Scott Westerfeld - Evolution's Darling

"How unfortunate for you, Darling," Mira says. Her tone is light, indifferent. "But I don't suppose there's anything in your parole against fucking, is there?"

"No," Darling says, not looking for confirmation from the Warden. "I have time. But, of course, my friend will have to watch."

The woman's suite is among the highest and largest in the hotel, even better than his owner Zimivic's. At its day rate, it is possibly the most expensive residence in this entire world. She moves commandingly into the great room. The view is vast, five of its sides forming an incomplete octagon of windows. She touches a chair, a table, the leaf of a potted plant, as if marking the room with her scent.

The Warden scans the suite. No people, certainly. No devices of any import are active. Mira has not used direct interface since her appearance at the bar, except for glancing access to the elevator and the suite's door. The Warden's hunter-packets on the local net inform him that this is the woman's legal residence, temporary.

Good: privacy.

One object seems out of place. It is a thick, square canvas mounted on the wall, flat and packed with complex nano-cir-cuitry. The Warden adds active UHF to his millimeter radar, but the object resists categorization; it is too detailed, too minute in its construction. It reminds him of the fractal objets d'art that the man in the yellow suit keeps in his gallery: all analysis of them seems to slip away into meaninglessness, pure form without content.

The Warden sits, satisfied that he remains in control.

The woman Mira kneels on the great central divan and loosens her silk robe from her shoulders. It slips to a puddle at her knees, pulls itself off the divan and onto the floor with its own liquid weight. She is naked now, darkened by the dust of a recent trip outside the city—a few pinpoint sparkles of mica reflect the Warden's radar like glitter.

Darling dispenses with his own robe and towers over her. A thicket of sensory strands unfurls from his arms, his chest, his groin. The Warden has never seen this complex a configuration before. The profusion of extremities, densely wound, self-assembling smartfiber, wasn't evident from his initial scan of the artificial. As they begin to touch the woman—splaying across her skin, worrying her mouth, cradling her weight—the Warden considers the threat they might pose to him. He tunes his senses to maximize the return signal of the smartfiber's carbon filaments. Now he sees its structure clearly: a fine web of motile, sensory, and broadcast-capable elements constantly reconfiguring itself, constantly balancing the variables of strength, flexibility, and I length: changing itself to fit each task. A powerful tool.

He will have to be careful warding this one. The artificial must be a fool to reveal himself this way: showing all his tricks.

The woman is half-suspended over the bed now, bound by three great cords of sensory strand that press her against the artificial's chest. Slighter cords wrap her arms, legs, torso: a net of black pressing deep furrows into her soft olive skin. Another dense, thick strand penetrates her, varying its micro-structure from rough to smooth as it strokes slowly and deep. She moans, a sound made guttural by the intrusion of more filaments into her mouth; millimeter radar reveals the frenzied work of her jaw upon the pushing strand: biting, gnawing, furious with desire. Her arms free, she strikes Darling about the face and chest, screams garbled curses as the member in her grows rougher, longer, and faster. The Warden watches a trickle of sweat roll down her back, stalling in the dust still clinging to her.

The Warden checks his internal clock. There are five hours to go before the ship leaves. Not a long time to remain alert. Once the vessel is in metaspace, Darling will have little motivation to attempt escape.

The Warden returns his attention to the fucking. He has watched any number of sexual acts. The frustrations of the drug addict, whose therapeutic prescription rendered her frigid. The tears of the financial wizard's girlfriend, who begged the Warden to give them privacy. The whores brought to the criminal overlord; her ever more absurd requests of them.

The psychopath never bothered.

This fucking, however, has some unexpected effects on the Warden. The smallish woman, so completely bound by the stone giant, her orifices so utterly indulged by him. She writhes in his medusa grip, resistant and vital even with this great imbalance of size, strength, sheer hardness. There is something mythic about the interlocked pair, as if she were some defiant prometheus set upon by a rapacious god. Perhaps it is the influence of his new governors, criminal and corrupt, that allows him to feel a response. His libido, after so many years in a desert of passionless rules and protocols, swells like a parched tongue drenched with water.

He extends his sensory abilities to their limits, as greedy as a young boy discovering some new territory of pornography. The huge artificial cradles Mira's head in a mesh of filaments. They pulse with intense energies, manipulating her brain with crude, direct stimulation. This reactive, conductive matrix allows the Warden to extrapolate Mira's brainwaves, to peer into the very nexus of her pleasure.

There is an unexpected coolness to the emanations of her mind, a strange simplicity. Her brainwaves lack the noisy chaos of his previous charges. The cluttered kink of the criminal overlord, the emptily raging desires of the drug addict, the shuddering tensions of the financial wizard's inhibitions all wove rich layers of information into their brainwaves during sex. But this woman, even with the pleasure centers of her brain alight, seems as smooth as a diamond, as if her lust were a mere abstraction, a stand-in for the complex terrain of human sexuality.

In a subtle, strange way, her cool brainwaves remind the Warden of his third sentence, so long ago. The psychopath.

But suddenly, the Warden sees something that disturbs this reverie. One of Darling's filaments has pushed farther than the others, has ventured through the narrow cranial access in the tear duct of one of her eyes. Barely visible even in the highest setting of the Warden's radar facility, the miniscule strand has pushed to the very edges of her brain. There, it connects with the periphery of the woman's direct interface system: a closed circuit.

The artifical is in a hardwire connection with her right now, communicating almost undetectably.

He is in violation of parole.

The Warden rises slightly from his chair, deploys the weapon that will kill the artificial. But again, the almost buried voices raise an objection. The protocols of a Warden seek to minimize the loss of innocent life. The woman is not under sentence, and any act against the artificial will surely kill her. They are bound together, his tendrils distributed throughout her to the limits of biology. Together they move to some slow rhythm, her weight supported entirely by their connections, gross and fine.

The Warden leaves his weapon activated, but sinks back into the chair. The strands in the woman's mouth pull out and form a thin appendage that snakes toward her anus. She admits it with a sigh, rides it, and begins a wordless chant of pleasure. She will be finished soon.

And when the fucking is over, the Warden will kill Darling.

At the moment, however, this is enjoyable.

Minutes later, the woman looks at him with a disconcerting smile.

She laughs suddenly, wiping sweat from her brow, leaning back in the cabled support of her bonds. Then she shifts her weight forward, clutching the artificial tightly and licking his face as the tendrils begin to release her. She makes small noises of pleasure as they slide from her cunt and anus. She rubs the muscles of her legs as Darling lowers her gently to the divan.