Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  Marco glanced around and laughed hysterically. “WhooHoo! What a fucking ride that was!” He cupped her face with both hands and planted a kiss on her lips before she could protest.

  Electricity shot through her, and her psi exploded in a wave of pleasure. She pushed off his chest, which left her straddling him. Memories flooded back. They’d always had chemistry, but their psi had never entwined. This was new. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to bolt or stay.

  “Sorry, darling.” He held her upper arms, his touch hot and firm. Amusement danced in his brown eyes. “I almost died just now. Kind of glad to be here.”

  Sitting on him like this had her body buzzing from his presence. She clambered off in a hurry and stood. “Are you ok?”

  “Oh, baby you have no idea. I was running for my life back there, then you just popped right in front of me.” He rolled over and got to his feet facing Armond and the woman, rubbing the small of his back. “Dude, what happened? And who’s this?”

  The strange woman said something to Armond in a language Zara had never heard and she’d heard a lot. Her voice was oddly stereophonic. Like two people speaking at once.

  Marco shifted his gaze to her, and she fell into those brown eyes. “I just kissed you right? I’m not hallucinating this?”

  “Yes, you just kissed me.” She could still feel the press of his lips and the resonance of her psi. “When that thing beeped, Armond touched it and disappeared. Scared me half to death.”

  “You left her?” Marco demanded. “Where the hell did you go?”

  “It appears the question isn’t where, but when,” Armond said.

  Marco eyed Armond and the woman. Something was seriously off. And those weren’t the same clothes Armond had been wearing when he left. The woman rambled on in a strange language, and she had her hand in the crook of Armond’s elbow.

  The albino was actually letting her touch him.

  “Armond, when did you change your clothes, and who is this?” Marco asked.

  “I could ask the same of her.” Armond nodded to Zara, then slid his arm around the waist of the woman in an openly affectionate move.

  “What the hells is going on here?” Maybe he hadn’t survived after all and was, in fact, lying dead in that pit-hole back on Sigma. He met Zara’s gaze and she shook her head. He stepped closer to her. If he was dead, and she wasn’t real, he was going to make the most of it. Cupping her face in his hands he kissed her again. Their psi twirled into a sensual mist.

  She opened to him for just a moment before shoving him backward. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Reality Check. I figure I must be hallucinating. None of this makes any sense.” And that damn psi thing, what was that?

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, but it wasn’t an aggressive move. More tender than anything.

  He wanted more of that.

  “Did we make it?” Ru spoke up from his pocket.

  “Dude, almost forgot you.” He pulled out the com.

  “You made it,” Zara said smiling. “But we’ve got a little situation here.”

  “A situation indeed,” Armond said. “Where are we?”

  “Don’t you think we should get out of here before chatting?” Zara asked. “You know, outlanders and all.”

  “We’re in outlander territory?” The concern in Armond’s voice was the most bizarre thing.

  Figuring out what the fuck was happening was going to have to wait. Zara was right. He started to head to the bridge, but paused, and faced the Armond and his companion. “Do you know what ship you’re in?”

  “This is the No Commitments. Delta class transport ship. One of twenty-three currently owned and operated by the Cavacent Clan, the head of which is Lord Rucon Cavacent, who was responsible for naming the vessel that is primarily yours.”

  “And what’s our current passcode?”

  “Snow White.”

  That wasn’t right. But it was the correct topic. Rucon had a fascination with Earth’s fairy tales and always selected things having to do with them. “What’s the date? Earth date, relative.”

  “March 19, 2018.”

  “Dude, that’s three months from now.”

  “Fascinating. It appears we have arrived from the future. Perhaps a singularity encountered during our jump.”

  He didn’t know how, but that was definitely Armond.

  He shot a glance at Zara. What was going on with their psi? He bolted for the bridge to set their course back to safer space. He set course to Xycor, and activated the hyperdrive before returning to the galley.

  The others were sitting around the table. Zara had made a pot of tea, which Armond was actually drinking. Shit just got more and more crazy. He pulled out a chair, flipped it around, and straddled it next to Zara. He wanted her close. She was speaking animatedly to the woman who’d arrived with Armond.

  Ru was propped at an angle on Zara’s com unit.

  When he’d been running for his life, it wasn’t Ru or even himself he thought of. It was her. Zara Mancini.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Zara said. She placed her hand over his for a moment, then yanked it back, her eyes widening under furrowed brows. “Sorry.” It was almost a whisper.

  “Don’t apologize. Now, someone tell me what’s going on.” He wanted to reach out and take her hand in his, but knew it wouldn’t be welcomed. Not yet.

  “First, introductions,” Zara tapped on the table. “This lovely lady is Vin.

  “She’s a friend of Armond’s.”

  Marco shook her hand, which elicited a giggle from the woman, who spoke again in the strange language.

  “What’s so funny?” Marco asked.

  “Shaking of the hand,” Armond said. “It is not a custom where she’s from.”

  Interesting. “So she’s not from Federation space?”

  Vin and Armond shared a look. After she spoke again, Armond replied. “I don’t see any reason not to.”

  “Huh?”

  “Vin can understand us because of this here.” He tapped a colorful device in his ear. “I can understand her the same way, but we can’t speak each other’s language directly as yet. To answer your question, she’s not from our galaxy.”

  “Not from our galaxy?” Marco turned to Zara. “Surely this warrants another reality check?” He wanted one, that was for sure.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  And then Armond smiled.

  And the universe backhanded him upside the head. Armond Nolde smiling? “You’re very different, you know that?”

  “I’m sure I am.” He took Vin’s hand and kissed the back of it.

  That was it. All the gods had returned to the galaxy and surely the hells had frozen over.

  “So, three months? How?” Marco struggled to wrap his head around this new Armond.

  “Encountering a singularity during a portal jump has always been a theoretical possibility. It is conceivable that jumping intergalactic distances increases the chances of said phenomena.”

  “You’re serious? Another galaxy?”

  “Yes,” Vin said. Her skin glowed with an internal luminescence. A deep sapphire purple-blue, which was easy on the eyes for sure.

  “And I take it your change in demeanor is due to Vin here?”

  “Indeed,” Armond said with another smile.

  That was so damn strange. It didn’t look bad or anything; it was just that in over ten years he’d never seen anything like it. “So what happens now? Where’s the other you?”

  “That’s the crazy thing,” Zara said. “I asked the same question. Armond thinks they need to go back.”

  “We haven’t yet finished a task back in Vin’s time. We should attempt a return, and soon. Things may or may not reset here.” Armond’s concern was disconcerting in the extreme.

  “Is the old you going to come back?” Marco asked.

  “I do not know.”

  It was a crazy thought. He felt like he should try and
get the other Armond back, but Armond sat in front of him. Time streams got complicated fast. He’d never been able to wrap his head around that shit.

  “What if the other you doesn’t return?” Zara asked.

  “Again, I do not know. It’s conceivable I will never return to your timeline.”

  “That would suck,” Marco said.

  “Does that mean you’d miss me?” Armond asked.

  And now he had a sense of humor? Holy fuck. “Yeah, dude, I’d miss you.”

  They briefly introduced Ru to Armond and Vin. Armond said he wanted to study the AI in the future, which was downright bizarre given the situation.

  “We should go,” Armond said to Vin.

  They all stood, and Marco held out his hand to Armond. “Take care of yourselves.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Vin spoke a few words before Armond translated for her. “She says she hopes we meet again.” They said their goodbyes, and the couple blinked out.

  Again, he wanted to reach out for Zara’s hand, but she backed away from him. He folded his arms across his chest and waited. “So, how long was he gone before?”

  “Only maybe a minute or two.”

  They waited another forty seconds before Armond blinked back in. He looked down at the table and back to him and Zara. “I was seated when you signaled. Why am I now standing?”

  “How are we going to explain this?” Zara said.

  “You got me.” They told him about future Armond and Vin, but it didn’t go down well.

  “Conceptually, I’ll grant that such a thing is possible,” Armond said a few minutes later, “but I have no memory of being elsewhere.”

  “You had to be somewhere,” Zara said. “But we’ll probably never know.”

  “You’re in for an interesting three months, dude,” Marco said.

  “How so?”

  “Well,” Zara stepped in, a smirk on her face. “From the look of things, you’ll meet a certain woman and fall madly in love.”

  “Yeah, you also get all emotion-y and shit. A whole new, softer side of you.”

  “I find that highly unlikely.”

  “I found it pretty damn disturbing myself.” Marco fetched a beer from the fridge and took a long drink.

  “You’re really going to like her,” Zara said, “she’s—”

  “Stop.” Armond raised his hand. “In the unlikely event this is, in fact, a singularity, I do not wish to know the particulars.”

  “Oh.” Zara was taken aback, but then nodded her head. “Yeah, I think I see your point. You want to let the future unfold as it will.”

  Marco didn’t see the point at all. He’d want to know what the hell his future woman looked like. “What is your plan now, Marco?” Armond asked.

  “We’re heading to Xycor, where Zara is based.”

  “Did you retrieve the com?”

  “I haven’t been called that in a while,” Ru said.

  “Armond, meet Ru,” Zara said “Again.”

  “Ru?”

  “Ruler of the Universe. A little joke Marco and I developed.”

  Armond conversed with Ru for the next thirty minutes, until he was convinced it was real. “This is indeed most extraordinary,” he finally conceded. “And what physical form are you going to be transferring it to?”

  Marco listened idly to the conversation. More and more, it felt odd to have Ru in its native form. It was an intelligent being, and having a relatable body just felt right. Gods, he hoped the procedure went well.

  Zara sat next to Armond, toying with her teacup. She was off in another world, and he wondered if he had any place in that space.

  Once Armond finished, he packed up his things to leave.

  “Ok if I keep the distorter?” Marco asked.

  “You put the last one through the wash again, didn’t you.”

  “That obvious?”

  He ported without another word.

  They made it to Xycor in just under three days. Zara had kept her distance, but he’d caught her watching him more than once. He’d been guilty of the same. Something had shifted in him. The thought of winning her back, of keeping her, didn’t terrify him like it used to. It was the opposite, in fact. It was the damn near-death experience that had done it. Ever since then, she’d been growing on him like a Sandarian creeper vine. Those suckers grew hooks that couldn’t be removed without destroying the host. That thought really should bother him more.

  He secured the ship and they made their way to Zara’s lab. Xycor was three times the size of Earth, and orbited a sun that held seven other closely-packed planets, five of which were settled. It made for a pretty impressive sky.

  The corporation she worked for was called Zero Sum, and from what he could tell, there wasn’t much they didn’t have their people working on. Integrative neural networks to cyborgs and AI. It was pretty cool stuff. Scary maybe, but cool.

  They started with a tour of the building her lab was in. It was the cleanest place he’d ever seen. All off-white walls and a nearly black floor. “Smells odd in here.”

  “That’s probably because it’s a nearly sterile environment. You were sterilized when you walked through the lobby. Zero Sum is an incredibly healthy place to work. No such thing as everyone getting the same bug here. Come on. I’ll show my little world.”

  It wasn’t so little. Her research occupied the entire fifth floor, and it was mind blowing. Along the back wall, humanoid forms, all plugged into various apparatus, faced the interior of the room. Their bodies were a metal alloy of some kind, and although their faces were human like, they’d never be confused with a biological being.

  “Doesn’t that creep you out?” Marco asked.

  “Nah, you get used to it,” she said. “These are all deactivated, anyway.”

  An image of the robots coming to life and going after them had a chill crawling down his spine. “So, what happens now?”

  “I’ll get the sequencing equipment set up and start the prep work for Ru’s integration with the neural network. How long are you going to be on Earth?”

  “Two and a half days to get there. I can turn and burn within a day. Rucon’s getting the owl DNA now, so I should be back in about a week.” He unclipped Ru from his shirt and handed him over. A spark of energy shot through his psi as their fingers touched.

  Her eyes widened; no way she didn’t feel that. “Take care of him.”

  “Always.” She stepped back. “I’ll see you.”

  “See you.” He resisted the increasingly strong urge to kiss her, and was on his ship and departing just under an hour later. It was going to be a damn boring trip without even Ru for company. When the hell did his ship get so lonely?

  Marco was back on Xycor seven days later, itching to see Zara. When he got to her lab, she was in a clean room with Ru. He watched her hovering over the com unit through the glass wall. She looked like a doctor operating on a tiny computer. He’d missed them. Both of them. He barked out a laugh, which looked stupid considering he was standing here alone, but he was acting like a fucking daddy.

  When Zara stood, he tapped on the glass and waved.

  The light in her eyes wasn’t as bright as he’d like, but she waved back and held up a finger. He’d wait a lot longer than a minute for this one.

  When she’d finished, she joined him. “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks. How’s our boy?”

  She crossed her arms. “He’s doing well. I’m afraid he’s going to be isolated until the neural lace has matured and fully integrated with the expanded hardware.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “It’s how I integrate a brain and computer. This is interesting, though, because it’s backward. I’m usually taking a Sandarian brain, either fully or partially isolated from their body, and integrating it with my cyborg tech. Here, I’m taking Ru’s circuitry and assimilating it with what will eventually be the organic brain of our owl.”

  “How long will that be?” Marco as
ked.

  “I’m not exactly sure. I’ve never done this before. The brain itself is under accelerated growth and should be mature in about a month. The amalgamation of Ru and the biological matter is fuzzy logic. We’ll know the second it happens from our monitoring equipment. Once that’s completed, we just wait for the owl body to finish growing. That will take two months, and then I can implant.”

  “Man, this is crazy.”

  “Yeah, it’s a lot to process.” She relaxed her arms and slipped her hands into the pockets of her lab coat.

  “Is this going to make him more vulnerable?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know. What if he’s shot, or something? If that body dies, will Ru still exist?”

  “Again, this is all speculation, but my guess would be yes, as long as his original circuitry isn’t damaged.” Her brows furrowed and she tilted her head. “You know what’s really an interesting question, is whether Ru would still exist if his circuits were damaged but his new brain wasn’t. I mean a few months from now, when everything is fully assimilated. That’s some crazy stuff.”

  “Crazy cool.” He reached into the backpack he’d brought with him, and handed her the box Rucon’s engineers had prepared. “This should have everything you need. There’s apparently some different subspecies in there. Rucon’s people thought some of them would lend themselves to your processes better than others. The full DNA sequencing for each is also included.”

  “That’s great. Tell him I said thank you.”

  “You can tell him yourself when all this is done. He wants to meet you.”

  “Oh. Ok. Maybe I can use it as an excuse to go see Earth.”

  “Absolutely. I’ve got plenty of spare rooms at my villa in a place called the Maldives. You should research it. I think you’d like it there.”

  She crossed her arms again. He held his smile in check. She was conflicted where he was concerned, which he figured was a good thing. She wasn’t full on hating him. She was, however, keeping her psi in check. Maybe time apart would help.