by Anne Tenino
James let himself drift on that drowsy warmth, not thinking. Well, he tried, and he even managed it occasionally. Fortunately, the “L” word was a great distraction.
Then he heard the door again. It was Pearl. Strange that he could tell stuff like that through walls now, where he couldn’t before.
Ah, shit. No, it wasn’t. Not strange at all. Not thinking about it.
She tapped softly before letting herself in. James pulled himself up to sit against the headboard and gave her a weary smile. She didn’t even raise an eyebrow at his shirtless chest, or Matt curled into him. He felt no surprise from her.
“I didn’t think you’d be too happy to see me anytime soon. If ever.” She kept her voice down, since Matt was still asleep.
“Need answers.” He shrugged. “I could tell you didn’t much like what had happened, Pearl. ’S’okay.”
She blew out a breath. “I’ll give you all the answers I can, but I don’t think I have many.”
“Are you sure they implanted this device you helped design?”
She nodded matter-of-factly. “I think it’s likely. I don’t know of any other research being done in the same area, at the same time in either the Red or the Blue. You got this done about three years ago?” James nodded. “James, tell me, did you volunteer for this?”
He’d like to lie to her, but it wouldn’t help anything. “No,” he told her quietly. “I’m a trooper. I was told to report and I did.”
“What… what did they tell you they were going to do?”
“Nothing much, before. They told me afterward what they had done. I was pretty freaked, I guess. Then they told me it was reversible, it could be removed. So… I kind of got over it.”
Pearl looked horrified. “It’s become part of your neural network. Removing it could cause a cascade event. Maybe it could be done and leave you the way you were before, but it’s far more likely to kill you. It’s growing into you, or more, you’re growing into it. Especially as you use it. They spent time teaching you to use it, right? Making you do exercises to integrate the implant?”
James nodded silently again.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she muttered. “Remove it my ass.”
She surprised a snort of laughter out of James. “Aren’t you a nun?”
“Yeah, but my god understands the need for bad language occasionally.” She waved off his comment. They both sat staring into space for a few minutes.
“Pearl….” She waited patiently. “Can it change me into something else?”
She stared at him a very long time. He could feel sympathy, but not so much fear. More a sense of… understanding. Or knowing, maybe. “I don’t think so, James. One of the things we’ve discovered recently is that the personality is more genetically based than we realized. It also doesn’t just live in your brain. It’s one of the reasons the Singularity failed, because they focused solely on the brain.” It took James a minute. Oh, yeah. The cult that believed humans would integrate fully with technology and AI would become human.
“Since your brain makes the connections to the implant, a major change in who you are is very unlikely. I’d almost think it’s impossible. Your brain is interested in protecting itself.
“It’s not unusual for someone to change personality quite a bit after severe brain trauma, but that’s after a large section of the brain shuts down, or is destroyed. That’s not going to happen with the implant I worked on.
“My greatest worry is that it could create abilities we can’t imagine, maybe far beyond basic psychic abilities. Because it wasn’t lab-tested, we have no basis to predict results from.”
“So I’m the guinea pig.”
Pearl nodded slowly.
In reality, new, crazy psychic skills didn’t sound that bad. But he had a feeling he was only imagining a tiny part of the possibilities. That was somewhat better than he’d feared.
“That’s only the best-case if they used your blueprint.”
“There’s a kind of serendipitous quirk designed into the team’s implant that’s significant here.” James nodded at her to go on. “The implant would work best in a homosexual male brain. A woman could easily integrate it as well, but a het male might have difficulty.”
James raised an eyebrow. Pearl gave him a small smile. “It’s all about the size of the corpus callosum. It’s bigger in women and queer men. It worked well for our design because of how the implant would interact with the brain. I feel it’s the safest design—for the individual with the implant—we could come up with.”
“Since I’m gay you think I probably have your implant.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Could just be coincidence.”
She gave him a sad smile. “Queer people only make up twelve percent of the population. The fact that the first soldier I’ve come across who has an implant like the one I helped design also happens to be gay gives me hope that it is the one I designed. It could be a coincidence, but I think it’s not.”
James sat up a little straighter. “I know at least one of the other guys that has the implant is also gay.”
“You know other soldiers that have it?” Pearl looked stunned. This quickly gave way to excitement. “Can you give me their names? Wait, don’t tell me, tell Anais. She’ll be better at coordinating this. I’d rather not know and get caught by the RIA, God forbid.”
Pearl’s voice was getting louder as she got worked up, and Matt was stirring against James’s side. With a sleepy mumble he hid his head under James’s lats.
James was having a hard time getting as excited over this as Pearl. “It’s like reverse discrimination.” He knew his voice had gone hard. Matt grumbled a little, so James put a hand on his back.
“What?” Pearl looked confused as hell.
“Reverse discrimination. It’s what they used to call it when someone received preferential treatment just for being of a specific minority group. Although this isn’t exactly preferential treatment.”
He could feel her guilt coming back, double strength. “Oh, God,” Pearl moaned, and buried her head in her hands. “Now I feel even worse.” She didn’t say it for sympathy. James was pretty sure she didn’t even realize what she was saying. He could feel Matt next to him, unnaturally still. James gave him a little squeeze.
“Pearl, I can’t absolve you of guilt. But I believe you didn’t mean to hurt anyone because they’re gay.” That was probably the best he could do for her. He knew he sounded stiff. It needed to be said, though.
Matt relaxed a little. He started to push himself up. “Gah! Left arm,” he muttered, laying back down and rolling onto his back so he could use his right arm. “Hey Pearl,” he said somewhat dully. James could feel Matt was a little angry with her, even though he believed she was sincere.
Pearl nodded and gave Matt a weak smile. “There’s a more immediate concern we need to talk about before you check in tonight, James.”
“We’re checking in tonight?” Matt asked through a yawn. He gingerly stretched his arms over his head and arched. James watched the muscles move in his back. When he arched like that, it really showed off his ass, at least from James’s vantage point. He was still covered with the blanket in front but James could see acres of Matt’s bare, pale skin from where he was. Matt had his arms over his head, and was gripping his hands together. It made all the muscles and veins in his forearms pop. James wondered how long it would take him to trace them all with his tongue.
Or he could lick his way down Matt’s spine to the end, right between those perfect cheeks…. Suddenly he realized Matt was waiting for an answer. His eyes flew up to Matt’s. Predictably, Matt was smirking at him. Busted. He quirked a smile at Matt.
“Yeah. Um, 2345 we call in.” He knew Matt would like the check-in time. “We’ll have to leave here at about 2300 to make sure we get to the phone on time. You’ll have to go in drag, I guess.” He didn’t even bother trying to get Matt to stay here.
“Phone?” Matt was looking at him like he was
nuts.
“You’ll see.” He grinned.
“You need to get out of the military,” Pearl broke in, redirecting his attention.
Both Matt and James stared at her.
“You’re in danger as long as you stay in. I think it’s likely that they’ll start trying to force your implant to make more connections. I don’t think that’s safe for you. Once the implant goes beyond its original programmed parameters it’s more likely to happen again.”
“Oh, fuck!” Matt looked horrified, jerking upright, his mouth open in shock, staring at James. “You haven’t told her?”
James shook his head. He looked at Matt because he didn’t want to look at Pearl.
“Pearl, they did something to James in the re-education camp—”
“I can tell her,” James broke in gruffly. Matt looked back at him and nodded. “They did something to me in re-education camp,” he said, lamely. Matt rolled his eyes and gave the “go on” gesture. “Uh, I don’t know what happened. I went into my assigned ‘therapist’s’ office and he started a vid and I woke up two hours later. Then it started happening regularly until I got out—they’d drag me into that office and I’d pass out. Maybe twelve times, total?”
They’d all been briefed on Red re-education procedures, and no one had ever reported a regular pattern of losing consciousness as part of the process. It was just another thing James had been putting off thinking about until he got home. Although he was starting to wonder how he’d deal at home, anyway. He could feel Pearl thinking across the room. “Did you ever see any vids?”
“No.” Watching educational vids was a standard part of every Red re-education. He didn’t remember seeing any. James swallowed uncomfortably.
“We’ve known the vids were a brainwashing tool, but without an actual example we’ve never been sure of the specific mechanism. Certainly it has to be made up partly of hypnosis and suggestion-planting. Maybe it reacted with your implant, somehow. Can you tell me how your abilities have changed?”
“Um, I have considerable range in the open, as long as there’s no physical barrier between me and the subject. I can sometimes pick up a word or two, when before I never could. I can… influence people, I guess. If they’re considering something but resisting it, I can push them into doing it or saying it.”
Pearl had been nodding until he got to the last one. Her eyes went wide, but she didn’t say anything.
“You can talk to animals,” Matt reminded him, dryly.
James flushed. “Yeah, that,” he muttered.
“You mean, you can communicate with them, as in two-way, mind-to-mind communication?” He could feel Pearl’s professional interest overriding her concern. She was fighting it, but losing with the new information he’d given her. “With animals?”
“Yeah.” James picked at the blanket. He could just see Matt’s smile out of his peripheral vision.
He’d show the bastard amusing later. He gave Matt a sour look, but Matt just smiled more broadly.
Pearl was silent a long time. Finally she said, “It seems that you’re developing two-way communication skills we never intended the implant be programmed to develop. The other stuff, the range and increased perception of individual thought, those are just an extension of the original program.” She paused. “In my professional opinion, your implant has jumped beyond the initial programming. If the programming is what we originally planned.”
“That’s bad.” James was ignoring the possibility that this wasn’t Pearl’s implant, for now.
“Yes. It definitely means you can’t have the implant removed, James. You’ve started to grow the implanted network further into your brain, and might even be connected to areas we don’t fully understand. Did these new skills develop immediately, or slowly over time?”
“Slowly. They’re still developing. I figured out today I can sometimes pick up brain waves through doors, if someone’s really close. It’s pretty muted.”
Pearl heaved a sigh. “That’s not good. I don’t see how that can be a logical progression of two-way communication. So it could be you’re developing a third subset of skills. The fact that it’s progressing slowly is both good and bad. It’s good, because it means your brain was given time to grow into the implant naturally and wasn’t forced. It’s bad because we don’t know what in particular is pushing the continuing growth. Do you think they knew something was wrong in re-education camp?”
James looked at Matt. Matt looked worried, and felt a little scared. He was still keeping himself open to James, which he appreciated more than Matt could know. It was somehow easier getting through this conversation having Matt there.
“Yeah, they knew.” James cleared his throat. He was still looking at Matt.
Matt must have realized he didn’t really want to talk about it, so he continued for James. “They put an extra tracker on him, and were uplinking data on his biorhythms and maybe brain waves. Didn’t you say they knew you were losing consciousness?”
James nodded. “After that first session, I always came to in a bed, with some kind of brain scan equipment. I was groggy, and it didn’t even click until later, after I was out.”
“They were keeping really close tabs on him too. Oh, hey! You could affect the signal the chips sent out, too, remember?”
“Yeah.” James nodded, and realized somehow his hand had ended up in Matt’s, fingers entwined. He wondered idly if he’d ever held hands with a guy before.
Pearl broke in. “That’s probably normal development. Chips send out waves, which aren’t that much different than brain waves. It’s something we thought could happen. Do you know if it happened before then?”
James shook his head.
Just then there was a knock on the door. Pearl cautiously approached it, reaching into her robe, presumably for a weapon. James raised an eyebrow and looked at Matt. Who knew the nun was packin’ heat? “It’s Carmella,” he told Pearl. He was sure she was packing. Matt’s lips lifted at the corners. James yanked him forward and pressed his lips to one of those little lines Matt got when he smiled.
Jesus, he was a sap. Matt gave him a little nudge with his nose and then pulled away just as Carmella came into the room with a big covered container.
“Dinner,” she announced. “I made sure Maligna didn’t spit in it when she was preparing your trays.” She smiled delightedly, clearly enjoying torturing the young nun.
Matt may have only eaten a couple of hours ago, but he fell on his dinner like he was starving. It was chicken, maybe raised at the convent. Beat the MREs all to shit. James ate his more slowly as they talked.
Pearl brought Carmella up to speed, and they discussed the more immediate options available to them. Carmella knew all about the implant. James figured he’d stretched “need-to-know” all out of shape until it was unrecognizable.
Not that he was feeling too loyal to SOUF right now.
“You can’t stay in the military,” Carmella announced decisively, recalling his attention. Matt snorted and said something unintelligible through a mouthful of bread. James could tell by the tone he was agreeing with Carmella, backed up by a dose of derision riding his brain waves. The bread crumbs Matt spewed across the bed punctuated the sentiment.
James sighed. He’d seen clean sheets in the closet next to the front door.
“Sah-wee,” Matt said. His cheeks were puffed out with bread and chicken. James snorted.
“I think Anais and Lance might be able to swing a medical discharge for you,” Carmella offered.
“But is the Blue going to let me walk away from them with a bunch of top-secret tech in my head? Doubt it.”
“What’s the alternative?” Matt shrugged. He’d managed to swallow his food. Everyone stared at him. James waited for Matt to get it. “Oh fuck no!” Matt was horrified. “We’ll leave, James. Go to Canada or somewhere that doesn’t have an extradition agreement. I’m not letting them just… you know….”
James could feel Matt stronger than ever. He lean
ed his head back against the wall, tipping it up so he could keep his eyes from overflowing. Matt meant it. He’d go with him, keep him safe if he could. He wanted to. James hoped the feeling ached in Matt’s chest the same way it ached in his. That want.
Pearl got up, signaling Carmella unobtrusively. “I’ll come with you tonight. I need to talk to Anais and Lance too. We’re going to work this out.”
Nobody said anything further.
Matt laced his fingers through James’s again once Carmella and Pearl were gone. “C’mere,” he whispered, tugging. James let himself be pulled. Into Matt’s arms, onto his chest. Avoiding the bandages.
James shut off his brain. He stopped thinking, and just let himself feel. He felt Matt’s fingers combing through his hair. He felt Matt’s muscles slide under his ear as he moved his arm. Matt’s hand on his back, fingers splayed, pressing James into him. Matt’s lips brushed his forehead.
James closed his eyes and sighed. He tightened his arms around Matt and let himself feel deeper. Matt’s concern and worry, and fear. It felt so good, like light surrounding him. Not the emotions, but the fact that someone—Matt—felt that for him. James.
James nuzzled his forehead and nose into Matt’s chest. He didn’t care if Matt made him cuddly or made him hornier than he’d ever been or even made him a lovesick fool. James was keeping him. Hopefully Matt would want to keep James too.
Chapter 15
BEFORE leaving that night, they took a shower. James was sort of amazed they could do it without the situation devolving into sex, but between Matt needing to keep his bandages dry-ish and James needing comfort, it didn’t happen.
Not that he didn’t feel Matt up. All over. And bite and lick the back of his neck a lot when he figured out how crazy it made Matt. But then Matt turned around to James, leaned against the wall, and pulled him in.
Matt could kiss. James had never been into kissing that much. It was just a sometimes necessary way station on the road to the good stuff. But with Matt it was the good stuff.
Matt explored his mouth, slowly, touching James in places he never thought he’d find erotic. Who knew a guy running his tongue along your teeth could feel so good? But it was the long, slow, sinuous tongue action that made James forget everything except being in that warm, wet mouth. He felt like he’d reached a transcendent state.