“Trust me, that’s not such a good idea.”
“Fine, just get lost in the simple physics of defying gravity then.” He set her down on the swing and pushed her, slipping into the same rhythm with the pushing as he did with the oars on the boat.
For the longest, most sublime moment, there was just the breeze, the sun against their skin, the sense of motion, the sense of peace, not a thought in either one’s minds, judging from the silence in her case. It was the first proof that they could draw a protective boundary around themselves from the rest of the world that they could seldom if ever do alone. It was pure triumph. He could sense the shift between them. Their bond cementing. She confirmed as much when she hopped off the swing however many minutes later and kissed him, unprovoked.
He hadn’t even realized it was what they both needed from one another until then. Even more than each other’s love. The sense of being, pure and simple. Their more common baseline was a sense of becoming, forever aspiring to something, a better world in both their cases, even if her approach to such an end was entirely different than his. Whatever pushed them out of their past with such force and blasted them into the future, it created too much momentum for moments like this. Obliterated any chance of being at peace and in the moment. They were hungry to rescue others, though it was they who needed rescuing most of all. They’d conditioned themselves to just not notice. And in that moment the conditioning fell away. The armoring fell away. And it was just the two of them without lies and defenses, and nothing but pure vulnerability.
For a brief moment they shared eternity together.
***
By the time Roman’s taxi pulled up to the airplane hangar of the private airport, he’d banked a good deal more choice moments together with Elsa on his mindchip to get both of them through the days ahead and to forever course correct them back to the people they were meant to be. Would it be enough? Or would it just be forever a painful reminder of how things could have been?
TWENTY-FIVE
Preston pulled the taxi up to the airplane hangar. It was situated on a private airstrip the size of Kansas, which made the one hangar and the one runway all that much more suspicious. But it was Roman’s guess this zone had been blacked out from satellite surveillance.
He glanced at the backpack beside him, feeling the full brunt of his ridiculousness only now.
Leaving the satchel behind, Roman got out of the car, and headed into the hangar. He was flanked closely by Preston.
The Sexy Six were standing at the ready, in their idea of a soldier’s at-ease position, their hands clasped behind their backs and their legs spread just a little wider than their shoulders. “Hello, ladies,” Roman said, “you’ve never looked lovelier.”
Preston leaned into him and whispered. “It’s a sign they’ve shifted into kill-mode. Their skin flushes. It’s just one of those things about them.”
Roman clamped down on his jaw. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time one of them rubs up against me.” He noticed his voice sounded hoarse.
The girls were all over six feet tall in their stiletto heels. Probably a good 5’11” or more barefooted. Ethan, at 5’9”, swallowed hard, choking down his ego, and reminding himself that he was just being sexist in any case.
Svena said, “We’re waiting for Sabrina to arrive with the jet and then we’ll be off.”
“Sabrina won’t be coming,” Roman said curtly. “She’s preparing to take on Ethan.”
That earned him a chuckle from the girls. “Pity we have to miss that one,” one of the girls said.
“And our plane is already here.” Roman waved his hand and it materialized out of the void, or more accurately speaking, uncloaked.
The girls gasped and stepped back.
“I’ve taken the liberties of making a few refinements,” Roman explained.
“But you’ve never even seen this plane before,” one of the girls balked.
“And now, neither have you.”
Elsa, studying him warily the entire time and putting two and two together, said, “He was checking out alternative timelines on his way over here to see which one served him best in this scenario. Decided the plane needed a few tweaks. Dialogued with its AI who undertook the alterations for him via the morphing technology at its fingertips.”
Roman was already advancing up the floating disconnected steps, each one a miniature hoverboard.
“Is it me,” Svena said, “or does he already move more like a soldier?”
“It’s not you,” one of the girls said, “if my rising pheromones are any indication.”
“Meow,” another girl said.
Svena caught up with Roman aboard the plane, stilled his forward momentum by grabbing his arm. “I didn’t miss the look you gave me or the curt tone back here. For what it’s worth, I loved Cristo, and I’m sorry things played out the way it did.”
Roman pulled back his arm. “It doesn’t mean much, but thanks all the same.” He softened his face some before he lowered his eyes. Maybe he was letting her off the hook too easily, but if they were going to be working together from this moment forward, it was best they let bygones be bygones.
Svena took her seat, her eyes welling, and he advanced toward the cockpit.
***
The instant everyone was aboard the plane, the steps reassembled themselves into the door, which when closed, became a seamless part of the craft.
Preston, taking his seat next to the ladies, said, “I’d like you all to know I’m into gratuitous sex at any time of day or night. No amount of kink is any kind of turnoff. Just wanted to put it out there.” He tweaked his suit to wear on him better from a seated position.
Some of the girls smiled, but they all basically ignored him.
Preston whipped out his spiral notebook and pen, jotting down notes to himself and verbalizing as he went. “Sorry, girls, but I have a little flight check of my own that I do before takeoff.” He shot a glance to the front row. “Svena: collagen-endowed lips, generous forehead, nut-cracker thighs. There’s no way that platinum blond hair is real.” He glanced up at the others by way of explanation. “Sorry, ladies, but my memory for names is the worst. All on account of my magnetic personality. I need this little cheat sheet to help keep you straight in my head.”
“Um,” Svena said, coming to her own defense, “I can’t resist dual-natured men, actors, anyone so uncomfortable in their own skin they have to flee into character. Also guys out to save the world despite how much they themselves might need saving. Oh, and the blond hair is real, dickhead.”
Preston smiled for her, hoping it would help him overcome the genuine pain of being temporarily overcome by the innocuous and irrelevant data stream, arresting his progress toward goal.
He scrutinized the next girl up for cataloguing before returning his eyes to his notebook. “Eva: legs for days. Legs and more legs. Strong round cheeks and bronze and gold hair water-falling off her shoulders.”
“Ah, Eva prefers dating robots, preferably the ones she makes with her engineering skills and who do not remind her of humans in any way, as with you pawns.” She mumbled the last part, while squirming in her seat.
“If they could just stop being so helpful,” Preston thought, anxious to get on with his cataloguing of more germane information. “Do they actually mind being objectified? When the whole point of life is clearly to be a sexual object of envy?” Alas, who cared?
Preston returned his attention to the work at hand. “Galina: Crystal ball eyes. I mean huge, get lost in them forever eyes. Flat cheeks. About twenty-seven nationalities mixed together and counting. Those eyebrows are definitely shaved.”
Galina uncrossed her legs and re-crossed them. “She enjoys long cons and elaborate schemes for trapping men in her spider webs, building them up to CEOs from a state of abject depravity, before tearing them down again to leave them homeless and wandering the streets. On account of how much she hates being objectified. She channels her aptitudes for seeing patterns
no one else sees when she’s on the job to furthering the cause of the mission.”
Preston just added to his notebook, “Can’t stop talking.”
He glanced up from his notebook to check out the next girl. A few of them shifted in their seats.
“The guy gives sexist pig new meaning,” Galina mumbled, brushing her loose-curled hair back over her shoulders.
Preston pressed on with his due diligence, taking his cues from the names behind each of their seats. “Zoya: Almond-shaped blue eyes. Strong Jaw. Straight-as-Asian-chick hair, however dirty blond.”
“Enjoys parlaying her aptitudes in numerous fields of physics into designing Schrodinger boxes for her boyfriends from which they can never escape and in which they are only alive when she’s around to fawn over them,” Zoya said in her defense.
Preston had to admit, it was a pretty good defense.
He returned to his a la carte menu. “Vera: Strong chin, ridiculous eye lashes, ears flush red for no reason.”
Vera groaned audibly, cracking her neck with a whiplash turn of the head one way, then the other. “Vera enjoys zombiefying her boyfriends with the chemical admixtures of her saliva, which she can alter at will to burrow out their brains, or just make them even denser than they are normally. She enjoys taking her time with this, so she can benefit from studying every facet of their slow spiral into walking vegetables. Seldom keeps a harem of less than six brain-fried boyfriends at a time. All because she too hates to be objectified.”
Preston shot her another glance. “Cool.” He added to his notebook, “definitely the most interesting of the bunch.” Let’s hope she’s not kidding. “Remember to do breakfast at Vera’s to take in the freak show,” he penned in at the last second.
Again he glanced up from his notetaking. “And last but not least, “Darya, larger bottom lip. Shiny black hair straight to a waterfall of curls. Pale blue eyes with mauve centers to match the lipstick.”
“Darya is a feeder,” Darya said, cracking a walnut in one hand in an impressive feat of strength before offering the contents to Preston, who politely refused with a quick shake of his head. “She enjoys fattening up her boyfriends from their lithe, gym-body figures into thousand pound whales who can’t lift themselves out of bed. She gets them to agree to this as the price of staring mesmerized at her heart-stopping beauty. If they catch on to the game in time and can free themselves from the hypnosis, and beg forgiveness, she lets them go. Otherwise, as soon as they break a thousand pounds, she buries them alive in the backyard with all the others.”
Preston nodded and smiled. “A definite silver medal winner for the Sick Fuck awards. I speak with authority on the matter.”
He stowed his notebook in his inside jacket pocket. Leaned into Darya seated beside him. “I read somewhere a larger lower lip means you’re a pleasure seeker and that you love the joys in life. How about these fortuitous seating arrangements, huh?”
***
Elsa fought to get comfortable in the copilot’s seat alongside Roman, feeling the heat of proximity in their new personas, as he continued to run through his pre-flight check. Her craning neck to the back of the plane alerted her to the fact that the seats were growing into the passengers. “What the hell, Roman?”
“The plane, in its current configuration, is a codependent lifeform. Should she or any of the passengers take a hit while in flight, she can rush life-support to them better this way. And the girls, in turn, can lend their superior DNA-computer intellects to upgrading the plane’s self-healing tech on the fly, or for that matter boost her offensive posturing.”
The Sexy Six, initially on the defensive, relaxed with a snort at his explanation of what was going on. He flicked off the COM, which he’d only flicked on so he wouldn’t have to repeat himself.
Reaching for the seat belts that came together and buckled at her chest, Elsa said, nervously, “You can fly this thing, right?”
“The man you once knew, Elsa, is no more. I thought you’d be happy.”
She bit her fingers into the handles of her seat and clenched her entire body as Roman took the plane out of the hangar and into the air at Mach 2. She could be excused the reflex under the circumstances, but it wasn’t the plane’s sudden acceleration that had triggered them. It was his proclamation.
***
Elsa glanced back and noticed the hangar, collapsed under the force of the igniting jet engines, resurrecting itself with its self-mending technology. She hoped the “do-over” would be as easy for her and Roman, but somehow she doubted it.
They were flying high and fast but Elsa used the fact that there was a big picture view to take in to help justify the awkward silence between them. When the clouds came in and gave her nothing to stare at, she had no choice but to focus on the two of them. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“I told you we were two parts of a whole now. Where you go, I go. This isn’t the direction I would have chosen, but that hardly matters now, does it?”
She ignored the testiness and the accusations in his tone. He had every right to take her head off for her betrayal. It certainly wasn’t her first. “We both know I would never have cut it as commune girl. Even with my memories wiped…”
“The old you was finding a way back in,” Roman said. “Yes, sometimes psychological trauma runs so deep there is not much a mind wipe can do. The damage has drilled down to a cellular level. Like muscle memory. It’ll always find a way back to the surface.”
“One more reason you shouldn’t have come, Roman. Every time you use your neuronet you remake yourself at a cellular level. Ensure no going back. Me… Well, there’s still some hope that even the cellular memories can be bled out of me, like squeezing a sponge. For you, there is no such hope.” She grabbed his arm and squeezed to emphasize her point. “Each time you use that mindcap, you turn yourself into an anti-matter-universe version of the Christ-figure, a spiritual being so illuminated by the mind of God that there is simply no separation between the spiritual and material plane. Miracles become second nature.”
“Is that what we’re calling the quantum realm these days, the mind of God?”
She released his arm. “Don’t quibble.”
He snorted. “Perhaps then you’ll remember when I tried to rescue you from the darkness engulfing you. And you’ll be nice enough to return the kindness.”
“We’re not exactly on a road to find out. Where we’re heading there will be little time for healing ourselves far less one another. Just more death and destruction, more darkness.”
“If that’s the only way to be close to you, so be it.” He throttled down on the jets, found another gear, and slammed their heads into the backs of their seats.
Maybe he’d meant to knock some sense into her. Maybe a mild concussion is what it took to do it.
TWENTY-SIX
The plane came in cloaked, slipping under the Ugandan radar readily, going so far as to land on the roof of the Presidential palace without incident. Even the lazy guard on the rooftop, seated on his foldout wooden chair, reading his newspaper, more attuned to comfort than perimeter security, failed to notice the plane landing. It had slowed to hover mode by then so the swoosh of the craft’s thrusters didn’t just blow him right off the roof.
They came in for a landing practically on top of his head.
Roman was almost in his face when he uncloaked himself and his plane. “Is that a real newspaper? I’d kill for one of those things. Well, you can tell I’m into collectibles.” He pointed to the craft behind him.
The astounded soldier shit himself squirming in the creaky chair, determined to rise from it, if only he could get past the handle of his holstered gun being caught under the arm of the chair. Finally, he cleared the impasse, stood, and reached for his gun, unable to free it from its holster in his flustered state. He wasn’t cognizant enough to think to undo the safety strap first. He had gone from gasping to making a strange whiny sound. “Tell you what,” Roman said, “you get all that sorted, while I e
njoy your newspaper, huh?” Roman took the gazette from him and assumed his place on the chair.
The girls filing out of the plane, surrounded Roman. The guard just got more flustered on seeing them. Still struggling to free his gun from the holster, he lost balance and went over the side of the roof. Finally, the gun freed, he shot towards the rooftop. But the bullets never connected. He landed on his back, his spine shattered, his eyes fixed wide, with nothing much to do but wait for the bullets to fall back towards him. Which they did. He had managed to shoot himself to death, in an unwitting act of mercy.
“You want us to capture the President?” Svena said.
“No, I don’t want you to capture him. I want you to kill him and every other corrupt official in this country. The sooner the gene pool is rid of the entire lot of them the better.”
“And what do you plan to do?” Elsa said testily.
“Not a damn thing. When have you ever known the male lion in a pride to get involved unless the girls get over their heads?”
The girls smiled. He’d earned a collective “meow” when he should have damn well earned a backhand.
Svena was already sauntering toward the locked door that would take her from the rooftop into the compound below. The screaming sounds of tearing metal followed on her heels.
The rest of the Sexy Six, evidently figuring she could take the palace singlehandedly without breaking a sweat, bounded off the rooftop to land on neighboring roofs. From there, they jumped down to street level to access motorbikes, jeeps, whatever conveyance they needed to get them on their way to fulfilling their end of the mission.
Elsa lingered long enough to give him the evil eye, let him know in no uncertain terms with her expression alone that this was not the way to win points with her, before turning to follow behind Svena.
“And girls,” Roman said, signaling by way of his neuronet to their mindchips, while keeping his eyes on his newspaper, “Keep the communications channels open. I want to see and hear everything.”
Biohackers: Cybernetic Agents Page 23