Steel Beneath the Skin

by Niall Teasdale

  The room was large and roughly oval, mirroring the shape of the huge, black table in the middle of it. Aneka thought it might be obsidian, but it looked like a single slab and she doubted it was possible to cut something that big. The chairs were distinctly uncomfortable, which had to cut down on meeting length. The room had two doors, a set of double doors which most of them had used to enter, and a single door at the other end which the Dean had used. It was the latter which opened now, and the room fell silent.

  Winter was dressed in a formal skirt suit in grey with a high collar. She was carrying nothing with her and proceeded to the chair at the head of the table which Aneka figured was the reason the Dean was not in it. He had looked annoyed enough about sitting along the side of the table. Instructions had been that Aneka sit at the other end, which had made her feel like she was about to be executed.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I assume that you all have realised that this meeting is with regards to Miss Aneka Jansen. Some of you are probably wondering why you are here now when you could have been told by Miss Jansen what our findings are. Don’t worry, I will be addressing that later in the meeting.’

  She smiled her rather bleak smile down the table at Aneka. ‘All the reports have come in from those responsible for examining Miss Jansen, and I must say they were most interesting reading. Her body looks like it will keep the Physical Sciences department busy for years. It appears that the Mental Sciences department is quite happy with her mind. There is a comment that, considering the stress she has been through and her lack of the behavioural modifications most jenlay have been through in the past millennium, she is actually better adjusted than many of our citizens. Further, analysis of her reactions and interviews with her and those who have interacted with her have satisfied Doctor Hoopin that Aneka may be an emulation of herself, but it is an emulation of a real woman, not a xinti creation. Cassandra assures us that her AI is subservient to her and so constitutes no danger.’

  There was a slight pause and Aneka could see the woman’s face shifting as she considered her words. ‘The only voice speaking in dissension on the matter is coming from the Navy. I have received a report stating that Miss Jansen poses a risk to the security of the Federation.’ The two naval officers nodded. Aneka had not worked out the insignia yet, but the dress uniforms they were wearing had enough metal attached to the shoulder to suggest high rank. They were pleased their report was being listened to. Winter looked at them and spoke. ‘Vice-admiral Crofton, could you explain to me what this, quite strenuous, assertion of Miss Jansen’s threat level is based upon?’

  Crofton tried to keep his discomfort off his face. Aneka tried not to smirk. ‘Careful analysis of the threat posed by a xinti agent being allowed…’

  ‘That is a general truth, Vice-admiral,’ Winter interrupted him. ‘Be specific. Why is Miss Jansen a threat?’ Crofton fumbled through his notes. Aneka had not seen the military report on her, but the only naval officer who had talked to her was Ape Gibbons and his dislike of her was based purely on prejudice. Winter put the man out of his misery. ‘That’s all right, Vice-admiral. I know there’s nothing in there specific to this case. I completely agree with your assessments, unfortunately they don’t apply where the person concerned is not actually a xinti insurgent.’

  She turned her attention back to Aneka. ‘It is the opinion of the Federal Security Agency and the Federal Intelligence Committee that Aneka Jansen poses no threat to federal security or the safety of federal citizens. She is to be granted full citizenship, as is her volitional AI.’

  Ella gave a squeak of glee and grabbed Aneka’s hand in both of hers. The rest of the Garnet Hyde team, and all the academics smiled down the table at her. Aneka was watching Winter, however; the woman was not finished.

  ‘Now we come to the reason you are all in this room rather than receiving this notification via a message. We must not have the news of what Miss Jansen is spreading into the community. There would be some panic, the Herosians would throw a fit, and there are some groups who would consider her an exploitable asset. So, her nature is being classified as a grade seven secret. For your benefit, Miss Jansen, that means that the information is need-to-know at the highest security level. Anyone revealing that secret is tried under the laws for treason.

  ‘Clearly, we will be needing a cover story and the simplest story is often the best. So, Miss Jansen is going to be what she appears to be. The Garnet Hyde discovered a xinti ship in deep space. The only survivor was a test subject found in a stasis pod. An Old Earth “human.” We are simply leaving out that she also happens to be housed in a synthetic body. Your records have already been doctored to reflect this.’ She paused briefly. ‘If anyone here has any issue with keeping this secret, I’d like to hear it now. I have armed guards waiting outside to arrest any dissenters.’

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one spoke. ‘Good. Dean Ajax, I suggest some form of gathering to announce that we now have a real, live expatriate of Old Earth in our midst. Mobilise the Media, spread the word.’ She gave Aneka a smirk which actually had humour in it. ‘This time next ten-day, people will be asking you to endorse breakfast cereal.’

  Aneka looked back at her and wondered what this woman was up to. She had never known a spook without an ulterior motive and Winter was putting her neck on the line taking civilian reports over the military. What did she want?

  Part Five: Plus ça Change

  Yorkbridge Mid-town, 6.6.524 FSC.

  ‘I’m really not sure I’m ready for this,’ Aneka said as she ran a comb through her hair. The hair did not protest, but it was never tangled and did not need combing.

  ‘Of course you are,’ Ella replied, not looking around. She was trying to decide what to wear. ‘You’ve got the Dean’s dinner in four days. If you can’t handle an evening with Kate and Dillon, how are you going to manage a formal dinner?’

  ‘What if I do something stupid? Like… use the wrong fork.’ Now Ella did turn, favouring Aneka with a look. ‘All right, but I could say something wrong. I could offend one of them…’

  ‘Your face has been all over the news. Everyone knows you’re from Old Earth. Even if you did make some social faux pas we can gloss over it with your lack of knowledge of everything now.’

  Aneka grunted an acknowledgement. ‘Well… what should I wear?’

  ‘Your swarm dress, minimal density. We’ll be having sex after dinner and you might as well let them glimpse the dessert during the main course.’

  Aneka started for the bedroom door. ‘I’ve just got over my fear of threesomes, and you’re suggesting an oncoming foursome?’

  ‘If three is okay, four is easy. Dillon’s the one who’ll have to keep three women satisfied.’

  ‘Poor man. I feel for him. I really do.’

  ~~~

  ‘So,’ Katelyn said, ‘what was it like back then? I mean, we had to ask, right?’

  Aneka smiled at her; yes, someone had to. She took a drink of the wine the couple had served, not a bad tasting drink, if nothing much like wine, and considered her answer. They had eaten a fairly simple meal which had tasted quite good. Perhaps that was because it was the first real food Aneka had consumed since waking up, but Aneka suspected that Katelyn was a good cook. They were chatting around the table while their dinner digested. In Aneka’s case, digestion involved nanobots disassembling the food and converting it into materials usable for repairs, while the water content was largely processed into fuel for her reactor. Al had decided to give her detailed readouts of the process, which she considered far too much information.

  ‘It was different from now in a lot of ways, but there are still a lot of similarities. I mean, I’m still learning. I haven’t even spent a month here and all the sleep learning simulations in the world don’t quite prepare you for the real thing.’

  ‘After a thousand years you’d think we were pretty different,’ Dillon commented. For a man with the muscles of a Greek god he had a surprisingly good brain. Then again, t
he average IQ of the human race was now about twenty per cent higher than it had been in Aneka’s day.

  ‘We didn’t have spaceflight back then. Well, there was a space station, we’d been to the moon, and there were a lot of satellites in orbit, but we hadn’t been to Mars yet. I think routine flight between the stars has made people a little more… cosmopolitan. You’ve had a lot of medical problems engineered out of you, and quite a lot of behavioural ones.’

  ‘Not me,’ Dillon said, rather proudly. ‘Born on a Rim World, like Ella. The medical services aren’t as good, I’m not as immune to disease as Kate is, but I also didn’t get the social mods and conditioning.’

  ‘Which is why he’s a body-obsessed pervert with a breast fixation,’ Katelyn stated with a huge grin. It did explain why he had hardly taken his eyes off Aneka’s barely concealed chest all evening. Neither Ella nor Katelyn were small, but Aneka had them beaten hands down.

  Aneka laughed. ‘Jenlay seem to have a more recreational view of sex than humans did then, but then again, I think that’s because they can have one. When the contraceptive pill appeared on Old Earth, and before we got AIDS and political correctness, people were having sex for fun. They still were in my time, but they had got more careful about it.’

  ‘And now we’re practically immune to diseases,’ Ella said, ‘and we have voluntary control of our fertility. So we have fun.’

  ‘Uh-huh, but my point is, we would have if we could have. A lot of what “human” means hasn’t changed much, even if the name has. It’s the environment you live in that’s different, and that isn’t as different as it could have been. You guys still go to work, you aren’t all cyborgs, or living as digital minds in a super-computer. There’s still crime, even if it seems to be mostly on the Rim. You still have politicians and lawyers.’ They laughed at her depressed tone on the last sentence.

  ‘But politicians are selected for their ability to be good administrators,’ Ella said, ‘and lawyers are good at debate and handling complex procedures. And with our lifespans being so long, we can usually have the career we’re good at and then move on to something else later in our lives.’

  ‘True,’ Katelyn said, ‘but have you noticed how politicians rarely do that? Once they get that power, they tend to hang on to it.’ Dillon was nodding his agreement quite forcefully.

  ‘I guess,’ Ella replied. ‘I mean, there’s the Dean, but he would still be in power if he didn’t like fucking robots.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with fucking robots,’ Dillon said. ‘I have fond memories of a Cocotte Model android back home.’

  ‘I don’t want you parading your sordid past in front of our guest!’ Katelyn said, mock outraged. ‘Let’s go sit in the lounge, I’ll put a vid on and we can chat over the top of it.’ She got to her feet and straightened her micro-skirt. Aneka was not sure why; the thing barely covered her behind anyway. It combined nicely with the black halter top and thigh-boots to give a mean-but-available look. ‘Computer, play a random video from list three.’

  The “lounge” was also the dining room, just as in Ella’s apartment. Here, while the guest room was walled in and had a door, the bedroom had been opened up and the large, circular bed was visible. It seemed to Aneka that it was waiting for them. It certainly seemed to have been stripped down to just its sheets. The other big difference from upstairs was that a quarter of the room was given over to a huge set of weights, and a treadmill. From the looks of the equipment, Dillon was serious about his iron-pumping.

  The lounge had a larger sofa, easily big enough to get four people on, and two easy-chairs, and as they walked over a section of the wall which had been displaying a cityscape went black. The video started and Aneka found herself looking at three people having sex. The scene was the circular bed. One was easily recognisable as Dillon from the sheer size, and she saw Katelyn’s dreadlocks in there, but it took another few seconds before she figured out who the third person was.

  ‘Is that…?’ Ella started.

  ‘Last time you were down for dinner,’ Katelyn informed her, grinning. ‘We played this a couple of times when we were missing you.’ She sat down on the couch, Dillon sitting on her left and draping an arm across her shoulders. ‘So how did the dig go?’

  Aneka manoeuvred Ella into the seat beside Dillon and then sat down herself. Her dress shifted around her as she did so, so that none of the beads were under her. The faux-leather felt cool against her skin.

  ‘It went well,’ Ella said. On the screen Ella had her mouth full of Dillon’s fairly enormous cock. ‘There’s stuff I’m not allowed to mention, but we got a lot of material on the mining operation and the people who lived there. And, of course, we found Aneka who is the best source of pre-Long Dark information ever!’

  ‘That wasn’t actually on Alpha Mensae Four though,’ Aneka said. ‘They took me off a derelict ship.’

  ‘I know,’ Katelyn replied enthusiastically, ‘it was on the news. I get this image of Ella in a ship-suit floating through this ruined spaceship to discover you hidden away in a corner, with one red light, flickering, to show you were still alive.’

  ‘It was a cupboard, and she had two men with her, but that’s not far from it. They got me out of there just in time. Much longer and the stasis system would have packed in, and I’d have been another frozen slab of meat.’ Aneka was finding herself vaguely hypnotised by the action on-screen. For homemade porn it was surprisingly good. ‘Who was filming this?’

  ‘We have a robot camera we’ve trained to get the shots,’ Dillon replied. ‘Kate wasn’t keen on using a robot, but she loves the results.’

  ‘Not keen on robots, Kate?’

  ‘About as keen as most of the population. They scare me. But I have to admit the little ‘bot we got to do this is really good at catching the angles.’

  ‘You two been up to anything exciting?’ Ella asked.

  ‘The usual,’ Kate replied. ‘Work, rest, play. Dillon’s been pumping iron, and me, and I’ve been running. I’ve been going out to the beach once a ten-day and doing fifteen kilometres there.’

  ‘Improving your stamina?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘I could, maybe, help with that,’ Aneka said. Both Dillon and Katelyn looked around at her. ‘I’m not an expert or anything, but I could lay out the exercise programme I had for the Army. That had a lot of stamina work in it.’

  ‘That’d be great, I’ve never had any professional help with this. Dillon’s all about the power.’

  ‘He’s got plenty of stamina,’ Ella commented. Aneka heard a sound which was very much like a zip being moved. ‘Aneka was a pretty top notch soldier. You should take a look at what she’s got.’

  ‘I intend to,’ Katelyn replied. Aneka was not sure whether that meant her training schedule or her.

  ‘It’s hard work,’ Aneka said, ‘but it certainly gets you very fit.’

  ‘If your body is the result, then yes.’

  Dillon’s head rolled onto the back of the couch and he let out a moan. Aneka leaned forward and looked around Ella. Dillon’s leather jeans were undone and Ella was slow-stroking him. Aneka shrugged and got to the floor on her knees, and then crawled around to kneel in front of Dillon. She looked at Ella. ‘May I?’ Ella pushed Dillon’s shaft forward and its owner let out a deep moan as Aneka’s tongue ran over the head. Another moan followed as she spread her lips about as wide as they would go and swallowed him, sucking hard. Then she pushed forward, driving his shaft all the way down her throat, and Dillon’s back arched.

  ‘Oh wow,’ Katelyn said as Aneka started to bob her head up and down. Aneka would have replied, but her mouth was full. She figured it looked impressive, but it was not like she had a gag reflex or a need to breathe.

  ~~~

  Aneka found herself on her back with Dillon between her legs and Katelyn on her face. They had been at it for hours; Dillon certainly did not need to worry about his stamina. Aneka, of course, was a machine, figuratively and literally. Her tongu
e lapped and her kegel muscles clenched in time to Dillon’s thrusts, and she could feel another orgasm building. She had actually asked why her body was capable of having them and Al had said the Xinti had created an exact enough copy of her original body that her mind would accept it. It sounded like a slightly inadequate reason.

  She felt the familiar rush, the explosion slowly forming in the brain she no longer had. Her body tightened and she heard Dillon let out a strangled cry before he rammed into her and climaxed himself. A second later and Aneka’s tongue had done its work. Aneka’s hands clamped over Katelyn’s iron-hard thighs to hold her down and keep the pleasure burning in her.

  Aneka swam back out of a slight daze to the sound of clapping. Katelyn had rolled to one side and Aneka turned her head, licking her lips as she did so, to see a naked Ella applauding them from the edge of the bed. ‘Awesome. That’s got to go in your collection.’

  Katelyn nodded weakly and Dillon let out a groan as he climbed off Aneka. It sounded like an affirmative sort of groan. Aneka propped herself up on her elbows to see a small robot slowly backing out of the room. It appeared to have a pair of cameras for a head and moved on smooth ball-like wheels. The camera robot. ‘I’ve never made a porn flick before,’ Aneka commented.

  ‘It’s okaying we’re filming, isn’t it?’ Katelyn asked. ‘It’s only for us and friends, and we can send you a copy if you like.’

  ‘As long as it doesn’t appear on the evening news, I guess it’s fine by me. Might even be educational.’