| |
RUN THE CODE
TIERNEY JONES
After wheeling Three back to the guards, I go straight back to my office and glare at my screen. There are a thousand things I should be doing, but I don’t want to do any of them.
Guilt roils inside me, mingling with self-loathing, frustration, suffocation, confusion about that moment his overwhelming, debilitating pain took over my own brain. And more. Shame. Fear. Hope?
Three’s like an illness. He’s under my skin, in my head, forcing his way into my heart with every second we are together.
I can’t even think straight. I’m risking my career—my life and my sister’s life—for what? A chance to give blowjobs to a shackled prisoner who is probably manipulating me, and hope we don’t get caught? We will get caught and then I’ll be Outlaw and nothing good will come of that for anyone.
I should just finish this horrible project so I can move on with my life and never think about this hellhole again. Not once in my life, have I been impulsive, not once have I been thoughtless, not once have I ever done anything so flagrantly, violently dangerous. Is it the vitamin? Is it making me temperamental as well as better at my job? The horrible thought occurs to me that maybe if I’d stayed on it, I’d have been incapable of designing this code.
And I tortured him. God, the look on his face.
I pull up his file with all its myriad pictures of him.
I’ve looked at them a thousand times. But I never get tired of staring at his face. There are hundreds of photographs of him, from childhood through now. The ones I like best are from before the Sierra’s escaped, before Octavius met Delilah, before she died. From about age twenty-four through twenty-five. In most of them, he’s smiling, carefree, easy, like he finds life to be infinitely amusing.
Slipping off my heels and curling up in my chair, I scroll through until I get to the more recent ones, three years later, taken here in the lab. Photo after photo of his glorious body, exercising, flexing, shifting. My lip catches between my teeth.
His body is almost scientific in its perfection.
The extra years have only made him even more devastatingly handsome, sharpened his features, roughened the deadly dominance of his bearing.
I click on the reels. Mostly they are from before I arrived.
One of them is of him pacing his cell, another in which he’s dancing wildly and singing at the top of his lungs that I can’t make heads or tails of. It has to be a distraction, but I can’t imagine from what. There’s another of him sleeping on his back in his cell, his cock jutting up rigidly above him. I’m unsure why anyone kept this particular clip, until his hips start moving. His eyes stay shut, and his arms stay loose by his sides, but the muscles of his abdomen clench and shiver, his erection bobbing arrhythmically.
The tip shimmers with his fluid. I wet my lips. I know exactly how that tastes. I shouldn’t watch this. I shouldn’t be fantasizing about Three and his cock. What did Nina call it? Mesmerizing? Mammoth? Neither is the word she used, but they both apply.
He groans quietly in the feed, and my body responds, answering to the sound of his voice.
His hips move quickly, and without a single feather’s stroke of stimulus, a thick spray of white shoots from the tip of his cock. It coats his belly, spurt after spurt, and he never even wakes up. Just groans his way through it.
Nocturnal emissions. Their only relief. Not even a blanket for privacy.
I tilt my head, watching it again, morbidly curious.
Someone chooses this exact moment to knock on my door.
I lurch upright.
Who the hell is it? Bob usually calls before coming over, and Baldwin never knocks. The lab techs are all half-afraid of me these days.
I clear my screen of the clip of Three.
Knock. Knockknock.
“Come in.”
The door opens, and in walks Dr. Caruthers. “Ms. Jones.”
“Dr. Caruthers.” I surge upright, my stockinged feet on the hard tiles of the floor.
He crosses the room and extends his hand, and his big palm swallows mine whole.
He holds it a beat too long, his gaze roving over my face, down to my stockinged feet. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“No. Why?”
The corner of his mouth tightens. “You look flushed.”
I shrug awkwardly. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
His thumb strokes over the back of my hand, and then he lets go, backs away and sits in the chair opposite my desk. I perch on the edge of my desk, facing him.
He lets us sit in silence for a while, like he always does, and I bite my tongue so I won’t talk first.
“Tell me when you’ll be ready to attempt the second series of chip uploads?”
Never. Because I don’t want to. I unfold my glasses and push them onto my nose, sucking in a long breath. “I need to comb through the coding again. I’m not convinced I’ve established the proper instructions to the chips for how to actually build the ganglia.”
His eyes wrinkle at the edges like he finds me adorable. It’s how people look at small children.
“It’s ready.” He rests his elbows on his thighs and steeples his fingers. “There’s no need to delay. It’s natural to feel apprehensive at this stage. Especially for you. But push through the fear. Your coding is solid. I reviewed it myself. And the first one went well, didn’t it? I just got the data.”
I hope that data is just the cold science. Not some weird hidden camera that caught me fellating the subject.
“It worked,” I admit warily.
“Would you prefer to do the first upload on the rest of the Sierras or proceed with the second on Three?”
The thought of subjecting the Foxtrots or the other Romeos to that pain makes me cringe. If Three were here, I know he’d tell me he’d rather be the only one to suffer. “I’d prefer to run a second upload first. That way we can work out any kinks before moving on to test it on another subject.”
“Good.” He pushes out his lower lip. It furrows out between his dark beard and mustache. I get a sudden vivid flash of him trimming it cautiously in the mirror each morning, methodical robotical maintenance. “You’re ready.”
Three’s face, contorted in pain, flashes before my eyes. I am decidedly not ready. “There was one problem. And I need time to fix it.”
He leans forward, tapping his thumbs together.
“I didn’t have time to put it in the reports, so you won’t have seen it listed with the data. The subject felt pain. Considerable pain.”
“That’s interesting.” He leans back in his chair, shifting his big body around, rubbing the dark beard along his jaw. He glances over at the camera in the corner, but doesn’t comment when he finds it turned off. “Debilitating pain?”
I nod, consider mentioning the pain transference and decide against it.
His knuckles trail along his chin, his eyes losing focus, like he’s playing out imaginary scenarios.
“But no permanent damage was done?”
“I don’t believe so. But ... it could be too soon to say for sure.”
His hand drops away from his face, and he leans toward me. “There isn’t always an option in what we do. The stakes here are high. Do the second upload tomorrow. Temporary pain for the test subject isn’t a problem that will be deemed warranting of delay.”
“No,” I breathe, suddenly longing for the safety of school, where any code I wrote was tested by computers and AI. Never on people.
His mouth twists as he looks back at the turned off camera. “Tierney ...” His deep-set brown eyes holding mine, he leans closer to me. “I have bosses too. They’re watching us all the time. I know you don’t want to do this. I know it ... I know it feels wrong. But we don’t have a choice. If you don’t do it, they’ll fire you, terminate your salary instantly, put you on permanent scrutiny for disloyalty. It’ll take one sneeze in the wrong direction for them to Outlaw you. Your sister ... They’ll ask me to do it in your absence.” His lips twist and his shoulders shift under his suit. “If I were to say no, they’d do the same to me. And then someone else would do it anyway.” He scrubs his hand over his bearded chin. “There’s no alternative here. Not ... yet anyway.”
My lip wobbles. I fist my hands so tightly, my nails dig in so hard it feels like they’re cutting me, but the angry tears recede. “He was just in so much pain. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
His dark eyes are full of compassion, he rises, wraps his hands around mine, pulls me away from the desk so we’re both standing, and tugs me into his arms. It’s a strange hug. Me stiff in his big laundry-smelling, suit-covered embrace. His nose trails into my hair. “It’s not you hurting them. It’s our bosses, this company, the government. It isn’t your fault. You’re just following orders. Just pushing a button.”
“But it’s so wrong.”
“And it’s going to happen no matter what you do.” He squeezes my shoulder, then lets me go. “Is there any reason to ruin your life over it?”
I step back, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, hoping he won’t know it’s because I’m about one fingernail digging into my palm away from losing it. And if he sees how much I care, will he know that at least some part of that is because of how much I’ve let myself care about Three? “I don’t know.”
“There isn’t. And I promise you. It will work out, okay. Just trust me.”
It will work out ... four little words with an ocean of possibilities. Does he mean it will work out and the company will not get their vile mind control? Or does he mean it will work out, you will live and be safe and the government will not Outlaw you if only you give them their vile mind control?
“Okay,” I say even though something inside me dies. After tomorrow, maybe I can sabotage it somehow, create false evidence that the upgrades erode synapse strength of something to cause a delay. “Okay, Dr. Caruthers. I will.”
He tilts his head. “Tomorrow. I’ll come help you. Offer some emotional support. I know this is hard for you. But press on. 2 p.m.”
I force a bland smile.
His lips form a contemplative line. It’s the same face I make when I’m about to say something I shouldn’t, reveal something personal. “Ms. Jones, Tierney, can we speak as friends rather than as colleagues?”
I nod, my throat too tight to answer, already imagining Three, muscles straining, that hoarse whine coming out of his throat, the tendons of his throat, the veins of his neck and forehead bulging.
“I can push the final key for you if it helps.”
I look down so he won’t see how my eyes burn at that. Tomorrow, Three will writhe before my eyes.
I have no reason to assume this upload and augmentation will be any different from last time.
It will hurt him badly.
Dr. Caruthers towers over me. His dark gaze locked on mine, he reaches out slowly, takes my hand in his again. “I’m sorry for asking this of you. If there were another way ... I swear I’d ...”
His thumb slides along my palm, warm and safe and reassuring feeling, and he steps even closer. Close enough I can see the blond and gray hairs mingling with the darker brown ones in his beard. His hand is warm on mine. “I know you’re struggling with guilt. It will get easier.”
“No thank you, sir. I ... I’m responsible either way. I can push the button.”
His lips part like he’s thinking about saying something, but after a long, awkward moment with his big hand holding mine, he drops it. “Tomorrow then.”
––––––––
After Caruthers leaves, I pull up the reels of Three again. I click through them. That clip of his nocturnal emission bothers me for some reason, just a small warning wiggle at the back of my mind.
Why was it saved? Usually, they just make a note for the records so we know how long it’s been and how likely it is that they’re at peak frustration. That’s how the lab techs choose which Romeo to pair with an ovulating Foxtrot.
But there’s really no need for this film. Not unless someone simply wanted it. And the only reason I can think of for that is if someone enjoyed seeing him orgasm.
Not that I’m one to point fingers, but it seems inappropriate.
I try to imagine Baldwin watching it and cast that away. She’ll banter with them, but she pointedly avoids looking at their nudity. She’d find no arousal in seeing this.
I click through the reels again. The rest are key moments that would be interesting to a psychological profiler like Schwitters. Interviews with him, him screaming at Baldwin and punching the glass, a few of him exercising.
I click over to Prima—she’s the one who strangled a guard using tampon strings. And sure enough, that is on a clip.
I watch it. Her hard body gleams in the lights as she sprawls against the wall, convulsing as if violently ill. The guard crosses to her, kneels down, and she springs into action so fast, my eyes can barely track it. One second, he’s on his knees. The next, he’s on his back, feet kicking restlessly on the floor, the string around his neck. It’s over fast. The guard never even made a sound. Why did she do that? To that particular guard? That time? And no one else?
Did that guard cross a line? I look through the records but find nothing about him.
There are other clips of her too. In one she is sleeping. Her genitals are visible to the camera, but that could be a coincidence. It’s unclear.
I go back to Kaksi and make my way through to Nova. There is nothing specific that calls to me. Though there are clips of all of them dancing or shouting, generally making spectacles of themselves, of them attacking their glass or shouting, several of them trying to masturbate and being shackled to a gurney. There are nocturnal emissions clips for four of them.
In one of them, Sev lies on his stomach. He has blood on the backs of his thighs. There is a record of the blood, with a comment from a lab tech that reads, perhaps self-harm? As if he punched the glass like Three did and rubbed his knuckles on the backs of his thighs. It seems like an outlandish supposition that he’d elect to wipe them there of all places. I even pantomime the motion. No one would elect to wipe their bleeding hands on the backs of their inner thighs.
Next, I go through all the Foxies’ feeds, starting with Prima and make my way to Tensy.
What I find is not necessarily indicative of any greater degree of sexual misconduct, but I do find it curious. There are so many clips to watch, of varying lengths. It takes me the rest of the day.
In one, Dolce is doing yoga. Her body is beautiful and the poses so seductive, it’s almost impossible not to believe the clip was kept on purpose. She moves into cow pose, her slim thighs, round backside pushing out, making her sex so visible, I have to force myself not to look away. These men and women are completely subject to the whims of their jailers. Even Three. In the short time I’ve been here, we’ve crossed many boundaries. It makes me wonder how often they’ve been tied down, incapable of defending themselves, alone in a room with a lab tech, or Baldwin, Bob or Schwitters, a guard, in a room without a camera. In the second-to-last clip I look at, Tensy lies on the floor in fetal position, sobbing hysterically, her hands between her thighs.
It’s possible, I tell myself, that it means nothing, but it could mean something far worse than I ever imagined about this place.
––––––––
2 P.M. THE NEXT DAY arrives far too quickly. I cried myself to sleep, dreamed of Three the entire time, as tactile and vivid as if he were there beside me, and woke feeling drained and heavy. Then went to work and tried to mimic the dead face all the executives eternally wear. Maybe this is why they wear it. Bob is back. His mother is fine. Almost before I know it, Caruthers is there, knocking on my door and entering as if he owns the place.
He’s not alone. One woman and two men file in behind him. All expensively dressed. All with that the flat look on their face that makes it clear what they are. Executives.
Caruthers flashes an unexpectedly warm smile at me as he introduces me and places his big hand on the curve of my waist. The heat of his palm cuts through the thin fabric of my dress for a split second, before it leaves and the smell of him, like fresh, clean laundry wafts over me. It’s a safe smell. A comforting smell.
Anita Cho shakes my hand with a curt nod.
As do Ambrose Lensky and Tom Burton.
“Ms. Jones is a gifted programmer. She’s familiar with chip integration through working in her father’s lab.” He looks down at me, brows drawing together slightly like he’s thinking the words it will be okay at me. “We’d like to take a tour of the lab, if you don’t mind.”
I glance up, surprised that he hasn’t asked Baldwin to present our work to them. Baldwin outranks Caruthers, but the chain of command at the company is complicated. Caruthers works in Programming. Baldwin is classed under Alternative Investigations. Caruthers’ bosses are more influential than Baldwin, though she works in Ring 1, which speaks volumes.
This isn’t the first time they’ve rubbed shoulders. I don’t know what Caruthers’ aim is with me, but he doesn’t intend to help Baldwin. That much is clear.
“Of course,” I say. “I’m sure you already saw the Romeos when you entered.”
“We did,” Ms. Cho says flatly, no acknowledgement that she just saw seven of the most tragically beautiful male creations known to the human race, trapped in a dungeon. I check her face, hoping for anything to signal an underlying humanity. But as with most of the executives I’ve met, Caruthers and Baldwin included, if she has any feelings, she hides them well.
“We’d like to see the Foxtrots,” Lensky says.
I do a cautious search of his face, wondering if I’ll see lechery or doubt written there. I don’t. I see nothing at all. Just dank eyes, a receding hairline and thick brows.
“This way,” I gesture down the hallway that leads to the other side of the lab. Showing the Foxies to them feels somehow like more of a violation than the Romeos. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the Romeos are so big, so larger-than-life they look superhuman. The Foxtrots are all in prime physical condition and equally deadly, but they look more normal.
They look like women. Captive human women, deprived of even the dignity of clothing to hide their nakedness.
Vix surges to her feet and grins when she sees me. It lights up her face.
In another universe, in a place and time where we could be equals, I think she and I would have been friends.
Caruthers makes an effort not to look at them, and for that, a strange warmth for him grows inside me. He does not leer at them or appraise their bodies. If anything, he keeps his gaze rigidly above their necks.
Lensky and Burton do not make the same effort. They look at the Foxtrots with leisure. I can’t help but bristle at where their gazes land. Burton looks like an uncle of mine who died when I was young. He has a square face, beady eyes and a pot-belly.
Lensky recovers first, tearing his gaze away.
Vix does nothing to help them out. She pushes out her breasts and her lips, lifts one leg wide for them, exposing herself blatantly. Maybe this is her way of refusing to let us violate her. Before anyone can get the chance, she does it for them. Violates herself with our gazes, milking the residue of power from the moment.
Tensy hides in the back of her cell, her body hidden in a veil of her almost-white hair.
Vix slaps her glass and leers at Caruthers, her gaze blatantly drifting up and down his tall body. “Oh, it’s the big man again.” She wiggles her brows and chews on her lip. “You come to play with me, daddy?”
He doesn’t acknowledge her, but he looks at a loss for how to respond.
“We’d have fu-uuuun. I don’t bite.” She tilts her head back and laughs, trailing the tips of her finger down the flat of her abdomen, and rolling her tongue along one slightly-elongated fang, and shimmying her hips back and forth. “Not too hard anyway.”
Caruthers freezes.
She bats her lashes theatrically. “Apologies for the state of my lady garden. It’s more of a jungle these days but, you know what they say. The bush comes and it goes every other decade or so.”
His eyes on the floor, Caruthers grates out, “I apologize. They don’t subscribe to any set of manners.”
“Manners, baby? Who said anything about manners? I’m talking about sex.” Vix slides her fingers south to dart into the red hair there, leaning toward him so her breasts sway back and forth. She drags the word sex out slowly, so it becomes a lurid sort of song, all its own. “The dirty kind.”
A lab tech titters and is silenced by a look from Caruthers, who turns back to me and indicates with a tilt of his head that I should continue the tour.
“These are the Foxtrots.” I sound lame even to my own ears.
Burton frowns. “I thought there were ten.”
“There are,” I say. “But three of them are still free. They’re not in Chicago.”
Cho’s mouth tightens.
I show them around the lab. “The techs monitor their physical symptoms. Responses to doses. We have one tech for each soldier.”
“And the goal is breeding?”
“They were designed to be adaptable. So the second generation would theoretically outperform the first.” I meet Caruthers’ eye, but his gaze holds no clue as to his thoughts. I wonder again what his agenda is. His bosses’ agendas. Baldwin’s. So many agendas. Maybe I need one. But what kind of agenda should a twenty-three-year-old recently-graduated recruit to mind control hell have other than keeping her sister safe? I wet my lips. “That’s the primary goal.”
“Surely we could inseminate them without their consent.”
I keep my face impassive, but it isn’t easy. My face twitches, micro-muscles pulling tight. “The Foxtrots possess the unique ability to control their own ovulation cycles. Without their willingness to ovulate, there’s no sense in inseminating.”
It’s the explanation Baldwin gave me when I pressed.
“Force them to do it.”
“We’re trying to gain control of their nanochips for exactly that reason.”
His lips turn down at the sides. “Implantation of lab-fused embryos?”
“Embryos assembled using their DNA die almost instantly.”
Burton’s left eye spasms.
Cho waves her hands through the air. “It’s the programming we’re most interested in, anyway.”
“Speak plainly, Cho.” Lensky man-smirks and cocks a hip. “You mean mind control.”
Caruthers dead-eyes him until he stops smirking. “Why don’t you explain what you’ve been working on, Ms. Jones?”
I don’t know how much of this is classified to them so I start cautiously. “The chips are adaptable. We’ve been writing code that tells them how to sequence their own augmentations. I’ll show you.”
I lead them out of the Foxtrot lab, down the long hallway and into my office. There’s an awkward moment where Caruthers and I reach for my office door at the same time, our fingers touch.
“Allow me.” He pulls open the door, and gestures for us all to file in.
On the wall screen, I pull up the imaging from Three’s initial upload. I start when the chip was un-augmented. “This is what the chips look like in all our brains.” I tap the screen. “Square. And located so it has direct access to the optic nerve. That’s how the feeds work. It sends data to that nerve, and we see an illusion of feed information at specified locations. People, streets, food.”
They all stare at me, dead faces, soulless eyes, zero affect.
I suck in a long breath. “But in order to control arousal, or sleep, or decision making, we need to get over to here.” I tap the screen again and it zooms in on the region of the brain in question. “To the hypothalamus. So to get there, we have two choices. We can install a second chip, which would involve surgical measures on all subjects. Or we can program the old chip to move there.”
Lensky’s chin juts forward.
Cho’s nostrils flare.
“All chips were outfitted with excess materials, starting a century ago,” I say it slowly because I know it’s a lot to process, and I want to let that sink in for them. “Think of it as spare parts. So we just had to teach the chip what to do with them.”
I hit play, and on the screen, the nanochip extends, growing microscopic tentacle-like ganglia that stretch across the back of Three’s brain. I swallow against the rising bile of the memory of Three’s clammy gray miserable face, contorted in pain. “It’s the first of the upgrades. We are about a third of the way there.”
Caruthers smiles. “And we are going to see the second upgrade now.”
My palms go wet. “I’ll have Romeo-Three brought into an examination room.”
I leave them roaming my office, Caruthers fielding follow-up questions, and find Bob. He makes the arrangements.
A few moments later, we are all standing in the examination room as Three’s wheeled in. He’s smiling.
I’m not.
For once, he doesn’t make any sexual comments about me, though his gaze is warm when it lands on my face, his eyes crinkling at the edges.
I want to touch him so badly, to reassure him. But I can’t. Instead, I drape a clean sheet over his body and send him a professional nod. “Hello, Romeo-Three. This will likely hurt a bit. Just like yesterday. I’m sorry for that.”
His lips quirk but he says nothing.
I copy the code sequence and drop it in the screen’s command bar. I hesitate at the keypad, my finger hovering over the ENTER key. Take a breath. I don’t want to push it. Maybe I could pretend it’s broken. Maybe I can fake push it. Sweat slides down my spine. I don’t think I can do it.
“It’s okay, Tierney Jones.” Three’s deep, gritty voice burns in my ear, and I close my eyes.
Caruthers clears his throat, his hand settling on my hip again. “Would you like me to press it?”
“No!” bolts out of me. No one else is going to do it. If it has to happen, it will be me.
Caruthers’ hand slides away.
I bring my finger down. Because it’s my job to torture this strange, beautiful, complicated man whose body and taste I know intimately. And if I don’t do it, someone else will. And I’ll be goddamned if I want anyone else hurting him.
I clear my throat and turn back to the line of executives against the wall opposite me, all in dark suits, all with blank faces. Caruthers inclines his head. I think he’s trying to tell me I’m doing a good job. But I’m not sure.
Three just stares at me from his gurney, his eyes roaming my body like he’s studying for a test.
“It took about fifteen minutes last time,” I say to fill the silence, resting my hip against the counter behind me.
In that time, we are all silent. Fifteen minutes is a long time to stand in a silent room with strangers. Caruthers and Three spend most of their time studying me. I make myself useful, organizing a few drawers of random supplies, scissors, twine, lubricant, examination gloves, gauze.
At some point Schwitters and Baldwin come in, which helps to fill the time. They introduce themselves, and they’re all so busy asking questions of each other and giving half answers, sizing one another up, preening and flexing, that at first, no one notices when Three groans from the gurney.
Baldwin makes the first face of almost sympathy I’ve ever seen. Her brow furrows just the slightest tic of a motion, and then it’s gone again. Schwitters wets his lip and moves closer, eyes narrowing.
Three’s face twists with pain. He doesn’t make any noise, but he doesn’t have to. The veins on his forehead bulge as he strains against the bindings. I think if he weren’t strapped down, he’d curl into fetal position and clutch his head, but he can’t. His legs rise up to his chest though, the sheet bunching around his thighs, just like last time, and his shoulders and neck lift off the gurney. Every muscle in his body is rigid. It looks like he’s trying to scream, but can’t, so he’s just doing it silently.
I take his hand and stroke his brow. It’s not likely to help him, but it’s something. It’s the only thing I can do.
It’s not intentional, but—it happens again, whatever allowed me to feel his pain. It strikes without warning, my own face contorts, and a deep bovine low rips out of me.
It goes on and on. Maybe three or four minutes of barely even breathing, convulsing on the gurney. Torture. It’s pure blinding torture. There’s no other word for it.
When it finally stops, we’re collapsed together, my face pressed to his neck, both of us, sweating and panting. I breathe him in, in the aftermath.
It’s only then that I notice my bosses, Baldwin and Caruthers, staring at me, and Caruthers’ bosses too. All of them, eyebrows raised.
Oh, shit.
I straighten sweating.