Honey Moon (2 page)

Sigh. On to the personality profile.
Sam only had to lure someone into saying yes. He wasn’t worried about winning the amazing newlywed lottos being offered, looks, money, or even finding instant love with the potential to endure the test of time. That’d be too much to ask. A woman with integrity, compassion and some balls? Not literally, but willing to take a huge risk for the greater good. Surely that was feasible?

He lied in the slots for name, employment and worth. Couldn’t risk his true identity leaking out, let on to being a world-renowned bachelor. Admit his actual income, and he’d be overwhelmed with responses. Forget the literary world. He went with construction supervisor. On a planet so heavy with life, it took a stream of skilled engineers to upgrade buildings and homes. Architect was a job in consistent, strong demand. As to wealth, he allowed access to see the amount in one of his accounts, which labeled him as a basic good catch instead of a fairytale one.

More truthful in his next answers, he raced through the hundred yes, no, maybe questions rigged to gauge personalities, match like to like.

He gritted his teeth, raised his arm and took two selfies with his phone. Then he slapped out a couple of paragraphs of crap.
I—ha ha—love long walks on the beach. Never been—too crowded—but had to throw in that old cliché. Dancing in the rain—and who doesn’t? Especially on non-acid Wednesday. And I’m definitely not a down-to-Earth type guy, not with a honey of a moon shining above. I play hard, work harder… Wait, is that the other way round?

Seriously. I want someone I can trust and come to love to take my arm, sit beside me as we catch an out-of-this-world ride into whatever happy-ever-after we can win. Ping me. We’ll chat.
Then he paid for two days of service and uploaded.

He stood and stripped off his shirt as he walked four feet to the shower cubicle. Five minutes later, towel around his waist, he opened the micro-fridge. Looked at both shelves, he saw nothing but an apple and a pretty much empty jar of multi-seed butter and closed it.

He flung himself down on the single bed and used his wrist phone to work his emails. He loved his job. Writing like he did, once or seven times a week, answering comments and getting off on the replies. He had thousands of ‘friends’ who occasionally gave him their thoughts on his ponderings, but a handful of commentators in particular made his heart jump when he saw they’d messaged.

Sam didn’t know or care if JJ was a man or a woman, gay, bi or straight. He loved how he-she pushed buttons. No comment today as of yet. He sighed, answered the most pressing messages then peeked at the logo for the dating site.

Holy crap.
His breath caught. The number 216 rode on the red arrow. That many matches?
Bloody hell, I’m a dating site stud?
He sat back down at the com-desk. These women, unless they lied and he couldn’t think of a single reason why they would, had a home in his corner of the city, placing them within a short bullet train ride.

He squared his shoulders and started alphabetically. Abigail, Amber, Amy, Arwen—all sounded wonderful. He barely glanced at their pics, homing in on dreams and desires.

Thirty replies, some short and sweet, others longer and more intense, to thirty randomly selected women, and he hit send simultaneously.

A half hour later, and
oh yeah
, he had thirty replies and forty new enquiries. Life would be good if he was an honest Romeo instead of a scheming Casanova who pretty much loved everyone indiscriminately. In general, he found people to be awesome—fascinating and special, even when first glance or first words exchanged were mundane. All these sweet women looking for adventure and escape… He couldn’t help but yearn to wrap his arms around each. Wish them the best of luck in finding a real prince.

He gritted his teeth, and zeroed in on weeding out those with any hint of closet or blatant bigotry in their profiles. In the interest of survival, humans had a selfish gene. In some, the need to reproduce with the best of the best, to attain social status no matter the cost, lay more dormant than in others. Seeing as he wasn’t about finding a mate to bear the perfect child or to help him forge ahead of the monetary pack, he only needed a partner who had either a strong moral compass or a death wish. Forgetting any of the standard questions to help pinpoint a sociopath—a ruthless personality that may actually be an asset when confronting the equivalent of Goliath—he focused on intolerance issues. Then he picked the women who’d also answered that they loved poetry in their profile, scrubbed the weariness from his eyes and shrugged at how lame he was presenting himself.

If you met a man from Nantucket whose #### was so long he could suck it, would you care if he only shared with a guy named Bucket?

If our daughter was in love with a gal from Nantucket who kept all her cash in a bucket, would you rather see her run away with the XY who took it?

If you bumped into a prick from Nantucket, who only dipped in the same gender bucket…

He worked the questions around standard answers concerning cat or dog, porn or reality—yada and yada—and copied and pasted to one cutie after the other.

After a few hours of sleep, he’d not bothered reading past the first few replies. Just pick and get on with the charming. He set his wrist phone, his head hit the pillow, and faces flashed across his shut eyelids.
Beautiful, sweet, gentle loves, which of you wants to play terrorist with me?

* * * *

The ding and low-voltage zap of his alarm shook him out of a deep sleep. He blinked, found his feet then dropped his butt in the com-chair.

Oh no, no, no.
What’d he do? So what that he’d never been to a dating site before. How could he have screwed up this royally? Just had to put those dumbass rhyming questions in. Unreal. Out of hundreds of spectacular choices, only four potential love interests hadn’t closed out of further contact.

Lisa:
Yes, my handsome male, I love to #### Man-tucket. I used to have a #### as long as all that, so cum sit on my bucket…

On to the next…

Tracy:
If there’s a man who lies with a male, surely he shall be put to death…

Gulp.

Kim:
I don’t understand poetry. But your—
she means you’re
—cute. Want to met
—sigh, meet
—me? No one else answers me.

Poor dear.

Laree:
Ha ha, you’re funny. I’m going to ignore the silly questions. All you need to know before we have a face-to-face is that you made my list of top hundred. Seeing as I crush any competition, I expect you’ll meet me at Spenders tomorrow night at 5 p.m.

No typos, plenty of arrogance and expensive taste for Ms. Laree. His wallet ached just thinking about the most upscale club in the city. He’d need a decent suit, a trendy tie and a hundred bucks for two drinks at the bar, let alone greasing palms to get a dinner reservation that would set the average Joe back a week’s salary, even when gender equality was the norm and dates usually split the bill. Based on numerous pictures, Laree was gorgeous—her killer smile and designer clothing said she was accustomed to a silver spoon. And yep, she’d picked that the best era to live was a couple of hundred years ago. Either she wasn’t smart enough to know it gave away that she liked the time period when men were expected to open every door, pay each bill, never let her step in mud let alone worse—or she didn’t care.

He’d answered that he thought the current time period was fantastic, the future exciting and if he got teleported into a steampunk romance, he hoped travel would be within the Milky Way or beyond, but in the present or the future. So what did a woman draped in faux furs and glittery jewelry want with him then? The obvious answer? She was broke and wanted a free ride on a respectable man’s arm. Not much choice now that he’d blown it with close to three hundred others.

His gut churning, feeling the fool, the last thing he wanted to do was mess with this site any further or start another. No doubt he’d get on bended knee to a transgender, a homophobe, a simpleton or a privileged princess.

Whatever will be is gonna be screwed if I’m involved
. He wilted, laying his head down on the com-desk.

* * * *

Oh wow.
Jenna shot her palm beneath her chin to keep from head-banging her com-desk. Over three dozen victims complaining of problems with dating sites in the past few days?
Crap piled high.
How many hopeful singles would—or did—get reeled in by dishonest means?

Jenna sighed, wishing for the umpteenth time that she’d taken any job other than drone for a viral support group. Mostly the only help she could give was to connect victims with others who’d fallen prey to the same scam.

On the WG—World Governments—site for the North America Continent, she saw a disclaimer that had been posted yesterday. It stated that all ‘love-bugs’ would be eradicated within forty-eight hours. According to WG, this bug they’d labeled IDS—Infect-Delete-Score—fell into the category of soft crimes, seeing as monies weren’t exchanged between the con and their mark, and they weren’t responsible for policing such.

Jenna skimmed the details, coming to understand losers wanting to hook up without effort and willing to spend a hefty amount to do so, had paid for the viral code on some site that was up for a matter of hours then gone. They zeroed in on a hot prospect—good-looking and wealthy—and buggered the account so he or she lost most, if not all, of their matches and were blocked from new ones. Then if the victim remained unaware that their account they hadn’t bothered to protect with more than simplistic firewalling was hacked, they’d chat with the few matches left, unaware they were dealing with some cheater.

Jenna drew a deep breath and turned toward the mini-cubicle to her left. “Hey, Lib? You get any messages from vics on dating sites about some new IDS bug?”

Lib’s dark head popped up, peering down at her. “Yeah, hon, I did. I’m swamped with a medical scam, so I forwarded to you.”

“Whaaat?”

Lib grinned, raised her hand and flashed her ring finger, sporting a sparkly band of studded silver and gold. “I’m engaged, sweetie. You aren’t.”

Jenna couldn’t scowl any deeper. “Nice. Because I haven’t trolled for Mr. Right on a dating site, haven’t fallen prey to Mr. Wrong with a tiny dong who’d rather cheat than face competition, I have time to handle this? The messenger who gets bitched at if I explain the person they’re in bed with—making plans to walk down an aisle with—is most likely an asshole who paid thousands for a tricky bug that overwhelmed dating sites have yet to completely squash?”

Lib beamed. “Glad you understand.”

Jenna raised her ringless hand with middle finger extended. Lib laughed and plopped back down.

Her head swam. There was much on her radar and so little time. On the off chance the least of worries for new lovers was how they’d met, Jenna slapped all the IDS messages into a folder with the icon of Superwoman in a cape with hands on hips and a bubble from her mouth saying the procrastination meeting had been postponed.

Chapter Two

“Yes,” Laree said. “As long as we get a better home. A humongous one.”

On bended knee, Sam smiled up at the most materialistic woman he’d ever met in his life, let alone the past month—and the dumbest. With the population on Earth exceeding eighteen billion and no wars in the past five decades to kill off the young and fertile, only an elite few owned a home larger than a prison cell.

The opportunist he could now call his fiancée had seen the videos and heard about mansions spreading like a swarm of locusts on a terraformed Mars. After weeks of clandestine research before he’d been idiotic enough to troll for a bride to use, he’d concluded that the pictures and propaganda posted by the world’s largest marriage broker couldn’t be genuine. He worried that for better or worse—through deceit or true love—the bit about ‘until death us do part’ could well happen much sooner than any phony or real lovebirds imagined.

Or not. Could be he was certifiably stupid in his paranoia. Sam’s jaw twitched, his stomach in knots because he’d rather hoped she’d have said no. Not easy, but he maintained the false persona of a happy man, the sparkle in his gaze and smile wide, watching as Laree admired the ring.

Current happenings were intense, shaping history in ways no one could have dreamed possible a mere few months ago. Hundreds of first-time shuttles prepared to launch in a week and that meant millions of guys were on their knees and under the gun. Jewelry stores competed fiercely for soaring sales as couples rushed to file applications and get married in time to hopefully score big time—all with dreams of winning either the round trip vacation to the moon or the one-way tickets to travel onward and be a part of booming colonies on the outer planets.

He’d gotten a look at protected, top secret schematics of aircraft designed to travel beyond the low orbit of Earth, then continue roughly 384,400 kilometers to land on the moon—a surface without an atmosphere—and return without refueling. Equipped with orbiters and external tanks, four solid rocket boosters with a million pounds of super-charged liquid propellants in each, six main engines per—these shuttles had to each carry a price tag of a couple of billion dollars.

He hadn’t been able to get copies of working blueprints for functional shuttles, but the problem was he shouldn’t have been able to access the prototype schematics. The paranoid mindset would think they’d been planted to lull the suspicious person searching for a hoax. But regardless of the seemingly legit set-up, he was a firm believer in the fact that free rides don’t exist on Earth or to its satellite. That suckers were still being born every minute, despite powerful population controls, and the entire free honeymoon and home project was highly suspect.