Interlocking Hearts

by Roxy Mews

  For those who had been in power for so long based on their bullshit, it was probably damn scary. For Paisley, who was sick to death of the lies, the image and the petty crap, it was like a dream.

  If she hadn’t lost herself… If she hadn’t met Coral… No. She couldn’t even go there. She’d still want everyone to have a say in their lives. She’d still want people to have a voice. And everyone with those stupid chips in their arms were people. It was ridiculous they had to prove it. Once a person knew they were a person, they deserved to be treated like one. Sometimes they deserved it even when they didn’t know.

  It had taken Paisley a long time to realize she had value. Now she knew that people who didn’t have those rights were being manipulated. There was a pissant asshole who thought he could control people who didn’t meet his standards.

  Paisley wanted to be the one to teach him a thing or two about standards.

  She crumpled up the paper and tossed it to the ground. The noise outside was cut off as the door closed behind her. It was just Paisley and the man who had started a war, placing her best and only friend on the front lines. It had to be the magistrate doing this. He was the one in front of the protestors in holographic form. He was the one who had access to the data. He was the one who had helped implant the chips.

  It felt like wasting time to press the up button at the elevator, but it would be quicker to take the elevator than trying to huff it on the stairs. It wasn’t like she could sneak up on the bastard with all the cameras in this place.

  If he was using the holographic projection from inside the building, he’d be transmitting from his office. Those big windows he enjoyed judging people out of faced the riots. Once inside a holographic projector, you could experience what was around you, but knowing when to begin transmission was just as important as a stable connection when stoking a fire like this.

  Paisley pressed the button for the fourth floor and felt her body become still. All the chaos. All the fear. Everything she had experienced in her life wasn’t important, because it wasn’t now. She’d learned to push everything about her past, her future and her emotions away. Before it had been for self-preservation, but now it would be the only way she’d make it through. She focused on getting to the office and cutting off the holographic feed. It would slow down the rioters if the man giving them justification wasn’t in their ears.

  She walked off the elevator in slow motion. Because this man wasn’t just the end—he was the beginning of everything that happened from this point on.

  Paisley was the woman who understood mechanics better than humans, and Coral had told her it was an important viewpoint. She had to get in there and make the magistrate understand. She’d rip his balls off later. Right now she had to defuse the situation, or at the very least, convince him to stop throwing gas on the fire.

  The hallway lights stayed steady despite the drain the holographic projector must be causing. She’d expected the door to be locked. She hadn’t expected to have company. She had pushed it all away. She had accepted she needed to fight, and knew it was her battle.

  So why was it she was relieved to see that, in these defining moments of her life, she wasn’t alone?

  Jon knelt beside the numerical touchpad that led into the magistrate’s office.

  Ben was watching his back, and judging from his expression, didn’t know what to make of Paisley’s presence.

  She couldn’t be concerned with her feelings for these men. She couldn’t have feelings right now. She was here to stop someone who needed to be stopped before he flipped the fucking switch. The magistrate was encouraging a riot that was going to kill a whole lot of people, including her best friend.

  “I’m in,” Jon said as he stood. He didn’t startle at her presence. He walked to her and looked down into her eyes. “I get to take out the asshole, if it comes to it.”

  “As long as Coral is safe, I don’t care who pulls the trigger.”

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  With how angry I am, neither do I. But she didn’t say it out loud. She nodded.

  Ben looked like he wanted to argue, but these men were the professionals she knew she had to be. This wasn’t playful. There wasn’t any seduction anymore. Whether they liked it or not, she was here with them. They were trusting her to help. The world had to rethink humanity, but the Anti-Mech movement wasn’t interested in that. Coral was a threat for the very reason that she wasn’t one. She could prove the reality. She could prove that she was real. She could prove that she could love.

  But then they’d have to kill Paisley too. The problem with love was it didn’t end with death.

  Even if they killed Coral, Paisley wouldn’t stop. When the door opened, she didn’t hide behind the two men. She pushed forward. She led them in. If she’d been alone she might have tried to sneak up on the magistrate.

  Now…now, she’d strike. Her way.

  Really though. She shouldn’t have expected anything to go her way. It wasn’t the magistrate.

  It was Darius. Her ex-husband was adjusting the projection nodes in the holographic device. He made sure the magistrate’s transmission was pushed through.

  Suddenly it was ten years ago. Paisley nearly dropped to her knees. Facing her past was not what she’d planned. Her body betrayed her mind as she couldn’t make herself take another step. His voice was loud in the sound-proofed office.

  “You always could lead men around by their dicks. I figured you’d be used up by this point, but considering you’re a mech-loving traitor to the human race, you’ve probably been tainted by some of that crap.” Darius stood up straight. He had a stun baton in his hand. It would do well at taking out the men behind her, but she might survive.

  Ben called out, “I get that you’re an idiot. You released a fantastic woman like Paisley. But this seems extreme.” Ben tried to push Paisley back, but she scooted around him and approached the man she used to think she loved.

  Dodged a bullet with this one. Paisley realized how short she’d sold herself by trying to keep him in her heart for so long.

  “Are you the one who started this?”

  “I lost my job to a fucking machine who gained its CoH. I lost my girlfriend, my apartment, and then I found an opening at the DMA. So why the hell not. But no, I didn’t start anything. There are lots of people who are sick of sharing what should be ours with our tools.”

  The magistrate was still being transmitted. Wherever he was, it wasn’t here. Why all these people decided to follow a man who wouldn’t even come near the danger zone was beyond Paisley. His lies were shouted loudly to be heard among the chaos. Paisley felt the chill at his hatred for the people he was supposed to be helping. She felt the blood draining from her extremities and her fingers tingled. Everything pounded into her heart and her pulse was whooshing in her ears.

  The magistrate’s form held strong inside the holographic projector. He’d needed Darius to run the connection through the DMA. Wherever the magistrate was, he didn’t have the amps to get his body projected on the street. She could only hope that meant the scrambler trigger was out of range as well.

  His voice was loud and clear as he said, “I’m being held in place by these robots. They’ve surrounded the building. This is what I feared when the very first robot was granted rights. We have been playing God and are paying the price. Officers, you need to let us correct the problem. Those stun guns have proven ineffective against some of the very documented cases that began the process.” He was riding high on his righteousness. It was a shame he wasn’t here to watch them pull the plug. “I made a mistake when I granted the first certificate of humanity. Please let me fix it.”

  Jon and Ben circled Paisley. Darius stood between them and the cable feeding the com unit into the holographic transmitter. The magistrate was still talking while they had a very different confrontation.

  Darius addressed Ben. “
So, I assume by how protective you are of her, you’re the one she’s fucking?”

  Jon and Ben both took a step forward.

  Ben let the bastard know in no uncertain terms, “She’s working to save her friend right now, but when she’s done, she will be fucking me.” He pointed to Jon. “Him too.”

  Darius leaned around the men to get a look at Paisley. “You really are a freak, you know. I planted that bug on these sickos when I heard them say your name in the bathroom. I never knew how low you sank.”

  Jon and Ben turned to her. They were ready to breathe fire after that speech. She realized she’d had more than a few orgasms with them. She had a connection. Looking at them both, suddenly everything was clear.

  They let her lead them in. They supported her in her mission. And they were willing to fight beside her.

  She didn’t have to push everyone away anymore. She could pull these two toward her heart.

  “This freak has two hot military men who can do more in bed with their little fingers than you could do with the pinkie between your legs.”

  Paisley smiled at Jon and saw his eyes light up.

  Bzzzzt.

  Ralph Winters’s hologram turned around, and suddenly there was another person getting the low down on Paisley’s sex life. “You idiot. Stop being worried about the slut you used to be married to. Someone has damaged the projection receptor.”

  Sure enough, the magistrate was no longer able to hype up the crowd. Some of the insanity he was stoking had resulted in a bottle hitting his receptor.

  “I’ll reset it.” Darius jumped to the ground and tapped a series of buttons.

  The magistrate flickered as the device rebooted. A quick off and on was still the most effective fix for tech. Go figure.

  Back on his high horse, the magistrate began shouting to anyone he could get to listen for thirty seconds or more. “They’re messing with the feed. You have to take control. If the military won’t stop them, you have to.”

  Paisley saw two things in the span of a half second. One, there was a com-link set up on the desk next to the projector. Two, that same fearless reporter she’d seen earlier was dragging her cameraman into the midst of everything.

  The news team had their shirts over their nose and mouth to avoid any possible smoke, but they were headed straight for the projector. Without even thinking, Paisley grabbed the com-link and goggles and jumped feet first into the green glow of the projector’s ring.

  Paisley had something to say, but suddenly when she stepped into the projector, it wasn’t her usual vulgar language. She hoped this time people might actually listen. She put the goggles over her eyes to get a better view of what was around her projection.

  The virtual reality around her made her stomach turn as her brain tried to reconcile two realities simultaneously. The office and the grounds in front of the City County Building blended together. Layers pressed into each other and she had to let her eyes lose focus to pull the pictures into a solid image.

  When she flipped the switch and merged her image transmission with the magistrate’s, his image spun around to face hers.

  His shock was eradicated with his rage. “Sluts have no place here. You should get back on your knees where you belong, and away from things you don’t understand.”

  “Care to repeat that for our viewers?”

  The reporter’s voice was muffled, through the fabric she had around her face, but the magistrate definitely didn’t miss the little red light blinking on the camera.

  “You need to tell people to get down here. We need all the help we can get to take back control from these machines!”

  Politicians were great at pretending they didn’t fuck up, but Paisley hoped the public would see the hate in his eyes instead of their own misguided fears this time. She had to hope.

  The noise behind her made her turn for a moment. Letting her eyes unfocus, she could see the noise was coming from inside the office.

  Darius was trying to move the feed source. He was trying to shut her up. Normally two specially trained agents would have been able to dispatch him quickly, but both her men had mechanics and the stun baton in Darius’s hand arced high with blue electricity and kept them at bay. With how bright the sizzles of blue were, he had that thing way past stun and on to a total malfunction setting.

  Stomach swirling as she had to handle two realities at once, Paisley tried to tune back in to the magistrate and the reporter. Her men trusted her, she had to do the same. And she did so just in time.

  “Look out!” she shouted.

  Hand guns weren’t as common as they used to be on the streets after the Republicrat Uprising, but Paisley sure as shit recognized what one was when it was aimed at the person in front of her. Someone was trying to shut them up. The black metal shook in the gunman’s hand as he tried to aim.

  The cameraman cursed and used his last working piece of equipment as a shield as he tried to get himself and his fearless reporter out of the line of fire. Paisley reached for them too, but the holographic projection technology just put her image out there. She sure couldn’t stop the bullets as they hit the camera and shattered the unit into hundreds of pieces of shrapnel.

  Paisley screamed as the reporter went down. Blood began to drip from her scalp and from her arms, but then she stood up. And threw out enough four-letter words that even Paisley was impressed.

  “That was our last fucking camera!”

  “You’re bleeding! Someone just shot at us. We have to get out of here.” The cameraman started trying to pull her without grabbing her arm. The limb hung at a strange angle. Paisley hoped it wasn’t more than a flesh wound, but even as her blood was dripping from her fingertips, the woman wasn’t slowing down.

  Pulling Coral’s tablet from where she’d tucked it in her pants, the reporter looked at the device before holding it up to Paisley. “Will this thing transmit as well as receive?”

  The world as Coral was seeing it was in front of her. The guns around Coral were so much bigger and so much more deadly.

  “It will transmit as long as you cut my feed,” Coral said.

  “No. We’re not doing that.” Paisley would have smacked the thing from the reporter’s hands. “The datachip is in my pocket. If you cut the feed, we won’t know what happens on the other side. Coral will be cut off. I won’t know if…” She wouldn’t think about the what if.

  “If we don’t have some way to report here, no one will see this either. We’re the last camera crew here. Everyone else ran.” The reporter held the screen at Paisley’s image with her working arm. “I’m not running this time.”

  A loud crash had them all ducking, even though it did Paisley and the magistrate no good. Someone had thrown a fallen drone through the window of a storefront. People began to file inside as the alarms sounded. If all the police were worried about the robots, who was going to come in and stop the looting? Mr. Montgomery’s shop was still a few blocks away, but Paisley’s blood ran cold worrying what would happen if he’d come into work today.

  “I’m shutting down my feed, Paisley,” Coral said. It was a miracle Paisley heard her friend at all over the noise.

  “I’m setting it up to dual transmit to the royal guard and the news station. I’m sure, if this was already being viewed by the king and queen, that they are assembling a riot squad to help, but this will cover us just in case.” After she fiddled with the settings and plugged in the receptor for her microphone, the reporter turned to Paisley. “Ready?”

  “For what?”

  “To tell the truth.”

  Another loud crash boomed beside them and Paisley nodded. If this woman would put her body on the line to report the truth, the least she could do was tell it.

  Paisley zeroed in on the images around her. She had to keep an eye out for anyone else trying to stop the reporter from showing the level of destruction, a
nd she had to keep the magistrate in the feed. Displaying someone on a live feed made them keep themselves in check. And it let her see his hands. As long as they were curled to fists as his sides, they couldn’t push a button and kill Coral.

  She hoped.

  While the reporter yelled into the microphone to be heard, Jon’s voice was in her ear.

  “We’re doing fine. Mr. Price here is too busy with us to disconnect your feed, but I’m locked on the magistrate’s signal. If you keep him there, we might be able to figure out where he is. Don’t let the projector fail.”

  Easy for him to say.

  The magistrate vibrated next to her. His image held steady, but his sanity was in question. “We’re going to be taken over by them. Don’t you see it? Are you so blind that you think we’re really safe letting these bots take over?”

  “You need to stop watching Terminator movies.”

  With the tablet pointed at her and her cameraman making do with what had to be an incredibly sub-par transmission, the reporter cupped her hand around the microphone and did her job.

  “We need help. We need assistance on both sides of the blockade the DMA has formed. These men and women are aiming guns at innocent people, and letting others shoot completely innocent reporters. I’m staying here to bring you the story.”

  Paisley saw something in the distance and nearly cried in relief. Bio-Dyne had been working on a few inventions at the king’s request. One of them was going to get a trial run.

  “Hold your breath if you don’t want to take a nap,” Paisley told the reporter.

  Although a few people around them listened as well, the majority of the rioters were too busy to see the pink smoke filter in until it was too late. Coral had helped develop this thanks to her reaction to her first orgasm. It was called sleeping beauty gas. One puff and it dropped human or bot.

  It dissipated as fast as it rolled through, but the reporter kept her shirt over her mouth as the three of them reviewed the hundreds of people passed out in the gas’s wake.