Message-ID: <25603asstr$965088610@assm.asstr-mirror.org> From: michaeld38@aol.communism (MichaelD38) X-Original-Message-ID: <20000731153016.11332.00003667@nso-fi.aol.com> Subject: {ASSM} Vector, ch.9 {MichaelD} (1/2) Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 20:10:10 -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: kelly, IceAltar AUTHOR'S NOTE AND LEGAL STUFF I did not e-mail you this story. If you unexpectedly found it in your mailbox, it's because your kid and/or your spouse is subscribing to adult newsgroups without your knowledge. Flame them, not me. This story contains explicit sex. If you're a minor, you've obviously gotten past whatever paltry filters your parents tried to put on your computer, so hell, you might as well read it. No one ever died from reading about sex. This story is mine. Free reposting and archiving is okay; commercial use is not (that includes using it on some slimeball banner farm). Contact me if you have any questions; cross me and I'll have you fed to rabid weasels. This is another serial like "Call Girl Cheerleaders." I have no idea where it's going or how it will end. Want to find out? Send me mail. My stories, including this one, are archived at: www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/MichaelD/www/ www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Richard_Bissell/www (all the work of my alter ego) www.storiesonline.net (complete but not always up) --- VECTOR Copyright 2000 by MichaelD38@aol.com. No commercial use without prior authorization. <-> Pomerantz talked some about picking up the pieces of his life and trying to put them back together again. He is Circe Berman's age, which is forty-three. Three months before, he had been given eleven million dollars to resign as president of a big TV network. "Most of my life still lies ahead of me," he said. "Yes," I said. "I guess it does." "Do you think there is still time for me to be a painter?" he said. "Never too late," I said. --Kurt Vonnegut, "Bluebeard" <-> Chapter 9. An unremarkable man sat at an unremarkable desk. The man had a close-trimmed white beard that made him look somewhat older than his sixty-two years. He was fit and trim for his age, but the invisible responsibilities on his shoulders sometimes pressed down harder than he could bear. Around his neck, out of sight, was a gold necklace, at the end of which hung a small Celtic cross. On his left pinkie finger was a gold signet ring, the design of which showed a cross similar to the one dangling from his necklace, over which floated an all-seeing eye. The ring was old and worn, and he told those who asked that he had once bought it in an estate sale. This was not too far from the truth, for it had been bequeathed to him by its previous owner, now many years dead, who had himself received it from a long line of others. The door to the man's office opened, and a younger man entered. Though it was out of sight under his shirt, this man had a Celtic cross tattooed on his right bicep. Given the popularity of such things, he rarely had to explain it to anyone who saw it. He handed the older man a folded computer printout. "These are the latest from Zurich." The older man flipped through the printout for several moments. "Did you triangulate them yet?" he asked. "Yes. He seems to have been stationary since the last reading." "He's still in Los Angeles?" "So it seems." "He might be settling there again." "Do you want me to do anything?" "Not yet. We mustn't be hasty. You remember what's happened in the past." The younger man nodded. "I'll wait for your order." "Thank you. Good work, Stefan." The younger man left, and the older man put his forehead in his left hand. He rubbed his temples, praying that their readings were correct. They must not fail again, not with the resources they had at their disposal now. The fate of the human race depended on it. --- Victor turned from his mirror, inhaling deep draughts of air. He felt thirty years younger, and in truth he essentially was. He had undone the damage that his body had suffered over the previous three decades. And now it was time to take it for a test drive. Victor could sense the millions of women in the city around him, could still sense Leslie miles away in her dorm room, but he did not want to pluck one of them out of their life as he had done with the Siamese cat Hemingway was still ravishing out in the living room. That would be rape, undeniably, and he was going not to cross that line. Besides which, he knew instinctively that he could not yet manipulate human minds well enough to make it work the way da Vinci had been doing so effortlessly. But could he do something else? He reached out into the city again, searching for a template to use. The images flashed through his mind like the film of a microfiche reader. He stopped abruptly, finding a possibility. She was miles away in Pasadena, a girl in her late teens or early twenties. Red hair. A face that could break hearts, a body that had sprung whole from every adolescent boy's fantasies. He reached into her, reading her, trying to map every molecule of her body. He surprised himself to discover that he could do it. It was rather like taking a photocopy, making an impression of her at the quantum level. He pulled himself back to his house; the template came with him. He held the template out in front of him and sucked in the elements necessary to recreate it. The girl appeared in front of him. And promptly collapsed to the floor. Victor started. He looked down at the motionless girl for a moment. Then he stepped forward and poked her with his foot. She was dead. Or rather, he had simply created a pile of lifeless flesh. Wondering if he had done something wrong, had recreated her incorrectly, Victor reached into the body, feeling for what he had done. There seemed to be no mistakes. She was simply dead. Pushing at the body, he discorporated it into nothingness again. Then he looked back at the real girl in Pasadena. The template matched, but something was missing. Life, obviously. He realized as he probed deeper into the girl that she was more than a collection of elements. There was indeed something at the quantum level that set her apart from the dead clone he had just created. He had to make that adjustment as well. Victor recreated the girl again, this time more slowly and carefully, guiding the components of her body from the most basic level. Again, the girl's clone appeared in his bedroom. And this time she was most definitely alive, for she shrieked in surprise. "Whoa!" She looked down at her naked body--Victor had not bothered to recreate her clothes--then up at Victor, who was still naked as well. "What the hell?" "Um--hello," Victor said. The girl backed away from him, trying to cover herself. "Who the hell are you? How did I get here?" Damn it, Victor thought. He hadn't realized he would recreate her consciousness as well. He reached into her brain--and got nothing but a mass of flesh and blood. No thoughts at all. And yet--something else was there, something burbling away at the quantum level. Electrical signals, jitters, flashes of energy. Was that her mind? Maybe he just wasn't interpreting it correctly. The girl was growing increasingly agitated, backing herself into the corner of his bedroom. Victor watched as one aspect of the energy in her brain swelled along with her physical agitation. On a hunch, he went after it. He pushed at it, trying to flatten it out, to calm the jitters and roiling waves. The girl's mood abruptly changed. The fear disappeared from her eyes, and her arms dropped away from her body. Victor's heart skipped a beat as he took in the near-perfection of her naked form. She had a gold belly ring and a little tattoo of a cat just below her bikini line. "Where am I?" Her voice had none of the anger and panic Victor had heard moments ago. "My house." "How did I get here?" "I brought you here." "But how? A second ago I was in my bedroom reading." Victor felt something else swelling in her mind--confusion?--and pushed down on it. "It might be amnesia. You don't remember coming here with me?" "No. Who are you?" "Victor." She looked down at herself. "Where are my clothes?" "You took them off. Out in the living room." The confusion swelled again, and Victor flattened it. "Oh." She looked back at Victor. "Were we going to fuck?" Victor began to feel as if he were manipulating a marionette. Disgust with himself swelled in his chest. He was about to discorporate the girl as he had done with the first, dead, version when he stopped himself. It would kill her, wouldn't it? She might be a clone, but she was also a living, breathing human being, and if he dissolved her now, it would be tantamount to murder. His gut went cold as he realized what he had just done. The girl was still staring at him. "What's your name?" he asked. "Meredith." Victor cursed at himself, then rapidly pulled his pajamas back on. "Stay here a moment." He went out to the living room, finding Hemingway curled up on his favorite chair and the Siamese in the middle of the floor licking her hindquarters. "Damn," Hemingway said. "I needed that. Who you got in there?" Victor ignored him for now and reached out to the girl in Pasadena. He scanned the clothes she was wearing and quickly recreated them in his living room. He scooped them up and carried them back into the bedroom. Meredith was still waiting by the bed. "Here." She looked took the clothes, though she looked down at them in confusion. Then she sat down on the end of the bed, leaving her clothes in her lap. "Okay. Wait a second. Can you tell me what's going on here? One second I'm sitting in my bedroom, the next I'm naked in yours." Victor struggled for a moment to make up something plausible. "You don't remember anything?" "No. Did I black out or something? Do I know you? It feels like I've never seen you before at all." Victor retained his tight grip on her agitation, sensing that she would go berserk the moment he let go. This was happening too fast, too much at once for him to control. Instead of trying modulate her mood, Victor instead pushed down on everything, trying to flatten _all_ the energy in her brain at once. The girl's eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell backward, unconscious. Not trusting his new abilities to do it, Victor dressed her as well as he could manage, then pulled her back on the bed so her head was on the pillow. Then he sat beside her to think. --- For several hours, he experimented with his abilities, trying to figure out how da Vinci had been manipulating people. It had something to do with controlling the energy in the brain as he had been doing so clumsily before he had to knock the girl out. Several times he had to stop and suppress her again when she began to regain consciousness. It took quite some time to differentiate between her conscious mind and her subconscious memories and inclinations. Her memories were not like a book, like stored data in a computer. Her mind was not a rigid, fixed system. It felt more like a pond, her surface thoughts manifesting themselves as the ripples and waves he had first noticed, her memories like the silt and drifting detritus near the bottom, fluid and changeable. He first tried probing himself, thinking the familiarity might help his explorations, but the attempt was an instant failure. It was like holding a mirror up to a mirror--the images and sensations were replicated beyond recognition. He was puzzled by this for a moment--hadn't he been able to alter his body with ease?--when the explanation suggested itself: the power was fixed to his consciousness, his intelligence, not his flesh and blood. Once he felt familiar enough with the structure of Meredith's mind, he tried to decide what to do. He had acted much too rashly, thinking he could just create some sort of blow-up doll to amuse himself when in fact he had created a living human being. Now he could not get rid of her without killing her. And if he simply turned her loose, she would no doubt head "home" to Pasadena, only to discover that she was already there. That way lay potential disaster. As much as Victor recoiled from the thought, he realized that the only solution was to alter her personality, to make her a separate person even if she was physically an identical copy of someone else. But how? Reading her mind was one thing; making wholesale alterations to it was something else entirely. He sifted through her memories wondering what to do. Meredith Alexis Carnaghan was her full name. She was twenty-one, an art student at the design school in Pasadena. She was something of a party girl; apparently going home with strange men was not unheard of for her, which perhaps explained why she had asked if she and Victor were going to have sex. She had grown up in Bakersfield and come to Los Angeles to try to become a model. The design school degree was a back-up, as she had had little success breaking into the modeling business. He passed through several memories of agents telling her that she was pretty enough, she just didn't have the "look" people wanted these days. Besides which, she was too old. Didn't she know that serious models started at 12 or 13? All of these memories swirled through a cloud of disappointment and disillusionment, which she had been trying to assuage through increasing debauchery on the weekends. Victor felt a twinge of sympathy. The girl was barely old enough to drink legally, and she felt as if she were nearing the end of her rope. Then Victor hit something he hadn't been expecting, though in retrospect it was not surprising. Meredith had begun thinking of getting out of this whole cycle, ditching the modeling and design school and just becoming someone's mistress. He ran through several vague fantasies (and he could tell they were just that, for the texture was subtly different from her actual memories) of Meredith lounging around a pool with no concerns beyond her tan. Yet her consistent failures at modeling had significantly lowered her expectations. Like many truly beautiful women, she suffered from a rather low self-image. She wasn't looking for Hugh Hefner; she just wanted someone to take care of her so she could stop screwing up at everything she wanted to do with her life. That gave Victor some ideas, but could he really implant a memory in her mind? There was really only one way to find out. Victor first went around his apartment changing things a bit. It was no sense trying to look like a potential sugar daddy unless his house looked the part. He didn't think he could make it any bigger, but he could replace the furniture and redecorate a bit, doing all the things he had been thinking about doing over the years. He dug out the copies of "Architectural Digest" he had been saving for ideas and went to work. He had a few mishaps when he forgot to pay attention to the plumbing while improving the fixtures in his bathroom (that took up another few minutes while he mopped up the water that had geysered up to the ceiling), but eventually he had the place looking a great deal better and--more importantly--pricier than it had before. Hemingway followed him around watching but generally kept quiet, even when he sent the Siamese cat back to her original home. Then he remembered Meredith's fantasy about lounging beside a pool. He looked out the back window. His backyard was big enough, but did he really have the ability to create a swimming pool out of thin air? He couldn't do it from scratch, not being a pool contractor, but maybe he could create another clone. He reached out into the neighborhood, looking for possibilities. West Los Angeles was filled with swimming pools, and in a few moments, he found one that would fit, physically and aesthetically, into his backyard. Pausing to gather his energy, he copied the entire set-up and tried to recreate it behind his house. He discovered, to his surprise, that it was significantly easier than copying a human being. It was so much easier than he expected that he almost forgot to hook up the plumbing and electrical connections properly as the pool came into being. But in the space of about five seconds, it was done. Victor blinked in disbelief. Where there had once been a rather plain expanse of grass and shrubs was now a $50,000 custom-designed pool. And as far as he could tell, the addition was seamless. "Nice," Hemingway said. "Thanks." "This is a lot of effort for one piece of ass." "Can you make yourself scarce once I wake her up? Explaining a talking cat is beyond my abilities right now." "Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about me." He hopped up onto the new tan leather sofa Victor had created and went to sleep. --- Vector Copyright 2000 by MichaelD38@aol.com Free redistribution permitted; no commercial use without authorization Michael ~Story Archives~ www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/MichaelD/www/ www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Richard_Bissell/www ~Other Archives~ www.storiesonline.net www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/BitBard/www/forray/michaeld/ -- 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. | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+