Criminal Core

by Nick Broad

My head spun. “She didn’t seem all that great to me,” I managed to sputter. “She stiffed me on a date.”

  Her eyes lit up. “A date? You’re kidding. You almost went out with Yulia Pavlichenko? That’s like...like getting a blowjob from Marie Curie!”

  I’d heard just about enough. Nothing about this was making sense - in fact, the longer I spent talking to this girl, the less I understood.

  “Whatever,” I grunted, pushing her out of the way. “How do I get back to Earth? There has to be someway out of this place...”

  Something clicked in my head.

  “Wait,” I said, turning around at the end of the corridor. “What do you mean she ‘was’ like Einstein?”

  A sad little look came over the girl’s face. “Noah,” she said, in the tone of someone who just knows that what they’re about to say is going to hurt, “Yulia Pavlichenko died nearly fifteen hundred years ago.”

  The words lodged in my brain and refused to let go. “Fifteen hundred years,” I muttered, my legs giving out from under me. Suddenly I was sitting on the floor, the metal strangely warm beneath my ass. Heated seats, a mad little part of me thought. “Of course. I’m dead. I’m dead and this is...I don’t even know what this is...”

  “This is the Black Oubliette,” the girl said, leaning over me. Her eyes gleamed with sympathy as she watched me struggle with the information - and more than anything else, that’s what got me through it. At the end of the day, a guy can handle a lot of bullshit when there’s a pretty girl batting her eyelashes at him - it’s been a constant throughout human history. Fifteen hundred years hadn’t changed a thing on that front. “And I’m Shay.”

  “Shay,” I said, taking her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  She helped me to my feet. Her grip was surprisingly strong for such a small woman. The room swam a little around me, then resettled.

  Oubliette, I thought. Even paralyzed by terror, the analytical part of my brain kept chugging along. French for ‘prison’. Different kind of prison than a bastille, but still a prison. This place doesn’t look like a prison, though - it looks like a starship!

  And they told me Philology was useless...

  “I’m sorry I had to shock you like that,” she said, sounding like she truly meant it. “I keep forgetting how old you. The risk of culture shock grows exponentially the longer it’s been since a decanting, and you’re...well, you’re actually the very last name on the list. The oldest.”

  “The oldest,” I said, shaking my head. The pieces were coming together, even though I didn’t like the picture they made. “Yulia, her chair...she wasn’t even done building it yet. I was a test subject - her first test subject.”

  “I know! I looked you up!” Shay clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re part of history, Noah. Hey, just between friends - you’re not feeling a little...crazy, are you?”

  I stared at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Hearing voices? Dipping in and out of reality?” Her hands ran up and down my chest, reminding me of parts of my body I’d almost forgotten in my shock. “It’s a real risk with Series One connectomes. Although the computer said you were ‘within acceptable parameters’...”

  I remembered those words from the white room. And I’d heard that word - connectomes - come out of Yulia’s mouth.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I groaned, losing a step and nearly toppling over. “She took a picture of my brain! This...this connectome thing, that’s what she told me the chair does. It reads my brain and copies it onto a computer, like saving a video game...”

  I trailed off. Something horrifying had just occurred to me.

  Shay gave me a little nod, coaxing me along. “She made a copy of your mind that day,” she said, nudging me. “Everything that made you you, at that very moment. You were the first person in human history to have that done to you. It proved the Pavlichenko Device worked - it revolutionized the world.”

  I remembered that moment of blinding, searing pain. “I think it killed me,” I said sadly.

  Shay sighed. “I checked the records,” she explained, “but everything I’ve got for the 2020’s is heavily damaged.” She started to chuckle knowingly. “You know how it is, with all the shit that went down in the rest of that century...”

  “No, I don’t!” I said, my eyebrows shooting up. “What happened?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it,” she said, shaking her head. “Let’s just say most of the guys who scanned in the decades after you were...more than a little damaged. I guess that eventually, that whole century of backups just got a reputation for being more trouble than it was worth. Which is why nobody ever thought to upload you to a Core until now.”

  “Hence the warning label,” I said, looking down at my hands. “I...I guess I feel okay. Okay enough for finding out I died, anyway.”

  “Don’t think of it like that,” Shay said with a grin. God, she really did had one of those grins that was trouble with a capital-T. If this girl had been walking around my college back home, she’d have had every single guy on campus wrapped around her finger. “Think of it like a time machine. You got to skip centuries of strife and terror and jump right to the cool outer-space future! It’s a pretty sweet deal, honestly.”

  That...made a lot of sense, I had to admit.

  “Man, so we’ve conquered the stars,” I said, staring at the weirdly-colored planet out the window. “Society must have evolved into some kind of utopia by now, I bet. I knew we had it in us to get things right, eventually.” I met Shay’s eyes. “So what is this place, Shay?”

  She giggled. “A prison.”

  My lips formed a tight little line. “Prison,” I said flatly. I guess some things never change.

  “Oh, not a prison for you!” Shay completely misread the look on my face. “You’re my Warden, Noah. I need you to help me run this place!” The corner of her mouth curled up in a smirk. “I never would have spent so many credits to decant someone just to throw them in a cell...”

  Good lord, Shay was frustrating. Every time I started to think I understood what was going on, she threw another curveball at me. But the biggest one of all was about to arrive.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” I said, shaking my head. “Why do you need a guy from the twentieth century to run your prison? I don’t know the first thing about jail. I was a college student, for God’s sake! I studied languages!”

  “Philology?” Shay asked, making my jaw drop. She was the first person I’d ever met who actually knew what I was talking about. “That might be more useful than you think, Noah. But you don’t need to worry about any of that right now, okay? We need to get you acclimatized before those ‘acceptable parameters’ become unacceptable. I’m not risking losing my brand-new Warden to future-shock.”

  Her words steadied me. She was right - none of this meant a damn thing if I went completely insane. Shay seemed to think there was a real risk of that happening, and I’d already died once - I was in no hurry to experience it a second time.

  “Okay,” I said. “How do we keep me from going nuts?”

  She grinned from ear to ear. “It’s simple,” she said, giving my ass a squeeze. “You need to fuck me.”

  Three: Shay

  I must have misheard her. There was no way. “Excuse me?”

  “Come on,” she said, her grin growing even wider as she took my hand. “Let’s go to my room. Don’t worry, the crew quarters are much nicer than the cells for prisoners...”

  She led me down the hall, her hips swaying from side to side like a model on the catwalk. It was like she wanted me to stare at her ass. And after a moment, I realized that was exactly what she was doing.

  “Look,” I said, trying to master myself. I just couldn’t seem to tear my eyes off her. “I’m flattered, really I am. You’re...I mean, fuck, you’re fucking gorgeous. I’m sorry, I don’t know if that kind of talk is offensive now or not - we kind of had a whole thing about it back in my time. Oh shit, I’m babbling, aren’t I?
That just goes to show you that I’m all kinds of confused right now...”

  She spun around without stopping, walking backwards just as smoothly as she walked forwards. For a second I wondered if she had eyes in the back of her head, then remembered - she probably did. She wasn’t human after all - she was some kind of a robot.

  Fuck, I was a robot. Every time I thought about it, it blew my mind all over again.

  “First of all, stop thinking you’re going to offend me,” she said, flashing that wicked little grin as she walked. “Sexual politics are...well, you’d barely recognize them compared to twenty-first century Earth. And just between us, I don’t mind one bit if you call me things like fucking gorgeous. In fact, I want to hear it out of you all the time. You are my employee, after all.”

  “I am? Yeah, I guess I am,” I said, shaking my head. “Fuck, this is all so crazy, Shay. Ten minutes ago, I thought I was going to go on a date with a cute Russian girl. Now I’m in the fucking future...”

  “You can think of this as a date if it helps,” Shay purred. She bumped into a door down another hallway, one of several in the section of the ship she’d led me to. “So really, you haven’t lost anything. This is my room, by the way...”

  The door opened. There wasn’t anything about Shay’s room that would have looked out of place in an upscale apartment. Like the rest of the ship, it was all sharp angles and clean fixtures. The lights were low, about as romantic as anything could get in such a sterile environment. Other than a table and a couple of chairs, the only real furniture was a large bed against one wall. It looked like it had never been slept in.

  Is this going to happen? I asked myself. My pulse quickened, and I became painfully aware of how long it had been since I’d last gotten laid. I tried to mentally add fifteen hundred years to the tally, but it felt too strange. Holy shit, this is really going to happen!

  “Shay,” I growled, grabbing her wrist right as she reached for the zipper of her suit. “Can...can I ask you a couple questions first?”

  She made a face. “You are an odd duck, aren’t you, Noah? I’m not used to reluctance in my sexual partners.”

  “It’s not reluctance,” I said, a catch entering my voice. “Not at all, Shay. You’re...well, fuck, it’s hard to control myself just looking at you...”

  That grin came back to her face. “Then don’t control yourself,” she murmured, tugging down her zipper. “I want to see you come unhinged, Noah. Get all those feelings out so my new Warden Core can be nice and excited about his new job...”

  Was that what this was? Hell, I didn’t care. Shay was willing, and she clearly wanted me. I’d never had a girl throw herself at me so shamelessly. I hoped I didn’t disappoint her - after all, she apparently had hundreds of years of experience.

  The zipper went all the way down between her legs. As she finished pulling it down, the skintight fabric fell from her shoulders and wafted to the floor. Followed shortly by my jaw.

  If there’d been any lingering doubt in my mind that Shay was more than human, it was dispelled by the sight of her glorious toplessness. Her breasts were perfect and perky, each nipple diamond-hard and the rich brown of expensive chocolate. Her smooth, flawless skin was milky pale, but I guessed there weren’t many opportunities to get tanned on a space ship.

  “Oh my,” Shay giggled, seeing the look on my face. “Someone looks like he just won the fucking lottery...”

  “I think I did,” I murmured, looking her up and down. I have no idea what plans you’ve got for me, I thought, but whatever they are, this makes them worth it.

  She had to stand on tiptoe to reach my lips. Hers were pouty and dark, like she was wearing some rich crimson lipstick. I could feel the heat rolling off her as grabbed a handful of my hair to lift herself, bringing those lips so close to mine...

  I put a finger against her chest. “Just one question,” I growled.

  Shay scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Seriously?”

  There was only one way to soothe the sting from it - I reached down and grabbed a hold of Shay’s ass. Her expression melted, a little whimper of pleasure leaving her as she pressed her body against mine. Holy shit, I thought. I knew she wanted it, but until that moment I had no idea how badly she wanted it. Had she been alone up here for hundreds of years? The thought made me a little dizzy.

  “Not about the future,” I said, cupping her chin with my free hand. I wanted her looking right at me. “The ship, my job, all that shit - that can wait. But there’s one thing I need to know before we do this.”

  A look of newfound respect entered her eyes. “Go ahead,” she whispered, her voice crackling with need. “Ask.”

  I swallowed hard. “Why me? That chair has records of everyone who ever had their minds scanned in the Pavlichenko Device - you told me that yourself. You could have had your pick of anybody to turn into an android. And a lot of them wouldn’t be nearly as confused and frightened as me. So why did you choose me?”

  I wasn’t expecting her reaction. She let out a surprised little snort, like I’d just done something unintentionally funny.

  “Do you really want to know?” she asked. “You’ll think less of me if I tell you.”

  “Shay,” I grunted, letting my free hand explore the small of her back, “there is no way I could think you’re anything less than a goddess.”

  Her mouth formed a little ‘o’ of surprise. “Oh wow, I’m going to have to keep an eye on you,” she purred, clearly pleased. “You might actually be trouble.”

  My hand didn’t leave her chin. “Why me?”

  She looked this way and that, then sighed. “Shit, okay,” she said, giving me a contrite glance and a shrug. “You’re tall.”

  It was such a ridiculous answer that I was sure I’d misheard her. “Tall?”

  An awkward little giggle spilled from her lips. “You know how I told you some bad shit happens back on Earth not long after you got exploded? One of the ways people tried to deal with them was genetic engineering. A decade or two after you died, Earth decreed a four-foot restriction on humanoid height.”

  I laughed. “Four feet!?”

  “I know,” she said, grinning. “Overturned eventually, of course, once we reached the stars. But let’s just say there aren’t a lot of guys with their brains saved in that chair who can still look down on me when I’m wearing heels.”

  A sneaking suspicion took hold of me. “You sorted the connectomes by height, didn’t you?”

  She blushed - she was actually capable of blushing. “No!”

  “You did!” I grabbed her and lifted her off the floor, pulling her into my arms. “You sorted them and found out I was the tallest, so you decided you just had to have me...!”

  Any protest she would have fired back was cut off when my mouth covered hers. Shay might have been a highly-advanced android, but there was nothing sterile about the way she tasted. Her lips were like a day at the beach, all fun and sun and barely-there bikinis. I felt drunk off her instantly.

  Her tongue explored my mouth for several long seconds before she came up for air. “Bed,” she grunted, her eyes widening. “Now.”

  I can do that, I thought with a grin.

  I guided her down to the bed, kissing her deep as she settled in. I peeled the last remnants of her shipsuit off her ass and legs, and grunted with surprise when I realized she didn’t have a stitch on underneath. Her legs were pale, smooth and surprisingly long on her tiny frame. I ran my hands up them, parting her thighs as she melted against me.

  “When was the last time,” I grunted, my mouth hot against her ear, “that a man treated you like this, Shay?”

  “Too fucking long,” she replied with a wicked grin. “God, I like you already, Noah. Now let’s get you out of that suit...”

  To my surprise, she took her time. Sex with Shay was almost like therapy - it took on the cadence of a ritual that first time, at least. She undressed me slowly, raking my chest and shoulders with her nails before planting tiny kisses all along m
y skin. To my surprise and delight, my new body had a few more muscles than the one back home.

  She kissed her way down my chest as my shipsuit came off, then kept right on going - lower and lower. I thought she was going to stop, but she scooted down the bed on all fours, nibbling and licking at me until she was at the most sensitive part of my anatomy. My cock was at full attention, so hard that it hurt. I looked up to see her staring at it, watching as a bead of precum dribbled from the tip and down my shaft. That part of me was a little bigger than I remembered, too, though I hadn’t had any complaints back on Earth.

  “You and me are going to have so much fun together,” Shay whimpered, giving the underside of my crown a sassy little lick. “Assuming you can keep up with me, that is.”

  It was a challenge, and I seized it. “I’m more worried about you,” I said with a dismissive little smirk. “How does some science fiction robot even know what an Earth guy likes, anyway? I kinda doubt you can even make me come, Shay...”

  Her face was a mask of shock. “You little shit!” she giggled, slapping my chest. “Mmmh, biology hasn’t changed a bit, Noah. Even in the thirty-seventh century, every guy wants this...”

  She kept on working with her tongue, the heat and wetness making me throb. Just as I was about to grab her hair and force her down on my cock, she latched her lips around the head and took me into her mouth. Pleasure coursed through me as she slid down my shaft an inch at a time, her lips forming a seal that no human woman could match.

  The whole time, her eyes never left mine. I’m going to MAKE you cum, those eyes said. Then I’m going to make you get me off three times just to make up for it...

  “Fuck, that’s amazing,” I growled, leaning against the wall as she gave me a slow, sloppy blowjob. It wasn’t the first one I’d ever had - but it was so good it felt like it. Everything I’d experienced before felt like a half-remembered dream, like training wheels for real life. My cock throbbed with new sensations, sending more bliss through me than the old Noah could have handled.

  Shay bobbed up and down on me like a cork, those eyes drilling into my soul. I held back as long as I could, but when she added her hand around the base and pumped me in time with her licks, I knew I was just about done.