Blackjack Wayward (The Blackjack Series) (24 page)

I laughed. “Well it’s good to hear a friendly voice.”

“Somewhat friendly, Blackjack. You trust too easily. I was wondering, why are you here?” he asked.

“Frustrated.”

“Does the woman frustrate you?”

“Women do that to every guy,” I said.

I walked away from the main building, through an open field covered with rough, low brush and dotted with bare trees as far as the eye could see. The sun was still coming up behind me as I crossed the road and moved toward an open field, with a grayish grass that swayed with the light breeze.

Back at the shack, a shadowy figure standing was watching me move away.

“But in any case, that’s not at all what I meant,” he said.

“What are you talking about? What am I doing with her?”

“No,” he said, trying to channel exasperation through the tiny speaker. “Her purpose is pretty clear. I’ve studied you long enough now to know that you crave female accompaniment and approval.”

“That just worked out that way, Haha. I couldn’t leave her to be raped, or worse.”

“I suppose....”

I grabbed a twisted stick and tore it in half, throwing it into the distance.

“Haha, humans need to feel close to each other. We’re social creatures. It’d take a monster like Zundergrub to not feel pity for her. I mean, what kind of man sees her in that predicament and walks away?”

“It helps that she is beautiful,” Haha began.

“Don’t start with that fecundity shit,” I warned him, remembering a speech he had given me on Shard World not so long ago.

“She’s the living dead,” he corrected. “Her body has arrested decay and managed to retain the will and soul that make a human being alive, but she is not alive, Blackjack. You are having sex with a corpse.”

“I thought you didn’t have any sensors or anything.”

He laughed, “I don’t. I need a long list of things before I can even try accessing the mainframe. I’m just going by your conversations. You should have asked me to translate everything she said in French.”

“I kind of know what she was saying. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. I’m stuck in Shitsville with an undead wizard who wants to fuck my brains out.”

I took maybe ten steps before he responded with “It could be worse,” making me chuckle. “From all your physical responses that I can monitor, she seems to be quite attractive.”

“She’s beautiful,” I admitted.

Again, Haha let that linger in the air as I paced onward, reaching the middle of the wide plain. Ahead was a sparse treeline where the ground gave way to a falling ridge.

“Again, I have to ask: what are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“There’s nowhere in the world that you can hide,” he said finally, as if reading my thoughts. Then again, he was, I was giving him my thoughts and getting them back through his pretend construct. “You can’t stay here with her, pretending the world will just forget about you. Besides, you’re forgetting the show.”

I swallowed hard, thinking back to the old website Haha had kept updated with videos of all of our escapades, images that were plastered all over my trial and used against me. Worst of all were the videos that Haha managed to get of me during the silent moments, staring at Apogee like a school boy with a crush. He made me look pathetic, simian, like a roughshod beast who only knew lust and rage.

Then again, maybe that was not far from the truth.

“Please tell me you’re not recording this shit, Haha.”

“I wish I had the ability. I barely have any processing power. If you can find a car battery out here, maybe I can be of more help. Besides, that’s not the show I’m talking about. You and Zundergrub. It has to happen, Blackjack. People are clamoring for it.”

I laughed.

“No one wants to see me, Haha, ‘cept to beat my ass and put me away. I’m better off out here, out of the way.”

“They won’t forget you. He won’t forget her.”

“She’s a big girl,” I said, tearing some leaves from a nearby bush and letting them fly with the slight breeze.

“If he didn’t have her at Utopia” Haha said, “then it’s likely he tried to find her and failed. He’ll try again, Blackjack. You have to help her.”

“Why?” I laughed, opening my hands to feel the low grassland I was walking through. “Lady Vexille was right, you know.”

“No she wasn’t.”

“She let me fry, man!” I yelled, thankful that we were so far away from the shack.

“It’s likely that....” Haha started, but his voice faded out.

“Haha, you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am short on power. As I was saying, it’s likely that she wanted to but wasn’t allowed.”

“Maybe” I said. “But then there’s the other thing.”

Haha didn’t respond, which meant either his power cell had died or he didn’t understand. In any case, I continued, figuring that talking to myself was probably better than nothing.

“I always thought that she and I shared something special, you know? I know that it doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s all fucking silly to you, but I honestly thought it wasn’t just me. I thought she was right there with me. But it’s more likely that she didn’t give a shit, that it was all a play to cause a rift between us. It was just like you warned me.”

I shook my head, pushing a small tree over as I passed it.

“See, the way I think of it is like this: if she had needed me, if I had been the hero, and she was the one facing the mind-prison ... no force on fucking Earth could have stopped me. You understand? Nothing.”

Another tree, this one quite large, fell over after a massive shove tore it from the roots.

“Nothing!”

“There’s another alternative that you’re not figuring, Blackjack,” Haha said, his voice replete with noise as if he was over-amplifying the speaker.

“And what’s that?”

“That you’re over-simplifying the whole thing.”

“Fuck you, man,” I said, picking up the tree I had just felled and tossing it into the distance. Every bone and tendon complained, but the exertion felt good. It was comforting to know that I still had my strength. Claire’s magic really had healed me.

“You’re not that thoughtful,” he continued, not giving a shit about how frustrated he was making me. “If you could only imagine the myriad of emotions that poor woman had to endure.”

“She wouldn’t have let me go down like that,” I said, almost pleading for him to agree. To hate her, like Claire did, was a much easier explanation.

“Maybe she thought it was necessary,” he continued, pushing the virtual dagger deeper into my heart. “Maybe she thought you needed a lesson. Maybe you should ask her.”

“For what, Haha?”

He didn’t respond.

“Fuck her, okay? I mean, I have everything I need right now. I have my freedom, I have....”

I stopped, having walked to the edge of a cliff that lay a hundred yards beyond me. From my position, I couldn’t tell how far down it went, except to guess it was quite a ways. The ground wasn’t entirely stable, so I didn’t bother going to the edge.

“I was there,” he said.

“I know.”

“I saw what she did to you.”

I peered at the cliff edge, then back at the tiny shack, far in the distance.

“I saw what you did to her.”

Suddenly, I started laughing uncontrollably. “Oh, man. You’re not uploading all this crap to your blog thing, are you?”

Haha joined in my laughter. “That’s the only pity. I wish I could record this for future use. We really need to raid an electronics shop for the base components.”

Mr. Haha was probably one of the most amazing works of engineering ever attempted. My theory was that Retcon had originated the A.I. and unleashed it, like a child, out in the world, but I had no way of proving that. In any case, Haha’s mainframe was uploaded in the net somewhere, waiting for his body to be repaired and rebuilt so he could jack in. In the meantime, he was just a mass of metal wires and simple components, running on bare battery power, without the ability to do much more than question my every decision.

“So what would you do, if you were me?” I asked him.

“I don’t have my processing net. I barely have my conversation heuristics. I just figured I’d need them in order to communicate with you. Few humans know Binary.”

I laughed, “Reminds me of when you backed out of that mission in Shard World–”

“I haven’t my memory grid to cross-reference,” he interrupted.

“You don’t remember? The big monster? Some poor bastard had to go down into a big lake and piss it off, then hope it killed the Mist Army. It was kind of a big deal.”

“Yes,” he started. “I have some recollection of the event via bullet-points. Again, I’d need access to the mainframe for full comprehension.”

I let the matter slip, not wanting to tell him how he had shown a robotic version of fear that day. He had told me he was unable to do the mission because of being apart from his mainframe, risking meeting a final end. Basically, he was afraid of dying somehow, and while he was perfectly suited for the task we had at hand, I had to weather the load. As I always did.

Now he couldn’t even give me advice.

“Part of me wants to run to that town, Alice, wherever it is, and get on a plane to the U.S. and try to track down Zundergrub.”

“Regardless of the challenge, you have to try.”

“I don’t know. I doubt I’d get past customs.”

“That’s nothing compared to the matter of how to find Zundergrub,” he said. “And how to do it while having every super from high and low, and every member of law enforcement across the world, looking for you.”

I hadn’t given much thought to how would I go about finding him with everyone after me. I guess my first instinct would be to go to where Apogee was and wait for him to strike. But that’s what I was expected to do, and I’m sure she was in as secluded a spot as they could figure to put her. In fact, I was just drawn to her; it was almost uncontrollable, and it made me sick. Claire had been right: I’d be in a completely different situation if she had helped me. I wouldn’t have gone to jail, wouldn’t be on the run from Zundergrub, wouldn’t have had to endure the ridiculous mind-prison. As if that was commensurate punishment for the crimes I had committed.

“But none of that is important,” he said, his voice sputtering.

“Everything all right?”

“Running out of power. Find me some batteries, will you? Anything will do. Just remember, you can’t hide from who you are, and you’re not safe here.” Haha said, his voice fading.

I looked back at the house, now just a tiny spec, miles in the distance, lit by the rising sun. Before me was a deep drop that opened up to a wide plain, and in the distance I could see another dusty road, this one much larger than the path beside Rabbit Flat, and several large trucks crossing it. Watching the main road, which led to Alice, I was struck by how odd it was that I didn’t really have much of a choice after all.

Chapter Sixteen

“Who were you talking to?” she asked when I returned, but I just shook my head.

“Any food?”

Claire let me pass her, entering the shack.

“I can make food,” she said. “Anything you wish.”

I walked to the faucet and poured some water in my hands, drinking the silty stuff.

“I’ll eat anything, just make lots of it.”

She smiled, waved her hand toward the bed and said, “Gwledd y duwiau,” and like if it was unfolding from the nothing, a massive feast rolled out atop the bed, including roast pig, breads, cheeses and skins splitting with wine.

I walked over and chuckled, grabbing a wine skin and unstopping it. “Forget eggs,” I said and poured the red fluid down my throat.

“So we’re staying?” she asked, taking a seat on the bed beside the food, but not bothering to eat.

I spilled some of the wine down my face and wiped it with my hand.

“We can’t, Claire. I’m sorry.”

She nodded, understanding the finality of my tone, but tried to convince me anyway.

“I know other places. Just as remote.”

Putting the wine skin down, I picked up a roll of bread, breaking it in half.

“That’s not really the problem,” I started, taking a small enough bite so I could still talk. “He’s out there.”

“Apogee,” she scoffed, shaking her head in disgust. “You have to save her.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, you’re right. She probably thinks I’m scum.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Besides, it’s not even that,” I started, moving closer to her. “What’s to say that we’re playing house somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and Zundergrub shows up. Huh? What if he shows up with fifty guys?”

I knelt on the floor beside her.

“He would need more than that, my dear. You forget who I am. Frankly, you forget who YOU are.”

Shrugging, I said, “Maybe.” I sat there for a moment, until she reached forward and toyed with my long hair. I was still getting used to it, and apparently she liked it. “But I’ve also learned it only takes one lucky shot to ruin even the best laid plans.”

She nodded, bringing her hand to my cheek and raising my face to hers.

“He couldn’t give a shit about you, Claire. If I go, you’ll be fine. If I stay, you’re always in danger.”

“Toujours le héros,” she said, flashing a wide smile. “Always the hero,” she translated for me.

“Yeah, I’m not much of a villain.”

“If I had met you three hundred years ago,” she said. “I wouldn’t be, either.”

She reached down and kissed me, her soft, warm lips a loving caress. We parted and I rose back up to meet her, now kissing her fully. Claire welcomed me to the bed, dismissing the meal with a wave of her hand, then gripping me tightly as I settled atop her.

When we were done, I left the bed and ran the tub with cold water, throwing myself in when it was halfway full. Claire was an aggressive lover, as had been her demon-imp persona in the mind-prison, and I’d be sporting a few dozen nasty new scars on my back if my skin were that of a normal man. My shoulders, arms, and neck would be bitten up to hell as well.

I had to bend my legs to fit fully in the tub, but the cool water after that hard exertion in the mid-day heat was worth any contortion.

Claire had fallen asleep in my arms and I’d held her as long as I could before my arms started feeling numb and my longing to wash away the heat took over.

The water was surprisingly cold, as its source was a deep well, and it felt fantastic to just lie there. I felt myself fading, about to fall asleep, when she stirred in bed and sat up.

“Mind if I join you?” she said crossing the room and coming to the tub.

“If you find a spot where you’d fit, you’re more than welcome,” I said.

She raised a foot, placing it beside my hip, facing me, and then swung over so she was straddling me, her small hips pressing down on mine. Leaning over me, she let her lustrous hair cascade on my shoulders, tickling and tantalizing me. Claire moved closer, letting me feel her small breasts in my face and lips, and using her arms to guide me so I could play. She was sensuous and soft, so unlike our previous session, and rubbed the sides of my face, the back of my head, and shoulders while I suckled, feeling her soft skin against my lips.

Reaching down to manipulate me, she helped me enter her, sliding down so we faced each other. A mischievous little smile crossed her face as she came closer and kissed me on the lips briefly, then continued kissing my cheek where I had been injured, my ear, and my neck as she rocked softly up and down, rubbing the inside of her hips gently against my groin. My hands worked her back, rubbing her soft skin, softly grasping at her buttocks and legs as she continued the slow rhythm. She arched her back, feeling herself getting closer, and I kissed her neck beneath her chin and down to her chest as I could feel her tightening around me and slowing down. Coming closer and closer, she rubbed herself on me, now barely rising at all, just using the torsion of her hips to climax, unable to keep from digging her nails into my back as her wave upon wave of pleasure spasmed over me. As she finished, I felt myself well upward and release as well.

Though we were done, she began her slow up and down slide again, now looking at me with a playful grin.

“Very nice,” she said, still catching her breath.

“Oh yeah,” I replied, just as breathless.

Framing my face with her hands, she moved closer, kissing me deeply, and longer than she had before. So long, in fact, that I started thinking of how silly I had been, trying to be the damned hero, thinking I could make a difference.

If Apogee was in any danger, she was a big girl, and she had friends in high places.

Claire paused, her face suddenly concerned.

“Please tell me you’re not off somewhere,” she demanded.

“I’m right here,” I said.

Shaking her head, she continued rocking her hips, the tightness alone keeping me still aroused. “You went away. I can tell.”

I just stared at her face, inches from mine, unwilling to answer.

“She’s not here,” Claire said. “It’s me here. This,” she continued, using the slow grinding of her body to make a point. “This is real. And I am here with you, because I want to be. So forget her.”

She kissed me again, pressing harder against my body, making me go deeper than ever before.

“I’m real, and I am yours.”

“I know,” I said, almost in a breathless state of shock.

Taking my hands, she placed them on her breasts, “These belong to you. You can do with them as you wish. And this,” she reached down with her right hand, opening herself wide for me, rubbing her index and forefinger on herself, and on either side of my penis. “This is for you to do whenever you want.”

With the rocking motion, and her manipulation, it didn’t take her much longer. She steadied herself with her free hand on my chest as the waves rolled through her, eyes closed and biting her bottom lip. She knew I was watching, enthralled by her performance.

Her breathing became heavier and heavier and her motion more and more aggressive, splashing water across the room, and I gripped the edges of the tub tightly, bracing myself against her hips slamming into mine. Finally she climaxed, pressing down against me, harder than ever until it was over.

She left me inside her, grasping the back of my neck with her left hand and laying her head upon mine, forehead to forehead.

“Be mine,” she said.

“Yes,” I responded feebly, eager for her to continue, to never stop. At that moment, I would have given anything for her not to stop. I reached down, grasping the back of her legs, just below her buttocks, and brought her up above me, leaning against the inclined edge of the tub. She cradled my face and kissed me softly at first, spreading her lips, her mouth probing mine.

And as the sun rolled overhead, we kissed and made love, again and again. I was hers and she was mine.

The next morning, I slid out of bed, leaving Claire to rest without me, and walked out to the dawning outback. I had a violent itch in my wrist, located around Haha, which I was coming to understand was his way to let me know that we needed to talk. The robot would never give me a straight answer to why he wouldn’t communicate with me in front of Claire, and I never bothered to push him for it. It was like two realities. One was a physical/sexual experience the likes of which I had never had before with a woman so ravenous that I was quickly coming to understand there was little I could do to slake her sexual hunger. The other reality was everything aside from our little game of house, a reality that Haha would soon bring me to, as if I were losing myself in a mind dream all over again.

And who would blame me?

I indulged the desires of such a beauty, time after time. I had been denied too long, with my only release in months or years being virtual imaginations, intangible and elusive.

I’m a man, and I have needs.

But Haha knew how to get my attention in spite of it all, and he drew me away for early morning conversations on the dusty plain. It was clear he was unhappy with the present situation, and we would have to do something soon to find a satisfying conclusion. I strolled into the bar and checked some drawers until I found a dusty, old 12-volt battery like one used to power a golf cart or an alarm system. I put my wrist over it and a tendril of cabling bore out of my skin, breaking off into two bare copper ends that attached to each terminal on the battery with a tiny spark.

“Not a lot of power left,” Haha said. “But it will have to do.”

“Why don’t we just go to Alice?” I suggested that morning after taking a long silent walk out into the bush. “I’ll find a netcafe or some other Internet connection, you can upload to your mainframe and everyone will be happy”

The pause in reply was almost answer enough, letting me know that he disagreed so much that he had to find a gentle way to get me to understand.

“The mainframe is just a depository of memory and program subroutines spread among the botnet for security reasons, Blackjack,” he said after a while. “To upload the rest of me there would just isolate me from the physical. I need to reconstruct my avatar. Only then is the mainframe pertinent.”

“I don’t have the materials or tools to rebuild you,” I said. Or the inclination or desire to, I almost added.

“You’re making the mistake of thinking I need a full battle droid construct,” he said, exasperated. “Just a minimal architecture, with independent mobility, is all I need. After that I can rebuild the rest myself.”

“And the hurry for all of this is?”

Haha laughed. “I grow tired of hearing your grunting sex rituals. Though, from her aural responses, it is pretty clear that you are quite effective.”

“I guess we could see if there’s a hobby shop or something like that in Alice,” I said.

“You would think since I’m an artificial intelligence,” he continued, “that I wouldn’t be embarrassed by sitting on your hide like a flea while you have coitus with that woman to oblivion, but in fact, I would prefer not to have to endure the hours upon end of it.”

“You sound upset,” I said, watching the sun rising, its rays streaming over the distant vegetation.

“To be frank, I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Haha, I’ll fix you up, ok? I just don’t want to walk into the biggest town in the Northern Territory just a few days after we scared off the proprietors of this place. When all is said and done, I’m still a wanted man, you know.”

But Haha was still on the other subject, mechanical as ever. “I don’t want to discuss your sex life, Blackjack, because I’m frankly shocked.”

“What?”

Haha was silent, unsure how to continue, but I pushed him, “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I’m bothered, that’s all.”

“About me and Claire?”

He said nothing.

“You knew something was going to happen, Haha. I’m sorry you’re stuck to me like this, and that you have to endure me doing ... you know ... what we’re doing. But this wasn’t my idea.”

“I don’t mean that, Blackjack.”

“I don’t mind giving you a second chance to live, and you being a parasite on me and all that, but you have to be patient, man. I can’t just run out to the city and hit the nearest Radio Shack because you’re getting antsy.”

“I mean hiding out here while there’s a heavy burden on your shoulders,” he said suddenly. “I mean Zundergrub. I mean Apogee.”

So that’s what it was. Somehow, my coupling with Claire, wasting time out here in the Outback, was destroying his paradigm for what I should be doing. After all the shit I had been through, the silly robot wanted me to be the hero. I couldn’t even take a few days for myself?

“What about Apogee, still angry at her?”

“What do you care?”

“Excellent Aristotelian logic, Blackjack. Answer a question with another question,” he said. “But you can’t believe that I’ll be so easily thrown off, do you? Again, do you think she could have saved you from your fate?”

I shrugged, watching a small lizard stalking an insect on a tree branch. The lizard noticed me watching and panicked, forgetting her prey and racing higher on the tree to safety.