The Eros Expansion

by Prax Venter

  Ahnix sucked in a quick breath of pleasure, then moaned as the flood of energy triggered a single orgasm. With intense concentration, Mark pried a channel off the vibrant torrent, twisting it back into his own mind. The power he was touching sent off white-hot flashes of raw potential that felt like holding onto a sparkler for too long.

  The feedback loop was created, the universe became a bit brighter, and Ahnix got to work.

  Mark couldn't really pay attention to what she was doing or what was happening around him, as most of his focus was on trying to maintain a smoothly-controlled flow of power, both into Ahnix and back into his own swirling pool.

  The paradox of using an ability to enhance itself was a slippery concept to hold in his mind to begin with, but the level of intensity he was currently managing was like nothing he had ever attempted before.

  He was vaguely aware that Betty, Willard, Roo, and Vale eventually came to stare. Since he was linked to Ahnix, he could also see a shadow of what she was doing.

  Inspired by her enhancement, the cat-girl typed command after command into the crafter console. He could tell she was making modifications she would never have thought about before and could feel her excitement spike as she continued.

  At the last moment, she tossed the hacking kit that Johnson had given her into the crafter, and slammed the green button, letting out a long breath.

  Mark's power ran out a moment later, and he slumped a little, holding his hand out to the wall for support.

  “Now that was a powerful enhancement,” Ahnix said, her attention locked on the glowing particles swirling around in the crafter's chamber.

  “Your eyes,” Betty began. “That white fire. I've never seen anything like it.”

  “He's the most powerful Lover I know,” Roo said, a wide grin on her puffy lips.

  Mark shot her a sidelong half-smile.

  The crafting process seemed a lot longer than it had been for previous demonstrations, but the tinkling sound and swirling motes of light stopped, and a new, tech-infused leather bracer was resting in the chamber.

  Ahnix pulled it out and scanned its properties, her tail hopping a little as she examined its stats.

  “What's it do?” Mark asked.

  Ahnix slid the piece of armor over her furry left hand, pulling until the glove fit tight. She turned her eyes on Mark as she flexed her fingers.

  “Advanced, long-range hacking, and... this.”

  As she finished her sentence, she pointed her tool-assisted fist at one of the storage crates and tapped a button with her right hand. A ball of tangled orange electricity shot out, enveloping the white cube in spidery energy before dissipating.

  “What was that!” Johnson said, staring at Ahnix from the floor, near his interface console.

  “Electromagnetic Scramble Pulse,” the cat-girl said calmly, lowering her arm.

  Johnson stood and closed the distance to Ahnix with three long strides. He tilted his head, examining his old hacking kit that Ahnix had upgraded and personalized.

  “You incorporated a nanite cloud... and energy collection from surrounding... how did you know any of this would work?”

  Ahnix blinked her eyes slowly as she turned to face Mark again.

  “Roo was right. Mark is the most powerful Lover we know. My whole Path was lit like the surface of the sun for ten minutes.”

  Mark felt Johnson's jealousy spike and wondered if this kid was going to cause a problem later. Thanks to the massive amount of essence from restoring the Crystal Heart, the exotic and attractive cat-girl went from computer clueless to advanced hacker right before his eyes.

  The young man in glasses crossed his arms. “Alright then. Think you could come figure out why that tertiary shunt exhibits data back-flow fragmentation when testing for packet parity?”

  Ahnix shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Mark watched Ahnix pad over to the terminal with Johnson.

  “You know...” Betty said, pulling his attention to see her contemplating the shield on Vale's back. “I can probably modify this old iron shield.”

  Vale arched one perfect white eyebrow and looked over her shoulder.

  “Modify?”

  “Yeah. That display of power was inspirational, and I see you have scratches, dents, and even a patch here. I'd wager this slab of metal, while pretty, doesn't do much against energy blasts.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  Mark could feel Vale teetering on the edge between worry and excitement.

  “I could whip up a batch of my exo-rubber polymer, give it a nice energy-resistant coat. Mmmhmm. Maybe a liquid-diamond sealant.”

  “Sounds neat,” Roo said.

  Vale, still apprehensive, said nothing.

  “Relax, I'm an expert Junker! Just give me some time with that hacked crafter, and I'll start cooking.”

  Vale nodded slowly. “If you think it will help.”

  “Got it,” Ahnix said from over by the console. As soon as she spoke, the ground shook under Mark's feet and what sounded like a distant explosion echoed through the hull.

  “Oh, it's angry!” Willard said, clinging to a pillow, his eyes wide as saucers.

  “What happened?” Mark asked, running over to stand by Ahnix and Johnson.

  The lanky kid typed some commands into the keypad and shook his head.

  “What we were doing to this access point shouldn't have had this effect.” He spun to face Mark. “A large portion of the lower decks just vented atmosphere all at once. The dramatic loss of pressurization caused implosions- major structural damage. Emergency bulkheads and forcefields have been erected.”

  “Will that h-happen here?” Willard stammered, looking around at the walls of the cargo bay.

  “It shouldn't have happened there.”

  Everyone was quiet, listening for any other explosions or creaking in the walls. When Johnson started typing into the keypad, the plastic clatter seemed deafening compared to the surrounding silence.

  The curly-haired kid pressed his fingers to his forehead and said, “What the hell is this?”

  “What's wrong?” Betty said, bracing herself for an impending implosion.

  Ahnix answered for him, looking down at the monochrome console displaying quickly streaming code.

  “The progress we made linking this terminal to primary systems has been randomized. This is not normal.”

  Johnson slammed his fist on the keypad, and the display flashed red before pausing.

  “We're going to die here,” he whispered.

  “Bullshit,” Mark said. “There has to be some kind of workaround, some next step.”

  Johnson looked at Mark and slumped back in his chair.

  “I'd love to hear how. It's like the main database is constantly being rewritten. Any change I make just gets corrupted again.”

  Mark smiled. He and his Enthralled had experience cleaning up corruption. Mark sent out an encouraging pulse to his girls, prompting them for ideas.

  “What if you protected your changes with a shield?” Vale offered.

  “We tried that,” Ahnix said. “Isolation code also gets overwritten.”

  “Can we touch the corruption? Maybe fight it?” Roo asked.

  Johnson let out a sharp, forced laugh. “Touch it? No.”

  Ahnix's tail started to hop behind her. She didn't like how this whiny kid was talking to her friend.

  “Wait.” Johnson sat bolt upright. “We could isolate it, and even touch it if we downloaded primary access nodes into a standalone system. We would need something huge though...”

  “Hey,” Betty said. “Could you cram your code into a Character Brain? These fine folks could probably salvage a blank one from Noir City.”

  “Yes! Beautiful Betty!” Johnson said. “We could download the system intelligence into an un-stamped brain. We could use a pure copy of ERICA to help bridge the gaps much faster, possibly accessing the Coms with hardware calls before being overwritten.”

  “No good,” Ahnix said
, crossing her arms.

  “Why?” Johnson snapped his head around to look up at her, his glasses almost flying off his head.

  “We blew the Character spawn station to pieces.”

  “Seriously?”

  “There are other domes, right?” Mark asked.

  Johnson started to type commands into the console again.

  “Damage report says only two other domes are functioning. Skullcrack Cove and Gluttony Gulch.”

  “Not the gulch, please,” Willard said from across the room. “You will all be devoured.”

  Mark turned back to Johnson. “Right. Show us how to get to Skullcrack Cove.”

  “No need,” Ahnix said, tapping a few buttons on the new hacking tool affixed to her arm. “I've just downloaded the Station Map. Here-”

  She tapped another button, and a spherical, three-dimensional, holographic display shimmered to life in front of her.

  Johnson's jaw hit the floor. “Holo-emitters? How did you get them to fit?”

  “Mark hit the Miniaturization skill pretty hard.” The cat-girl smiled, reaching her free hand down to ruffle the curly, black hair on his head. “I'm really glad you told me to put points into everything on the Hacker path. It's worked out on many levels.”

  The scrawny kid blushed and swallowed hard.

  “Great,” Mark said, moving things along. “Ahnix, you know how to harvest one of these Character Brains?”

  She nodded. “If you don't blow them up first.”

  “Let's hope there aren't disgusting enemies pouring out this time,” Vale added.

  Ahnix's small mouth curled into a half smile.

  “I should be able to disable the spawn protocols with this,” she said, taping her new hacker armor.

  “Awesome. Then we're off to Skullcrack Cove to hunt blank robot brains. Anything we should know about this Adventure Dome?”

  “Watch for pirates,” Willard said from his pillow nest. The bald man looked like a round, orange buzzard keeping its eggs warm.

  Betty snorted. “You all said you ran into bloody corpses in the Noir City dome. Who knows what nonsense you'll find. I'll work on that shield upgrade, sweetie.”

  “Thanks, Betty,” Vale said as she slid closer to the glowing map. “These balls- these are the domes?”

  “Yes,” Ahnix said and tapped a few keys on her arm again. One of the spheres started to flash lightly. “This is our destination.”

  Vale squinted as her violet eyes darted around the map, then reached a finger out to the glowing display.

  “Let's take this tube here and avoid some of the larger hallways. Those wheeled creatures can't maneuver on the ladders.”

  Johnson pushed his glasses up his nose. “There's a pirate lord called Captain Blackheart. The brain reservoir is in the back of the boss chamber.”

  “Of course it is,” Mark said.

  Johnson shrugged and said, “Betty's right, though. All the NPCs could be idle, active or worse.”

  “Whatever it is- we'll handle it, together,” Mark said, looking around at his Enthralled.

  Ahnix tapped a button, and the map collapsed into her wrist. Then the cat-girl held out her furry arms.

  “To me.”

  Mark and his girls all moved in close to Ahnix for the teleport out into the station.

  “We'll be back soon,” Mark said before they all whooshed into the hallway outside the cargo bay.

  Mark, Ahnix, and Roo followed Vale to the closest access tube. They were headed down instead of up this time, and he was slightly surprised when the giant naga dove in head first. He looked over the edge and watched her long, snake body spiral downward with perfect control. Her tight, flawless movements against the metal shaft were quite something to behold. Mark held up the rear while Ahnix and Roo climbed down after Vale.

  With her new hacker armor, Ahnix was able to quickly open locked doors and access panels from a distance, and they were practically flying towards their destination, but it was a lot of climbing and crawling.

  “Tell me about this Character Brain we're after, Ahnix,” Mark said, bored as they crawled through the bowels of the Eros Pleasure station.

  “They are complex storage devices that hold the behavioral patterns and dialogue scripts for NPCs spawned in the adventure domes.”

  “And we need a blank one?” Mark asked.

  “Yes. They are stamped with pre-coded templates then absorbed by a nano-swarm shell during spawn.”

  “I was okay with machine brains, then you lost me,” Vale said from farther up.

  Mark chuckled. “She lost me too.”

  He saw Ahnix's black tail bounce off the tube as it jumped around.

  “Look, we just need to take one before it's used to spawn a new NPC. Apparently, there is a foolproof restriction on duplication and a limited supply. It has to do with something called corporate intellectual rights. And that's where I get lost.”

  Mark knew this one.

  “It means the process is a trade secret. Someone owns the knowledge behind making the NPC brains.”

  They crawled along in silence for a while then Vale stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  “How can someone claim ownership of knowledge? I get that knowledge is power... but it just seems wrong somehow.”

  “Maybe they paid a price for that knowledge,” Roo said holding out her hand, summoning a small flame that spilled steady light around the maintenance shaft.

  Vale sighed and started moving forward again. “And imagine if someone owned the rights to start a fire? Whatever the reason, it means we need to get one before we kill everything this time, right?”

  “Yes,” Ahnix said.

  Another vertical shaft and short time later they found themselves outside the entrance to the adventure dome labeled 'Skullcrack Cove'.

  - 11 -

  After passing through the entrance and pirate wardrobe store, they ducked under a black curtain that led to a torch-lit stone cave. Vale took the lead as they moved through the mossy rocks, and Mark smelled a clean, sea-scented wind blowing toward them from ahead.

  He only took a handful of paces along the rough cave floor before Ahnix pulsed out an alarm through their bond and held her hand up for them to stop.

  Mark tried to listen and thought he heard snatches of music on the warm, damp breeze blowing past his face- or maybe Ahnix was mentally piping it into his senses.

  The cat-girl held her hand up, palm out, telling them to wait while she checked it out, and faded from sight as she spun away from them. Even though she was invisible, Mark still knew exactly where she was as if his mind filled in a glowing outline of his treasured desert queen.

  He was struck with a thought from her, the force jarring his mind. She vehemently reminded him she was not really a queen. Mark furrowed his eyebrows.

  “No,” he thought back at Ahnix, and forcefully sent the concept of her forever being his queen, and that she would have to deal with it.

  He could sense her pause as she padded silently towards the music drifting to them from around the bend in the cave, but continued after she gathered her composure again. Ahnix sent him a quickly fading image of her kissing him on the cheek and then focused on the task at hand.

  A minute later, she canceled the cloak and stood before Mark again.

  “It's a skeleton with a yellow toy bird on its shoulder playing some type of small metal instrument within its bone fingers.”

  “Harmonica,” Mark said. Now that he had a faint image of her reconnaissance in his mind, he could identify the sound.

  “Skeleton?” Vale asked. “Is it armed?”

  “I didn't see any weapons.”

  Vale frowned. “I'll take the lead. Be ready for anything.”

  They followed the heavily armored giant naga through the cave, and Mark could start to see daylight spilling onto the rough, rock walls.

  The temperature grew to sweltering as he stepped out of the cave and into the sunlight. After his eyes adjusted, Mark saw the back
of a skeleton wearing tattered clothes and a red bandanna. He played a jaunty tune on a harmonica while a bright yellow rubber ducky sat on his shoulder.

  That was odd in itself, but the view beyond him was breathtaking. They were high up, near a cliff, and azure-blue waters stretched out in all directions dotted with mountainous islands covered in jungle. Low-hanging, fluffy, white clouds cast moving shadows over parts of the stunning vista. All around him were the brilliant greens of tropical plants and trees, with a layer of sand over the occasional rocky outcropping.

  “That's a lot of water,” Roo whispered, a little apprehensively.

  The skeleton stopped playing and turned his skull face towards them.

  “Ho! Some new land-lovers come to claim Captain Blackheart’s treasure?” The man's skeletal jaw moved like normal when he talked and was only a little unsettling. He turned his skull to face the toy bird attached to his shoulder. “What do you think, Rodger? Think this crew's got what it takes to sail the high seas?”

  The rubber toy bobbed up and down, in midair, as if an unseen ghost were animating it.

  “Caw! Shipwrecked! Shipwrecked!”

  “Aye, good bird. Here.” The skeleton pirate reached into his pocket, pulled out a small fish, and tossed it up to the rubber duck on his shoulder. The toy duck opened its beak and caught the fish, slurping it up.

  “Rodger's got a good eye for disaster. Best head back to your comfy beds- nothing but danger and ruination on these reefs.”

  “Yeah...” Mark said, his eyes locked on the bizarre bird on the skeleton's shoulders. He cleared his throat and shook off his confusion- it was time to play another game.

  “We're here to sink Blackheart and claim his pirate booty- and we aren't leaving till it's ours.”

  His girls looked at him, and he could feel a mix of confusion, support and a small amount of unquenchable desire.

  “Well, now,” the skeletal pirate said, putting a bony hand on his knee. Mark could almost see the man's nonexistent eyebrows arching upwards. “You hear that, Rodger? These lubbers might have some fire after all.”

  “Ruination! Ruination!” the rubber toy called back.

  The man's empty eye sockets turned to face Mark, and a chill ran up his spine.