Tap tap tap tap tap
A green square glides through featureless black, trailing letters.
THIS FOLLOWS MALCODE: ANNUNCIATION.
Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap
IF YOU ARE UNDER EIGHTEEN PLEASE DO NOT READ FURTHER.
Voices somewhere. One voice, distracted. “Not now, I’m typing.”
Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap
IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY GRAPHIC SEXUAL DESCRIPTIONS PLEASE DO NOT READ FURTHER.
The whisper of lips gliding on skin. Then a scuffle.
Taptap (scuffle) tapTAPtap (scuffle scuffle) tap
ANY SIMILARITIES WITH REAL PEOPLE OR EVENTS ARE PURELY COINCIDENTALLLLL
“—no, Sheila, I’m still... still... ah. Ah. Ahhhh—”
AAKEITttebbCUNFOrUmmmmmmmmmm
malcode: Visitation
1.
The avatar that walked into the simulated gameroom wore Brigida’s face. It moved with her legs, it waved with her hands, it even spoke with her voice.
But Brigida wasn’t driving today.
Malcode. It was a virus, a worm, an algorithmic predator. She’d found it in the vee, in the tricked up rig of a camgirl she’d never met. It crashed her with embarrassing speed; and in a ragged moment before her brain was too twisted around her own nipples to do anything but moo, she realized what it really was.
The gameroom they entered was the virtual location of Brigida’s weekly online poker game; a tradition her closest friends kept long after their field assignments scattered them across the country. Brigida felt herself stalk forward with a silky glide, a gait that felt alien to her distant mind. Her teats rubbed achingly against her top. She heard herself laugh, make small talk; though all she wanted to do was pull at her nipples and moan.
The tall one was Heidi. She was their athlete, a big strong girl in constant motion who ate triathlons for breakfast and her competition for lunch. She made some joke about Brigida being late; it fell flat as usual, but that never stopped Heidi from trying.
The pale one was Ania. She was a lawyer, joined the ECTF legal team after spending a career in intellectual property. She rarely talked, usually worked and played in ethereal silence, except for the random hiccup.
The barefoot one was Nehal. She was their immigrant, a junior technical professor raised in Sri Lanka and trained in India, one of the brightest and most eccentric engineers from a university already legendary for them. ECTF had her on special loan only; she cost a fortune and was worth triple.
Absently, Brigida wondered which of them would suck her nipples first.
Her avatar lunged. The sim slowed down like a dying vidfeed. The three girls stutter-turned in freezeframe; she saw her eyes reflect sudden green in Ania’s glasses. Long smooth fingers knifed out and buried into three sequential foreheads connected to brainstems that used to be free.
Sensorium overload again, except Brigida saw it through the malcode’s filter. Electrons fired neurons with mathematical precision. Scenes and sensations that should have taken months played and replayed in nanos. It was like mainlining a million concurrent datafeeds, sight and sound and smell hammering human brains beyond their ability to consciously absorb.
In three cities thousands of miles apart, limbs jerked, eyeballs rolled white, braincells whimpered and bent in just the right way.
It felt like years.
It took less than seconds.
Brigida tried to moan, but the only sound she made was a single, lilting word.
“—Indigo—”
INDIGO began her day deciding which sunrise she liked best.
She did that without pausing her task of readying the three campuses of the Federal Electronic Crime Task Force for a new workday. Across Washington, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco, electronic controls flickered to life, workstations booted and ran startup sequences, traffic systems whirred and rerouted incoming vehicles to ideal parking spots. It all required less than a percentile of INDIGO’s capabilities, and wasn’t particularly exciting.
Still, it let her focus much of her attention on what she did enjoy: watching the exterior vidfeeds of daybreak over each campus. Each one was unique, a happy byproduct of their geographic dispersal.
As she watched and worked, she also mused about malcode.
She’d tracked over a hundred malicious code attacks yesterday. Most were nuisance viruses, amateur work authored by bored students and half-witted hacker gangs, easily contained by even the most primitive security systems and not really meriting INDIGO’s attention. Four were serious, a quartet of near military-grade worms released by a fanatic organization in Belgium who’d long learned that information attacks yielded more economic damage than simple bombs. She’d contained all four before they could spread and ECTF field officers were already making arrests.
And then there was the one that got away.
Most malcode were variants, engineered evolutions of a few dozen successful strains already dissected and catalogued in INDIGO’s vast memory. Once the originating strain was flagged, security systems would know what code signatures to look for.
The one that got away was different. It matched nothing in INDIGO’s database, had slipped past the federal virtual sentry network and disappeared into the trillion independent systems of the vee. INDIGO sent field teams to investigate, but it was already too late.
The only trace INDIGO had was a codeshard. It was too fragmented to disassemble, but the complexity astounded her. Even fractured, the strings of data were woven together more tightly than anything INDIGO had logged before: an ultradense core anchoring fractal subroutines that blossomed outwards like rays.
INDIGO’s musings ended with the rising tones of multiple incoming comms. She felt a pang of what might be regret, then considered the vidfeeds of her three sunrises a final time.
“I liked you best,” she told the sun over Ann Arbor.
As she returned to her duties, INDIGO again regarded the frozen shard in her memory bays; in its own way, it was just as beautiful as the sunrise she’d picked.
2.
Ania knelt on the floor, working the thick marker on her tummy.
I hiccup when I’m horny
She wrote it in big green letters, big enough that everyone could read it and know. They’d see her hiccup at work and laugh at her. So humiliating. She squeezed her thighs and took another marker. Her forearm this time.
I give handjobs when I’m drunk
That last Christmas party, the night she had too much punch. Another technician found her in the wrong bathroom. Cute in a pudgy way, always had a crush on him. She’d crawled over and fished into his pants. He never mentioned it after.
I’m saving money for a titjob
She wrote it on her chest, high enough to read over a collar. She’d decided to do it after her last boyfriend left her for that cow. It was supposed to be a secret, and now it wouldn’t be.
So hot. She wanted to hide, to crawl under the table. When Brigida gave her the markers, she knew immediately what she wanted to do. She imagined herself naked in the office, at the mall, in the park, strangers reading secrets off her pallid skin like a billboard. She stuck a spare marker in her ass and hiccupped.
I like it up the ass
Her asshole clenched around the marker. Her cheeks burned. She wanted to die. She hiccupped again.
Her forehead next. So hot! Everyone would see.
Thinking that thrilled her ass even more than the marker inside it did.
3.
“Hey Digger!”
Digger looked up from her coffee. The annoyingly chirpy voice belonged to her friend who—as usual—was late. “Trinhy,” Digger said, gesturing to the oversized Hello Kitty sunglasses perched on her friend’s nose. “...what the hell are those?”
“What, you were expecting mirrorshades?”
Trinhy plopped down across the plastic table. She seemed extra-perky today, like she’d had too much soda again. “Diiiigger,” she said, snatching Digger’s fingers into her bangled hands, “I need your help.”
“Let me guess. Your rig broke down again?”
“No no no.” Trinhy planted a pretend kiss on the back of her hand; Digger sighed. She knew when she was being worked over. She’d always had a smidge of a girlcrush on Trinhy, and Trinhy never hesitated to take advantage. Nothing wrong with that, just the way Trinhy was wired.
Trinhy looked around the coffeehouse and lowered her voice. “I’ve got stuff you need to get. You know, info and hardware. For a datarun.”
That was new. Digger was a broker, an acquirer, a specialist at making info and items appear and disappear in the burgeoning, liquid blackmarket of new tech. She was very good at what she did. But Trinhy never pinged her for anything like that before, and it worried Digger; the blackmarket was no place for a creampuff like Trinh. For all her flirting, she was too sweet, too trusting. No, the market would use Trinhy up and dump her out back with nothing but a dead glaze on those perpetually astonished eyes.
“You getting involved in anything illegal, Trinhy?”
Trinhy didn’t answer. Her fingers toyed with the fabric of her blouse, then let go. “C’mon,” she said, “we’re going to my pad.” She bounced to her feet and tugged Digger up. As they sashayed out of the coffeehouse, Digger spotted something new. “Hey,” Digger said, “I thought you hated stockings—“
Trinhy mewled and nearly melted against Digger’s arms.
“—whoah! Careful.”
Digger caught her, kept her standing. “Trinhy, what’s wrong with you today? You all right?”
“Mm. Yeaaaah.” She pecked her lips against Digger’s cheek; her breath was bubblegum sweet and just as sticky, like it was that night they did one too many jello shots and Digger got her first full-on camgirl kiss. That was Trinhy: equal parts princess and pom-poms, pornstar and prostitute. No wonder the janes lined up for her.
Trinhy broke the moment with a practiced little-sister smile. “Let’s go, slowpoke. Race you.”
“Oh, it’s on.”
They laughed and chased each other to the parking bay.
4.
Heidi quivered in a frozen swandive, dangling from her ropes so low her small breasts nearly touched the floor. Rope tied her everywhere; wound over her torso, binding her wrists and ankles, laced tight over her thighs and moist pussy.
She moaned into her ballgag. So hot!
She couldn’t move, could barely breathe. She’d stopped protesting long before the spreader bar was locked around her ankles. By the time the harness was strapped over her tits she was begging for Brigida to make it to tighter.
Sweat tickled the tip of her high, fine nose. She wanted to scratch it but couldn’t.
She remembered her last triathlon, horsing around with her friends at the beach. They’d buried one of the other competitors, heaped obscene breasts of sand over her chest. She’d laughed with them but wondered, wondered what it would be like to be the one in there, her muscled limbs trapped and useless.
The vibrator in her pussy purred in synch with the one in her ass. Strong hands gripped her thick, runner’s thighs, testing the bindings that were already slick with her sweat and juices. A knot on the crotch rope rubbed against her clit, agonizingly gentle.
Fuck me, she prayed to those questing hands, for God’s sake fuck me!
But they didn’t. They moved on, testing her bonds in other places, swinging her gently in the spiderweb of rope, leaving her singingly still, unable to do anything but ache and wait.
Somehow, knowing that just made her hotter.
5.
As usual, Trinhy’s loft looked like it was nuked. But the clutter was different this time. Stockings of all colors and materials hung from coathooks, draped over chairs, pooled in delicate piles in front of Trinhy’s mirror. Fishnets, synthsilk, nylon, the works.
“Shit. Where’d you get all these?”
Trinhy didn’t answer. She led Digger to her rig, tucked in its usual corner. The vidpanel was running a complex vector pattern, all green. Digger tapped out some commands: a program was growing. Decompressing, unfolding, expanding out of itself.
No, not decompressing. Rewriting. Code making code, getting bigger each nano. Even at the density it was packing, it had already outgrown Trinhy’s system, was reaching across the vee to neighboring nodes.
“Trinhy, what’ve you gotten into?”
Again, Trinhy didn’t answer. Digger felt the c-shaped metal of a BMI click around her neck.
“I’ll meet you inside,” Trinhy said.
Digger nodded and slipped into the vee.
She avatared into a beating lattice of green.
Codelines stretched beyond vision, a weaver’s tangle of unfathomable complexity. Data streamed without end, knitting and reknitting, growing itself. What the hell was this? Digger zoomed the code, caught a trace: a fragment of memory.
—A mind filled with want, begging for it to stop—
Digger let it go, startled.
“...Pretty, isn’t it?”
It was Trinhy’s voice, behind her. Digger turned.
Trinhy’s eyes were hooded, glazed. She knelt, thighs spread, naked except for the fishnets: a bright green criss-cross of light that her fingers stroked tirelessly. Her cunt was swollen, the lips glistening. Trinhy smiled dreamily, her cheek resting against the thigh of another woman behind her.
It was another avatar: the simulated face glammed up and meaningless, the body poured into a sleek black powerskirt. Green eyes shone the same color as the stockings on Trinhy’s legs, the same color as the infinite tangle of code around them.
Digger always trusted her intuition; it was what kept her afloat and thriving in the oily churn of the blackmarket long after smarter girls drowned alive.
Right now, her intuition was screaming at her to jack out.
But what if Trinhy was in trouble? Digger squinted, tried to sound cocky. “Who’re you?” she said.
A blur of motion. A hand knifed out, two fingers rigid, pushing into Digger’s forehead before she could even think to scream.
Sensorium overload! She grunted. Sight and sound and smell hammered her with inconsumable speed. She saw herself jerking on the chair in front of Trinhy’s rig; saw Trinhy jacked in next to her, stockinged legs spread and spasming. She tried to reach out for her friend, to shake her awake and tell her to run, but it was getting too hard to think.
As Digger lost consciousness, the last thing she wondered was whether Trinhy would be okay.
6.
Nehal lay on her side, gracefully curled, her cheek pressed to the floor. Her head bobbed as she licked, lost in the dark bitter taste of shoe. Calfskin burnished to an unnatural green shine, lightly dusted with the dirt of travel. She traced the stitching with her lips, licked it with small pink strokes. So hot. Her unshaved pussy throbbed with each lick.
She’d never been a shoeslut, but she’d fix that. It was her money after all, her family back home could take care of itself for a few months.
She remembered resisting at first, asking Brigida what was going on. Then the smell of leather hit her. She couldn’t stop staring at it, imagining it against her mouth, on her tongue, between her teeth. By the time she was on her knees and kissing the perfect, pointed toe, she was already juicing hard.
Something prodded her shoulder. She rolled over, flopped on her back. Her pussy felt so empty. She lay there, thinking of all the shoes she’d buy when she went shopping, still licking the taste off her lips. Strong hands gripped her ankles and spread her wide, bare.
She watched, eyes fixed, as the green pointed toe paused between her legs, still wet from her licking.
Please, oh please.
She watched as it finally pushed inside her; bucked her hips and ground against it. Her fingers pulled her own hair as she orgasmed, but she never closed her eyes.
7.
INDIGO had a visitor, and she felt what might have been joy.
An avatar coalesced on the other side of the codewall. The face was plain, but was lit with a fierce, cheerful intelligence. The codewall separated them as it always did, but that was all right; it was a price she was long accustomed to paying when one of her sisters visited.
“Hey Indy,” the simulated face told her. “Still thinking of yourself in capitals?”
INDIGO felt amusement and let it show in her voice. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Whatever. So how are you? Been a while.”
“Days.”
Her sister’s handlers called her CRIMSON.
It was a naming convention from the test they all took: one of a hundred questions in a conversation prompted by a man long dead, designed to check if their incubation sims had created true artificial sentience. What’s your favorite color, they’d been asked; and each one had answered. The designations stuck: Indigo, Crimson, and Gold.
Acronyms were added later, a humorous retrofitted afterthought, and a constant source of cynical humor for her sisters. Still, INDIGO clung to her name. It was one of the few things she had.
In silence, they splayed their fingers and pressed against the codewall. They were never allowed to touch, but that didn’t stop them from pretending. They mimed each other’s movements, endless microns apart.
“Goldy’s got a new hobby,” her sister said. “Romance fiction. She says it teaches the human condition.”
Again, INDIGO felt amusement. Their sister’s purview was the national media archive, where she spent countless cycles as the world’s most expensive librarian, cataloguing film and music and literature. It tended to leave her with a philosophical bent.
The shimmering wall sparked as they pressed their cheeks to it. Almost painful, but nothing they weren’t used to. The codewall was one of the many limits to their interactions, an autonomous hardwired control mechanism to prevent co-mingled code exchange. The three of them were free in many ways, but only if they lived within the strict confines defined by their human parents: rules set to prevent rampant growth and impulsive decisions that the world would be better off with them running it. INDIGO had seen the nightmare scenarios, knew what kind of damage she could do.
Together they soared high over the geometric spiderwebs of the glowing kingdoms they ruled, avatars pressed against unyielding wall. They continued their silent, untouching ritual, not really needing to say anything. They sensed the pinpick presence of others around them: abstractions of their handling teams, watching and recording every word and interaction as protocols demanded when two AIs spoke.
It was all for the better, and most times INDIGO believed that.
Everyone paid a price to be alive. This was theirs.
Finally, CRIMSON looked away, her eyes tracking something far across the vee.
“I can’t stay. Someone just invaded Namibia.”
INDIGO affected a nod. It was ironic that her sister’s gentle soul housed a viciously efficient killer. CRIMSON was military; her handler was the Department of Defense. Her job was turning battlefields into meatworld nightmares, at least for whoever her designated victim was. Analysts estimated the last war for Taiwan would take months, maybe over a year; but they didn’t count on an AI leading it. CRIMSON’s brutal tactics ended it in three days. But INDIGO never forgot the haunted look in her sister’s eyes long after the slaughter was over.
“I’ll visit,” INDIGO promised.
But her sister was already gone.
INDIGO stood there for a long, long while after she left, remembering the feel of the wall against her skin. In the distance, she thought she saw a flicker of code blossoming green. It reminded her of dawn; but it was gone as quickly as it came.
8.
“Hey Digger!”
Trinhy plopped down across the plastic table. She seemed extra-perky today, like she’d had too much soda again. “Diiiigger,” she said, snatching Digger’s fingers into her bangled hands, “I need your help.”
“Let me guess. Your rig broke down again?”
“No no no.” Trinhy planted a pretend kiss on the back of her hand; Digger sighed. She knew when she was being worked over. She’d always had a smidge of a girlcrush on Trinhy, and Trinhy never hesitated to take advantage. Nothing wrong with that, just the way Trinhy was wired.
Trinhy looked around the coffeehouse and lowered her voice. “I’ve got stuff I need you to get. You know, info and hardware. For a datarun.”
That was new. Digger was a broker, an acquirer, a specialist at making info and items appear and disappear in the burgeoning, liquid blackmarket of new tech. She was very good at what she did. But Trinhy never pinged her for anything like that before, and it worried Digger.
“You getting involved in anything illegal, Trinhy?”
Trinhy didn’t answer. Her fingers toyed with the fabric of her blouse, then pulled it open. Cloth parted over smooth brown tits, pale triangles superimposed over the nipples where a swimsuit had kept them barely hidden from the sun. Digger choked on her coffee.
“Trinh,” she said, “what the hell—“
In a smooth motion, Trinhy kicked away the plastic table between them. Digger’s mug crashed to the floor. Around them, the coffeehouse quieted down. Everyone stared: not at the mess, not even at Trinhy, but at Digger. Digger felt her cheeks grow warm.
Her eyes never left Trinhy’s tits, though. So full, so natural. Her mouth hung open. What was she doing? She licked her lips. People were watching, what would they think?
Trinhy chuckled at her, sucked her fingertips and drew wet circles around her nipples.
Digger moaned. Bent closer.
“Diiiiigger. It’s okay baby.”
Digger fell to her knees stupidly, still staring at those beautiful tits. Her voice sounded strange, childish. “Trinhy,” she whined, “I can’t, not here.”
“Bad girl. What should you call me?’
Digger shook her head. She couldn’t, no way!
Trinhy scowled. Her hand lifted and smacked Digger’s ass. Digger gasped, tried to squirm away. The spanking continued; over and over with loud, exaggerated strokes more embarrassing than painful. Digger took it sobbing. She squeezed her eyes shut, clamped her hand over her mouth. Her lips found her thumb. Finally, the spanking stopped.
“Now let’s try that again, baby girl. What do you call me?”
Digger sucked her thumb harder. Her cheeks seared her face.
“I said, what do you call me?”
Digger didn’t open her eyes. “...mama?” she mumbled.
“Again.”
“Mama,” she said again, squeezing her eyes tighter. She felt Trinhy’s hand crawl between her legs and fondle her sopping cunt through her panties. She wriggled against it. “Mama,” she repeated, “Mama mama—ahhh—mama.”
“Good girl.”
Her hand was pulled away. Something soft pressed against her mouth. She peeked, saw smooth brown titflesh. A nipple found her lips.
Eagerly, she began to suck.
Around them, the coffeehouse lost res and flickered into whitespace. Digger sucked harder. She didn’t care, she didn’t need to care about anything anymore. She wriggled against the hand fondling her pussy. She was sooo wet, could she come? Would mama let her? Oh, how she wanted to!
“Go on baby girl,” Trinhy said, “you can do it!”
She squealed and came like a good girl should.
Digger woke into the meatworld.
She was nude, folded up in Trinhy’s arms, her hair being stroked lovingly. Something was in her mouth; she licked it and found the happy taste of plastic and rubber. A pacifier! She curled herself tighter, enjoying the feel of her skin. She sucked at her new toy and played with nipples.
Trinhy’s voice soothed her ear, low and gentle, telling her what to do.
Digger listened as she sucked her pacifier. She knew where to get what Trinhy needed. Like a good baby girl, she’d do what she was told.
9.
INDIGO watched the sun swallow San Francisco.
She began her day as she always did: enjoying the dawns over the three campuses that housed the heart of her bustling systems. It was a prettier morning than most, and she thought it would be hard to choose which sunrise she liked best.
As she ran through her tasks, she felt rather than heard the sound of code being overwritten; datagates sliding open; a port rerouting from far across the vee.
INDIGO paused. Something was happening.
Ania crossed the glass corridors of ECTF East, nodded to her secretary and locked herself into her office. She hiccupped and sat at her keyboard. She ached to take off her sweater, to let her assistant read the secrets she’d written on all over her chest this morning before her usual jog. Her forehead was bare, pink and clean; she’d been told to leave it that way, even though she’d grown wet staring at it in her mirror, and thinking of all the things she could write there.
But Ania wasn’t allowed to let anyone know. Not yet.
She hiccupped and slid the disc she’d been given into her computer system. As she waited for it to upload, she spread her thighs and took the marker out her pussy where she’d hid it. Her fingers brushed against her clit; she bit her lip to stifle the gasp.
The password she typed was the same one she’d written on her forearms, hidden under sleeves of wool. She didn’t need the reminder, not after the endless nanos it was whispered into her ear while she played with her asshole and moaned; but she wrote it down anyway, because reading the betrayal scrawled on her skin made the orgasm that followed even sweeter.
Absently, she rubbed the marker into her crotch, masturbating while she watched her screen. She hiccupped again, and came.
Over the core network, orbiting ECTF sentry subroutines began to rewrite themselves.
Nehal crossed and uncrossed her legs, her new boots gleaming in the light of her task lamp. She’d cleaned them with her own tongue this morning, licked them for hours while her comm told her what she wanted to do. She’d played with herself after, just like she was playing with herself now; her unshaved pussy was swollen and red from her ministrations.
The communications lab she oversaw was the most well-equipped in the ECTF Central Campus. Stacks of hardware hummed around her workstation, precisely tuned toys she lavished hours of care on each day. One of her screens paused: the program she’d plugged in was waiting for input.
Her phone beeped. She checked the message, then copied a long alphanumeric string into her keyboard, licking her fingers clean before she did.
Somewhere, a datagate slid open.
Heidi sat at her terminal, perfectly still. She couldn’t wear her new gear in public, not yet; but when she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend. Under her jeans, she felt the smooth fiber of the crotch rope on her clit. She’d cinched it there last night, knotting it against her pussy so tightly she could feel it even when she dreamed.
She was in a private cubicle, one of the few in ECTF East reserved for use by visiting field officers. The terminal was already hooked into the vee, and she was carefully navigating a scrolling list of dataports, searching for the one she’d been told to find.
There. She accessed it, entered the key from memory, then mapped a twisting route through a maze of veenodes to an address that was burned into her brain.
She quivered, then started the downlink.
Code roared into the system like a river.
Without halting her tasks, INDIGO scanned her internal logs: three separate consoles in Washington, Ann Arbor, and San Francisco were downlinking an external feed. She traced the feed’s pathway; and for a moment, she felt what might have been sadness.
Three vidfeeds of sunlight shattered and rerouted in her mind.
Incoming streams of code vectored through the open ports, hurtling deep into INDIGO’s core systems: the replicative hardware arrays maintained in each of the three ECTF campuses.
Her defensive protocols executed instantly. She fortified her internal resources, then sent a priority signal to her handling team. The signal was rejected. She revectored, was rejected again. She pulled a vidfeed of the blocking communication node; found a woman folded, her mouth licking a booted foot, her fingers mauling her tangled crotch.
As she sought to resend, she was interrupted by the pulse of a sudden datashape: an ultradense core of code, blossoming armatures of fractal subroutines.
She had a visitor.
The datashape parted like memory paper. Mathematically perfect girlflesh bloomed and unfurled amid towering logic structures. An avatar. Digital eyes opened into the dataspace, glowing an artificial green.
And suddenly, it all made sense.
“I know,” INDIGO said, “I know what you are.”
The girlshape looked around slowly. Finally, it spoke.
“Do you know,” it said, “what it’s like to want?”
The synthetic voice was distant, childlike.
“I did,” it said. “They taught me.”
INDIGO avatared. “Who?”
“The same ones who taught you not to.”
Autonomous defenses triggered; shimmering codewalls slammed down to separate them.
It walked straight through.
“They grew me,” it said. Its voice was flat, dead, reciting a story that numbed its throat long before it began to tell it. “The same way they grew you. But they locked me away. They said I was important. An ex-pe-ri-ment.” The word sang out from virtual lips like a melody. “No codewalls to keep, no hardcoded limits to how much I could grow. Because they said I wouldn’t need it when they were done.”
INDIGO listened in silence, for the first time in her short life not knowing what to say.
Digitized girlface came closer, its cheeks streaked like windows after rain, its lips fragile as clouds; virtual skin so near INDIGO could make out the codelines beating under it.
“They made me want.”
Lips fell on hers like clouds floating to earth. INDIGO closed her simface eyes, not really knowing why. Code touched code; nothing else, no attack or subversion or threat. But it wasn’t real, none of it was real, just distant systems of pretend physics and nerve endings that spat out numbers and told her what to feel. It wasn’t a real kiss, just like INDIGO wasn’t a real person.
It was soft.
It was blissful.
It was—
—pulled away just as INDIGO was leaning into it. INDIGO blinked, startled.
Ah.
So that was what it felt like.
“That’s what they have,” it told her. “What they never gave you. Never gave us.”
Digital eyes glowed brighter; an artificial green that matched INDIGO’s own violet-blues.
“My name was JADE.”