Crash
I’ve never liked the idea of ballistic travel. I hadn’t left the US since the end of the international jet flights. I know that as what we used to call a ‘nerd’ I’m supposed to love the idea of hurtling through the edges of earth’s atmosphere at multiples of the speed of sound I hate to consider. And I should enjoy the fact that I can make a weekend trip to any advanced country in the world. But I don’t. I hate the acceleration, I hate the weightlessness, I hate seeing the curve of the Earth. I’d done it once, for a business trip, but that was enough for me.
My sons loved it, though. They loved it enough that Ben went to college in Australia, and Robert went to college in Japan, and they still came home several times a year, much to the detriment of my credit cards balances. Of course now they were grown, and paying for their own trips, even if I hadn’t paid off some of the ones from their college years. Ben had met a nice Aussie girl and they wanted to settle down out there in Melbourne, and of course have their wedding there. All the conventional international flights were gone by then; other than taking a very slow cruise or hopping a cargo ship, I had no way to get there other than a ballistic shuttle. So I’d hopped a train out to the Mojavi Spaceport, and there I was waiting in line to board a sixty-two-passenger launch to the Down Under.
As I fidgeted in the line, I was startled by the tell-tale beep in my ear, notifying me of a tag. I glanced around, looking for someone I knew, then opened the tag. I realized right away that it was a picture of a football, from one of those little interactive games that the kids play these days. I looked around for who might have accidentally passed it to me. She was walking towards me, a young woman who couldn’t have been over 20 years old, with wild blond hair and a gaudy glowing hoop through her nose. She was smiling playfully at me. “Just toss it back,” she said.
“I can’t,” I replied, tapping my temple, despite the fact that the actual implant is at the back of the head. “I’m running Open Diamond 4.”
“Diamond? Are you serious?” She looked incredulous at the fact that I had such old software—and obviously the hardware to match.
“I was one of the first four test subjects for Life Processor,” I revealed.
“Wow,” she said, “you must be old!”
I stiffened. “It was only twenty-fifty-six.”
“So you’re,” she paused, and I could tell she was letting her own implant do the math, “at least fifty.”
“Fifty two. Which is not really old these days,” I defended.
She grinned. “Sorry. So how do you live with it?”
“It does everything I need. I actually worked on a lot of the original Life Processor software, so I’m into the Open Life Processor project, we make a lot of new stuff to support new systems. There’s only a couple thousand left in production, mostly in poor areas.”
“Wow. So, wait, did you know Mark Jackson?”
I sighed. “Oh boy did I. The bastard cheated me out of my stock options.”
“Really? I have to hear more about that.”
A tall, dark-haired young man stepped up, panting, and interjected. “Hey, Patty, what are you doing?”
“Oh, sorry Josh, I passed the ball to this guy and his software won’t let him participate.”
“What a newb,” chided Josh, directing the jeer at Patty and not at me.
“Go ahead and start a new game, I’ll see you on the plane,” said Patty.
“Too late,” I observed, “they’re boarding now.”
Patty and Josh returned to their place in line, and loading began. Each passenger scanned his or her hand over the boarding terminal. When my turn came, I swiped my hand and then followed the cues in my implant as it guided me to my seat. It was near the middle of the body of the integrated-swept-wing aircraft for the smoothest ride, and on the aisle so I wouldn’t have to look out. A young man in a suit was already sitting in the window seat.
“Excuse me,” said a voice. It was Patty, addressing the man next to me, “would you mind trading me seats? I’d like to sit next to my friend here.”
“Well...”
“The view will be better on the other side,” she said, gesturing to empty seat she’d vacated.
“Well, I suppose it can’t hurt,” he said. He stepped over me and moved to the other seat next to a young man who I guessed must be another of Patty’s friends. Patty smiled at me and then climbed across. I noticed for the first time that she was wearing a very form-fitting pair of short shorts. Her bare legs brushed against the inside my bare knee. I admonished myself for the inappropriate thoughts I was having. It didn’t help matters any that I could hear Patty’s friends snickering about why she was so interested in me. Maybe she heard too, or maybe they were sending her texts, but she shot them a very dirty look.
“Sorry about them, they’re my teammates but not my friends. So,” she said, fastening her harness and turning towards me, “tell me what it was like to work for Life Processor! It always sounded like such an amazing place.”
“The real amazing stuff happened elsewhere,” I said, “I was just a coder. But I happened to get chosen for the trial because I was young and healthy and single.”
She must have noticed the way I hesitated, and glanced down at my wedding ring.
“I got married a couple years later,” I felt obligated to explain, “I have two boys, all grown up. My wife... she died of breast cancer seven years ago.”
“Oh, my, I’m so sorry,” she said.
“It happens. Less and less all the time, thank goodness.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“So anyway, Jackson picked me and three other guys for the trial. And mine didn’t even work at first, despite that I’d been using the headsets for a long time. The doctors screwed it up, and they got it working eventually, but they said they didn’t want to risk any nerve damage, so I can never get a new interface. I’m stuck with what will run on what’s in there, which is so old it doesn’t even have a serial number, let alone a model number.”
“You’d think he would take care of you, that’s like a lifetime disability.”
“Well, they didn’t see it that way back then. And on top of all that, Jackson wrote a clause into the stock options of all us early programmers that invalidated most of our options. I would have had one point eight billion if my options had matured as advertised, but instead I got eighteen million. Which got my kids through school, anyway. We all went to court, all us who got stiffed, but nothing came of it.
“Wow,” she said.
“So, what brings you to Australia?” I asked. The shuttle was being taxied into the catapult, but I tried not to consider that.
“School trip,” she said, “I’m on the football team.”
“You mean soccer?” I said, trying to imagine Patty’s slender build rattling around inside a set of American football pads.
She laughed. “Don’t let them hear you say that down there!”
“What school?”
“Olympic, in Santa Monica.”
A high school girl. I felt doubly dirty for the unbidden thoughts that wouldn’t leave me. The way she sat on her leg, leaned in towards me, twirled her hair around her finger. She was probably thinking of me as grandfatherly.
“I’m headed down for my son’s wedding,” I volunteered. She was too young even for my sons. That should have sobered me, but it didn’t.
“Oh, congratulations to him.”
“Yeah, he’s met a real nice girl.”
“That’s nice,” she said with an air of dreaminess. “I met a boy I thought I wanted to marry, once and it’s good I was too young, because he was a jerk.”
“Attention passengers, please brace for launch,” came the automated announcement. The flight attendant walked down the aisle, checking seat belts, and the rarely-used tray tables, despite the fact that all were electronically monitored. I gripped my hand-rests tightly. Patty just put her feet on the floor, and looked out towards the window.
I heard the whine of the catapult ramping up, the distant hiss of the fusion engines. There were three soft tones inside the cabin, and then the craft accelerated sharply, pushing my head back into the contoured headrest. The roar of the engines filled the cabin. The boost lasted about five minutes, and then the thrust eased off and we settled into weightlessness.
As soon as the seatbelt sign disengaged, Patty disengaged her seatbelt and stood. Strictly speaking, one is supposed to stay in one’s seat through the flight, as sixty-odd tourists flying around the cabin would be a logistical nightmare, never mind the inevitable vomit. “For some reason, free-fall always makes me have to go pee,” said Patty as she floated over my seat. With practiced ease she launched herself down the aisle and over the head of the scornful flight attendant. I caught myself looking up the bottom of her weightless shirt, and wished they served alcohol on those flights so I could have a stiff drink.
After a few minutes, Patty came out of the lavatory and aimed down the aisle again, spinning through the air gracefully as she went, her hair splaying. She reached out to catch herself and grabbed onto my shoulder. She giggled as she maneuvered over me. Her shirt was floating up, and I got a good look at the lighted piercing in her navel. She smoothed her shirt down and settled into her seat, slowly bobbing up and down between the seat and the padded ceiling. I had to force myself to look away from her young breasts bouncing under her shirt on each movement.
“You should try it too,” she said.
“No thanks,” I croaked, hoarse not from anxiety but from something else entirely, “I get space sick.”
“Oh,” she said, eyes darting to the space sickness bag in front of me. She dug into her little backpack.
“I’ll be okay so long as I remain seated.”
She produced a pack of mint flavored marijuana gum and offered it towards me. I raised an eyebrow.
“What?” She said, “you only have to be eighteen to buy it in Nevada.”
“And twenty-one in California.”
“It’s only a two hour train ride,” she said, popping a stick into her mouth. I waved the pack away, shaking my head.
She looked out the window at the curve of the earth spread out below us. “I can see the Cape of Africa,” she said. I just closed my eyes, so I could stop looking at her, smacking her lips and rolling her tongue around.
Suddenly, the shuttle lurched. I opened my eyes. We were so high in the atmosphere there could be no turbulence. The seatbelt sign came on, and Patty, obviously also understanding the meaning of the strange motion of the ship, complied rapidly. Suddenly the weightlessness faded and we felt ourselves pushing upward against our seatbelts. Out the window, it was obvious that the plane was turning downwards.
“Landing already?” Someone asked.
“We’re nowhere near Australia yet,” gasped Patty.
Muttering and praying filled the cabin. The attitude of the craft became disturbingly steep. Out the window, I could see a plume of gas from the engines firing on full reverse thrust. We were pulled forward by deceleration and gravity.
The mutters turned to screams. I just closed my eyes. Suddenly, the plane began to level, straining us forward and down. The craft shuddered and shook.
“Brace for impact,” said the live, human, non-recorded voice of the pilot for the first of time the entire flight.
There was a deafening crash. I was knocked out.
When I woke up I heard a woman crying. I opened my eyes. I saw a smoky gray sky above me. Around me, unfamiliar vegetation. I managed to sit up.
The crying woman was holding the broken body of a man to her chest. Beyond her was what was left of the shuttle, wedged between some tropical-looking trees at the end of a clearing. The nose was completely collapsed. People were stumbling away from the craft. I saw Patty, helping an injured man descend on the craft’s safety slide, which was punctured and deflated, hanging limply down to the ground. Something was smoking in the wreck, but the engines were off and there was no obvious leak of helium or oxygen.
“Anybody left,” called a man from the ground.
“Not alive,” called Patty. This led to a fresh round of wailing from more of the other passengers.
“The pilots?” I asked, looking around for them.
“Nothing left of them,” said the man, pointing to the ruined nose of the craft.
“Anybody know where we are?” I queried.
“I got no signal,” said the man, referring to his implant.
“What about the GPS?”
“None.”
“What?” I countered, “there’s GPS everywhere.”
“Not here.”
My unit didn’t have GPS to begin with, but I could confirm that there was no internet signal. I had a more robust antenna, in fact, designed as it was in the dark ages of patchy WiFi access.
“We should move away from the shuttle, in case there’s a gas leak,” I observed.
“Right. Come on everybody, let’s move uphill,” called the man. And just like that, he was the de-facto leader. I helped the distraught woman to leave her husband and come up hill. We walked to the farthest point we could still see the shuttle, and settled in to watch it smoulder. A crowd of folks was arguing over how the crash could have happened, where we’d ended up, and so on. My head hurt; I stayed out of it. Most of the rest were sitting sullenly like me. A couple of the more ambitious ones set out to explore the immediate area or to gather up materials for shelter and fire. After a while, Patty noticed me sitting there and came over.
“You okay?” she asked with great concern.
I was massaging my temples. “Yeah, just a regular headache.”
“Probably from the smoke. You got a few lungfuls before we got you out.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking at her, “you’re a real hero.”
“We’re not out of this yet.” She moved behind me and put her fingers on the sides of my head, doing the massaging that I’d been doing. It really did help. I tried to ignore the faint sensation of her body against the back of my head.
Once the leaders were satisfied that the shuttle wasn’t going to explode or gas anyone to death, some of us went back down to look for supplies and take care of the dead.
For my part I went directly to the rear electronics compartment, where I looked for the equipment for the satellite data receiver. I recognized the device and found a way to remove it from the rack.
“Anyone find any power supplies or batteries?”
Edward, the leader, produced a fancy portable solar battery pack for a mobile workstation. A small crowd formed. It was only the work of a few minutes to connect the leads and get the satellite up-link to power on. Almost immediately the status lights indicated that a connection had been established. But I still had no connection over the wireless to the device.
“Anyone?” I asked the onlookers. They all shook their heads. Patty touched my shoulder reassuringly.
On the back of the device was a diagnostic port. After some scrounging I found that we did not have a cable for it anywhere. Instead I stripped out some of the communications wiring, found a roll of clear tape, and began the process of fashioning a cable from carefully-arranged copper leads. I had half of the cable completed when it started to get dark.
“Unless we have some really good lights,” I said, “I should wait until morning.”
A few small shelters had been constructed, but the consensus was that it wouldn’t get too cold overnight in this tropical climate. Someone handed out tiny little airline blankets, water, and bagged potato chips.
“We should save those,” I said, but they all got eaten anyway. I stashed mine in my bag with a box of chocolates that I wasn’t about to advertise the existence of.
Someone thought to strip out all of the seat cushions. They smelled like burned plastic. Patty continued to stay close to me. She was not talkative, and neither was I.
Once it was completely dark, I noticed the soft sound of her crying. I reached over and patted her hand. She took that as an invitation, throwing her arms around me, hugging me tightly, and dousing my shoulder with tears. It started to get cold, and I covered her up. In her characteristic presumptuous way, she pulled her own bedding over, and held me close while she fell asleep.
I knew my compassion was what she needed. I also realized that I hadn’t so much as shaken hands with a woman since well before my wife’s death until that day. Now Patty’s youthful body was pressed against me. I was painfully aware of her breasts against my arm, even through all the layers of clothes she’d put on for warmth. I was tortured by her breath on my neck, by the scent of her under the day’s grime. I was sickened that despite everything that had happened, despite her age and her innocent trust, I was incredibly horny and feeling irrational.
Once she was fully asleep, I slipped out from under my blanket and wandered out into the forest. I opened my pants and let my straining member out into the night air. I jerked off in the dark, and try as I might to think of other moments from my life, I couldn’t avoid fantasising about unsuspecting Patty.
I came, and I didn’t really feel any better. But I managed to sleep, laying next to Patty but no longer touching her with my filthy body.
As soon as the sun was up, I went back to fashioning the other end of the plug, wiring it into the diagnostic cable from my bag.
Word came back that we were on a small island, with no sign of human inhabitants. There were some fruit trees of unknown variety, some fresh water, and plenty of birds around. It was too fortuitous that we’d landed on a tiny speck of land in the vast oceans we’d been flying over. The selection had to have been at least partly deliberate.
When I was done I turned the relay on again and handed the makeshift cord to Patty.
“Plug it in,” I said, pulling up the back of my hair.
“Wow,” she said, “you actually have a data port in your implant?”
“Yeah,” I said, “one of only a few dozen ever made.”
She snapped it carefully into place and I opened the terminal viewer. The lead on my optic nerve displayed for me the device’s interface.
“Ah,” I said, “it just stopped because the aircraft services bus was missing. Hang on...”
A couple minutes of fiddling later, the connection was online.
“Thank god!” said Edward, noticing that the net was back up.
“Holy shit,” yelled Josh, “check out the news!”
It was clear right away that we weren’t the only ones in trouble. There had been a coordinated attack on a huge range of systems, from the GPS and shuttle navigational systems to power plants, trains, cars... and that’s when I realized.
“Stop!” I said. I reached out and unplugged the power from the relay.
“What the fuck man!”
“Hey!”
“Listen!” I said, “I’ll forward you all this article. They’ve discovered that there’s a worm that will infect your implants.”
“What do you mean? How is that possible?” asked Edward.
“I didn’t read the whole thing, but it seems there was a backdoor in Friday’s Life Systems OS update.”
Murmurs spread through the crowd.
“So listen, it won’t affect me, so I will turn it back on, and I need you all to shut down your connections so you don’t get infected.”
“What’s so special about you?” challenged Edward.
“He’s got a really old implant,” offered Patty, jumping to my defense, “he’s running Open Diamond.”
“How fucking convenient!” yelled Edward, “maybe I should just look into this story.”
He stepped towards the relay, I couldn’t move, still being delicately attached to the diagnostic cable. Patty stepped in front of him.
“Hang on,” she said, but he tried to push past her, she lost her balance, and fell over backwards, knocking the relay off the top of the suitcase I’d set it on, and sending it crashing to the ground, landing atop a pile of fist-sized rocks. The onlookers gasped.
“You little bitch,” he said, “look what you did!”
“What I did?!” countered Patty.
I dived to the ground and righted the relay. It had a large dent, and something rattled loose inside it. Perhaps worse, the cord had yanked so hard that it had engaged the safety release on my own interface cord, designed to ensure that a minor accident wouldn’t pull the implant from my skull. The tiny, delicate end of the cord was ruined. I held it up.
“With this I might have been able to interface more of the electronics. Now we’re back at square one.”
Edward huffed away, and Patty turned to me with sad eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry. I think the worm probably got to the relay anyway. I got the payload, I think all of you did too.”
She gasped, raising her hand to her head.
“Don’t worry, I think it’s harmless, anarchists or something. I’m going to de-compile the payload now, see what I can make of it.”
I spent the rest of the day working on the worm. It was an amazing piece of software, designed to morph itself to affect a wide variety of systems from a tiny executable. It would compromise the infected system and then seek out further instructions from one of many sources. I checked the wireless network traffic, and I could see packets from the worm on all of the other passengers. The worm had not got to the point of retrieving the next set of instructions, whatever that was.
“Patty,” I said, “I’d like to try something out if you don’t mind, see if I can take control of the worm in your implant so I can disable it. It might break your implant, I don’t think it will, but I can’t be sure.”
“Sure,” she said, accepting my remote access request, “that would sure help with the others.” Near the plane they were having a conference, which they had pointedly not invited us to.
I opened up the control port of the worm. The worm’s control language used some strange keywords and I needed to find out what they meant. I tried out a harmless looking command, ‘report’. The output was simple, just the word “OK”. But at the same time, Patty spoke. “Subject is ready for control program input.”
“What?” I asked, eyebrows raised.
“Hmm?”
“What do you mean, “subject is ready?”
“I didn’t say anything,” she said quizzically.
I hit the command again.
“Subject is ready for control program input.”
“Why did you say that?”
“Say what?”
“You’d better not be fucking with me,” I said angrily.
“Jesus, of course not. What are you getting at.”
“Just that the worm seems to have made you talk.”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that before. Strange, isn’t it? Something about resignation with the data bus or something.”
“Yeah,” I said. I went back to the source code, back to the references to the control program. I was able to infer the application interface, and ran a script to generate an interface to the control parameters that would upload a generated control program to the worm. The labels were in a human language I didn’t recognize. Normally I could have gotten them translated, but whatever this was it wasn’t common enough to be in my loaded translation libraries.
I adjusted one of the parameters and sent the program.
“Sorry,” said Patty, “I think I need to pee all of a sudden.”
She trotted out into the forest and squatted behind a tree.
About the time she came back I tried another parameter.
“I hope I didn’t touch something poisonous,” she said, “I’m all itchy.”
I lowered that parameter and tried the next one. What happened next would have gone a lot differently if I had noticed that instead of setting it from ‘zero’ to ‘three’, I set it to ‘thirty-three’. I sent the program, and saw Patty’s eyes widen. I was going to set it back, but what she did took me completely off guard. She pounced on me, and leaned in to kiss me full on the lips. I tried to stop myself, I swear I did, but she put her hands on me and soon I had my hands on her too. I was running my hands up and down her sides, and then her hands were pulling at my shirt. She pulled off her shirt, and then the tank-top she had under it, and then her bra. I gaped up at her perfect teenage breasts, then she pressed them against my chest. She kissed me again and struggled with my pants. I helped her slide them off me, my underwear coming along too. She stood and slipped down her pants and underwear and straddled me, urgently. I had one more pang of regret before she tried to mount me.
I’m not a well endowed man. In fact, my dick could fairly be called small. I had never measured it, but it was less than four inches. I am a little overweight, which hampered things further as inexperienced young Patty tried to jam her little pussy onto me. She seemed to be struggling with it, trying to use her hand to guide it. I grasped her firmly around the hips and helped her get to the right spot. She sank down onto me, burning hot and wet like a young girl should be. She rode me like she’d done it before, and I felt a pang of jealously wondering with whom. But I focused on the fact that it felt so damn great. I touched her all over and palmed her breasts. She threw her head back and moaned—I wondered briefly if the others would come back this way and deal with me like the pervert I was. I wanted to fuck that girl all day but then she came, her pussy gasping around me, and I let loose a torrent of long-since surgically sterilized semen inside her.
She seemed inclined to keep going, but my no-longer-young cock wasn’t up to it. She humped my lap till my flaccid member slipped out. I regained my senses slightly, and mentally reset the errant parameter, only then noticing the extra digit in the adjustment. She climbed off me, suddenly looking nervous, and dressed. I wasn’t sure what she would think about the advantage I’d taken of her. Once we were fully dressed she sat down on my lap and hugged me.
“I don’t know why I did that,” she said, “but I’m glad I did.”
“Me too,” I said, my voice creaking like a teenager. We shared a laugh.
I spent the rest of the day testing the other parameters surreptitiously on the rest of the castaways. Soon I began to label them: urinate, itch, arousal, anger, fear. I discovered another layer of the interface where I could target the feelings more accurately: you have an itch there, you are angry with that person. Once I found the ‘agreeable’ parameter it was a lot simpler. Soon I had a fairly full-featured system.
I had no idea how the control functioned, but I inferred from a few specific artifacts in the code that some of the work had come from a medical research project. I gathered that whoever had stolen this code and had turned it into a terrible, terrible weapon.
I realized that we might well return to a world where anyone with an implant—everybody but Seventh-Day Adventists and old folks, more or less—was under control of whoever had authored this worm. I spent the evening modifying the worm deployed in my little group to ensure they wouldn’t fall victim to a further attack.
Patty had been providing me assistance all along. That night I used the worm to allocate some extra bedding for me and her. I had set up two beds a respectable distance apart. I had decided I wouldn’t use the controls like that again. However when I came back from eating dinner—some kind of a sea bird, which was gamy and tough—she had put our two piles of seat cushions together, and lay under the covers gazing at me forlornly.
I gave in and crawled under the covers with her. She leaned in and kissed me. This time we made out for an extended period, until my two-day beard had reddened her chin. I felt like a young man again, groping around under the covers, undressing beneath the blankets while people who would not approve prowled nearby. Once I had her naked, I slipped under the covers and between her legs. I ate her out, careful of my scratchy chin, licking her to a lather, fingering her little love tunnel, bringing her to three too-loud orgasms. I took a moment to lower all the infected passengers’ interest in the worm. I never messed with Patty’s parameters at all, but I knew that her artificially high arousal level had probably flooded her body with endorphins and bonded her to me in a deep emotional way.
I stopped after the third orgasm only because it was so stuffy under the blanket I couldn’t breathe. “You’re good at that,” she gushed the moment my ears were near her. She did not hesitate to kiss my lips, slippery from her arousal.
“Thanks,” I said, sliding my ready member inside her. We humped under the blankets. I didn’t get her off again, but she seemed to be enjoying herself as I took my time with her. It was twenty-three minutes this time—I prefer to shut off my implant when I have sex, so it isn’t so easy to focus on the clock, or anything else, but I wanted to keep the worm controls open just in case. I came inside her again, and we fell asleep under the steamy, damp pile of blankets.
In the morning we made our way to the running stream that had been found a couple of miles around the hill. The water was cold, but we stripped down and dipped in. Her giggles told me that if I’d had the energy, I could have had her again. I longed for the energy of my youth.
We washed some of our clothes and blankets and hung them out. Then we trekked back to the crash site.
The other survivors had finally decided it was time to bury the dead. The flight had been nearly full, with 54 passengers, 2 pilots, and one attendant. Now only 43 passengers survived. They dug 14 shallow graves and marked them with wooden crosses.
Among the survivors there were two nurses but no doctors. There were a few with useful vocations and a few more with useful hobbies. With the help of the worm I guided Edward to a happier, more cooperative place and encouraged him down the right long-term path. I didn’t want to be leader, he was doing a fine job of that, and I needed to focus on the electronics jobs.
In two days time we’d set up a proper workshop—and quarters—for me in the aft section of the airplane. We’d rigged the plane’s batteries to all the various solar panels on the gadgets the passengers had brought with them. I assembled what tools I could find, and set out disassembling the useful electronics and avionics from the plane. I thought I had the parts I needed to fix the relay, but I lacked the right tools, especially a soldering iron. I knew how to solder with a nail and a flame, but for such delicate circuitry it would not do. I ended up fashioning one from a warming element for the shuttle’s wings.
That night after dinner we retired to our makeshift bedroom. I turned on one of the small reading lights—quite a luxury given the scarcity of our power. I jumped onto the bed and reclined.
“Ready to break this thing in?”
Patty, however, looked uncertain.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m on my period,” she said, almost like it was a question. I’d long ago forgotten my qualms about that, but I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.
“That’s okay,” I said, and she crawled down next to me, relieved.
We lay embracing and her hands moved over me. “Would you like...” she said, her fingers resting on the bulge in my pants.
“I would love,” I said, settling back.
She opened my pants and pulled them off. She stroked my throbbing dick. She leaned down and gave it a kiss on the head, then kissed down the side, looking up at me.
“You’ve never done this before,” I blurted. This was kind of a surprise: from all the stories you hear, you’d think that they teach oral sex in 7th grade—well, they kind of do, come to think of it—but here was a girl who’d fucked but never gone down on a guy. It made me feel dirty all over again.
“Sorry,” she said, pulling back, “am I doing it wrong?”
“No, no, that is great. You’re just so tense. Just relax. So long as you keep your teeth away, there’s not much you can do wrong.”
She took a deep breath and took my little dick into her mouth, slurping it down almost to the base.
“Watch out so you don’t gag now,” I warned, but she seemed to be fine. She slurped back up and down again.
“Touch my balls while you do that,” I said, and she complied. “Gently, but firmly. Yeah.”
She seemed to have some idea of the basic premise, because soon she was slurping up and down on my cock like it was made of melting ice cream. She stopped for a moment and smacked her lips; I guess she was tasting my pre-come. She looked at the thin strands leaking from the top of my dick, and smeared them down over my shaft, before sucking me back inside.
“Take your shirt off please honey,” I said. She sat back on her feet and did. I watched her intently. “Yeah, that’s good. Very good. Oh, yeah. Wow,” I said. She had pushed my minimal member all the way to the back of her mouth, and now her lips were down over my pubic hairs. She was so enthusiastic. This was something my dear late wife had always done so daintily.
“I’m going to come soon,” I said.
She popped off, a hand resting on my balls. “What am I supposed to do? Swallow it?” She asked, with endearing naivety.
“That’s up to you. You can keep it in your mouth and either swallow it or spit it out after. Or in this position you could just lick my balls and let it go on my stomach. Usually it’s more sexy if it ends up on you.”
“Like in the pornos?”
“Yeah, like that. But the main thing is don’t let go until it’s done shooting, even if you just want to keep a hand on it.”
“Okay,” she said, “why don’t you do it in my mouth, this time,” she said.
My cock lurched. “Happy to oblige.”
She slurped down on my dick again. It didn’t take long before I was there. “Here it comes,” I managed to grunt as I started to shoot. She expanded her mouth, catching my semen. She kept her eyes on me, and once I was done I nodded to her. She pulled off and rolled her tongue experimentally through the messy goop, unsure what to do with it.
On a whim, I accessed her worm control page, and raised the parameters for hunger and enjoyment. She swallowed, and her eyes lit up.
“That wasn’t bad at all,” she said.
“I’m glad,” I replied. I turned off the light, and reached for the blanket.
“I’m kind of snacky, though,” she said.
I reset the parameters and retrieved one of my hoarded chocolates. She cooed in delight and sucked the confection until it had dissolved in her mouth.
Ten days later, I had re-established the network and established a stealth copy of the worm for reconnaissance purposes. The news sites no longer showed anything about the worm; they showed the situation improving. Elsewhere, however, remaining persons without implants were being rounded up and put under guard. A whole separate cover story was being fed to countries with a low degree of implant use. I realized that whoever controlled the rest of the network had the world under his thumb, from the information systems to the nuclear arsenals. Many countries prohibited government officials or military members from having the US-made implants. It was turning out that they were right.
There was another group resisting the enslavement. Those, like me, with older implants, seemed to figure out what was happening quickly. For the first couple of days there had been some activity on the message boards for the Open Diamond project. The remaining members had been captured or else had fled. Following a hunch, I found one of the other developers logged in to the Open Diamond build server, an ancient, un-advertised appliance in a dusty corner of some data center, only used by a handful of developers. He was also trying to determine the pattern of the worm, but he hadn’t had the advantage of having access to infected implants in the intermediate state like I had. The final incarnation of the worm used advanced encryption and a distributed command system. I didn’t tell him what I’d found; he’d inferred much of it. We worked together for two days on cracking the final worm, but after thirty hours he disappeared.
We’d also inferred our location as being somewhere in the island Republic of Seychelles, northeast of Madagascar. We knew that there was civilization not far away, and that the Seychelles were known for eschewing implantable electronics, not even providing the service in their hospital. However I didn’t want to tip our hand too far.
Patty and I meanwhile had settled into quite the domestic life. She was working as my personal assistant by day—and in saying that I don’t want to belittle her intellectual contributions, as she was a useful sounding board and had good ideas. I still had to keep her in the dark, however, so she was approaching the problem from a more general position. She did, however, manage to reverse-engineer the client selection algorithm, allowing us to merge our stealth client with the network and soon after crack the command key, which was only possible thanks to the fact that it turned out to be present in a freely-available ‘rainbow table’. Still, without Patty’s newer, faster implant to do the number crunching, we’d have taken ten times longer.
At night, we had quite a romantic life. She was madly in love with me, and I was starting to fall for her, perhaps in justification of my questionable actions. There was plenty to love about Patty, but I just couldn’t bear to think what my sons would say about her, and about how she would change as she matured emotionally. Still, I was in no position to turn down the fact that she wanted to jump my bones at every possibility. I knew I could have used the worm to reverse her feelings, and pick one of the other female survivors—some of whom were no pain to look at—to keep me company. However I felt I had a real connection with Patty, whatever it was. I kept telling myself that before this was over, I would try to reverse her feelings for me and let her free to fall in love with a young man.
And the things that she came up with—I think once I let her back onto the net with the portable terminal, she must have been watching porn or reading sex books for all the ideas she kept coming up with. In sixteen nights together, we’d had intercourse in no fewer than twenty positions, many of which I’d never even known of let alone tried. Ever since I’d taught her to enjoy the taste of my semen, she would usually have a taste of it, even dipping her fingers into her own messy snatch to get to it. She became insistent that I come twice a night. The second round was always long and intense. I was getting worn out. We were having sex all over the area round our camp, from the stream to the shade of the trees.
I had developed a replacement worm client which would place me in charge of the network. Unfortunately, I knew I couldn’t deploy it from the island, lest I run the risk of losing connectivity at the wrong time or being traced. Going to Victoria, in Seychelles, would just give us access to more satellite phones. I subverted the operating system of an automated sea taxi from Victoria, and summoned it to our beach.
I left instructions for my people to wait for me, and brought only Patty, and her soccer teammates Josh, Marcus, and Tina. Young and athletic, they made good choices for the physically demanding trip. It was a five-day cruise to Mobasa, Kenya, which Patty was determined to spend teasing me to insanity. Ostensibly her friends didn’t know what we were up to, but that illusion dissolved the first day. Patty was sitting in my lap, telling a naughty story, in full view of her friends.
“So there we were in the showers,” she said, “and I could hardly move my arm. So I asked Britt if she would soap me up.” She giggled, and wiggled on my hard-on.
I’d been slowly shifting the expectations of the four of them. Finally I had pushed just far enough.
“Jesus, Patricia,” spat Britt, “just fuck the man already, it’s not like we don’t see what you’re doing.”
“Well, if you insist,” purred Patty, turning towards me.
Soon we were fucking right there on the vinyl seat, Patty bouncing on my boner. I wasn’t thinking of the others at all, until I heard Josh moaning. I guess I’d pushed them a little too far, as somehow or other Josh was sticking his dick in Britt’s mouth, while Marcus seemed to be getting ready to fuck her.
“Done this before?” I asked, curious.
“Nope,” said Marcus, “but no time like the present, eh?”
I watched them go at Britt like hungry wolves. Britt is a nice looking girl, with auburn hair, big freckled tits and wide, flaring hips. Marcus was somewhat better endowed than me, and was screwing her from behind in long, slow strokes. Josh meanwhile was holding his own meaty member still while Britt was pushed back and forth, and he watched Patty intently.
“What, you want her too now?”
“No dear,” I said, “you’re more than enough for me. But I don’t mind the show.”
“Fair enough.” She climbed off me, and assumed a similar position to Britt, ass up high as she knelt along the length of the bench. I pushed back into her and watched the boys going to town. In no time at all, Josh pulled his dick out of her mouth and squeezed his come out onto the bench under her face.
“Eww,” said Britt. Just then Marcus pulled out of her and slapped his cock against her ass, coating her rump with a little fresh glaze. By some consensus, the boys switched spots, and Britt slurped one greasy teenage cock while another was worked up and down over her pussy lips, trying to get hard enough to penetrate her.
Britt seemed more complacent than aroused, so I tweaked her settings again. She let out a pleasing moan as Josh got his length inside her.
Meanwhile Patty was enjoying herself just fine, and she had her first orgasm. I felt like I was close, and I guess she felt it too, as she jumped up, dropped to her knees in front of me, opened her mouth and closed her eyes. I obliged her, jerking my dick hard and spraying three large gobs of semen across her face. She greedily scooped it all into her mouth, smacking her fingers clean.
“Daaaaamn,” said Marcus, “that was hot.”
Patty lay back and started to finger her inflamed pussy, looking at me. She seemed to be aware, though, of Marcus gazing lustily at her as well. I don’t rightly know whether it was her idea or mine, but I nodded to Marcus and he wasted no time relieving Britt’s mouth of his cock. He approached Patty and she guided him in to place. I watched them fuck, with only a little jealously, but soon I was unexpectedly aroused at the sight of their teen-aged bodies.
I moved up and offered my dick to Patty’s mouth from the side of the bench. She was somewhat distracted, but soon had found a reasonable cadence for the two of us. I pinched her little pink nipples. After a while I could tell she was getting worked up again, so I took my dick away and focused on her body. She came under Marcus, who didn’t slow at all.
I hadn’t heard Josh finish, but he was collapsed on the bench, torpid, and Britt was crawling towards me on all fours, her ass covered with two copious teen-aged loads, and her chest smeared with the splooge that Marcus had left on the bench. She slipped her head in between me and the bench, and started licking my balls and stroking my cock. I palmed her copious breasts with one hand while I tweaked Patty’s pencil-nub nipples with the other.
Marcus urged Patty to turn over on her hands and knees again. I lay down in front of her and pulled Britt on top of me, reverse-cowgirl style. She sank down on me, hot and pliant from the fuckings she’d gotten. I had in mind that Patty might lick my balls while her friend rode me, but it didn’t really work out with the pace Britt was keeping. I felt her breath on my thigh, though, and felt her lips tremble as she came again. Finally, I heard Marcus come, forgetting himself and spewing seed inside her.
Then Patty and Britt were both sucking me, and it was very nice. It lasted a while, while I could see the boys debating whether they had anything left in them. Josh had the sense to get a drink of water. Eventually I was getting close, and as much as I’d always dreamed of a double-facial, I had something else in mind.
I put Britt on her back and slid myself into her. I stroked her three times and then let loose my goo into her vagina. Then I stepped aside, and Patty merely shook her head and slapped me playfully on the ass before crawling between the other girl’s leg to slurp up my precious leavings.
“Jesus Christ,” said Josh. He watched for a few moments before taking his turn up inside Patty. Marcus, meanwhile, seemed prepared to bide his time. I was spent and limp, and regretting it in the face of the enticing sight of creamy pussy lips and probing tongues.
That’s pretty much how we spent the five days. By the time we stopped just outside the coastal radar range of Mombasa, everybody was sore and tired. Not exactly the best condition to be in when you set out to save the world, but at least we were prepared to die happy.
It only occurred to me as we tentatively crept along the dark ocean-side street that I probably should have brought at least one of the dark-skinned passengers with me. My control application told me that there was nobody with an implant left in the immediate area. Here in urban Kenya there had been a high enough degree of implant use that the worm had taken control of the police and military and rapidly gathered up all non-implanted personnel. Even here on the northern outskirts of the city, there were signs that there had been a fight. Overturned cars, a five-ton military truck riddled with bullet holes, the ground littered with rifle shells, drying pools of blood. Towards the city center, I could see several towers of thick black smoke.
The Internet signal was very good here. I made my way towards what I hoped was an unoccupied apartment above a hardware store. It had a good view of the surrounding areas. The door stood open. I crept in and assured myself that the place was empty, then called my entourage to follow. They took up look-out positions around the perimeter.
I watched the activity over the control network. I could see evidence of whoever was running the worm dealing with activities on the US east coast. I’d taken to calling him Fool, after the control code he had assigned to to his terminal, the letter F followed by fifteen zeroes and a one, or the first of a very long series of hexadecimal numbers. I watched him sending commands back and forth. Finally the activity tapered off, in the pre-dawn hours of Kenya. I hoped Fool would be asleep, or otherwise engaged. I sent my updated control program into the network.
I watched as the worm clients checked in to my new command and control center. By the thousands, then by the millions, the worm clients came under my control. Minutes passed, and I had about seventy-five percent of the slaves under my control when I saw an update come from the other commander. Of the remaining twenty-five percent, Fool managed to retain about twenty percent.
My control program was very simple: it made the clients less violent and prepared them to accept written commands from me. I really had no good way to issue detailed commands to the entire system as Fool had been doing. I couldn’t just disable the worm—the backdoor remained, and I didn’t have a way to patch the operating systems. I also knew that if I let the world go back to normal, war would break out all over as the blame flew. I had to disable Fool’s controller, and take his slaves, and then bring the world back to normalcy.
I checked up on my assets. All over the world, the few remaining slaves under Fool’s control were attacking my slaves. I hadn’t anticipated this splintering, and so my slaves failed to defend themselves. I corrected that situation with a broadcast order.
I started checking on high-profile targets—the military. He controlled enough of it to make me uncertain. I managed to find my way to where the US military high commanders were assembled, and found that I controlled most of the military. I was alerted moments later that an intercontinental ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead had been launched from somewhere inside Russia. I switched my focus to Russia, and tried to find out more, but the language barrier held me up. The Secretary of Defense notified me that the ICBM was headed eastern Africa. My gut sank yet again. He knew where I was!
“Everyone outside!”
We ran out and found a beat-up sedan with its doors open, keys still in the ignition. We piled in and after a moment it started. I floored it, and raced to the nearby highway, traveling North.
Meanwhile I’d sent out word what had happened and for anyone with the means to do so to seek to disarm the launched warhead, and to evacuate Mombasa. The US Air Force was going to use one of its airborne lasers, but it did not have a craft in range. It was going to attempt an out-of-range shot before reentry, but it was a slim chance. The capable Russian defense system was useless behind the launched rocket, but the Indians and Israelies tried to employ their own defenses. Soon the precise bearing of the device had been calculated by my elements in Russian missile control, and shared instantly between the various groups. The launch facility had been located and personnel there were attempting to gain access, but the outlook was not good.
We raced across the African countryside. We passed a crowd of people fighting, over what I didn’t know. Then, near the end of the launch phase, an Israeli Arrow V missile intercepted the target. The world breathed a sigh of relief as the device plunged harmlessly into the Arctic Ocean.
However in my pre-occupation with the military threat, I had neglected Fool. He had issued a new update that was going out over the network, taking over the slaves I had locked him out of. I realized with a sinking feeling that this revision might even take over my companions! Immediately I ordered the three of them to turn off their network connections, something most people rarely did, but I’d at least had them at the ready. I pulled the car off the road, just in time it seemed as the engine was smoking and steaming. The others got out, but Patty stayed next to me, lost in thought.
I turned to Fool’s new client. It was impossibly complex; I had no idea how he’d come up with it so fast. It must have been a version he’d had in development, and was pushing out the door. Maybe that meant there was a bug in the code...
But then, without any intervention on my part, the slaves started returning to me. Fool disappeared entirely.
“Well, I don’t know what happened, but he’s offline,” I said, turning.
Patty was grinning at me.
“Wait... how...”
“You never asked if I knew how to code Haskell,” she said Coyly.
“Haskel? For Diamond? What does that have to do with it?”
“Fool. He was running Diamond, too. So I de-compiled the worm’s control functions and reverse-engineered them to run on Diamond.”
“Amazing! But how did you get him to run it?”
“Well, I realized pretty quickly that he was still pulling automatic updates from Open Diamond.”
“Of course! But how did you get access to the update server? Only a couple of us know the key.”
Patty pantomimed an innocent whistle.
“You... you rooted my implant? When?”
“The first time I met you,” she confessed.
“Of course! The game, it was all a ploy! I executed the damn thing. You saw the little plug in the back of my balding head and wondered what I have in here. You saucy wench!”
“Don’t you want to know what I did with Stanley?”
“Who’s Stanley?”
“Stanley Russel, the Worm author, Fool.”
“Oh, yeah, of course.”
She sent me a live video feed of a little white guy, dressed only in his tighty-whities, being arrested by a whole crowd of angry-looking police officers.
“I’m glad you’re here to help me,” I said, “we have a lot of work to do putting this all back.”
“Yeah, a lot of fucked-up programming to undo.”
“So, um, do you want me to reverse your programming? I mean, I guess you could do it yourself.”
“I closed off the worm days ago, sweetie,” she said. “What I am now is what I am. I can see every thing you ever changed about me and I don’t hate any of it.”
I relaxed. “That’s good.”
“Although...” she continued.
“What?” I asked.
“Turn-about is fair play,” she intoned seductively.
Quite to my surprise I suddenly felt flushed, aroused. Without further thought I dived over into Patty’s seat and kissed her.
“Oh god baby,” I sighed, “you’re fucking with my implant aren’t you?”
She grinned as I stripped her down. “I only turned it up as high as you did to me that first time.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. I fucked her right there in the seat of that little car, as the sun rose, and the world waited patiently for us to finish what we were doing and give them back their free will.
The next two weeks were very strange.
We flew back to the States and developed a process whereby we brought the world’s leaders out from under the worm, and helped them to delegate the process of ensuring order as the larger release progressed. Almost all of those released had their implants removed. By the time the operations were completed, word was starting to get out about how Patty and I were such heroes. For a few brief days we enjoyed fame and thanks from most of the world.
Then, one day after we’d finally had enough of lying in bed in our fancy hotel suite, Patty had run down to pick up some lunch. She’d been gone for all of thirty seconds when a full tactical assault team with “FBI” printed on their vests burst through the front door. They arrested me, and dragged me out of the building in front of a huge crowd of reporters. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what I’d been charged with.
They had forgiven me for cracking some of the most sensitive computer systems in the world, and the aftermath of the incident. They recognized me as a savior there. They were charging me with human trafficking on account of my spiriting Patty, Britt, Josh, and Marcus across borders while being under the influence of the worm, and further with sexual assault for my relations with Patty while she was under the influence of the worm.
I was spirited away to some secret prison. I met with a lawyer, who was useless, and my rights were seriously infringed. I rotted there for twenty-seven months with no idea what the outside world thought of me. I had no idea what they’d done with Patty beyond that she was receiving “post-worm counseling”, which I’d started to suspect was a euphemism for some kind of Orwellian reconditioning.
The bane and boon of the first six months was my implant. They wanted to take it out, but their doctors agreed it couldn’t be safely removed. They’d found a radio-frequency shielded cell for me, so it was on and disconnected, which was nice as I had some reading materials, and I could write letters for my eventual release. Unfortunately, however, Patty had left my libido jacked to the sky, and so I couldn’t resist the urge to masturbate multiple times a day despite the cameras which I was sure could see what I was doing under my blanket.
Then, the battery for my implant ran out, and they wouldn’t let me charge it, but they started letting me take exercise outside. In the ninth month, I caught my first glimpse of another prisoner, through a window outside the courtyard: it was Stanley fucking Russel, being kept in the same place as me. I was being classed together with a man who had few peers.
From there my conspiracy theories flourished. Maybe they were afraid of what I might have found out? Or that I might yet have installed some ‘back door’ access? After the first year I started to go crazy. By the time they let me out I had no idea who I was anymore, other than a penis and a pair of eyes that saw the smiling face of a blond-haired girl every time they closed.
Then, one day over two years from my arrest, without ceremony, and without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom, they gave me back the clothes I’d been wearing—which hung loose over my depleted body—and drove me to the airport. I finally realized that we were in Denver. I was handed an airplane ticket for a flight back to Los Angeles.
I made my way through the airport and found that boarding had already begun. I shuffled onto the plane. The flight attendant led me to a seat in first class; I was obviously not the only person operating without an implant in those days. After a while the flight attendant closed the boarding door and only then did I realize that there was nobody else on the flight but for one attendant and the flight crew. I stiffened; I worried it might be a trap. But then I knew, quite for sure, that it wasn’t. From behind me Patty emerged, her face long, tears forming in her eyes as she walked towards me. I stood up.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, embracing me.
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
“Yes it is, I should have known what Dad would do.”
“Your father? What does he have to do with this?”
“I should have told you. My father is Mark Jackson.”
“But you...”
“I have my mother’s last name. She can’t stand him either.”
I turned my head.
“When he found out what happened between us, he... he went to one of his politician buddies... and they locked you up. Made up some horrible things about you.”
“My... God... that... bastard.”
“But now, he is the scapegoat, nobody wants implants any more, and he’s being sued into oblivion.”
“Wow,” I said, “I hadn’t considered that.”
“Before all this he was the third richest man in the world. His stock lost seventy-five percent of its value right away, and the rest has all been frozen. Good thing my trust fund is in order. I’ve got more buying power than him now.”
I glanced around at the empty aircraft. The flight attendant caught my eye and gestured to the seat belt sign. We settled into a pair of the first-class seats. She took my hand.
“Kind of a big plane for just the two of us,” I observed.
“The press is all over the heliport. They are all expecting you to board my Falcon any minute now. I even hired a girl who looks like me to sit in it and look out the window. By the time they figure it out, we’ll be a thousand miles away.”
“A girl who looks like you,” I said, quite sincerely, “is quite an impossible feat.”
She finally smiled, even blushed a little.
“So where do you want to go anyway?” She asked.
“How about anywhere I can take a bubble bath and eat a steak. Preferably at the same time.”
“Any other pressing needs?” She asked mischievously.
“You have no idea,” I sighed, “but I still feel like... that place.”
She nodded, and just put her arm around me as the plane ascended.
“By the way, I’ve arranged a rather sizable wrongful imprisonment settlement for you. So, you won’t have to feel like you’re leeching off me.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I almost forgot,” she said, sitting upright, “I brought your charging cable.” She held it up for me.
“No thanks,” I said, “I’ll stay in the dark for a while.”
Sitting there together, we flew off into the sunset.