret Service.
“No, I’m purposely directing protesters to Washington, to give a sense of security to the New York location.”
Adam felt another connection coming in, this one from Slim and Tony in Los Angeles. He answered the second call while he continued the conversation with his Washington agent, a trivial multitasking effort.
Slim appeared, motioning to someone off camera, and seconds later Tony entered the image. The two men sat in a heavily scarred video booth. Adam didn’t like the public location because of the chance of being overheard. Yet if he sometimes doubted the judgment of these two, they had carried off hundreds of memory extractions and other tasks without a problem.
“Boss,” Slim said, “we found the girl. Do you want us to go in and get her?”
Adam wondered if Slim had forgotten his explicit instructions to wait for an extraction team, then realized it was simple eagerness.
“Give me your location. The extraction team will be there in six hours.”
“Come on boss, we don’t need anyone else. We got that entire Institute Enforcement Team, eight people, by ourselves. This is one little girl.”
“Those were eight experts on AI. This so-called girl has taken on and beat more than the likes of you, including a security bot. Besides, she’s special. You will wait for the extraction team.”
Slim frowned.
Adam relented to placate Slim. “I’ll have the team include you on the extraction. Upload the location details.”
Slim reached forward, his hand growing large on the display, and swiped at the handheld computer.
Adam hungrily analyzed the girl’s location history, more than eighteen hours of her movements, including where she lived and ate. “Excellent. Meet the team at the airport. In the meantime, I need you to get some equipment, and make sure it’s untraceable. And I want one of you to keep an eye on the girl at all times.” He uploaded the equipment list and cut the connection.