Message-ID: <25040asstr$963043811@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
X-Original-Message-ID: <200007071846.LAA05390@king.halcyon.com>
From: elf@halcyon.com (Elf Sternberg)
Subject: {ASSM} Journal Entry 064 / 0100 [ Flags ] by Elf Sternberg
X-Original-Subject: Journal Entry 064 / 0100 [ Flags ]
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 04:10:12 -0400
Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail
Approved:
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d
X-Archived-At:
X-Moderator-Contact: ASSTR ASSM moderation
X-Story-Submission:
X-Moderator-ID: apuleius, dennyw
A Tale of Pendor 064 / 0100
"Can I ask you a question?" Becky asked.
R'Dam grinned. "That is all you ever do of me. I understand
that part of your job is to find out all you can about me but
sometimes..."
She kissed his cheek. "I can be a bit too much, can't I?" She
smiled at him. "I'm sorry, sweetheart."
He touched her cheek with his fingertips. She opened her mouth
as they kissed, lingering a little longer than was seemly. The
spectacle caught the attention of the surrounding diners attempting to
enjoy their lunch in the unseasonably warm end-of-March weather. She
enjoyed the attention. "And I'm truly sorry about your job," he said.
"I'll live. The chance to work with you is a bit too much to
pass up, though."
He nodded. "What was your question?"
"There isn't a hint of wind." She pointed across the street to
the Pendorian embassy. "But your flag is flying clearly and calmly.
Every other flag is limp as a rag. Is it just an illusion?"
"No, I don't think so. I never noticed that before. It must be
made of Starkcloth." He glanced over at her, and she was looking at him
with open, curious eyes. "It's a cloth built of microscopic cells.
They use magnetism and the interatomic strong force to deform the cells
internally, just like muscle cells. But they're much stronger. Pressed
into two-dimensional sheets like that, we can stiffen and flex the cloth
at will."
"Is that all?" she asked.
"Starkcloth is one of our miracles," he said. "It isn't a
fashion statement, it's a weapon. Shaped to the body, it can magnify
strength manifold, and when attached to a predictive sensory package can
protect you against bullets, bombs, and some energy weapons. It's the
standard material of our soldiers and bodyguards."
"Oh," she said. "So it's one of those things I don't suppose
you'd be willing to sell to us?"
"Not readily," he agreed with a grin. "I thought negotiating
trade deals was no longer on your list of tasks."
She shrugged. "As much as I enjoy your company, Dam, I'm still
thinking of my world's best interests."
He nodded, eating wholeheartedly from his salad as if it were
the finest in the world. She envied his innocence, his expression of
openness, his lack of inhibitions when it came to, well, anything. He
loved Earth almost as much as he loved Pendor and everything he did
revealed that.
And it confounded her more that, with only a few exceptions, the
Pendorians seemed willing to give away the store. Their access to raw
mineral commodities was astounding to anyone familiar with the
commodities market; Dam had revealed that they could dump on the Earth
as much gold, platinum, palladium, uranium, and other industrially
precious metals as were currently available.
That bothered her. Her speciality in college had been political
economics. The Pendorians had basically said that the ships they had
come in had been the local equivalent of the Nina, the Pinta, and the
Santa Maria; there was a crash research program underway on Pendor to
make ships that were bigger, faster, and more efficient. If their
program was as succesful as the model they had chosen to emulate on
Earth, the development of the diesel engine under wartime conditions,
then in less than ten years they would be sailing between Earth and
Pendor ships that could cross the distance in less than three months,
haul a hundred times the capacity of their current ships, and do so with
a minimal crew or, perhaps, even no crew at all.
It had been a good day so far. They had met in the morning and
visited yet another part of the Smithsonian, this time the Museum of
Natural History. Dam had been fascinated by the dinosaurs, but he said
that little was known about more than 1% of Pendor's surface. He said
he hoped that he would never meet something quite so monstrous on his
world, but that it was also entirely possible that they existed.
That Pendor was an artifical world, one so incredibly massive
that its effective landmass was three hundred thousand times that of
Earth's, had shocked everyone. Given Pendor's population, at this time
every ten people could have their own Earth all to themselves. When Dam
had admitted that they were broken up into four occupied territories,
the largest barely the size of Massachusetts, she had given up trying to
wrap her mind around the idea.
Now they were dining in the little French cafe in the Embassy
District within view of the Pendorian Embassy. It had become a hangout
of sorts for the local alien watchers who spent their days waiting for a
glimpse of someone from another planet. It had also become a favorite
stop for some of the Pendorians, who seemingly enjoyed the attention.
It drove the Secret Service out of their minds. There were also the
feline-like bodyguards, the tall, powerful Uncia who accompanied certain
members of the Embassy staff. There was a rumor that some of them were
actually robots, and the Pendorian admission that they could manufacture
robots that were indistinguishable from living creatures, at least on
the surface, only helped to inflame the rumor. Becky was convinced that
there were no robots among the Pendorian staff.
"Hey, R'Dam," she said, "What's the inside of the Embassy like?"
"Are you just curious?" he asked, teasingly.
She returned his grin. "Of course I'm curious. I'm always
curious. I'll probably get grilled about what I see, where they can put
microphones, that sort of thing." That her role' as a "spy" had always
been out in the open hadn't stopped either one of them from enjoying the
time they had together.
"Well, I can show you around the public portions, if you like.
It's not very impressive. We like to do things traditionally."
"I still want to see it."
He flagged down the waiter. "Come on, then. I will show you
around." He paid the bill and they left. She gleefully held his hand
as he took her through the front gate of the Pendorian Embassy, a
single, cubical box of silvered windows. Unlike many of the other
embassies in the area this one lacked the forest of antennas on the
roof. Instead, there was a simple quad of white boxes, each on an
independent gimble mount, that tracked unseen and undetectable objects
in the sky. There was consensus among the Pendor watchers, professional
and otherwise, that the boxes were lasers, bouncing signals off stealthy
satellites that kept the Pendorians in touch with their teams
planetwide. The most common number cited for the satellites was twelve,
given that there were four lasers and line of sight could only provide
coverage of at most a third of the world at any given time. That the
U.S. Air Force said they couldn't find any such satellites, while at the
same time they were tracking a lost glove still in orbit from the Gemini
missions, did nothing to lift the rumors.
Inside the walls, there was the usual courtyard, this one with
some sort of modern sculpture in the front, an unrecognizable mass of
marble that reflected the Springtime sun. "I don't understand it
either," he confessed to her as she puzzled over it. What was striking
about the front yard was the lack of guards. It was something
much-commented on by the pundits, but the Pendorians had thus far
steadfastly refused to comment on it. Every nation had representatives
of its military within the grounds of its embassy. Every nation except
Pendor.
Did Pendor qualify as a "nation?" The most common description
of it, even from the Pendorians, was "a well-run anarchy supported by an
automated industrial base that satisfies the basic needs of the
individual. Luxury goods are hand-made goods." When asked how
Pendorians organized to do things like research projects and starships
to Earth, Dam had said, "The way the human body knows to fix an injury.
It's not heirachal. An idea is proposed, argued about, and so on. If
it's good enough to get the industrial attention needed, it's started.
We work on it until we're done."
"That doesn't make sense," she argued. "How is it paid for?"
"It just is," Dam said.
"How are the people paid for?"
"They pay themselves. Or they wouldn't be there."
Becky had given up.
They entered the embassy, only to encounter a human woman
sitting behind a circular desk. To Becky's eye, something was
distinctly amiss with the desk and the receptionist. It took her a few
seconds to realize that there were no telephones, keyboards,
typewriters, displays, monitors, or intercomms. The desk was bare
except for a nameplaque loose on top of the dark blue marble ring in
which she sat. The nameplaque was in both English and the delicate
Pendorian script, and the English read "A.I. Athena."
Becky looked up, startled. The woman behind the desk smiled,
but her appearance could best be described as a generic receptionist,
unremarkable and only averagely attractive. Her age was somewhere in
the late 30's to early 40's. "I thought..."
"Yes?"
"I thought you were a computer."
Athena grinned. "It's nice to meet you too, Rebecca. Lean over
the desk and look closely."
Becky stood up on her toes and did as Athena suggested. She saw
a human torso emerging from a platform mounted to the floor; there was
nothing below the waist but machinery. "You're a robot?"
"No, this is just an animatronic interface. I'm actually down
in the basement. If you want, Dam might even be able to show you what I
really look like. Not that I'm much to look at even there." She
grinned and handed up from somewhere behind the desk a very commonplace
pass on a necklace, a thick white card with her photograph, name, and a
green stripe along the bottom. "This is only necessary for other people
in the Embassy. We have a small staff here, less than twenty Pendorians
and about a hundred Terrans right now, and everybody knows everybody
else. You should get some interested looks, but the fact that I'm here
letting you wander around without a couple of hulking security robots
will reassure the Pendorians. The Terrans, however, feel more
comfortable with something more visible than my tacit permission."
Becky nodded and pulled the pass over her head. The admission
that there were robots inside the embassy, and that they were used for
security, she quitely filed away. She adjusted the pass under her hair
and let it fall over her blouse. "There."
"You look just like another member of the staff. The green is
for 'guest,' of course."
Becky took a good look at the foyer. "Dam? Where did you get
all this darkened hardwood? I thought your people had been insistent
about not using woods that came from threatened forests, which I think
one of your people said was the entire planet."
Dam grinned. "Not quite, but close. Actually, the wood you're
seeing came from a building in Detroit that was scheduled to be
demolished. Two of the people on our staff are master carpenters and we
encouraged them to recycle anything they might find from demolition
projects. We're expert recyclers. We have you as an example of what
happens when we fail."
Becky frowned. She didn't like the sound of that. "So Earth
serves only as a bad example to you?"
"No, no, nothing of the sort. You have a wonderful, dynamic
cultural basis here, Becky, the likes of which we on Pendor have never
seen. We've never known the privations that your people have suffered,
and so we don't really have that mother of invention, necessity. We
have only it's stepparent, curiousity."
She grinned. "Still, it sounds to me like you'd rather avoid
what we go through."
"I think we would."
She nodded. "Where to?"
"What do you wish to see? There isn't much to see, actually.
There are a few rooms I could show you, like the astrogation room, or
Athena's home."
"Then show me those."
He led her to an elevator. The doors closed behind them and
without the press of a button or the speaking of a command the elevator
dropped downwards. The doors opened. "Left," Athena's voice said as
they walked out.
"Blueline, please," Dam said. A line of blue lit up on the
featureless beige carpet, leading them away from the elevator. They
followed it around two corners and through a door. Another door stood
before them, a sign on it in in six different languages: "WARNING. AI
Repository. Tampering with the effects herein constitutes assault and
attempted homicide or actual homicide of a Pendorian Citizen, and
persons guilty of such will be shot."
Becky gulped. "That's serious."
"Athena is a person in her own right. We mean to keep her as
safe as we keep ourselves. Safer, perhaps; she is the glue that keeps
us all together." He opened the door.
Becky wasn't sure what she had expected. It turned out to be
more mundane than she had thought. It was a very clean room, the walls
done in the kind of white usually reserved for the insides of microchip
manufacturing facilities, which should not have surprised her. In the
center was a grey workstation, complete with video screens and a
keyboard marked in symbols she didn't recognize. There was also an
outlet of sorts, massive compared to the parallel ports she had seen on
her office computers. Next to it was a tall cylinder of a milky-grey
color, and it appeared to be moving. "Athena?"
"That's me, in the flesh, so to speak."
"What are you?"
"I'm a radical design in modern Pendorian artificial
intelligence. I'm made up of billions of almost microscopic units
working in parallel that change in accordance with outside data,
resulting in massively parallel computing. It's a design that works at
room temperature, making it useful in environments where power and cost
would make systems that need to be cooled prohibitive. The system works
with nearly 100% efficiency. The tiny failures are due to indeterminate
events at the quantumn level and interference from high-energy cosmic
rays that prevent the molecules that make up my thinking from
interacting completely deterministically. Whether or not this gives
rise to a consciousness, as some people claim it does, is a matter of
philosophy. In real terms, I'm indistinguishable from you as a
conscious being." There was a distinct sense of pride coming from
Athena's voice.
"Wow. You said 'radical design?'"
"Yeah. Most Pendorian systems are based on interatomic
interactions. Harder to track, but easier to initialize and can be
compressed to much smaller sizes. Liquid intermolecular systems like
myself are easier to design up front and we can be scaled to incredible
sizes without much loss of parallel processing efficiency. And the
cryooptical systems, which are the original Pendorian AIs, tend to be
less introspective, more mechanistic. We're still trying to figure out
why. Anyway, thanks for visiting. I hope this information is useful to
the guys at the Agency."
Dam laughed, and Becky managed a smile. They were so casual
about her being coopted by her own government to report on people she
liked, and yet she found herself resenting those very people that she
was reporting to. The whole project stank, she thought, and she wanted
to get out of it.
Dam interrupted her thoughts. "Come on, I'll show you the
astrogation chamber." He led her into another room. This one was an
eggshell white in color, with rounded corners. "Okay, Athena, give us
the tour."
Becky gasped as she found herself plunged into darkness. "This
is the universe that we know," Athena said as stars appeared all around
Becky, even in the space between her and Dam. "Here is Earth, and here,
Pendor." Small arrows appeared to float in midair, pointing at two
stars. "We have sent several small, automated probes out to the more
promising looking stars, but there isn't much to go on and many of the
systems we've explored have had only a few gas giants and airless rocks.
To date, nothing like the Earth or Pendor has been found within the
eight light year sphere that Pendor has explored.
"The pace of our exploration is slowed by the need for manned
ships. AIs, it seems, do not do well alone, although there are a few
exceptions and there is now a crash course in discovering what it is
about interstellar travel that makes AIs susceptible to erratic
behavior. Pendor does not as yet have many manned vessels, but we're
building new and better ones even today."
The world seemed to tilt and whirl as she watched the approach
of the Pendorian vessels to Earth. She saw them slow down as they
approached the Earth, shedding their velocity with incredible
efficiency, dropping off parts of their ships that would make a
six-month run around the sun, collecting as much energy as they could
and using it to make tritium before they came back to Earth, fully
refueled, ready to take the Pendorians home.
The lights came back up slowly, as they would in a planetarium.
Becky had found it all fascinating. "It's not really meant for this,"
Dam said. "Our intention when we installed it was to make this a useful
navigation tool fifty years from now when we need to go places other
than the Earth. But for now, it's a good projector. And we
miscalculated its utility. Athena, please load Arctangent One."
The lights brightened momentarily, and suddenly Becky found
herself standing... outdoors? She looked around. There was no wind,
nor was there any sound. "Athena surprised us when she showed us that
she could produce this scene so accurately. One of our carpenters is
considering installing speakers to add to the effect so that will
probably happen soon. Wind machines might be a bit much."
Becky looked around. Overhead the sun (the sun? A sun, she
decided) blazed down upon... she was standing on what must have been the
roof of an incredibly large building. A glance behind her told that it
might be some kind of aircraft carrier. There were two white, gleaming
aircraft, military by their look although they had no obvious missiles
installed. They were handsome looking machines, rakish in profile. She
watched as the rear nozzles on one extended back, then rotated to almost
45 degrees, then executed a perfect circle. In concert, they promised a
craft that could perform almost any maneuver.
She looked past the planes and realized that this must be an
image from Pendor itself. The land shot out in front of her, straight
on forever until it curved upwards into a milky haze where the clouds
blocked her view of the land. Looking even further up she saw the land
clearly again, now with a good view of the clouds soaring over that
landscape as if she were above it. She realized that her eyes were
looking at the land across millions of miles. The implications
staggered her. "Turn it off, Dam."
The vision went away. "Are you okay?"
"It was... too much to take in. How... how much of Pendor could
I see there?"
"About a third. A hundred thousand terrs, or Terran surface
areas. A lot of it."
Becky gasped. "A hundred thousand times the surface area of the
Earth?" Dam nodded. "And you have less than three million people?"
Dam nodded again. "My God, no wonder you people are so different. You
have the playground to yourself and the power to defend it."
"That's what we're afraid of," Dam said. "Complaceny.
Jealousy. Misunderstanding. We want to be more like you, Becky, not
less, but we don't want all the other things that come with being like
you."
"I know, Dam, but... God. You people. I can't help it."
Dam smiled. "Come on. It's been a busy day. I'll show you to
my office."
They spent a short time in Dam's office. Becky enjoyed the
view, looking out across the Embassy District, and enjoyed talking to
Dam as he plowed through paperwork without a hint of holding back. Not
that he told her anything at all about what he was working on. It was
all in a squarish form of the Pendorian script anyway, which she
couldn't read. She had the strangest feeling, though, watching him,
that he was somehow doing more than merely shuffling paper. There was
something else going on, something in the way he seemed to be grinding
his teeth as he worked.
"Done," he finally announced. "Nothing terribly important,
although I have to go to France next week. Would you like to come?"
Becky was flattered. "I'd like to, Dam, but you know I can't
afford something like that."
"I can. I'm permitted one companion on my budget. You could be
that person. Better you than someone from the staff, someone whose very
air I shared for six months while trapped in a spinning steel ball."
Becky smiled. "Merci', then," she said. "I accept."
"Athena?"
"Got it," a voice said from out of nowhere. Athena had been
listening the whole time and Dam had never once mentioned it. That was
what it was like, living with the Pendorians. Becky thought she could
get used to it. She also thought that she would like to get out of
there, get Dam someplace a little more private, and have her way with
him. Or let him have his way with her. Something like that.
Becky took Dam's hand as he led her out of the Embassy. With
eager smiles they walked back to her aparment, keeping the late-
afternoon habit they had fallen into so very quickly and easily. Becky
had come to appreciate just how casual Dam was about sex. With her. He
made it seem easy, and for her that was a first.
Inside the door, he drew her into his arms and kissed her. She
gave a little sigh of pleasure at the touch of his arms around hers and
the press of his knee against her thigh. There was nothing at all
threatening about this half-man, half-cat. There was just strength.
Becky surrendered to it, betrayed her upbringing to it, allowed herself
to be swept away by R'Dam's welcome touch. There was nothing to stop
her, now, not work, not family, not even the pressures of her future.
This would end someday but she hoped in would not be ending too soon.
She liked the priveleges of it, the pleasure of him.
Dam took her hand and led her to her bed. What had been
tentative two months ago was now passionate. He kissed her throat, his
fingers expertly at work on the buttons of her blouse. In seconds he
had her chest exposed. The fur that covered his arms, usually hidden by
the tailored suits he wore, now stroked at her breasts.
And she was permitted by his very freedom to participate, to
respond to his needs with her own. His own moan greeted her as her
hands slipped inside the belt of his trousers, sliding along the fur of
his belly until she found his semi-erect cock and its furred, completely
retractable prepuce.
Releasing him, Becky lay back on the bed and let Dam do the work
of removing his clothes. She watched him as he stripped, warm assurance
in every gesture, an indescribable grin of anticipation on his lips. He
had never said he loved her and she didn't care. She didn't think she
loved him either. Instead, she liked him. They were immune to each
other; he couldn't impregnate her, they couldn't share diseases. There
was nothing to hold them back from giving one another pleasure, and so
they did, as much as they could.
As he removed his clothes and put them aside, he exposed his
chest, furred white with a ring of orange at the sides and across the
shoulders. He lowered his pants and then his undershorts-- boxers, of
course-- revealing his erection to her. She was always fascinated by
it, almost completely human in appearance, the thin fur at the base
thickening as it deepend into his belly and thighs.
Dam crawled onto the bed, covering her body with his as he
stepped, hands and knees, over the sheets, over her. She reached up to
caress the fur on his chest. It was like petting a cat, a cat with a
hard-on, intelligence, and desire for her. His face was human, though,
and even his eyes were rounded, although he had said that there were
Satryls with slitted eyes. He kissed her neck, her breasts. She liked
the way he plastered her body with kisses, covering her in little
circles of coolness that faded with the summer heat.
Her hands were on his body, stroking his cock. "Oh, yes," he
moaned as she wrapped her hands around it. "Yes, Becky, wow." She
looked into his eyes and felt connected to him. He was just warming up
and already they were getting into that groove.
He turned, peppering her belly with his kisses, his mouth
lingering longer below her navel, kissing his way into the thicket of
hair she had around her pussy. He kissed the mound at the top, then
dipped his head between her thighs and kissed at her lips. She felt a
surge of warmth right where his lips touched, and a tiny trickle of
fluid between her legs.
Her hand stroked his cock and balls almost absently. She took
her time examining the lightly-furred scrotum and bare cock of pale
skin. She liked the way he looked, and although she had never had an
uncircumsized lover she had quickly come to love what he could do with
his cock. She stroked it, touched it, loved the loose skin around the
head.
She shifted her shoulders to get underneath him, struggling to
fit her head under his legs, to reach that incredible cock with her
mouth. The smell of him-- musty, feline, not at all like a man-- was
something she had grown to love in the short time they had had
together. She reached up with her mouth and kissed the head of his
cock. His moan, muffled by her sex, told her that she was doing well.
She licked at the head, teased the underside. Her tounge played with
the small stretch of skin that seemed to anchor his foreskin.
She wrapped her lips around his cock, sucking him down. He
responded with a playful nip of her vulva. She squealed. "Cheater!"
His laugh was light and as wonderful as always. She returned to
his cock, sucking him into her mouth, playing with the head. A pearl of
precome hovered at the tip of his cock and she licked it playfully. In
was salty and sweet. She sucked down hard on him, wanting more. The
sounds coming from between her legn told her she was doing well.
And reminded her that he was hard at play down there.
Distracted for a moment, she let herself be swept away by pleasures that
must have been building for quite a while. She wondered how she could
not have noticed them as they stormed into her, occupying her
attention. She made an half-hearted attempt to wrench her attention
back to him but it was too late; he had her, as he always had her by
now, her orgasm coming on strong, thundering through to her soul.
She was spent from that but stil she wanted even more from him.
"Dam, get inside me. Please?"
With a grin he turned around in bed, lifting her legs until her
feet were pressed against his shoulders, and in one swift motion thrust
himself completely inside her. Becky rolled her head from side to side,
unable to control herself as the thrill of his thrusting cock within her
kept sending wave after wave of pleasure through her.
Dam was a true cocksman. She had read stories about men who, by
their cocks alone, could give incredible pleasure, and she had never
believed it. Dam had proven it to her. His cock was an amazing
instrument, backed by a hard body that could go on without pause, and he
liked it that way. He could go fast, then slow, hard, and soft, that
beatuiful smile on his lips, his eyes glazed like someone in the throes
of his own religious ecstacy, communing with her lust. They pressed
against each other, each thrust forceful and loving.
"My God, Dam, you're... more..." She was whimpering, begging to
feel that shaft keep thrusting within her, in and out, in and out.
"More," she whispered until her voice was gone and then, "more," her
lips would form without breath. Between gasps her body would act, her
legs around his hips, pulling him into her, tilting her hips to him.
She could tell when he got closer. His whole body would start
to quiver like a harpstring, holding back the energies that he had
created with his lovemaking. She could feel it inside him, feeding him,
and feeding her, as it built incontrollably towards his climax. He came
with a shout of joy in a language she didn't even know and didn't need
to. She knew "yes!" when she heard it.
Dam held himself up, a tiny bead of sweat just about to fall off
the tip of his nose. He looked down at her and smiled. She smiled
back. He let go a laugh of pure joy, and she joined him in a final
celebration of their adventure together. "Oh, Becky," he sighed. "And
it is only getting better."
"Yeah," she said. "You are getting better."
He chuckled gently. "Magnificent." He turned over and
collapsed onto the bed, his demeanor confessing that, for once, he was
spent.
Becky sighed, profoundly content. This was one part of their
relationship that she had no questions or qualms about, although it was
certainly the part of her relationship that confounded her "handlers"
the most. They had agreed on that; she had told them that he was
completely, and like all Pendorian species deliberately, built to be
compatible, and that it was none of their business what she did with him
in the privacy of her bedroom. They had reluctantly agreed to take her
word that she would faithfully report anything he said that was of
interest to national security.
"Mmmm..." she moaned. "What is it with you? I've never felt
anything like what you drive me to." She felt behtween her legs,
running her fingers over her pubic hair. It was sticky, predictably,
but it also felt warm, there. Fulfilled.
"I don't know," he answered, sounding honestly bewildered.
"There's something special about you, too, Becky. I can't put it into
words but when I'm making love with you I feel... content. Happy."
She turned over and rested her head on his shoulder. "I love
the fact that you don't hold back, Dam. When you want to make love, you
do it like it's the most important thing in the world."
He smiled. "It is."
"I know. Lots of people say that. But it's not. Not really.
They're afraid that the other person will think bad of them, think
they're a whore or something because they cut loose. The way you do."
"Is that why you're sometimes so quiet? Because you're afraid
I will think less of you? Or is it because of the people recording us?"
"WHAT?"
"Your people, they put microphones in this room. I assumed you
knew."
Becky's outrage kept her from putting together a coherent
sentence for a moment. "They're listening? Right now?"
"Yes, right now. I assumed you knew."
"No, I did not know. In fact, I explicitly told them not to
listen in here, and I wanted my privacy respected!" She seethed
angrily.
"Just a moment them." Dam went curiously quiet, his eyes losing
their focus for a moment. "There," he said as his eyes retrained on
Becky. "The listening devices have been disabled."
"What did you do?"
"I asked Athena to turn on the masking devices our people put
with the listening devices. We wanted to make sure that we could turn
them off at any time. Although Pendorians are used to being part of a
mutual exchange environment all the time, Terrans are not part of our
system and we're not about to treat them the same way."
Becky felt a strange chill run up her back. She sat up
straight. "What is a mutual exchange system?"
"I thought I explained. From anywhere on Pendor you can find
and read any book, see any movie, hear any story being told. The AIs
make this possible. And they respond to our requests because they are
listening all the time. Athena is part of that."
"You mean to tell me that Athena is listening to us now?" she
asked. He nodded.
Becky shivered. "Big Brother for real."
"You may look at it that way. Look at your own culture. What I
imagine is important to you-- what you read, what you wear, what you
eat-- is all knowledge stored in the records of your credit cards,
records anyone with enough time and money has access to. Your neighbor
could know everything important about you, if he cared to dedicate time
to finding out-- whether you read pornography, or the Communist
Manifesto, or the Bible. But he would probably not know if someone were
brandishing a knife on you one night. This difference distinguishes the
AIs on Pendor. They keep private when it is not our business to
inquire, and raise the alarm when it is in our best interests to make
knowledge public."
"So, how did you ask her?"
"I just spoke it quietly, subvocally." He pointed to his
throat. "I have small implants in my jaw and ear that make it posible
for me to talk to and hear her whenever I want to. She can also hear
everything going on around me."
Becky felt her mouth fall open. She hadn't realized that the
man-- mel, she habitually reminded herself-- who she had cuddled up to
so often in the past two months had been allowing his supercomputer to
listen in on their every word, every act, and recorded it all. And that
the radio itself was inside his body; it couldn't be taken out, couldn't
be turned off.
Growning colder by the moment, she got out of bed and grabbed
her clothes, pulling her pants on in a hurry. All of the wonders of the
past hour forgotten, she ignored his protests as she buttoned her shirt
and, without her socks, stepped into her shoes and fled. In a fast but
controlled walk she left his residence, fled down the stairs and out
into the street. She continued walking until she saw a bus going by.
She boarded it and allowed it to take her away from R'Dam.
Becky groaned as she rolled over and stared up at the ceiling.
"Another day," she sighed. Another day to enjoy a healthy income
without actually doing anything and without anything to do. The CIA had
agreed to pay her through the year, and then she would be free to pursue
whatever career she wanted, although probably not one in government.
Still, she had had a good career in the State Departement; as long as
her private life stayed out of her resume' (as if that were possible)
almost any company in the world would want her as an international
customer contact. Financially, she was set for life as long as she
found something to do.
But her body ached for R'Dam's patient hands. She couldn't help
but close her eyes and wish for his loving mouth against her lips. She
dreamed of his strong body against hers. Her fingers strayed down
between her thighs even as she thought of him. "Oh, Dam," she sighed.
Finally, she knew that nobody was listening to her, because there was no
part of her life that anyone cared about. Not anymore, not now. Her
fingertips pressed against the swell of her vulva, touching between her
lips. Her body was already rehearsing where it would go if Dam were to
mysteriously show up on her doorstep. It encouraged her, asked more of
her. She bent her knees and drew her feet up, allowing the flower of
her vulva to open. Fingers, her fingers, brushed her already liquifying
pearl. Small and obscene shudders flowed through her thighs.
R'Dam's phantom mouth touched her breasts, his hands upon
the outsides of her hips. As her own fingers began to circle in on her
pearl she dreamed of his cock, average in size but so talented in
action, entering her, knowing where it should go, knowing what inside
her it should touch. Her insides began to melt at the intensity of the
memories, at the strength of her own caresses of her inflamed pearl.
A hard moan filled the room with her climax.
Even before the tremors completely subsided, Becky sat up.
Kneeling, she turned around and lifted the venetian blinds over her bed.
She looked out onto the narrow, brownstown-lined street that had been
her home for the past six years. She would be leaving it all soon. She
would go someplace where nobody listened. She wanted it that way.
She turned away from the window and wept silently.
The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related Tales
Copyright (c) 1989-2000 Elf Mathieu Sternberg.
Distribution limited to electronic media not-for-profit use only.
All other rights are reserved to the author.
Elf M. Sternberg, rational romantic mystical cynical idealist
http://www.halcyon.com/elf/
"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure
reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little pratice, writing can
be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!" - Bill Watterson's Calvin.
--
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| alt.sex.stories.moderated ----- send stories to: |
| FAQ: Moderator: |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Archive: Hosted by Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository |
|, an entity supported entirely by donations. |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+