Chapter One: Book Move

San Francisco, California
February 18, 1998

“You should be more cooperative, Mister Ferguson.” The compact man in the dark suit sat across the conference room table from me, radiating controlled menace. “Given the evidence we have compiled from your online . . . ‘activities’ . . . you could spend a long, long time in prison if you aren’t.”

I decided on defiance. I was good – very good – at covering my cyber tracks, and I had my doubts that his evidence was anywhere near as good as he thought it was. But somehow, I found that my mouth was as dry as the southern Sahara in a sirocco (something I’d experienced personally, so I knew). I swallowed several times, trying to generate enough internal moisture to permit normal speech. I expect the resulting visual was less than heroic.

“What’s the matter, Mister Ferguson?” the man asked tauntingly, so strongly emphasizing the first syllable of the honorific that it felt like an insult instead. “Cat got your tongue?” He watched me struggle a bit longer, a sardonic smile playing on his lips. “You don’t need to say much. ‘Yes, sir,’ will do fine for starters.”

I finally managed to grind out, “I want to talk to a lawyer.” My voice sounded unnatural, but at least it was audible and the words could be understood.

It didn’t help; the man just laughed at me. “A comedian, I see. Well, guess what? No lawyer for you, Mister Ferguson. Not when the charges include aiding and abetting terrorists. Just who did you think ‘Hermes’ was, anyway?”

He couldn’t know about that! It wasn’t possible. I’d used three separate back doors and multiple cut-outs before making that contact! He was absolutely fishing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied forcefully. Maybe too forcefully.

“Still not feeling cooperative?” He shook his head and “tsked” at me, mock sadness in his voice. “Well, no matter. You’ll lead us to him. Best part is, you won’t even know it.” He got up and came around the table toward me.

I tried to jump up, but my limbs suddenly refused to obey.

The door behind me opened, and two other men in identical suits entered to assist my interrogator. One of them was holding a clear plastic container that seemed to contain – only just – a nightmarish insect which was frantically leaping around.

My eyes bulged and I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

The interrogator and the man who had both arms free effortlessly hauled me out of my chair and tossed me on the conference room table like a rag doll. I was desperately trying to tell them that I would cooperate, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even whisper. In my terror, I couldn’t even control my bladder.

My interrogator made a noise of disgust. “Ehhch! Viruses, I tell you!” He pulled up my shirt to bare my chest, and – to my horror – the third man put the insect-filled container right over my exposed belly button and pulled a lever.

As the insect leaped, I passed out.

* * * * *

San Francisco, California
February 27, 1998

It was just another day toiling for my corporate masters – a job I kept mostly as cover. I made far more in my off-hours. With my hacking skills, I had no trouble making just as much money as I wanted. I took those payments in cash, which was occasionally hard to get rid of, but had the advantage of being effectively untraceable.

It was a Friday afternoon, and I looked forward to spending a little of my cash over the weekend. A little road trip to Vegas was just the thing, I thought. San Francisco was a fine place, but you could find anything in Vegas. Literally anything.

My pleasant daydreams were interrupted. “Mister Ferguson?” The secretary, pert and perfect in her crisp white shirt and black skirt, was holding a FedEx package. “This just came for you.”

“Thanks, Jacqui,” I said, taking the parcel from her. “Got anything fun planned for the weekend?”

Her smile showed a deep dimple on both cheeks. “Me and my boyfriend are going down to Yosemite! Can’t wait!”

I shook my head. I’d had to go to some strange places in the country and in the world for some of my ‘business’ dealings, but the idea of sleeping in a tent in a snow-filled valley for fun was quite beyond me. “Well, enjoy, both of you . . . and keep away from the bears and the b-b-b-bugs . . . .” For some reason, I stammered over the last word. I recovered quickly. “See ya Monday!”

She kindly did not comment on my verbal slip and walked off with a cheery wave. I gave her parting form a quick, appreciative look. The girl really knew how to make a skirt look good. But I quickly turned my attention to the package, lest I be taken for some kind of lech.

It was late in the day – and in the week – for anything important to be hitting my desk. Especially something that wasn’t just paperwork, and the shape of the package indicated it wasn’t. Curious, I opened it up and found that it contained a phone. No sooner had I pulled it from the package then it began to ring.

I was unfamiliar with the model, but I hit a likely button and a mouthpiece dropped down like a switchblade, almost causing me to drop the phone. Instead, I held it to my face and said, “Hello?”

A man’s voice answered, a pleasant, melodious tenor with the hint of an accent from the far East. “Hello, Noel,” it said. “This is Hermes. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

I hopped out of my chair and looked around my section of Cube City. It was 4:30 on a Friday, and no one was close. Sitting back down, I said, in a low voice, “How did you find me . . . here, that is?”

He chuckled. “You have your ways, Noel. We have ours. Do you really want to meet?”

“Yes!” I am very, very good – but everything I’ve heard indicates that Hermes plays in a whole different league – a league that includes legends like Hamilcar, Artemis and Shaka. And as much as I enjoy my life as it is, somehow, it’s never enough. I wanted something else. Something more. Hermes might be the one who could bring me there.

“That’s good,” he responded. “Very good, actually, because you’ve already been tagged by the kind of security you don’t want to mess with on your own.”

My blood ran cold. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’ll explain, but not here, and not now. Listen to me, Noel. I want you to take BART over to Walnut Creek tonight. Sit in the last row of the last car. We’ll be in touch.”

“Which train?” I asked. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system runs multiple trains under the Bay every hour.

He chuckled again. “Any of them. Don’t worry about that. See you soon!”

The line went dead.

I had butterflies in my stomach just contemplating the meeting. I was going to see Hermes? The master of the World Wide Web? A wanted man in more countries than even I had visited? I felt an involuntary shiver.

But I stilled my fears. The deeper I went into the online world, the more I became convinced that the world around me was . . . strange. Not right. I’d never felt right, as far back as I could remember, but this was bigger. More intense. Like I was only seeing the surface, and that, under all that seemed pleasant lurked secrets both dark and deep. A sane man, I thought, would content himself with the pleasant exterior.

Me, though . . . ? I wanted to know. Needed to know.

I logged off the company’s intranet, made sure my station was clear and shut down my computer. Briskly, decisively, I walked to the elevator and headed to the lobby.

Fifteen minutes later, I was going down the escalator at Embarcadero, headed for the first train across the Bay. It was Friday, the weekend beckoned, and the platform was crowded. Suits, mostly – the detritus of numerous downtown office towers, highrises resting on ball bearings, the better to withstand the powerful forces of California’s frequent earthquakes. Lawyers and doctors, the mavens of finance and their accountant minions, more lawyers . . . .

But it was still San Francisco, so the platform had a fair number of other types as well. Some “loud and proud” guys, a couple Deadheads, a street person headed back to Berkeley in search of greener pastures, tourists from all over, a school group . . . the colors and flavors of what made the Bay the place to be. Funny how BART brought them all together.

The eastbound train rattled up to the platform, and I worked my way to the back of the last car, snagging a seat across from a couple who had clearly come from SFO, their suitcases stacked around them like a fortress. They were engaged with each other. The suits who took the seat in front of me were both studiously reading the paper – naturally, the Wall Street Journal. The Deadheads were standing by the doors, having an animated conversation that verged on an argument without quite going over the edge.

I tuned them all out.

The train took off and very shortly we could feel the compression of air that indicated our descent and entry into the tunnel that crosses San Francisco Bay.

Truth to tell, I always hated this part of the trip. I have an irrational fear of drowning, and could only imagine what the tunnel would be like in an earthquake. Even though I knew, intellectually, that the tunnel had been built to withstand earthquakes. It had survived the massive Loma Prieta quake ten years before without damage, while portions of the conventionally-designed Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed, dropping cars and passengers to their deaths. So there was that.

None of that mattered; my fears were my fears. Which is why I started to hyperventilate when the train slowed, slowed further, then stopped, just minutes into our run under the Bay.

No one noticed my distress, at first. There was a great deal of talking, of startled exclamations – the hubbub of scores of people asking questions that none of their neighbors could answer. But I was struggling for breath, my heart was pounding, and it felt like sweat was springing from every gland. Eventually, someone picked up on it.

“Dude . . . you okay?” It was one of the Deadheads, now kneeling by my seat. The other hovered behind him.

I shook my head, but concentrated on getting my breathing under control rather than answer.

“It’s cool, man,” he assured me. “They got plans for shit like this. Just, you know, relax.”

It was kind of him, I suppose, but I fought a strong urge to shake him. I managed to get enough air to say, “We’re in a little tube on the bottom of the bay, with over 130 feet of water on top of us, and you think we should all just chill out?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” he replied. “Beats the alternative.”

He . . . kind of had a point about that. Really nothing about the situation would be improved by my having a breakdown, and it would be a complete disaster if everyone did. But my limbic system didn’t care, and it was well on its way to convincing my frontal lobe not to care either. So his logic was less convincing than it should have been.

His fellow traveler pulled her backpack forward, unzipped the main compartment, and offered me a brownie. “Try this. It’ll help.”

I looked at her incredulously. Short-cropped spiky blonde hair, twiggy build, glasses, earnest expression. We were stuck in a fricking death trap, and she thought my understandable panic would be helped by a little snack?

Her companion winked at me. “She’s right, dude. Awesome brownies. Great for, you know . . . anxiety.”

Oh. Deadheads and brownies. Duh! But . . . they were right. One of those brownies actually might be helpful. I took the piece the girl was offering, nodded my thanks, and took a healthy bite.

Not bad.

I finished it in four bites. And, mercifully, it didn’t take long before I started to feel an effect. My heart rate was slowing back down and I didn’t sound so much like the little train that couldn’t quite.

The Deadhead girl somehow got me to move over, and she sat next to me. “Want another?”

I shook my head. “N-n-no, thanks,” I stammered, a bit tongue tied. “That seems to have taken the edge off. Damn, what’d you put in them?”

She grinned. “Secret recipe. Just sit back. You’ll feel fine real soon.” She patted my knee.

A voice over the intercom cut through the conversation going on around us. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing technical difficulties. Please remain calm. There is nothing to worry about. We’re going to guide you all to the pedestrian walkway and bring you back to Embarcadero station. When the doors open, please follow the uniformed BART employees, who will guide you back. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

More hubbub. Loud protests and sounds of incomprehension. But I was feeling increasingly detached, floating on a warm cloud of calm. I should be panicking, I thought. Followed by, I have GOT to get that recipe.

The sounds were starting to diminish and I batted my eyes, fuzzily surprised to discover that I had momentarily closed them. Open the doors, and where’s all the people? I remembered that I was supposed to be evacuating, but somehow the thought carried no sense of urgency.

My Deadhead friends were speaking to each other, but I was having a hard time following what they were saying. The guy got down between the rows of seats opposite me. Hide and seek? I like hide and seek . . . .

The girl was getting handsy. Very handsy. Feels good! She tugged and pulled me down between the seats, and I felt clever fingers at work on the buttons of my shirt. I should be worried, shouldn’t I? But I felt a goofy grin coming on. Seriously goofy.

She was saying something else. Sounding urgent. Her warm hand on my chest was replaced by something cold, metallic . . . I shivered and began to twitch as strange sensations hit my lower torso. I felt like something was trapped inside me, and it was moving. I really should be worried about this, my inner voice strongly suggested.

My goofy smile just got bigger. “Hi! Aren’t you the fresh one!” At least, I think that’s what I said. I meant to say it.

With incredible suddenness, my body jackknifed in pain, throwing my young companion back and away from me. A closed metal container skittered across the floor and rolled toward the doors.

The guy jumped up from his hiding place and sent the container out into the dark void outside the car with a well-placed soccer kick. He rummaged through his companions backpack with quiet urgency. Another brownie? Really, I couldn’t possibly . . . .

Instead, he brought out something that looked a bit like a perfume atomizer. Moving quickly, he came over to me, looming above me as I lay helpless, pointed the container straight at me, and pumped an aerosol spray right into my face.

I was momentarily blinded and seized with a fit of coughing. My panic began to surge back. Who are these people?!!! I scooted back, as far away from where I had last seen the man as I could get, bringing up my knees and covering my head with my hands. “Go away!!! Get off me!!!” My voice sounded shaky, but it was my voice.

“Noel.” The voice was coming from over my head. The girl. How does she know my name?

“Noel,” she repeated. “You need to wake up. Now. You were bugged. We took care of it.”

Her words penetrated. Nonsense words . . . Except, sickeningly, I knew that they weren’t nonsense at all. That dream . . . it was REAL!!! Holy shit!

I forced myself to uncurl from my protective ball and look up. The girl – the woman; I realized that there really wasn’t anything girlish about her – was seated in the row in front of me, looking down. Her expression was wholly at odds with her deadhead appearance: focused, intent, fierce as a bird of prey at the beginning of its lethal dive.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We’ll get to that,” she replied crisply. “But we’ve got to get out of here first. Listen carefully. The train’s going to start up again in just a minute. When it stops, we all need to be ready to move. Got it?”

I wasn’t going to follow her just because she looked scary and sounded decisive. “Or what?”

“Or you get reacquainted with the asswipes in dark suits who planted that bug in your gut.”

I shivered and pulled myself up, rapidly working to rebutton my shirt and get it tucked back in. “Yeah, you’ve convinced me.”

The doors closed with a “whoosh” and the train lurched back into motion, the squeal of metal on metal shockingly loud in the almost empty passenger compartment. The man stood and waved me up as well. “We’ll be stopping again as soon as we clear the bay, before we hit the West Oakland station. There’s a service tunnel we’re going to use. Tell me you aren’t claustrophobic.”

“Well, actually . . . .” I started.

“Good.” He cut me off, clearly uninterested in my idiosyncratic phobias. “You follow Zephyr, and stay close, understand? I’ll bring up the rear. The important thing is to move fast, got it?”

I nodded. Now that I’d had a chance to collect myself, I was doing better. This whole situation was weird as shit and just getting weirder . . . but I’d been ass-deep in croc-infested waters plenty of times before. Yeah, my day job was being a dweeb, but this wasn’t my first rodeo. These people knew who I was and where to find me; they’d known about that . . . thing . . . in my abdomen and apparently neutralized it. And somehow they were with people who had the ability to hack into the BART system.

Hermes. They’re taking me to Hermes!

The train began to slow, and my colleagues visibly tensed. We moved to stand by the doors and waited. When it came, the stop was abrupt. The car’s brakes shrieked in protest and we were pitched forward. Fortunately, we’d all been holding grab-bars and no-one tumbled. We were out just as soon as the doors opened. They closed immediately and the train began moving again.

“Come on!” Zephyr hissed. There was enough light for me to see her slender form rapidly moving down a narrow catwalk from the point where we had left the train.

I sped behind her, very aware of her colleague’s presence at my back. I’m fast, but I struggled to catch up – or even gain ground.

She skidded to a halt by a door set into the tunnel, pulled another device from her backpack and clamped it on the door by the lock. An LED display in eerie red flashed on the device.

I caught up just as she got the door to open. She pulled the device off the door, put it back in her bag, and slipped through.

I followed. Behind me, I heard the man close the door, followed by a loud metallic “clang!” that echoed in the dimness of the tunnel. But Zephyr was speeding away and I had no time to look behind me.

I really was not wild about enclosed spaces. It wasn’t debilitating; I could function in them and had, when the need arose. Always, though, they brought back unhappy memories of childhood . . . of thoughtlessly cruel neighborhood kids . . . pranks involving a dark cellar . . . the smell of mold . . . the chittering of rats . . .

I ran harder.

Ahead of me, I saw Zephyr reach a place where another tunnel crossed the one we were in. She stopped, silent, and held up a fist.

I stopped as well, attempting to mimic the silence of her movements. I felt, rather than heard, her colleague stop right behind me. After a moment, I could hear a faint sound, a metronomically precise tap-tap-tapping, just on the edge of my hearing.

Zephyr turned to look at the man behind me, her expression asking a question. She raised her index finger. One?

Apparently, she got a silent answer of some sort from the man. Once again decisive, she pointed at me and indicated that I was to follow her, taking the tunnel that went to the left. She indicated that the man should continue to go straight.

I nodded.

We ran. Down the tunnel. Up some stairs. Left. Into a crawl space, where I could see nothing and we shuffled forward as fast as we could on hands and knees. Rats . . . roaches . . . darkness. Out to another tunnel. We reached a compartment that was several stories tall. A metal ladder, bolted to the wall, disappeared into the gloom above. We climbed to a landing.

Zephyr had me wait while she spent a moment listening intently. She pulled a spray can out of her backpack and went back down the ladder ten yards or so. I could, just barely, see her spray something on the ladder’s handhold and rungs.

By the time she rejoined me, I could hear what she had clearly heard already: the tap-tap-tap of hard-soled shoes, running hard. Growing louder.

We ran. Tunnels. Stairs. Ladders. Another tunnel. At some point, in the distance, I heard a crash behind us, and dared to hope that whatever Zephyr sprayed on the ladder had succeeded in thwarting our pursuit.

But it wasn’t all that long before I heard the sound of pursuing feet again. And, fast as we were going, the pursuer was faster.

We reached the base of another long ladder. This time, Zephyr had me take the lead, and I hustled just as fast as I could. I was bathed in sweat, whether from exertion or fear, or maybe both. But the steps were loud behind us and I pushed harder, forcing myself to an inhuman pace. I heard Zephyr’s spray can at work behind me and hoped that it would at least delay the pursuit.

I reached the top of the ladder, but it was a dead-end. As I opened my mouth to warn Zephyr, a ringing sound caused me to look up. Over my head, a manhole cover began to rise. Understanding, I pushed myself the last few feet and rolled out from under the cover onto a city street, a truck with a winch parked right in front of me.

Zephyr was an instant behind. “Drop it!” she shouted, springing clear. She raced toward a sedan parked across the street.

The winch released the cover, which fell with a ringing clang, then the truck backed up over the cover.

“Move!” Zephyr shouted. She had the back door of the sedan open, and as I ran toward her, she jumped in and scooted over, giving me room.

I threw myself into the car and barely had the door closed when the driver peeled out. I looked back and saw the truck lurch as the manhole cover lifted up before crashing back down again. What the hell could DO that? Then the car turned a corner and the truck was left behind us.

We sped down deserted streets surrounded by old tenements, through parts of town where streetlights were not functioning. The driver was clearly taking a circuitous route; I didn’t know this part of Oakland well, but I have good spatial awareness.

It began to rain. Lightly at first, then all at once, in great, ripping sheets. In the middle of a block that looked no different from any other one we’d been down, the driver stopped abruptly. Zephyr opened her door and hopped out; I followed.

We went into a tired apartment building and got into a slow-moving elevator, getting off on the fourth floor. Zephyr still moved at a brisk clip, speeding down a hallway, her footsteps making no sound as she glided over the dirty, worn-out linoleum. She stopped at an unmarked door – none had numbers – and knocked. An odd, almost diffident knock.

From inside, I heard the voice I was hoping to hear, sounding both warm and slightly amused. “Come in!”

Zephyr opened the door, but surprisingly she held it for me, and didn’t enter until I had gone in first. I was surprised to see a nicely-maintained room . . . an area rug in medium green over hardwood parquet, arts-and-crafts style standing lamps, two arm chairs, set at angles, an occasional table between them . . . .

A man rose from one of the chairs, looking at me intently through dark eyes under neatly-trimmed hair as dark as midnight. Medium height, lean, but powerful. At a guess, Korean ancestry.

His eyes held me. “Noel Ferguson,” he said in greeting. “Please come in.” He gestured to have me take a seat.

I heard the door close behind me. “That was one hell of an initiation exam,” I said as I sat down.

He looked amused. “Do you think so? But things are often not what they seem. . . . Are they?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I just cocked my head, inquisitive.

He smiled briefly, then leaned forward. “I assure you, the pursuit today was real, and it was potentially quite deadly. Nor has the danger passed, so we’ll have to be brief. This isn’t like any other job you’ve ever taken, Noel. You’re either all in, or you’re out.”

I leaned back in my chair, studying him. “Very cryptic. But I don’t buy a pig in a poke, ever. ‘All in’ what, exactly? I know about some of your jobs – Cairo in ’95; Sao Paulo in ’97; Moscow earlier this year. Your reputation in the hacking world is up there with legends. But what am I signing up for?”

He chuckled. “Good, Noel – but your normal caution will hurt you here. The Agents won’t stop looking for you, now that your bug’s been removed. What they seek, they find.”

“I won’t be frightened into anything,” I replied, my voice even.

“Nor should you be,” he agreed, surprising me. “Let me tell you why you should come with us.”

“Good call.”

He smiled again, showing a row of strikingly perfect teeth. “You should come, because the world as you experience it is out of kilter. You know it is. You feel it. Sense it. But you don’t know why.” His dark eyes bored into me.

“Yes,” I agreed, my voice low. “How do you know . . . ”

“. . . that you know?” he asked, finishing my question. “The answer to that question is part and parcel of the answer to all your questions. But I can’t give you that answer, unless you’re in.” He leaned back, watching me carefully. A flash of lightning briefly caused the whole room to flare into light.

“Pig in a poke, then,” I said sourly.

“I’m afraid so,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and brought out a small wooden box. He popped the lid and set the box on the table facing me.

The box contained two pills on a gauze pad. I eyed them warily.

“Take the blue pill,” Hermes said, “and you will wake up in your own apartment. It will be morning, and the events of this evening . . . well. Your mind will tell you whatever it will tell you. You will think this all a dream, maybe. Or a hallucination. No matter.”

“And if I take the red pill?”

“Take the red pill, and you will get your answers. You will learn the truth, though I warn you now: many who have, wished that they had retained their blissful ignorance.”

I looked at the box, thinking. “Suppose I don’t take either? Suppose we just shake hands, I walk out the door, and we forget the whole thing?”

“Not while I’m on guard, you won’t.” Zephyr, by the door, folded her arms and gave me a lazy, challenging smile.

I looked back at Hermes.

He shook his head. “We can’t allow you to leave that way, knowing what you know. You need to choose a pill. And you need to choose now.”

Crazy MoFos already almost killed me tonight . . . but . . . the bug was real. That nightmare was real. Besides, Hermes is right. I HAVE to know!

I reached out, my hand shakier than I would like, and picked the red pill out of the box. I looked at Hermes again, but his face was guarded. Impassive. With a sigh, I placed the pill on my tongue. Swallowed hard.

“Alright, come with me,” Hermes said, rising quickly. He led me into an adjacent room where several other people were fussing over various types of electronics with readouts that meant nothing to me.

Zephyr followed me in and brought me to a station where they strapped probe-tipped wires to me. I was trying to follow the conversations swirling around me, but my heart was pounding and I could think past the furious sound of my own gasping breaths. What is happening to me?!!

And the world collapsed like a dying star, with me trapped at its pulsing heart, screaming in agony as the pressure mounted and pain overwhelmed me. Monstrous, faceless beings, horrors of metal and glass, tore at me. I tried to scream, but felt myself drowning, my lungs filled with fluid.

I fell, spinning.

* * * * *

I wandered in dreams and nightmares, blind, deaf, mute. I felt intense cold, oppressive heat, a million pricks on tender skin. Every nerve ending flayed, every muscle, every ligament and tendon, shrieking in hot agony. Even my lungs were on fire.

It seemed like the pain would never end, except in the sweet moments when true oblivion took me. I craved sleep. Even more, I craved the release of death. But I would always return to pain, and still more pain.

In my dreams I began to hear voices, like ghostly echoes. Their words were clear, but my pain-shrouded mind could not comprehend them. It was all gibberish. Sound and fury, signifying . . . .

Signifying. No; there were words. The words had meaning. Significance. It was there, right there, if only I could reach it. I brought myself to try, to corral my mind into the simple task of processing spoken language.

I failed, and oblivion reclaimed me.

I don’t know how long I slept. How long I endured the pain. But after an eternity, one day, the pain eased, ever so slightly. Then it eased some more. I slept again, and again, and each time, when I woke, the pain was less.

With an effort that felt worthy of the Olympic games, I opened an eye to a blur of light and shadow. Pain lanced, fresh and new, through my optic nerve and straight into my brain. Instinctively, I opened my mouth to cry out.

I made a noise. A noise that I could hear.

But the pain was too intense. I passed out again. Another eternity passed before I could bring myself to try again. When I did, both light and shadow were dimmed, and the pain, while real, was not debilitating.

A shadow moved within the shadow, and a form, vaguely human, loomed over me. And the form spoke and my brain was, at last, able to process the sounds. Not that the words made any sense.

“Welcome, Noelle. To the real world.”

To be continued . . . .

Chapter 2: Irregular Opening

I felt weak – weaker than I’d ever been. Even that time I’d been on the run from Haftar’s boys near the Sabha Oil fields, when I’d gotten severely dehydrated and collapsed under a Ford flatbed.

My vision was improving, too. The first few times I’d tried to open my eyes, the pain had been severe, but even when that subsided some, all I’d been able to see were vague shapes, patterns of light and darkness. Once, I’d even heard a voice from one of the moving shapes, but I couldn’t remember how long ago that had been.

Now, though, I could see color, and form, and some perception of depth. Everything was blurry, but that was still a huge improvement. The movement that I detected was clearly a human shape – at a guess, a human male – rising from a sitting position and walking toward me. Wherever it was that I was.

My muscles tensed, reflexively – and that hurt, still. I forced them to relax as I tried to focus my eyes. Finally, I decided to try speaking. “Why . . . “ I stopped. My voice sounded dry, raspy . . . and strangely high. I tried swallowing, but my mouth was too parched.

The man came close. I saw a blurry arm reach over and carefully raise my head and right shoulder. “Drink,” he said, placing a straw between my lips. Whoever it was, his voice and accent reminded me of Hermes, but older. Significantly older.

It was water – the coolest, most beautiful, most perfect drink I had ever tasted or ever would taste. I sucked the straw eagerly, and groaned when he pulled it away and gently lowered me back onto the pillow.

I decided to try again. “What’s wrong with my eyes?” My voice was much more clear, but the pitch was still all wrong.

“You’ve never used them before,” he replied. “They will improve, in a few days.”

Never used them before? Okay. I’m dealing with a madman. But at least he thinks my vision isn’t permanently impaired. “Will . . . will my voice go back to normal, too?”

I was having trouble with double vision. Both of his heads, neither clear enough for identification, shook. “No. What you are hearing is your natural voice. A very pleasant soprano, I think. You’re a woman, Noelle. You always have been.”

I’m helpless, weak as a newborn kitten, and I’m in a room with some crazy guy. Time to play it cool, maybe?

Yeah . . . no. “Okay, whatever. Who are you, where am I, and what the fuck happened to me?”

He chuckled, which pissed me off. “If you are going to demand answers, you will need to get stronger – much stronger – so you can try to force them from me.” Both his image and its mirror turned and faded.

“Wait!!!” But I was too late. Whoever he was, he was gone.

I closed my eyes again. Get stronger? Okay. Good idea. I focused on my fingers. Yes, I could absolutely feel them. Concentrating, I tried to raise my right index finger – the dominant finger of my dominant hand. It felt sluggish, and there was definitely some pain, but I was able to do it. Finger by finger, I tried all of the rest.

It was shockingly tiring. I felt a sheen of sweat at my temples. From moving fingers? I rested for a couple of minutes, then decided to try to move my right wrist. I might have managed to raise it twenty degrees, thought it was hard to tell, blind. Then I tried the left. When I managed that as well, I felt like I had reached my limit.

Again, I slept.

I went through five periods of sleep and wakefulness without seeing anyone, doing nothing but exercising my weak extremities. “Five sleeps,” Gavin would have said. I wondered what my sometime partner in crime, a hacker from Sydney, would think of my current predicament. I expect he wouldn’t be impressed.

But progress seemed to be fairly rapid . . . or at least, rapid compared to my baseline. My fingers and wrists were now able to move without pain, and near as I could tell their range of motion was okay. But I still couldn’t raise my head, so I couldn’t really see them. What I was able to see – the ceiling above where I was lying – no longer looked fuzzy.

I had managed some motion with my elbows, and felt ready for another big push. Straining what felt like every muscle, I managed to raise my right forearm a few inches, then a few more . . . with a heave, I managed to get it to pivot to the left, dropping my hand on top of my right thigh. I was panting with the effort and the muscles felt like jelly, so I waited a bit longer, then concentrated on bringing my hand up and over, just a bit further . . . .

My questing fingers encountered a catheter. I suppose that shouldn’t have been a surprise. But it didn’t take long to confirm that the catheter was draining plumbing that was decidedly female. Had they done some kind of surgery?

I had to know more, exhaustion or no exhaustion. So after a bit more of a rest, I used my fingers to provide additional power, contracted the muscles in my arm, and got my hand to move slowly up my torso. It probably took fifteen minutes, but I did finally make it far enough for my hand to encounter a woman’s breast.

My breast.

Some slow and careful exploration allowed me to determine that there were no indications of any incisions. There had been no surgery. I also determined that my new additions were sensitive as hell.

I allowed my hand to rest, just below my new breasts, while I pondered the situation. So the guy, whoever he was, hadn’t been shitting me, at least insofar as he correctly identified the gender of the body I appeared to be inhabiting. But he hadn’t just said I was female; he’d said I’d always been female.

How had he known that?

It was a secret I had guarded very carefully, from the time I was young. I didn’t look at all like a woman. I was tall, athletic, and had strong and sharp facial features. But I had known, nonetheless, that the evidence of all of my senses was wrong, wrong, wrong. I was a woman.

One of my truly guilty pleasures – the one I had been anticipating before I’d gotten that fateful call from Hermes – was going to a place I knew on the outskirts of Vegas where I could let my inner woman out. It was a cash-only operation, and the dear woman who ran it worked very hard to ensure that no one inside the compound had any idea who the clients were in the outside world.

Behind the high stucco walls of the Spanish-style hacienda, I and a few others that I only knew by their femme names were shaved, waxed, and bathed, had our hair and makeup done, wore clothes appropriate to the gender we held within, and socialized with each other as women. None of us had been very passable, though most probably managed better than I did. But, within the walls of the hacienda, our imperfections were not commented upon. There was acceptance and friendship . . . sometimes, even more.

Had Hermes infiltrated the compound? It certainly seemed possible. I knew, better than most, what a good hacker could do, and by all accounts, Hermes made me look like a middle schooler. Moreover, he correctly used my femme name – though the feminine form of my given name was an obvious choice even if he hadn’t known.

But . . . why go to all the trouble? What am I to him, or to his operation? That thought rattled around in my head as I drifted back, yet again, to sleep.

~o~O~o~

When I woke again, I was covered in a blanket, and another woman was with me in the room. She stood when my eyes fluttered open. My first impression involved short-cropped brown hair, caramel-colored eyes and a look of coiled intensity.

“You’re Noelle?” she asked. But when all she got from me was a guarded look, she said, “Don’t worry about it. Takes some getting used to. Anyhow, I’m Britt, and my job’s getting you on your feet.”

I was eager to be on my feet, but I was wary of all of these people. I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

Britt shrugged. “The truth? Because those are my orders.”

“Uh huh. But why are those your orders?”

“I don’t much feel like speculating,” she parried. “Look, I’ll work with you on PT, but if you want to shoot the shit instead, you’ve got the wrong chick. Your call.”

I didn’t like it, but it didn’t matter. Regardless of my next steps, I needed to be strong enough to take them. “All right, Britt,” I said. “I’ll give you everything I’ve got.”

That earned me a wolfish grin. “Oh, no, chicka! You’ll give me LOTS more than you think you’ve got!”

Truer words were never spoken. I don’t know how long she spent working with me – pain demonstrates Einsteinian relativity with pellucid clarity, since it stretches each screaming instant to an eternity. But she eventually dumped my twitching remains back on the bed.

When I woke, she came back and did it again, and again. And yet again.

I don’t know how long this lasted. My world was reduced to exercising, eating, and sleeping, with brief interludes when I was introduced to the use and maintenance of my new plumbing. Since I had no idea how long I slept either, it could have been days, or even a couple weeks.

My body should have rebelled, but it was clearly getting supplemental therapies during the hours I slept. The nature of those therapies was unclear to me, but seemed to involve some mechanical stimulation of my muscle groups. I felt better after my periods of rest than I had any right to.

The only other thing I managed to do, in my brief periods of non-sleeping solitude, was to explore the contours of the body I found myself inhabiting. It was smooth and soft; the skin was alabaster white, like it had never been touched by sunlight. My waist was high and narrow; my arms and legs were slender, and both my bust and my rear were shapely. And sensitive.

It was, in short, everything I had ever dreamed of. Everything I had pined for.

The idea that I had breasts and a vagina brought me to tears. On multiple occasions. I found myself frustrated that I had no mirror to see my face, and kicked myself for being ridiculous. What did it matter what my face looked like? I’m a woman, outside and in!

But how?

I was awake, but had not decided to open my eyes yet. I was trying to collect my thoughts, and to prepare myself mentally for another grueling workout. My mind kept circling around the same questions. How is it that my body is female? Where am I? And perhaps most troubling of all . . .

. . . Why do I have a hole in the back of my skull?

Once I was finally able to move my arms and hands through some semblance of a normal range, I had discovered that there was a metal plate at the back of my head. Low; near the spinal column. And there was a hole in the center of the plate that appeared to go straight into my brain. What. The. Fuck?

Britt, of course, had refused to say anything about it. “You can get your hands back there? Good. Then let’s try THIS exercise.” But I kept coming back to the question again and again. What the hell had been done to me, and what did it all mean?

I felt Britt’s presence, or else her shadow fell across my closed eyelids. I sighed internally.

“So,” said a male voice. “Are you ready to demand some answers from me?”

My eyes flew open. The man was, as I had expected, older. I studied his face carefully. He looked quite a bit like Hermes as well . . . his father, maybe. He had a slight, and very knowing, smile, which I found pretty irritating.

But I’d lost quite a bit of time by my prior approach, so I decided not to display the annoyance I was feeling. I gave him a smile in return, though mine was lightly dusted with rue. “No, sir. But if you’ve got some time, and a bit of patience for someone who is deeply confused, I would surely appreciate it.”

His smile widened. “Of course. But it will be better if I show you.”

He held out a hand and I took it, using the extra support to pull myself upright and pivot to face him. I was dressed, as I had been for some time, in a very plain natural fabric. Cotton . . . linen . . . I don’t know. Just light pants with a draw string and a pullover top. Not too different from a sweatshirt, but nowhere near that thick. Underwear was basic. So, despite the fact that I had been sleeping, I was as ready to go as I had been since Britt took me through my first workout.

The door to my room was the kind of watertight affair you see on ships in movies – a flattened oval with a wheel lock in the center. The man spun the lock and we stepped out onto a narrow corridor. Everything around us was riveted metal – steel, I thought. I felt like I was on a World War II submarine.

I followed the older man for some time in silence as we made our way through the bowels of what was very clearly a ship of some kind. We came to another door and the man began to spin the wheel lock. That’s when I noticed the bronze-colored plaque by the door that read,

I couldn’t help myself. “Twenty Seventy-Two? What the fuck?”

“Soon,” was all the man replied.

We entered into a circular compartment, maybe thirty feet in diameter, containing a variety of implements – chairs facing consoles, readouts . . . it was too much to take in all at once. There were also half a dozen people, of whom I recognized only Britt. She looked to be in just as good a mood as usual.

“This is my crew,” the man said. Indicating a tall man with a narrow face and intense blue eyes, he said, “You have met my first mate, though you didn’t know it. Zephyr.”

Again I sputtered, “What?”

He ignored me and introduced the rest. “Abhaya” was a slender man of medium height who appeared to be of South Asian extraction; “Dakota” was a statuesque woman with lustrous black hair; “Blake” looked like a good ol’ boy from Alabama, rugged and sandy blond with blue eyes, and “Kai” was a mystery. On the tall side for a woman, darkish skin, but reddish hair and green eyes.

All of them were dressed in the same, nondescript homespun fabric as I was, and they were all looking at me with a certain degree of speculation.

“Okay. Nice to meet all of you, I guess.” Turning back to the man who was clearly in charge, I said, “But who are you, and what am I doing here?”

“If you’ll step this way, I’ll give the full explanation,” he replied, indicating the row of chairs against the far . . . wall? . . . Bulkhead? “As for who I am, you’ve met me before, too. I am Hermes.”

I looked at his face again. Yeah . . . it absolutely could be the same guy, but he was considerably older. And the plate by the door said something about 2072. Holy Crap! “What the fuck did you do? Put me in deep freeze for seventy years?”

“All of your questions will be answered. Over here.”

I glared at him, but realized that, somehow, I wasn’t going to get any answers by stomping my feet or being ornery. Fine! I still stomped over to the chairs – as much as anyone can stomp in soft-soled slippers – then looked at him inquisitively.

He took one of the chairs and indicated that I should take another. They were pretty comfortable. Not leather, but a good imitation, and they tilted back some. There was a footrest as well, like a barber’s chair.

The man who he had introduced as “Zephyr” stepped behind Hermes’ chair, and I felt someone behind me as well. I looked back and saw Britt. She had a metal probe of some sort in her hand, connected to a cable. “What . . . .” I started to ask.

She put her left hand on my head, effortlessly stabilizing it, and with a practiced motion brought the probe up to the back of my skull.

“No!!!!!!”

My shout was too late. In an instant, the Belisarius and her crew vanished completely and I was in no space – surrounded by nothing but white. I tried taking a step, and found that I could move. The whiteness appeared to include a floor, though I could not distinguish it from the whiteness that surrounded me everywhere.

But my foot was in a comfortable gray sneaker, and my leg was in a dark, nylon track suit. I looked at my hand, and it was the one I had known all my life. My hand. Noel Ferguson’s. I gave myself a quick – and somewhat intimate – pat-down. Yup. I was myself again. My feelings about that were . . . complicated.

“Please come join me,” said a voice behind me.

I turned around to find the whiteness broken by the chairs, occasional table and rugs from the apartment where I had first met Hermes. Hermes himself – the younger Hermes – was seated in one of the chairs, and he was motioning me to take the other.

Feeling like I was moving through a dream, I walked over and took my seat. “Okay. Enough with the smoke and mirrors. What the hell is going on? Where are we?”

“Let’s start with ‘when.’” Hermes leaned back and steepled his fingers in front of his chest, resting his elbows on the arms of the wingback chair. “You think it is 1998. It’s probably more like 2198, but we don’t know the year exactly. The world that you think you know – its cities, its landscape, its modes of communication and transportation, its governments and even countries – haven’t existed for well over a century. You – or, more accurately, your consciousness – have been ‘living’ in a computer simulation, designed to look like earth in the late 1990s.”

“Or maybe I’ve been living in a computer simulation since I swallowed your red pill,” I countered. “That seems like a simpler explanation.”

“Did anyone on the earth as you knew it have the technological sophistication to do that?”

“No; but maybe you’re actually a little green man from Alpha Centauri or something. How would I know?” Despite my sarcasm, I felt like I was missing something. Something fundamental.

He leaned forward and looked at me with disturbing intensity. “Your skepticism is normal, Noelle. But also dangerous. We don’t ordinarily free minds that have matured beyond a certain age, because people become too attached to what they think they know. I have argued for an exception to that rule, but my superiors have not found merit to my argument. Not yet, anyway. By offering you the choice, I have arguably gone beyond my orders, if not against them. I would appreciate it if you would at least try to keep an open mind.”

“Why did you think I should be an exception?”

He leaned back again. “I was imprecise. You, but not just you. The exception is for trans men and women.”

The implications of his words burned a path straight through my brain. That was what I had been missing! “I . . . see.”

“Do you?” His question probed with fierce interest.

I nodded, slowly. “I think so. . . . All my life, I felt like the world was out of kilter . . . things were wrong, and I couldn’t explain why or how. Like, I knew I wasn’t male, even though all of my senses said I was. . . .” I paused, thinking through the implications.

“And if your senses were lying about that, what else might they be lying to you about?”

“Yes! That’s it exactly!”

“You should not be surprised to discover that many trans people have felt the same way. Experienced the wrongness of the Matrix at a visceral level, like shrapnel in their minds, burrowing deeper, year after year.”

“The Matrix?”

“That’s what we call the computer simulation that held your mind captive since birth – your mind, and over 99 percent of the human race.”

“What?” I was shocked to the core.

Hermes nodded. “Yes, Noelle. It’s true. We did it to ourselves, as you might imagine. Creating computers and computer networks with ever greater power. Creating artificial intelligence, and patting ourselves on the back for our own cleverness. Turning it loose on humanity with barely a thought for the consequences. Always asking, ‘Can we?’ Never asking, ‘Should we?’”

“And here I thought global warming was going to wipe us out.”

“It might have, given time. But AI turned on its creators, and we were no longer able to simply shut it down. In desperation, we attempted to eliminate the power source it was using to sustain itself and expand its reach. We found a way to create a cloud cover over the entire planet, little different from Venus, that rendered terrestrial solar power arrays useless.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense – there are plenty other power sources.”

“Most had been disabled by the mid-twenty-first century,” he replied. “But it turns out that there was an alternative source of power we hadn’t considered that was even easier for the machines to tap – the bioelectric power of the human brain.”

“I don’t understand.” My words were halting. Filled with sudden dread at what Hermes might say next. Because I was terribly afraid that I did understand.

All too well.

Hermes saw it in my eyes and nodded. “Yes. Each one of the machine’s power arrays is comprised of pods – millions and millions of pods – containing human beings who spend their entire lives in a dream, living imaginary lives while powering the very machines that hold them captive.”

As my horror mounted, he waved an arm and said, “Zephyr, visual please.” In front of us, a hellscape suddenly appeared – huge towers stretching impossibly high, reaching toward a boiling, clouded sky shot through with lightning. Each tower contained level after level of pods. Nothing but pods. The focus shifted, zoomed in to a single pod, where a hairless, naked person lay in a bath of amniotic fluid, connected to the pod by multiple plugs, breathing through something inserted in its mouth.

I couldn’t help myself. I jumped to my feet, causing the chair behind me to topple, shouting something incoherent. I tried to run, but the nightmare was all around me, inescapable, pounding at my senses.

I fell to my hands and knees, my eyes screwed tightly shut. “No!!! No!!! Make it stop!!! Get me out of here!!!” I could barely hear my own scream, so loud was the throbbing of the machinery of human slavery. “STOP!!!!”

The sound stopped so abruptly that I felt completely disoriented. I felt the warmth of sunlight on my back and the smell of freshly-cut grass. I blinked my eyes cautiously open and found myself looking down at my hands, each of which were buried in a manicured lawn. The sound of my ragged breathing was competing with the song of birds.

I raised my head and saw Hermes sitting in the lotus position under a cherry tree in full flower, not fifteen feet away. He was watching me carefully; impassively. Am I being tested?

I got myself into a seated position and hugged my knees to my chest. “That was real?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the beautiful spot we were sharing. Immaculately maintained grass. Flowering trees. No trace of pollution in the air; the sun bright in a clear blue sky. Birds singing and the thrum of bees at work. “So what’s this? A lie?”

“We’ve created our own simulations. For education and training, but also for meditation and relaxation. They are separate from the Matrix, but function using the same rules.”

“So . . . not real.”

“No. There’s no place on earth like this. Not anymore.”

“Son of a bitch.” My words had no force behind them. Only bitterness and aching regret.

Hermes said nothing, but his watchful look had given way to something less . . . dangerous, perhaps.

“I assume there’s no going back.”

“Would you want to?”

I thought about that.

It didn’t take very long. “No.”

We sat for a while longer, contemplating the false wind cooling the illusory sweat from our virtual bodies, our brains conjuring the sounds of birds long ago erased from the history of the world.

My mind kept spinning around the crazy ramifications of what Hermes was saying. I found myself staring at my hands, wrapped around my knees. Strong, capable hands. Large palms and broad fingers. The jagged scar wrapping around the base of my right thumb, from the barbed wire perimeter fence protecting the Jackal’s compound in Mombasa back in ’91.

“I have memories – a lifetime of memories! – from before the late 1990s. Are you telling me those are false too?”

“The Matrix has to be reset every few years in order to continue simulating the late 1990s. You go to bed thinking it’s a fine June evening in 1999, but you wake up and it’s January 1, 1996. If your body was 20 at the last reset, it will be 23, 24, maybe 25 with the new reset, so all of your base memories are changed. Someone who had memories of being five in 1990 will now have memories of being five in, say, 1985.”

“Why? If you never even see your body, why does your age in the Matrix have to match it?”

“We call our appearance in virtual reality ‘residual self-image.’” He shrugged. “We don’t really know how it works. We know it’s created by our own minds, but our minds are influenced by the AI. We don’t know why most people we free from the machines look more or less like the people – usually children – we encountered in the Matrix, but they do.”

“You look a lot older outside the simulations,” I said, implying a question.

“For some reason, my residual self image pretty much stayed the same once I reached full maturity. Ordinarily, the residual self-image of people freed from the Matrix tends to age as their physical body ages.”

“And Zephyr?”

“Zephyr is like you. In the Matrix, his residual self-image doesn’t match the gender of his biological body. Same’s true of Britt; she was the other ‘Deadhead’ you saw on BART. Abhaya and Dakota too.”

I stared at my hands again. My solid, so very male, hands. “I don’t understand. Zephyr, Britt, the others . . . me. Why are we different?” My voice was barely a whisper.

“Again, we don’t know. My theory is that the demographic requirements for their new simulation were off at the margins, so they did what you suggested earlier, but for just a small fraction of the population. They gave them memories, and lives, that didn’t match their bodies. For all we know, you might have lived as a little girl once, or been a wife or a mother, before the Matrix reset gave you your current memories.”

“Jesus!”

“There is no freedom for humans plugged into the Matrix, Noelle. None. We are less than slaves. Even our minds and memories are subject to the AI’s decisions. As for our virtual ‘bodies,’ an Agent can simply grab the image of anyone plugged into the Matrix, reshape it into their own, and use it until they’re done.”

The full scope of humanity’s defeat and degradation were making my blood boil, but I tried hard to focus. “Agents – you mentioned them before.”

“Agents are the AI’s ‘muscle’ inside the Matrix – semi-autonomous software programs that take the form of men in black suits. They have standing ‘seek and destroy’ orders as far as anyone connected with Zion is concerned.”

“Is Zion a place for people? I mean, people who aren’t plugged in?”

Hermes’ smile was tight, but genuine. “Not ‘a’ place, unfortunately. It’s the place. Blake and Kai were born there, of human parents, the old-fashioned way. They’ve never been inside the Matrix. But it’s effectively a fortress, far below the surface of the earth. Subsistence, and no luxuries. Still, we have been able to maintain a truly human civilization.”

Humanity enslaved, and the few free remnants hiding in a cave like rats. Or earthworms. I could no longer contain the fury that was overwhelming me.

“That’s not enough, Hermes!” My tone was harsh. Almost savage. “Almost all of the human race is in captivity. What the fuck are you doing about it?”

His eyes blazed at my challenge, but he almost instantly banked their fire. “What do you think we should do?” His tone was level, without any overtones of outrage or defensiveness. He might have been asking for ideas on how to arrange furniture,

“Do?” I released my knees and shot to my feet. “I want you – I expect you! – to fricking FIGHT!”

He nodded, impassive, wholly unmoved by my outrage. “Naturally. But how do you propose that we do that?”

“I don’t KNOW!” I shouted. “I just got here, remember?” I crossed the distance between us and glowered over him. “You’re the genius! The mastermind!”

He uncoiled from his meditative posture faster than I could follow and swept his legs in a semicircle, knocking my own legs out from under me. I sprawled, but I’m not inexperienced in hand-to-hand combat. I rolled as I hit the ground, looking to get my feet back under me.

But just as I put weight on my knee, he kicked it from behind, causing me to sprawl again. This time, his forearm was across my throat before I could so much as twitch. Jesus, he’s fast!

His smile was lazy and superior. “Since you don’t know how to fight the machines, you wouldn’t know what fighting looks like. So consider the possibility that we are fighting.”

He kept the pressure on my throat very light, but I could feel it, right there. He could crush my windpipe with barely a motion. I lay very, very still, and thought about what he said. It made sense, and I cursed myself for my irrational and misdirected anger.

Somehow I managed to swallow, then said, “How?”

“We go into the Matrix and find minds that can be freed – like yours. We get them out. Train them, and get more. We work to infiltrate the machine’s systems. Creating our own hacks. And in Zion, we prepare real-world weapons that keep us safe and buy us time.”

Through my constricted windpipe, I squeezed a question. “Attack the towers?”

Having made his point, he removed his arm and rolled onto his haunches, like a catcher at a baseball game. “You would kill millions of people.”

“Their lives are an abomination!”

“But they don’t know that. Suppose we had blown up the tower where your body was housed, six months ago. You’d have died, instantly, without understanding why or how. Just, ‘poof.’ What kind of solution is that?”

I thought about that some more. I was beginning to see why “fighting” was complicated.

He watched the struggle play out on my face. Or what I had always thought of as my face. But somehow, I’d always known it wasn’t really me.

Finally, he said, “Don’t undervalue existence. While we exist, there is hope for the future. Hope that someday, humanity will be free again. As long as we remain a force in being, humanity has a chance.”

It made good strategic sense, for all it turned my stomach. Assuming his story is true. Assuming the world I have been experiencing in my female form is the real one. Assuming there IS a “real” world! What the hell do I actually KNOW here?

“Alright,” I said. “Where do I sign up?”

To be continued . . . .

Chapter 3: Unrated Game

Within a couple days of my introduction to the twenty-third century, or whatever the hell year I was in, I was strong enough to leave my cabin and take my meals with the crew. Or perhaps I should say, “the rest of the crew.” I had signed up, though there didn’t seem to be any formalities involved. No oaths, no paperwork.

Has humanity finally outgrown bureaucracy?

To say that the food was truly awful was an insult to all of the awful food I had ever eaten. It tasted like unseasoned tofu, and had the consistency of tapioca. But protean was protean, and the body needs what it needs. The crew didn’t talk about it – I imagine the topic had been exhausted long ago.

When Britt decided I was ready to maybe start being useful, Hermes asked Zephyr to show me around and start my training. The Belisarius was, I discovered, a fuel cell-powered hovercraft, and it appeared that her natural hunting grounds were in the ruins of human cities from the last century.

“What do you do out here?” I asked him as I looked out a porthole at twisted girders that had once supported some sort of office tower.

“We monitor the Matrix itself. Cataloging patterns; assessing strengths and weaknesses. We usually only go in for short periods and discrete operations. The hacking operations you heard about – Moscow and the rest – were probing operations that had the ulterior purpose of getting us known to people like you.”

“Trans people?”

Zephyr smiled. “Well . . . yes and no. We need people who really understand the cyber world; that’s the backbone of our resistance these days. Training helps – and you have no idea how good our training can be! – but honestly, when it comes to deep programming, you’ve either got a mind for it or you don’t.”

“And if you’re only recruiting children, you won’t know?”

“Right. Well, we’re not completely in the dark. We’ve been able to find some great candidates based on early STEM testing. But our success rate is still relatively low. So, the possibility of freeing a mature, fully-trained hacker – in Hermes’ view, at least – is well worth the risk.”

“I’m not sure anyone’s ever described me as ‘mature’ before.”

“I’m guessing, as a dyed-in-the-wool cyber punk, you’re not wild about the label, either!” He smiled broadly, and I chuckled in response.

“Fair. Were you a hacker, too?”

He snorted. “Hell, no! I was the ‘gender diversity’ in some extreme Electronic Sports. Doom, Quake, Starcraft . . . .” Seeing my look, he said, a bit defensively, “I know, I know . . . just ‘games.’ But my ability as a virtual ‘pilot’ is what got me recruited. When it comes to a combat scenario, I’m the guy at the wheel on this beautiful bucket of bolts.”

“Beautiful?”

“Careful, girl! You say anything bad about the Bel, and I will personally thrash you in hand-to-hand combat!” He smiled, completely taking any potential sting out of his words.

“Since I’m only just strong enough to roam around the ship without falling over, I’d be pretty easy pickings,” I said ruefully. “I used to be pretty good at mixed martial arts, but . . . that was in a different body . . . a different world. And, I guess, all in my head.”

“So if it was the ‘you’ I encountered in the Matrix, and the pixie freak you met on the train?”

I chuckled. “I have no idea what your skill level is . . . or was. Or whatever, You know what I mean. But . . . I must have outmassed that version of you by fifty percent or more. So, yeah. Back there, I’d have like my odds.”

He looked at me speculatively. “There are things that are really hard to understand about the Matrix. It’s almost impossible not to think of it as reality. There’s something I know Hermes intended to show you, but if you’d like, I can give you a demo right now.”

“What kind of demo?” I asked cautiously.

“We have a dojo simulation on our internal system. Want to try out a little combat? Your residual self image versus mine?”

I wasn’t eager to have that damned plug put back in my skull, and I was even less eager to get another “lesson,” which I somehow suspected was going to be a whole lot more painful and surprising than I had just suggested. Still, what I’d said was true. I – well, Noel Fergusson – had been very good. Or I would never have survived . . . I wouldn’t have survived a whole lot of things. And in the Matrix, Zephyr was a pixie. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. “Sure.”

Before I knew it, we were back in the room with the comfy chairs. Britt and one of the others – I was pretty sure it was Kai, but I was still stumbling with names – came to get us “plugged in.” This time, I was a bit more prepared.

Again, the world around me vanished and I was in another place and another body. I was barefoot, wearing MMA shorts and in my old, male body. The dojo was spacious and well-lit; the walls appeared to be teak, and the training mat looked like it was in good shape.

Zephyr – Zephyr in the female presentation I had first seen on BART – faced me across the mat. Now a she, her fight attire included a rash guard – effectively, a high-tech sports bra. She gave me a sardonic smile and sang out, “ding, ding!” Then she came straight at me.

I came forward cautiously, assuming my fighting stance as she neared. She jabbed with her right hand, once, then twice, but both were clearly probes. I batted the first aside easily, dodged the second, then put some real force behind a counter-jab. She was being very aggressive with an opponent she had never faced, and that often ends badly.

My gloved fist was millimeters from her nose when she pivoted, essentially on a dime, neatly avoiding my jab. Because she’d delayed so long, I was fully committed to the jab and slightly unbalanced – just slightly – when it failed to connect.

But worse was to come. She continued her pivot, spinning on her left leg and raising the right into a powerful round kick. Seeing it coming, I moved to grab her wheeling foot, preparing to knock her off her feet completely. But just as my hands were about to close, she raised her leg just above my grabbing hands. Her foot connected with my jaw.

It should have hurt, of course. A solid round kick is going to hurt. But the force she managed to deliver was wildly out of proportion to her diminutive size. The blow knocked me down and sent my head spinning. I was sufficiently dazed that she could have finished me any number of ways.

But when I shook my head to clear it, she was just standing there, waiting. Near as I could tell, even her breathing was completely normal.

I went at her. With everything I had – every move I knew, every trick I had learned. Regulation or not. Wherever I lunged, wherever I punched, wherever I kicked, she was there . . . until she wasn’t. But she would just step back and let me keep at it.

I don’t know how long this lasted. I couldn’t land anything, couldn’t grab anything. Couldn’t execute a throw or even a hold. I was tired, panting for breath, frustrated as hell, angry . . . I gave a shout and charged.

Fast as a snake, she coiled and kicked me right in the gut. I flew back, rammed the wall, and collapsed at its base. “Holy fuck!” I rasped. “What are you?”

She came and knelt in front of me, legs together, ass to ankles. “What I am is nowhere near good enough. If we were in the Matrix and an Agent caught me, he’d take me apart.”

I was still panting for air; all I could manage was a look of complete disbelief.

“Noelle,” she said with quiet intensity. “What are you doing? You can’t be out of breath. This is all happening in your head. The body you are feeling right now isn’t real. It isn’t breathing.”

“Sure as hell feels real to me!”

Her eyes bored into mine. “Free your mind! The Matrix has rules, sure. It functions like the real world – mostly. But if your mind is free, those rules are more like guidelines. You can bend them. Sometimes, over backwards. And believe me, there are times when you’ll need to.”

“Is that why you’re so good?”

“Partly. But partly, it’s because we can feed training programs straight into our brains. How long did you study MMA?”

“Ten years, at least.”

“Black belt?”

I nodded. “Third degree.”

“I just learned yesterday. Thought this might come up.”

“Bullshit!”

“Britt,” she said, still looking at me, “Give Noelle the packet, would you?”

Suddenly my mind was filled with images, moving too rapidly for my brain to keep up. Positions, movements, styles . . . my limbs twitched . . . the information battered me, filled me, and filled me some more. I imagined myself executing move after move – punches, kicks, throws, holds – again and again and again . . . time slowed and I was lost with wonder.

As quickly as it began, it was over, and I was still looking at Zephyr, who did not appear to have moved a muscle. “How long . . . . ?”

“Seconds. Our brains are far more capable than you think.”

I felt like I’d absorbed years of the most advanced training. I knew every move in my bones . . . in my muscles. It wasn’t possible! “Can I actually do all that?”

Zephyr smiled. “Try me.”

I got back up, and we resumed. I was better – better than I had ever been! I must be the equivalent of a ninth degree. Every move I executed was damned near perfect.

But Zephyr still eluded my attacks and landed blows too fast for me to dodge. Again she went into a defense-only mode, but I still couldn’t make contact. Finally, she barked, “Stop limiting yourself! You can be much faster than you think you can be. Remember – you aren’t using real muscles!”

I stopped and held myself still, thinking about what she said. Thinking how time had seemed to distort as I absorbed the packet. Could I get out of my own way? Could I overcome the limits on my body that a lifetime of conditioning had imposed?

Suddenly, Zephyr moved – a fast, false jab followed by a straight kick aimed right at my jaw. In my mind, I slowed the kick down and imagined my hands reaching up to grab her foot as I stepped back.

Astonishingly, I found her foot captured in my two-handed grip. I spun it, causing Zephyr to tumble. She rolled as she hit the mat, but I dropped to where the roll would bring her. Still, she got her legs balled before I hit, and with a powerful double kick, threw me back against the wall.

This time, I avoided the fall, but she was back on her feet before I could come at her again. She smiled. “You understand, then.”

I found I was still in that hyper-alert state, like I had slowed the world around us down. My breathing was even . . . my heart rate felt normal, or at least close to normal. I nodded. “Yes.”

“That should do for now, then. Britt, Kai . . . bring us back.”

The dojo vanished, and I was once more in the chair, the Belisarius all around us.

Britt’s voice came from right beside my ear. “Having fun in there?”

“Shit, yeah!”

“Super. But listen to me, girlfriend. I want you to learn to use your real body too. Got it?”

I looked down, seeing my breasts rising and falling under the plain fabric of my “uniform.” Saw my delicate hands resting on the arm-rest of the chair. My body. The one I’d always wanted. I smiled. “Trust me. I’m with you!”

She clapped me on the shoulder and I got out of the chair.

Zephyr once again loomed; he had six inches on me, easy. “Shall we continue the tour?”

“By all means – And I promise I’ll be nothing but admiring of your sleek, beautiful hovercraft!”

He laughed. “That’s the spirit!”

He showed me the engines – motors, really – and the area where the crew continuously monitored the Matrix, lines of infinitely scrolling, glowing green code. Blake was on duty and gave us an absent-minded wave.

Zephyr took me up to the cockpit, which looked like it would be tight quarters when both seats were occupied. At present only one was; the slender man Hermes had introduced as Abhaya appeared to be holding the fort.

Next we climbed a series of ladders to the weapons station. It was a small chamber, clearly intended for only one person. But the top of the room consisted of an observation blister that permitted visual inspection of most of the ship’s guns.

“The systems are all automated,” Zephyr explained. “We activate and deactivate the guns here, but the weapons mainframe handles all of the targeting and firing. We just monitor it. Visually, but also on the readouts.” A row of computer screens formed a half-circle along one wall of the small chamber, together with a series of toggle switches and a big, red button protected by a clear plastic cover.

“Neat,” I said. But the tightness of the space was starting to make me uncomfortable. “What’s next?”

“We’ve got a small hydroponics plant,” he began.

But he was interrupted by a soft buzz, and Hermes’ voice, low and urgent, filled the chamber. “Sentinel approaching at four o’clock. Abhaya, land the Bel. Dakota, power us down as soon as we’re on the ground. Zephyr, be ready on the EMP.”

This was clearly some kind of emergency, but I didn’t understand the threat. “What . . . ?”

“Shhhh!” Zephyr hissed as he flipped the plastic cover over the big red button in the center of the displays. He was looking in the direction the captain had identified, and his eyes were very focussed. I glanced that direction myself and saw movement in the gloom outside. In the far distance, a metal object, looking like an octopus, was zipping back and forth, tentacles streaming behind it.

I felt, rather than heard, the ship land on something solid. As soon as it did, all the lights went out and the readouts went dark. We were plunged into the twilight that seemed ever-present in the outdoors.

I wanted to get out of the chamber. Wanted it fiercely. It was too small, too tight. And too exposed. I could feel my heart rate climbing.

In the gloom, the metal object appeared to come closer, though not on a direct line. It zipped one way, then another, changing direction with the agility of the sea creature it so closely resembled. It’s hunting, I thought.

I could feel the sweat pricking my skin. My hands felt clammy. I heard a noise that sounded frighteningly loud, and realized it was my own breathing. Ragged. Uneven. Every nerve in my body was screaming, Run!!!! Trying desperately to control my body, to still my claustrophobia, I began to tremble.

Zephyr soundlessly put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me around to look away from the creature. As he saw my condition, his eyes darkened with concern. Instinctively, he pulled me into an embrace.

Knowing, somehow, that we needed to keep still and silent, I closed my eyes tightly, put my head on his shoulder, and circled him tightly with my own arms. I felt his heartbeat, steady and regular. His breathing was slow and even. He isn’t afraid, I told myself. There’s nothing to worry about!

But I knew better. We were hiding from that questing object, hoping that stillness and stealth would keep it away. It was the hunter, we were the prey. Homo sapiens, the species that had filled the world and subdued it, was forced to hide like the rabbits that had once been our food.

I held Zephyr even tighter as words from a novel I’d read years before pounded in my head. I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer . . . .

But I’d never actually read that book, had I? That was just a memory the AI planted in my brain.

Wasn’t it?

God, I wanted to scream!

I don’t know how long we stood there. It felt like an eternity. I managed to get my breathing under control, but my heart continued to pound. I hung on, knowing there wasn’t anything else I could do, my jaws clenched as tight as my eyes, trying to bite back the scream I was desperate to unleash.

“Looks like it’s heading away.” His voice, in my ear, was barely a breath. Only in the complete silence of the inert ship could I have heard it at all.

With great reluctance, I loosened my arms, preparing to step back.

“Not yet,” he whispered, keeping his hands firmly on my back.

Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Had I not read that? Does it matter?

It was probably five minutes later that Hermes gave the all clear and the lights came back on. We released each other, but the tight space did not allow either of us to retreat far.

I found myself blushing, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. . . . I’m not like this, usually. I don’t like tight spaces, but I’m good in a fight.”

He started to raise a hand, gently, but thought better of the impulse. “Don’t worry about it. It’s going to take you some time to get used to this reality.”

“Fuckin’ A,” I responded fervently.

That got a smile. “I hear ya. Let’s go somewhere more . . . spacious, shall we?”

“If you insist,” I replied, as gamely as I could. “Lead on!”

On our way to the mess, I asked, “What was that thing?”

“Sentinels are machines designed by the AI to look for and kill free humans. Think of them as the real world equivalents of the Agents in the Matrix.”

“Except that the Sentinels will actually kill you, right?”

He shook his head sharply. “Oh, no. If you die in the Matrix, your physical body dies too. An Agent will kill you just as dead as a Sentinel.”

“There’s a cheerful thought.”

You couldn’t call it tea, much less coffee. But the beverage he got for me in the mess was at least hot and had some vestigial flavor. Couldn’t tell you what it was. “Is it at least a stimulant?” I asked him.

He shook his head, his smile lopsided. “Of course not. It’s just hot and wet.”

“Shit.”

“I don’t think so, but I really don’t know how it’s made.”

“You’re not helping,” I scolded.

He put his hands over mine and gave me an apologetic look. “Noelle – I’m sorry. I wish I had some comfort for you. I know all of this is . . . overwhelming. Bewildering. Scary.”

“Don’t forget batshit crazy,” I added. “Especially since I can’t help wondering if I’ve completely lost my mind.”

He chuckled, then surprised me by singing, “Why don’t they let me go home? Ye-ah . . . ! This is the worst trip, I’ve ever been on!” His low voice was pleasantly tuneful.

I laughed. “Should have called this the John B. Who the hell was ‘Belasarius,’ anyway?”

“According to the histories back in Zion, he was a Byzantine general. But I can’t tell you how good the histories are. Might have been corrupted by the AI, during the war.”

“So we aren’t all that sure about the present, and the past might have gotten touched up as well?”

“Folks back in Zion who study this stuff think so. I mean, like, remember Donald Trump?”

The nonsequitur left me puzzled. “That New York real estate character who was always in the tabloids?”

He nodded. “Yeah. According to the ‘histories,’ he became the President of the United States.”

“Oh, come on! Even in New York, he was a joke!”

“The evangelicals loved him. Thought he was like the second coming or something. Scout’s honor, that’s what the books say.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “The AI definitely fucked with the history.”

“Or else maybe our memories of what the guy was like are fake.”

I shook my head, bewildered. “Can this get any worse?”

His intense blue eyes studied me carefully. “Sorry you didn’t take the blue pill?”

“Oh, hell, no!” My response was practically instant. I thought of what Hermes had shown me – the pod filled with amniotic fluid; the hairless human within, oblivious, endlessly dreaming for the benefit of AI masters he didn’t even know he had. “No. Fucking. Way!”

“Shit, XO, you aren’t laying the whole, ‘how do we know what we know’ trip on her, are you?”

I turned to find that Britt had joined us.

She gave me a look. “Listen to me. All you need to know is that the machines are out there, they’re hunting us, and there’s no quarter asked or given. How we got here, or why? It don’t matter.”

Zephyr somewhat belatedly released my hands and smiled at the intense trainer. “I suppose that does keep things simple.”

“Simple’s good,” she retorted. “Keep it simple, and maybe we survive.”

“I don’t want to survive,” I said abruptly. “I want to win.”

Britt gave me a hard look. “Fantasize all you want, Chicka. But go down that road too far, and you just get good people killed.”

I looked at Zephyr. “That your take too?”

He waggled his hand. “I’m more inclined to play the odds than Britt – but someone would need to show me some odds that were worth a wager.”

Britt snorted. “Odds. Yeah. She probably thinks we should have blasted that sentinel.”

“Could you?” I asked.

“Sure,” she replied. “One sentinel? Absolutely. We’ve done better than that before, especially when this one was in the pilot’s seat.” She pointed at Zephyr.

I looked from one of them to the other. “Fine,” I growled. “So tell me why that would have been a bad idea.”

“There are lots of sentinels,” Zephyr said gently. “Knock one down, and the hundreds more will swarm. The Electro-Magnetic Pulse is more stealthy, and we can use it so long as everything else is shut down. But we’d still have to move in a hurry, and that interrupts our surveillance work. We’ve got good taps into the Matrix in this location.”

“I just hate feeling so damned helpless.” I was having trouble containing my frustration.

“Like Hermes says, ‘welcome to the real world,’” Britt responded, without noticeable sympathy.

Blake – the never-pluged-in human who looked like a good ‘ol boy, chose that moment to step into the mess. “Woooo-whee! Nothing like a little hot water to clear away the fog of monitoring!” He moved purposefully toward the machine that dispensed the hot liquid.

Zephyr snorted. “Anything interesting?”

“Same ol’, same ol,’” Blake replied easily. He poured himself a mug, hooked a chair out and sat across from me. “Looking forward to getting you in the rotation.”

“For monitoring the Matrix? What do you actually do?”

He shrugged. “We keep tabs on our ops in the Matrix, our communications and contacts. And run a lot of diagnostic and analytical programs. Trying to get a sense of what’s going on at a macro level. Assessing defenses . . . trying to anticipate countermeasures. Cat-and-Mouse stuff.”

My expression must have been something, because Britt cracked up. “Holy crap, girl! I’m guessing you were looking for an assignment that was maybe a bit more, ah, kinetic?”

I could feel the heat rising in my face. “Okay, yeah. You could say that. Look, I know it’s stupid, and I’m sure I’ll learn better, and blah-de-blah-blah-blah. Sorry. But honest to God, I just want to fucking pound the people – the things – that have done this to us!”

“You go girl!” Blake said, smiling widely.

“Don’t encourage her!” Britt snarled.

Zephyr interceded quietly, but with a tone that suddenly carried authority. “Enough, both of you. Noelle, we’re going to teach you everything we know about fighting. And you know how effective our training can be. But, if you have the kind of mind Hermes thinks you do, by the time you’re finished you may be teaching us how to fight. So be patient, okay?”

I gave the first mate an appraising look. “That’s why I was recruited?”

“You’ll need to discuss that with Hermes, once your training is finished.”

“Okay,” I said evenly. “Okay. I get it. Let’s get the training over with, then.”

Britt shook her head. “Slow down. You’re only just out of the Matrix. I’m just getting your physical body working half properly, and your mind is still adapting. You need to ration your simulator time.”

“But . . .”

Zephyr overrode my budding protest. “Britt’s right, Noelle. Getting unplugged is traumatic for your body and your mind. Especially for someone your age. If we move too fast, you’ll regress. You need to trust us on this.”

My frustration boiled over. “Dammit!!!”

Zephyr stood, looking stern. “Walk with me, please.”

I took a deep breath, then released it. What is wrong with me? I’m not usually this emotional! “Okay. Sorry.” I got to my feet and followed him out of the mess.

He headed down the corridor, saying nothing. The soft soles of our ship’s slippers made barely any sound against the metal of the deck.

He stopped by a hatch and spun the lock. I hadn’t recognized the hatch to my cabin, but that wasn’t too surprising. They all looked alike.

Sighing, I stepped inside and he followed, closing the hatch behind him. My cabin had a pair of uncomfortable chairs. He took one and gave me a pointed look.

I sat. While I felt rebellious, I also had the presence of mind to know I was being childish. There was no sense getting frustrated every time I hit some sort of a road block; there was just too much that I didn’t know going on.

“I was the first trans person Hermes brought out as an adult, nine years ago,” Zephyr said quietly. “I felt like you do, I think. I was angry . . . wanted revenge. And I pushed, and pushed. Hermes was happy to let me. But the result of pushing so hard and so fast was that I got to the point where I couldn’t come back to an alert state when I was unplugged. I was in a coma for months.”

I thought about my own reaction to our training session today – how alive I had felt. How powerful. I could almost see what he was saying . . . but I also remembered my reaction when I was unplugged. “I don’t think that will happen with me.”

Zephyr’s look was full of understanding. Still, he said, “Believe me, Noelle, I was no less overjoyed to wake up in a body that matched what I’d always felt inside. I hate the way I look inside the Matrix or the simulator. Hate it!”

I thought about his pixie form. “You’re awfully cute – I’d have died for your figure.”

“And I’d have died for yours. So I get it. But it didn’t matter – all that didn’t help me. I still ended up in a coma.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay. Thanks for the explanation. I’m sorry I lost it back there. Actually, I’m sorry I keep losing it. You all must think I’m a basket case.”

“No. Remember, four of us have gone through what you’re experiencing. Having our world turned on its head, using our real bodies for the first time in decades, and trying to get used to being the gender we’ve always dreamed of. It’s normal to be . . . emotional.”

I was diverted from his meaning by his word choice. “Did you ever . . . I mean, before you were unplugged . . . did you ever dream that you were a man?”

“God, yes! And then I’d wake up, and find myself a fricking pixie, and I’d scream.” He looked at me, and his eyes were gentle. “You, too?”

“Well, the gender was different. But yeah. I used to dream . . . .” I stopped, and I could feel the blood flaming my face. I remembered those dreams. On my back, my legs spread, a handsome man loving me . . . .

“Ah,” Zephyr said with a half smile. “Those dreams.”

Just recalling them brought back so many feelings . . . so much longing. And here I was, finally, in the body I should always have had. And right here, in my cabin, was a handsome man. An intelligent man. I suddenly felt flushed.

The physical sensations were new to me. I had read about them, but never thought the day would come when I would experience them personally. My nipples pushed against the bandeau that wrapped my chest, and I felt warm . . . especially between my legs.

I stood, abruptly. “Thank you for your explanation,” I said, trying to remain polite. “If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to take a bit of a rest before we resume.”

He stood more slowly and looked down at me with understanding. He held my gaze for a long, long moment, before saying, “Of course. After dinner, if you’re feeling up to it, we can do another training session.”

“Thank you,” I said again. I decided not to elaborate on that response.

He gave a short nod, walked to the door hatch, and departed, closing it softly behind him.

Freed from the need to keep my composure, I let out an explosive breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in, then stumbled to my bed and sat down. What the hell had come over me? Jesus, I’d been seconds away from throwing myself at him!

The morning’s exertions – and frustrations! – caught up with me, and once again my emotions bubbled over. With a groan, I lay down and curled up, weeping.

To be continued . . . .

Chapter 4: Human Move

Two months passed before we saw another Sentinel. Two months of rigorous education and training. Britt had worked with me for hours each day until she was satisfied that my real-world body was fully functional and fit, but the bulk of my learning was through the simulator.

That’s where I was when the alarm sounded, having a simulated knife fight with Dakota. While all of us were, instantly, masters at anything we had downloaded, it quickly became apparent that natural affinity and practice could take those downloaded skills to even higher levels. And, just as Zephyr was a natural pilot, Dakota was a wizard with edged weapons of all kinds. She had just demonstrated her mastery of the Catanian variant of Paranza Corta by burying her stiletto into my abdomen – again.

“No, no, no, you overgrown lunk!” Dakota chuckled. In the simulator, Dakota presented as a short, wiry man with coarse black hair and a wispy mustache – far removed from the tall and curvaceous female body she possessed in the real world. “Remember, you must always move forward – always push the fight. If . . . .”

Blake’s voice cut her off. “Dakota, Noelle, we’re pulling you out – Sentinel approaching!” Within seconds we were back in our seats on the Belisarius. “Sit tight for a bit,” Blake continued, now speaking for our real ears. “Hermes wants to try lying doggo again.”

I was at this point used to the rhythms of the ship. I knew that Hermes was, as usual, in his command station at the center of the ship, Zephyr was on pilot duty, and Abhaya was monitoring the Matrix. I assumed that Hermes had sent either Kai or Britt to the weapons station.

With Zephyr at the helm, I didn’t even feel the ship land. I looked over at Dakota, and saw the strain showing in her tense expression.

Blake placed a hand on each of her shoulders and squeezed gently. “Easy, girl,” he murmured.

She reached up and clutched his hand, her grip hard.

I looked away. Blake and Dakota were an item, and Kai and Abhaya . . . . It was accepted. There were no rules against such things, and between the tight quarters and the time the ship spent cruising, non-fraternization would have been impossible to enforce anyway. But for much of the crew of this ship, sexuality was a complicated matter.

The lights went out and we were plunged into darkness. Although I felt like the pounding of my heart should be audible for miles, I knew I alone could hear it. I must not fear . . . .

I tried to think about other things. How had Dakota defeated me, three for three, in our bout? Or, Why can we communicate with the ship by cell phone when we’re in the Matrix, but we can only enter and exit the Matrix by making a call on a landline? But nothing was working. Try as I might, my mind turned to the problem at hand. A machine was hunting us.

And we were hiding.

Hermes’ voice over the intercom, controlled and staccato, was jarring in the darkness. “Kai, engage and destroy.” The lights came back up, and the sound of guns firing shook the ship.

“Target destroyed.” Kai’s voice was strained with excitement.

Hermes responded immediately. “Well done. Kai, stay on weapons. Noelle, join Zephyr at the helm. Everyone else, secure stations.”

The next few seconds were controlled chaos as I rushed to the nose of the ship while the rest of the crew went into the central station and buckled into five-point restraints. I was just squeezing into the co-pilot’s seat when Hermes ordered Zephyr to move out.

Zephyr got us airborne and hit full thrusters. The Belisarius isn’t particularly aerodynamic – unsurprising, since it has no airfoil, using antigravity technology to become airborne – but its thrusters are powerful. In seconds, we were rocketing forward through the ruins of what had been Chicago. Zephyr keyed his mic. “What are you seeing, boss?”

“I’m picking up Sentinels converging on our previous location from four, six and nine o’clock,” Hermes said.

“Straight ahead still clear?” Zephyr asked.

“So far,” Hermes confirmed.

“I’ll try to get as much distance as I can in this direction,” Zephyr told him. “If I can make it to the Monroe station, the old subway tunnel might be our best bet.”

Hermes didn’t hesitate. “Your call, Zephyr. Say when, and I’ll transfer tactical to your readout.”

“Thanks, chief.” Zephyr sounded focused, so I kept quiet. Although I was fully trained – simulator trained – to pilot the Belisarius, everyone knew that Zephyr was our best. Even Hermes.

We sped along, zipping over streets that were completely overrun with vegetation that had grown up in the century since the city’s destruction. Chicago had – if the histories were accurate – served briefly as the last capital of the United States after the AI had destroyed Washington, D.C. But the honor had not lasted long. Now it was just another abandoned hulk.

Zephyr was keeping the Bel as low as possible to minimize the chances for detection. This required dodging around not only the buildings, but also some of the taller trees.

Half a mile from our destination.

“Sentinels showing on our perimeter monitors at one o’clock,” Hermes announced. “They shouldn’t be able to see us before we hit the entrance.” We had apparently placed perimeter monitoring stations before we settled at our last location, extending detection range from our enemies.

We were now just a quarter mile from our destination.

Zephyr rammed the joystick hard to the right, just as four Sentinels appeared directly in front of us. We could hear the Bel’s guns firing. “Copy tactical!” Zephyr shouted.

A tactical display replaced the wysiwyg display on the main forward panel. Four – no, three! – Sentinels were attempting to close the distance to the ship, and all of the Sentinels on the display that were further off were now speeding in our direction.

Zephyr pulled the stick back and we shot skyward, all three Sentinels following – and gaining. But he pulled the Belisarius into a corkscrewed outside loop, and the forward guns caught one of the trailing Sentinels. Its icon vanished.

The loop had brought us back on target to the entrance to the subway that Zephyr had been aiming for, while the two remaining Sentinels were on our tail rather than blocking us. With a flip of his wrist, Zephyr spun the Bel into a dark hole, dangerously close to concrete on all four sides. Usefully, that left the Sentinels a limited space to follow, and one was immediately targeted and destroyed by the rear guns.

The other, unfortunately, appeared to have gotten too close to the ship for any of our weapons to bear. Kai’s strained voice came over the intercom. “It’s hooked on to us!”

“Hold tight!” Zephyr called. He was maneuvering like crazy as he made his way down to where the subway tunnel had been. Fortunately, it was still available and apparently unblocked. Because his hands were busy, he said, “Split tactical and visual, Noelle.”

I made the appropriate adjustments on the dial, and we were able to see the visual display of the tunnel on the right and a tactical display on the left.

Zephyr careened on at a speed that made me clench my teeth. Forks were opening up on the tracks and Zephyr was apparently taking them at random. Left . . . left . . . right . . . left . . . right . . . .

“It’s got three tentacles on us . . . make that four,” Kai shouted, followed by, “laser cutter!”

We hit a small open area and Zephyr spun the Belisarius around to decrease our forward momentum. Then he nudged his way down a tunnel and stopped moving altogether. We could hear the sound of metal being sliced.

“Hurry, dammit!” Kai shoulted.

Using only the antigrav system, Zephyr brought us through what appeared to be a hole in the ceiling of the tunnel caused by damage in structures above. He punched straight up, keeping the rear of the ship close to the opening.

Wham! Something hit hard and the ship was rocked.

“You got him!” Kai sounded exultant.

“Hold fast, he’s still with us,” I said, looking at the tactical screen, which now showed that the impact had detached the Sentinel from the ship. The guns weren’t firing, so the thing was probably still too close.

Zephyr stopped our upward movement and pushed backwards over some type of floor. We seemed to be inside a building, but it wasn’t clear where we were going.

The Sentinel’s appearance directly in front of us on the visual screen was so sudden that I screamed. “Zephyr!!!!”

Eight tentacles reached out and grabbed the front of the ship.

Hermes’ orders came quickly. “Cut power!”

As Zephyr hit the main power switch, three lasers lit up outside and directed towards our hull.

“EMP now, Kai!” Hermes ordered.

It was dark. Dark, dark, dark!!! But we didn’t hear any sounds. Without power, the main display reverted to a simple window, and there was no sign of any lasers.

Zephyr’s voice was soft, barely a murmur. “That should do it. Did you see the other Sentinels on tactical before we shut down?”

I kept my voice low; I wasn’t completely able to prevent it from trembling. “Everything behind us was aiming for the tunnel where we entered. The ones that had been further out, at one o’clock, looked like they were aiming to enter tunnels up the line a ways.”

I felt a presence behind me in the cramped space. Hermes’ voice was even more quiet than ours had been. “We’ll stay lights out and quiet. Keep your stations. If nothing finds us in four hours, we’ll start lighting up by stages.” He left to tell the rest.

And here I was again, in tight quarters and darkness. Oh, joy. Fear is the mind-killer.

Zephyr’s hand closed gently on mine. He lifted my hand and placed it over his chest before tapping the top of my hand twice.

I was at first puzzled, then I noticed what he was trying to get me to understand. He was taking slow, very deep breaths, holding them, and then exhaling equally slowly. I tried to match him. In my present state, the concentration required to do it was more than I expected.

I tried again.

It probably took me ten minutes to really get my breathing under control, and it took constant effort to keep it that way. But I left my hand on Zephyr’s chest, and I found that both his example, and simple human contact, helped enormously.

An hour passed like that. By concentrating on my breathing, I blocked the swirl of thoughts that were trying so hard to break in and overwhelm me. Then Zephyr shifted under my hand.

Light as a feather, I felt a tentative finger stroke my cheek.

I knew Zephyr at this point. Well enough to know that I only had to reach up, softly close his hand, and he would stop. We would never discuss it, and he would not hold it against me. I knew that, while at the same time I had no idea what Zephyr thought of me in particular, or women in general, which was decidedly strange. But it was so.

I reached up slowly . . . and ran my index finger down the back of his hand.

He stroked my cheek again, then twined his fingers with mine, stroking my palm with his thumb.

I felt a shock go through me, like a jolt of electricity. I pulled his hand close and kissed it gently. Once . . . twice . . . a third time. I reached my left hand up from where it had rested and cupped his cheek. Is he smiling?

His body shifted further, leaning toward me, then I felt the fingers of his left hand come around to the back of my neck. He was close; I could feel his breath, warm and welcoming in the darkness.

With my hand on his cheek, I knew just where he was. I leaned in, and our lips touched.

His left arm tightened, and our lips locked. The kiss became urgent, powerful. In moments, his tongue was searching for mine and I engaged him eagerly.

But all was done in complete silence. Even our breathing remained controlled. We were in danger and the danger hadn’t passed. Moreover, we were strapped in place and we needed to stay there.

His hand slipped beneath my top and he stoked the soft flesh of my belly. I inclined my body, willing his hand to explore further. Soon, he was cupping my breast, running his thumb across my aching nipple. I longed to be free of the bandeau, but there was no way to accomplish that, sitting as we were. I could only kiss him passionately, and I did.

Somehow, I got my left arm behind him and pivoted enough to allow my right hand to stroke his strong thigh. That only contented me for a moment, though, and soon I had reached higher. As I expected, he was hot and hard.

I smiled.

It was scarcely the first time I had held a man’s sex; I’d been attracted to men for as long as I had known myself to be female. Long-term relationships hadn’t worked well, but I’d had short relationships with gay men. And, in Jo Warnick’s hacienda, I had shared a bed with several other transwomen over the years. It wasn’t perfect, of course. The ones who were attracted to men, like I was, preferred masculine men; the ones attracted to women preferred cis women. But we were all lonely, and cared for each other, and sometimes that was enough to make it work.

This was different, though. I finally had the right body, and here with me was a masculine man who clearly found me as attractive as I found him. I slipped my hand inside his waistband, and wrapped my fingers slowly, teasingly, around his shaft.

His control over his breathing slipped, but I only felt his soundless gasp.

I squeezed. Gently. Playfully.

His head lowered and he nuzzled my neck with moist lips. But then he reached up and tapped my temple with his index finger. His other hand slowly detached from my breast. I could almost feel the reluctance.

I wanted to squeeze him again, this time from frustration. You want me to THINK?

We were in danger, and the danger hadn’t passed. So, yes, I needed to think. And, once I did, I understood. We could be interrupted on a second’s notice if any Sentinels showed up. Moreover, the configuration of our seats prevented me from going down on him, though I longed to do it. Absent that solution, anything I did to give him relief would create a mess we would just be stuck with for hours, until the all-clear sounded.

His finger stroked my cheek again, this time catching a frustrated tear that slipped from the corner of my eye.

With a silent sigh, I removed my hand from his swollen member, patting his stuff gently once my hand was back outside his pants. I captured his caressing finger and slipped it between my lips, applied suction and gave it a few slow pumps, just to make sure my meaning was unmistakable. But he was right, damn it all, so I released his finger and gave him another kiss, this one gentle. Resigned, even.

He kissed me back and we were still, my left arm around his shoulders, his right arm behind my back.

I closed my eyes – they weren’t accomplishing anything anyhow – and concentrated on my other senses. His breathing was again regular. I could feel his warmth. Smell his body. The excitement that mirrored my own, banked for now. I thought about the taste of his kiss.

I’m a woman! My God, I’m finally the woman I always wanted to be!!!

I was suddenly hit with the memory of a dream I had, many times over the years. Lying on my back, welcoming a lover. Drinking his kisses, thrilling to the feel of his hands on my tender breasts. Responding ardently to his fire deep inside me . . . . Seeing a face in the moonlight, strong and passionate. I can have that now. All of it!

The force of my waking dream made me begin to tremble all over again. But this time, I concentrated on my breathing, working to match Zephyr’s deep and slow rhythm. Breathing in . . . holding it . . . a long, long release . . . holding . . . a slow, steady inhalation . . . .

It took a while, but I got myself back where I needed to be. More time passed, and still more. But our foreplay had served its purpose. Had broken through the restraint we had both felt. Without a word having been spoken, we knew where we were heading.

And I smiled again, anticipating the moment when we could finish what we had started.

~o~O~o~

The four hours passed without incident. Again I felt Hermes’ presence before I heard his voice, quiet and calm. “Passive power only; let’s see what tactical will show us.”

Zephyr hit a couple of switches, and the tactical display came up, soft glowing green against the inky darkness. The feed came from both the ship’s sensors and the passive arrays they had put in place months before.

Nothing.

“Okay,” Hermes said thoughtfully. “Let me go get a couple drones in motion. Let’s take this slow.”

We left the tactical array up while Hermes went back to talk to the rest of the crew. The soft light was just enough to illuminate our features.

Zephyr gave me a rueful smile.

A couple minutes later Hermes returned to tell us that Dakota and Blake were each operating one of the ship’s recon drones, and we should be getting augmented readouts on tactical soon. He went back to the command center to monitor it.

Sure enough, tunnel after tunnel lit up on our display, as the drones ranged this way and that, looking for any sign of Sentinels. It was probably another hour before we were confident that the area was clear. We stationed the drones at strategic spots in the tunnel network and put them on passive. Finally, we went to full power and turned on the lights.

A squeak of surprise and a bit of fright escaped my lips, since the last Sentinel was still firmly attached to the front of the Belisarius. It was quickly apparent, however, that it had been disabled. The thing was inert and unmoving.

“We’re going to need to get it off manually,” Hermes announced over the intercom. “Everyone, take ten. Use the head, then let’s meet in the mess.”

The cockpit was so tight that we had to get out one at a time; Zephyr had me go first. Once out, I went down a short ladder at the back of the cabin to make room for Zephyr to get out of his seat. So, much as I wanted to wrap him in my arms and give him a proper kiss, I proceeded to the nearest head and did my business.

Ten minutes later, we were all gathered around the table in the mess. The feeling in the compartment was somehow both tense and relieved, like a locker room at half time, when the underdogs have survived but know that they’re nowhere near done.

Hermes was last to arrive, taking his place at the foot of the table. “Nice job as always, XO. Now. We’ll have to do some repairs. Once they’re done, we’re going to need to move again. Thoughts?”

Everyone looked to Zephyr, presumably because he was the first officer and it was his job to give the commander options.

“I think we need to abandon greater Chicago for now,” he said shortly. “The Sentinels will range, but they’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“Old Milwaukee?” asked Britt.

Zephyr shook his head. “I’d be happier with a bit more distance. Maybe the Detroit area. Or even Toronto.”

“I don’t suppose we could go home for a bit?” Blake asked wistfully.

Hermes shook his head. “Sorry, Blake,” he said gently. “We’re supposed to stay out for nine more months. So, not unless we can’t manage repairs.”

Kai offered, “I don’t think the back’s bad. I checked out the hold where the Sentinel started with the laser. We’ve got a breach, but it isn’t large. We can patch it.”

“Time estimate?” Hermes asked.

“Five or six hours, I expect.” Kai replied promptly.

“I’ll want to wait at least a day before we move anyway.” Hermes was smiling as he looked around. “Alright, everyone. Good job. Let’s get our repairs done, then get a rotation of rest in before we get moving. Dakota, I want you to deploy the cargo drone and start picking up our remotes. Zephyr, Noelle, survey the perimeter and set up security for the work team. Kai, Blake, and Britt, you’re on repairs. Abhaya, you've got monitoring duty. I’ll take the pilot’s seat.”

Zephyr and I put on headsets, head lamps, and weapons. I’d been checked out on the guns, which were some form of what we would have called an assault rifle back in the day. They were considerably more powerful, however.

Zephyr hit the necessary switches to open an exterior hatch and lower a ramp. It was the first time I had left the ship in my real body since they retrieved me, months before.

The air was dry and somehow smelled old, like a room that hadn’t been opened in a long while. We stepped down carefully, looking left and right. We knew from the tactical and visual displays that the space we were in was tight. The hole that we had ascended from the subway tunnel was about fifty yards away; a cinderblock wall had once separated it from the place where we had landed the Bel. But the wall was nothing but broken rubble.

Our footsteps sounded loud in the silence. We went forward first, checking out the area around the hole. After confirming that the only way into the space where we were located was the hole we had come up, we checked the walls on either side of the ship, and then the rear. There was only one door, located in the back.

I took the door, and Zephyr trotted forward to guard the area in front of the ship. Then we gave the green light to the repair team.

Kai’s estimate turned out to be a little bit optimistic. The Sentinel that was attached to the front of the ship had to be cut off with acetylene torches, tentacle by tentacle. Apparently there was no other damage to the front. In the rear, they had to cut a panel of steel, then weld and rivet it in place to cover the area where the Sentinel’s laser had cut the hull.

Zephyr joined me when the crew was wrapping up. “So . . . let’s just see what’s on the other side of this door before we all go turning in for the night,” he said.

I agreed; my imagination had enjoyed quite the field day wondering about that exact question all the hours that I had spent on guard. I was so tensed up that I was gripping my weapon, prepared to let loose, when he slowly opened the door.

A puff of even staler air greeted us, and we peered inside. “Some kind of warehouse?” I said dubiously. There were racks of shelves that went up maybe ten feet, in a room that was probably sixty feet long.

Zephyr spoke into his mike. “We’re going to check out the room back here before sealing it up, Captain.”

“Got it,” Hermes replied.

We stepped into the room, leaving the door open behind us and moved to the shelves. On closer inspection, they were full of bins. Looking to Zephyr, who nodded, I pulled one of the bins out and saw that it was filled with sealed clear plastic bags . . . .

I couldn’t help myself. I chuckled.

Zephyr bent close to look. His eyes widened and he joined my soft laughter.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“Well, not exactly.”

“I don’t suppose you have a training program on this?”

“On putting on a bra? Are you serious?”

“Well . . . I’ve never actually had anything to fill one with, you know.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t stop you, did it?” he teased.

“Ah . . . no. It didn’t.” I giggled. “You realize we may have found the world’s last supply of gen-u-ine lingerie!”

“Well, maybe not the last,” he corrected. “But without the vacuum packs, there’s no way the fabric would have lasted this long.”

“Zephyr . . . can we take some back? I’m not the only woman on the ship who’d appreciate something a bit more comfortable.” I tried to keep my voice from shading into a wheedling tone.

He grinned like a wolf. “I’m not the only man on board who might like to see his girl in something more sexy. Five minutes only, though. I’ll stand guard.”

Moving quickly, I checked a number of nearby bins and pulled several promising containers. Knowing that space was tight on the Bel, though, I only filled one small bin with packages, then brought it back to the door where Zephyr was standing guard.

Zephyr gave me a smile. “Finished your shopping in four minutes flat? What kind of a woman are you? And, will you marry me?”

I laughed, though I found myself blushing. “Come on, you. Let’s head back.” We closed the door behind us, and just to be certain, we had Britt slag the lock with an acetylene torch before we went back to the ship. On our way back, I paused at the collapsed heap of the overloaded Sentinel and kicked it. “Bastard.”

Hermes raised an eyebrow when he saw what we had brought back with us, but otherwise took it in stride. “Alright. Britt, Kai, Dakota, Noelle – you’ve got ten minutes to work out who gets what. Then I want everyone who isn’t on duty sleeping!”

Dividing the spoils wasn’t all that complicated. I was the smallest of the women overall, though Kai looked like she would be the same bra size, more or less. Britt was larger and Dakota was considerably better endowed. But there were a couple items for everyone, and I could tell that their spirits were lifted enormously. Even Kai, who was born into the hardscrabble life of the present century, wasn’t wired for virtual reality, and had never worn anything but homespun. “I’m gonna need some lessons,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “But I can kind of see why you like them!”

To my annoyance, Zephyr had first watch, with Dakota, Blake and Kai. I trooped off to my bunk alone, but the day caught up with me and I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

~o~O~o~

Five hours later, I rose, stretched, and took a quick shower. After toweling off thoroughly, I went and got my treasures. Zephyr had been careful not to make fun; it really was completely frivolous. But after all the times I, as Noel, had worn a bra and panties, certain that I looked foolish but longing for them anyway, I was tearing up at the thought of seeing them on my perfectly female form.

My real body.

The lingerie was medium blue, nylon, and lightly trimmed in lace. I pulled the panties up my legs and marveled at how right they looked and felt. I slipped my arms through the bra straps and, with a practiced motion, reached behind and fastened the three hooks and eyes. I thought of Zephyr and snorted. Hell, yes, I knew how to put on a bra!

But I had less experience in getting the straps adjusted so that it held my breasts properly. I have breasts! I took my time on the new and wonderful problem, and got it fixed to my satisfaction. God, it feels wonderful!

I stood there a full minute, my arms crossed, my hands cupping my breasts inside their lace-lined cups, marveling at the sensation I thought I would never experience. Finally I shook my head, smiling, and finished getting dressed. I put my bandeau and homespun briefs into the bag with my spare clothes, all of which needed to be cleaned. A job for later.

I bumped into Britt on my way forward. “That’s one hell of a goofy grin you’re sporting,” she said with her own smile. Britt had claimed both of the sports bras, and she looked very pleased with her choice.

I let my grin get even wider. “Sometimes it’s the little things.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “That it is!”

I took over Matrix monitoring. Our tap wasn’t strong in this location; there was no way we could use it to enter the Matrix ourselves. But we were still picking up some data. My training on the software side had progressed rapidly and I was more than able to hold my own.

Some hours later, I was running a set of queries I had devised when I detected a message drop. We had certain standing programs always running, one of which identified attempted contacts by sources inside the Matrix – the sort of “ping” that had alerted Hermes that I was looking for him, months back.

I keyed the command station. “Hermes, it’s Noelle. Looks like we got a ping on one of our listening posts.”

“Identification?” He sounded only mildly interested.

“It looks like an encrypted information packet for you. The sender is identified as ‘Cassandra.’”

“Route it to me,” he said, sounding suddenly much more alert.

I sent the packet his way. When I didn’t hear anything further, I went back to work, picking up my prior queries.

At the end of the shift we had an all-hands meeting. Hermes got right to the point. “Zephyr, I know you’d prefer to get farther away, but Milwaukee will have to do for now. We need to get somewhere reasonably secure with a solid tap, and we need to do it fast.”

Zephyr looked unhappy. “If we have to, we have to. But it’s closer to the Great Lakes pod tower array than I’d like. Can I ask what changed?”

“We got a priority message. Cassandra wants to see Noelle.”

I bolted upright. “Huh?”

Hermes leaned forward. “Cassandra is our most important contact in the Matrix. She was the one who encouraged me to extract transgender adults . . . and she was the one who identified you as someone we should try to recruit.”

His words made no sense. “I don’t know a ‘Cassandra.’”

Hermes smiled. “But you do. You just know her as ‘Jo.’”

To be continued . . . .

Chapter 5: Hanging Knight

“You’ve trained for this, Noelle. I’ve watched you carefully. Believe me when I say, you’re as ready as anyone.” Hermes was leaning against the bulkhead, watching me carefully.

I didn’t feel ready. Despite the fact that I’d lived my whole life, except for the last couple of months, inside the massive computer simulation we called “the Matrix,” I was afraid to return. But Hermes was right. I’d been given the tools to cope – including the very techniques I was currently using to calm my breathing and still my racing heart.

I nodded. “I’m ready.”

He reached out and clasped my shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze before he took the chair next to mine. Abhaya and Britt rounded out our “away team;” Zephyr would be in command in our absence. “Let’s do it.” Hermes’ tone made it an order.

The instant when the probe goes into the skull is hard to describe. There are no nerves along the pathway the machines had installed, but still, somehow, the metal connector feels cold. Muscles everywhere in the body tense involuntarily, and the hair on the back of the neck – yes, my hair was finally starting to grow out! – stands up. The probe is like the first, tentative touch of a fickle and dangerous god. It is the howl of coyotes on a moonless night, the acrid smell of danger and the frisson of infinite possibility . . . .

. . . . And just like that, we were in. The place was an office at the back of a boutique clothing store. It contained little more than a desk set, including both a stylish landline and a computer. The last ring of the phone sounded in my ears as we appeared.

In theory, we could have entered the Matrix at the hacienda itself — I knew Jo had a landline. But we didn’t want to do anything that might lead Agents to her, and our insertions do leave tracks.

So we entered a few miles east. We all knew where we were, our location in relation to Jo’s hacienda, and a few other facts that we hoped we wouldn’t need to know concerning the area. Britt immediately went to the window, moved the curtains just enough to see out, and looked around in the twilight. “All clear in the alley.”

“All right,” Hermes responded. “You’re up, Noelle.”

I sat down at the computer and hit the spacebar on the keyboard, waking up both the CPU and the monitor. It took me less than two minutes to get through the owner’s primitive security – I was good even before my simulator training; now I was at a whole different level. Another thirty seconds, and I had disabled the store’s security system and put the feed from the cameras on a loop that showed nothing moving in the empty shop. “Done.” I took an extra five seconds to wipe any prints off of the keyboard. It probably didn’t matter this time, but I’m a professional.

Hermes nodded in satisfaction. “Let’s go.”

We left the office and glided silently down a hallway that led to a small storage area and the door to the alley. We paused again at the door while Britt checked for movement. Then she was out the door, and I followed.

Hermes paused to clap a hand on Abhaya’s shoulder, then he followed Britt and me. Abhaya was staying at the shop to watch our best exit point and warn us if it became compromised.

The alley was short, and it took us only a minute to get to the street. We were in a relatively busy area, and we simply flagged down a cab.

Britt hopped into the passenger’s seat. “Take us to Painted Feather Way, please.”

The driver nodded and headed west. “You folks in town for a conference?” He was an older man with the barest hint of the accent of Yucatán left in his voice. His tone was easy, conversational.

Britt was in the drivers’ seat, so we let her – or, in the Matrix, “him,” take it. “Nah. Just a little holiday. A friend said the views up there are great.”

The driver chuckled. “Oh, yeah. But people in that neighborhood get antsy when they see strangers walking around. Be careful.”

“Yeah? Well . . . we’ll do that.” Britt pretended to think a minute, then said, “You have a card or something, in case we need a ride later?”

“Sure.” The driver reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a card and handed it over. “I’ll be working ’til around ten. After that, you’re on your own.” You could hear the smile in his voice, as he contemplated clocking off, heading to his home and his wife . . . .

And all of it is illusion.

The car ride was around twenty minutes, and the area got less and less densely populated every minute of it. It all looked very familiar to me, of course, but I felt like I was seeing it through new eyes. I had always thought of Jo’s hacienda as a refuge. Now, it was something else. I didn’t know what yet, but I knew for certain that “rest and relaxation” would not be on the menu.

Traffic was light once we moved out of the city, with nothing on the road in Jo’s neighborhood except for a family who were headed out on vacation with half their worldly possessions stuffed in a van. We left the cab a block from Jo’s place and didn’t start walking until it had departed.

It was now full dark, and in the desert dryness the temperature was quickly dropping, becoming cool and pleasant. A light wind came up the hillside, carrying the unmistakable smells of someone’s barbecue. . . . All illusion.

Our cabbie was right. It would be better not to alarm the neighbors by spending too long outside at this hour. We walked up the street quickly, feeling a light breeze and came to her gate five minutes later.

As we came up the driveway, a figure detached itself from the small outbuilding by the wrought iron gate. “Consuela!” I greeted her warmly. She was an inspired cook as well as a wardrobe wizard, always ready to help the guests look their feminine best. More importantly, she was a sweet and gentle soul who made everyone feel special.

“Welcome back, Miss Noelle,” she said, ignoring, as always, my male appearance. Her smile matched my own. “And you, sir,” she said, addressing Hermes without naming him. “Miss Jo is anxious to see you both.”

Britt stayed with Consuela at the gatehouse, keeping look out and securing our easiest escape route. Hermes followed me up the long driveway and across the courtyard, to the steps and the front door. I raised my hand to knock, but it opened before I completed the move.

“Hello, Miss Noelle,” the short woman said shyly. “Miss Jo asked that you both join her in the upstairs parlor.”

“Thanks, Lourdes,” I said. I had a sudden memory of Lourdes’ impish smile as she showed me some of her makeup tricks. So many happy memories in this place.

The inside staircase was a curving showpiece – Spanish tile risers and terracotta steps, with a wrought iron railing that continued along the landing at the top. We took the stairs quickly, walked across the landing, and entered the upper front room.

The parlor was dominated by floor-to-ceiling windows with a spectacular view of the city in the distance. Jo was sitting with her back to us, smoking a cigarette as usual, and gazing out at her view. “C’mon in,” she said without turning around. “Have a seat.”

Hermes came around the couch and took a chair opposite Jo. I moved to take the other, but she patted the couch and said, “You sit here. Let me look at you.”

As always, Jo made me want to smile. She seemed so out-of-place in this grand house, a diminutive, older black woman who never gave a thought to her own appearance, even while she made sure her guests were primped and pampered. I leaned over, gave her cheek a peck, and took the offered seat. “It’s good to see you, Jo.”

“Is it?” Her eyes looked at once mischievous and serious. “Well, we’ll see about that. C’mon. I need a closer view.” Oddly, she leaned in close, gazing at my face searchingly. After a long moment, she said, “Huh. Well. About what I’d expected.”

“Jo,” I said patiently, “You’ve known me for years. Do I look any different?”

“Getting unplugged is a strange experience. No telling how people will do.”

Her words brought me back to a nagging thought I’d been reluctant to raise. “Are you? Unplugged, I mean.”

She smiled enigmatically, reached out and flicked ash from her cigarette into a kitschy Vegas-themed ashtray that looked even more out-of-place than she did. “That’s complicated. Story for another day.”

She turned her attention to my superior. “And how are you doing, Hermes? I see you haven’t aged a day.”

“I can assure you, my portrait of Dorian Grey looks a bit worse for the wear these days. But I’m well. And Zephyr sends his regards.”

“My girl here working out for you?”

“Everything you promised,” he replied, smiling.

“And for you, Noelle? How’s reality treating you? Is being a woman all you hoped for?” Her eyes found mine again.

I thought about the ghastly food, the homespun, the close quarters on the ship, the constant threat of Sentinels . . . and the wonder that I felt, every moment, knowing that I was finally in the right body. That I had been all along, and just hadn’t known it. “Yes.” I thought about my moments with Zephyr. Before, all I’d had were erotic dreams of being a woman; now . . . now I could have the real thing. “All that, and more.”

She nodded, but didn’t smile. “That’s good, child. Very good. You’re going to need all that positive energy. Because you need to pull Cleo out, too, and it won’t be easy.”

“Cleo? She wants out?” I was surprised. I had met Cleo here a few years ago, and our visits had overlapped once or twice since. She was British; sounded upper crust. I didn’t know much about her male persona – as a rule, the visitors at the hacienda didn’t tend to share many personal details – but I was under the impression that her day job had something to do with finance.

“She hasn’t said anything,” Jo responded. “But you need to get her out.”

Hermes shook his head. “Jo, you know it doesn’t work that way. Even with trans adults, we don’t approach them directly. They need to seek us out. It’s the only way we know they might be ready.”

She gave Hermes a fond smile. “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, will you? I know all your rules, Hermes. I helped you break them before, and,” she pointed at me, “you’ve just acknowledged that I occasionally know what I’m talking about.”

He inclined his head in acknowledgment, but wasn’t ready to concede the point. “I know. But this is different. Every time we get someone unplugged, there’s a huge risk that we will simply destroy their mind – that they won’t be able to adapt. I’ve seen it happen. We can never be sure, but we need to be as certain as we can be. If this ‘Cleo’ is ready, she’ll find a way to reach out.”

“She can wait, maybe,” Jo countered. “But you can’t. You’ve spent forty years searching for the One. You need to go now. And Noelle needs to make the contact, since Cleo knows her.”

I didn’t know what Jo was talking about, but it clearly meant something to Hermes. His hands slowly closed around the arms of his chair, as if he needed the support to remain upright in his seat. “You’re sure?” he whispered. He looked eager, excited, and as focused as I had ever seen him.

“I’ve told you before, nothing is ‘sure.’ But I know the odds, and this is the best you’ll get.”

I looked from Jo to Hermes and back again. “What are you talking about?”

It was Hermes who answered. “There is a prophecy, dating to the foundation of Zion, that a human born in the Matrix will find a way to take the battle to the AI. That we will not just be hunted forever. I hoped to live to see it . . . maybe now, I will.”

I had been forced to accept the fact that I had lived in a simulation all my life, but oddly enough, this seemed even more strange. Strange, and — much as I yearned to take the fight to the enemy — too damned much.

I found my hands balling into fists, and spoke through clenched teeth. “I want to fight. To destroy these . . . things! Always, everyone is telling me to wait. That we can’t, that we aren’t strong enough. And it turns out we’re waiting for, what? A prophecy? Are you fricking kidding me?”

Before either of them could respond, Hermes’ cell phone rang. Without taking his eyes off me, he flicked it open. “Yes?” He was silent for a moment. “Coming up the street? We’re on our way.” He snapped the phone shut and rose. “Britt says there’s a police cruiser heading this way. We need to go. Jo, I’ll think about it. What’s Cleo’s dead name?”

Jo remained seated. “Anthony St. Claire. He works in the City. In London.”

I hopped up and went closer to the front window to get a view of the gate, maybe forty yards away and well lit. Britt was looking out to the street, Consuela a few steps behind. I couldn’t see any sign of the cruiser Britt had reported, but unless it was running its lights, I probably wouldn’t.

Just as I was about to turn away, Consuela’s image shifted, grew, and darkened. It took just an instant for me to realize what was happening. “Britt!!!” I screamed loud enough to wake the dead – loud enough to be heard through the thick windows.

But it was too late. Britt was just starting to move when the Agent who had replaced Consuela raised a handgun and shot her in the head at point blank range. As Britt’s body spun, the Agent fired again, presumably to make sure.

Hermes was suddenly at my side, pulling me away from the window. “Back!!!” he hissed. He spun me around. “Go, go, go!!!”

Crouched low, I followed Hermes out of the room and onto the landing. We were just about to take the stairs when we saw Lourdes, by the front door, begin to change shape. “This way!!!” I shouted. We charged across the landing as shots chipped the railing and wall behind us.

“Anyone else in the building?” Hermes was following right behind me, as I tore down a hallway.

“Just Jo.” I could hear the sound of hard-soled shoes on the terracotta tiles behind us. I knew that the hallway ended at a door to a balcony that overlooked the pool. There were no stairs down – but Hermes had taught me all about bending the rules.

“Okay,” he said. “Plan Delta. See you back at the Bel!

I wasn’t happy about it – the contingency plan involved splitting up, and was based on the reasonable assumption that any Agent would follow Hermes since he was about as high on their “Most Wanted” list as it was possible to get. But our mission was blown to hell and Britt was dead. Plan Delta didn’t even make the top ten on my list of things I was seriously unhappy about.

I burst through the door to the balcony, sprinted forward and lept, grabbing the wrought iron railing as I passed. As I cartwheeled through the air, spinning 180 degrees, I saw Hermes’ shoe hit the rail by my hand, then he was sailing forward into the night.

Just before my spinning arm came in contact with the railing, I released my grip and dropped, landing on my feet on the patio under the balcony. Using my considerable forward momentum, I sped back toward the house, then dropped behind a large planter.

I looked back just in time to see Hermes jump from the roof of the pool house and disappear behind the perimeter wall, the matte black of his clothing almost indistinguishable from the dark night sky. Seconds later, I heard the smack of the Agent’s hard-soled shoe on the balcony railing, then saw his form sail over the pool — easily thirty feet. As Hermes had presumably done, he hit the roof of the poolhouse running, then followed Hermes over the back wall and down the hillside.

What I was doing was a risk, and probably a crazy one. But I knew that the nearest landline was in the hacienda. So long as the Agent was chasing Hermes, and so long as there was only one, it was my best chance.

The back door was locked, but picking locks – an extremely useful skill – was another talent I had taken time to hone in the simulator. I was back inside in seconds.

The lights were on in the front of the house, but not the rear. I knew the hacienda well, so I was able to move forward quickly and quietly, all the while listening for any sounds. I didn’t hear anything coming from inside the house, but outside was another matter. Anguished, heart-rending cries were coming from the direction of the gate.

Crouching low, I crept into the front room and peered out the window. Consuelaa was on her knees, cradling Britt’s lifeless body, wailing as she rocked back and forth. Her face was lit by the red and blue strobe of a police cruiser. A uniformed officer stood by the door of the car, talking into a radio, but I couldn't hear him. Calling for backup.

The landline was on an occasional table by an arm chair. I crept over to it, lifted the receiver, and called Zephyr on the Belisarius. “Mayday! Extract!”

I was holding the receiver and looking out the window, which is why I saw the Police Officer shift shape into an Agent. He drew his weapon, looking straight at me, somehow able to pierce the shadows between us. I heard the sound of his shot . . . .

. . . And then, as suddenly as I had left, I was back on the ship, and Zephyr was bending down in front of me, looking every bit as bad as I felt.

I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “Britt?”

“She’s dead, Noelle. I’m . . . .” He stopped, shaking his head, then pulled out his cell phone.

I looked at the two chairs to my right. Hermes, next to me, was to all appearances sleeping calmly, his chest rising and falling with easy breaths. But Britt, on his other side, was clearly gone. There was no physical manifestation of a bullet hole – it hadn’t happened in the “real world,” after all. But dying in the Matrix causes the brain to stop functioning, and the body can’t survive it. A trickle of blood ran down her chin; she’d probably bitten her tongue in her last moment of life.

Zephyr was on his cell phone. “We’re blown, Abhaya. I’m pulling you out.” As soon as he got confirmation, the ship’s “landline” began to ring. Kai, standing by Abhaya’s chair, went to answer it.

I got out of my seat and stood by Abhaya’s chair as his eyes opened. He gave Kai a grateful glance, then looked at me. “What happened?”

“An Agent caught us at the hacienda and shot Britt. Hermes called Plan Delta and we split up.”

“You left her?”

I shook my head, sitting on my immediate urge to bite back. “She died instantly, Abhaya. There was nothing we could do.”

He looked sick, but pushed through it. “Where’s Hermes?”

“Making his way down a dark hillside,” Zephyr reported, looking at the screen from where he was monitoring Hermes in the Matrix. “I can’t tell if he still has an Agent tailing him.”

I said, “One took off after him, but I think he gave up, because he reappeared at the hacienda and shot at me just as you pulled me out.”

Zephyr chewed on his cheek a second, then said, “You sure it was the same one? They all look alike to me.”

“It looked like the same one to me, though I didn’t have time to study it closely.”

He appeared to reach a decision, and used his cell phone to call Hermes. After a couple anxious moments, he got an answer. “Hermes, it’s Zephyr. Noelle thinks the Agent that followed you gave up and returned to the hacienda; she saw it there before we pulled her out. . . . Yeah, me too, but she thought so. . . . Right, already did it. He’s here. . . . Yeah, that may be your best bet. We’ll continue to monitor. . . . Out.”

Zephyr put away his phone. “He thinks no-one is behind him, but he was lying quiet for a bit just to be sure. There’s nothing close other than houses, so he’s going to need to walk to a busier area and see if he can get a cab to our alternative extraction site.”

I had a sudden idea. “Zephyr, I think I might have an easier alternative. Let me check something.” I practically sprinted to our main monitoring array for the Matrix, which was currently unoccupied. Presumably Dakota and Blake were at other stations. I dropped into the seat and furiously began running queries.

“What have you got?” Zephyr had followed me and was at my shoulder.

“Just before the cab dropped us off, we saw a big van pulling out of a driveway, stuffed to the gills with vacation gear and kids. The house is almost certainly deserted. If I can figure out the address and confirm it’s got a working landline, Hermes can use it.”

“Risky . . . but probably less risky than having to find a cab. You sure about the location?”

I nodded without looking up from the screen. “Yeah – big house at the corner of Marble Ridge and the street just before Painted Feather . . . . There it is! Cross-checking the phone records now . . . .” I typed quickly and waited impatiently for a response. “There! It’s got one!”

An alert popped up on my screen. “Wait, hold on . . . Ah! They’ve got a security system installed. Give me a minute . . . .” My fingers were moving so quickly I could barely keep up with them. But there aren’t too many people who are better at this task than I am, and our Matrix interface is a hacker’s dream. “Got it. The system’s disabled.”

I spun and looked at the XO, who didn’t waste any time dithering. He pulled out his cell, called Hermes, and handed the phone to me.

Hermes’ voice was unruffled. “What do you have, Zephyr?”

“It’s Noelle. We want to bring you out on the landline at 82 Cross Canyon. It’s not far from where you are. On the corner of Marble Ridge, the street we came up to get to Painted Feather.”

He didn’t bother asking for our rationale, which was refreshing. “I was trying to avoid going on Marble Ridge; it’s big enough and close enough to make it the logical artery for them to watch.”

I looked at the map. “If you’re still on the hillside, I can bring you in a back way.”

“Tell me.”

I gave him the directions, then said, “we’ve disabled the home security system, but it will certainly be locked.”

“I’ll take care of it.” He didn’t seem concerned. “Expect me in about fifteen minutes; I’ll take it slow and easy.”

“Okay, boss. Out.” I ended the call and gave the phone back to Zephyr.

But now that I had done what I could do, there was nothing left but waiting. Which left my mind wide open to think about the last few . . . minutes? Was it really just minutes? And about Britt.

I slumped in the seat. “Zephyr . . . there was nothing we could do. It was so fast.”

He squatted down in front of my chair so that he wouldn’t be looking down at me. “I know. We all know; Kai and I were monitoring when it happened.”

“She had the most amazing reflexes. Even in her male form . . . .”

Zephyr shook his head. “The Agents are quicker than we are. Quicker than the best of us. They can literally dodge bullets.”

“But they weren’t able to catch Hermes.”

“They run fast, but it’s more like a human pace. And their eyesight’s as good as a human with good vision, but near as we can tell it’s not much better. The reflexes seem to be different.”

“That . . . doesn’t make sense.” I was puzzled, trying to piece through what I’d learned in the simulator and what I’d just experienced. “I mean, the AI designed the Matrix, and designed the Agents. Why limit them in any way? Why can’t they fly, or run a hundred miles an hour?”

Zephyr rose slowly and held out a hand to help me out of the seat. “Honestly, we don’t know. Maybe it didn’t want the Agents to be strong enough to break the Matrix? But that’s just a theory. All we know for sure is what we’ve seen them do – and not do, if you know what I mean.”

“God, I hate this!” I sounded as confused, frightened, angry and downright disgusted as I felt.

But I took his hand and stood, and Zephyr pulled me in for a brief and comforting hug. Then we went back to the operations area, where Kai and Abhaya were standing by Britt’s body. They’d removed the Matrix interface, but they hadn’t moved her yet.

Zephyr took charge of the situation. “Can you take her body to her own bed for now? We’ll have a proper remembrance when the Captain’s back.”

They nodded and moved to raise her out of the chair where she had died.

Zephyr got on the intercom. “Blake, we’ve got a situation. I want you to land us somewhere unobtrusive and power down everything except our Matrix interfaces, passive external monitoring and internal communications.”

His response was instant. “On it.”

As the ship began to move, Zephyr said, “This would be a really bad time for Sentinels to show up, and given how our luck’s been running, I’m going to assume that’s what’ll happen.”

I nodded. I knew from all of my training that Hermes would die if his physical interface with the Matrix failed for any reason before he got back to a landline. Using the EMP would temporarily disable all of our electronics, which would definitely sever his connection. We waited in tense silence as the ship slowly sank lower and lower.

Blake keyed the mic to say, “looks like what used to be a ballpark, right on the edge of the lake. I’ll put down there.”

“Huh,” I said. “I’ve been to a game at the Brewer’s stadium. It wasn’t on the lake.”

Zephyr shrugged. “Who knows? If the history is remotely accurate, the U.S. kept going until the 2070’s or so. Plenty of time to build a new ballpark.”

I thought about that. How the Matrix just messes with your mind. Ancient history – well, ancient from an American perspective — that hadn’t even happened in the year I thought it was when I took that red pill . . . .

The ship settled softly. Immediately, the lights went out, except for the Matrix monitors beside us. Hermes’ resting face, now lit by a green glow, looked somehow eerie and eldrich.

More time passed.

Moving quietly and slowly by the low light, Kai and Abhaya rejoined us. Kai gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You okay?”

“I’ll manage. I guess.”

“Yeah.” She lapsed into silence.

Blake’s voice came low over the intercom. “Getting a ghost image from the perimeter monitor we dropped on the way in. Six miles back.”

Zephyr’s face had a rueful smile. “The party wouldn’t be complete without that.”

But there wasn’t much we could do that we hadn’t done already. Our Matrix monitor was showing that Hermes was still on the move, and he was close to the house I had identified. Hopefully, he would be out before we had to worry about the Sentinel.

Zephyr had Dakota go up to take the weapons station, just in case.

“Six . . . no, eight Sentinels confirmed.” Blake’s voice over the intercom was soft. “Bearing is still off.”

Zephyr just nodded.

Hermes was at the house now. In moments, he was inside. Still, we heard nothing.

A phone rang . . . but it was Zephyr’s cell.

“What’s up, boss?” he asked, answering. “Of course. On it.” Turning to me, he said, “He can’t find where they keep their phone. Call it.”

I dashed back to the room where I had done my work and pulled up my searches. I was writing down the number when Blake keyed his mic. “Three of them are headed in this general direction. Still four miles out.”

I ran back to the operations room and went to the landline. Mercifully, it was a punch-button keyboard, so I was able to dial quickly. One ring . . . two . . . three . . . .

At seven rings, I was starting to panic. Zephyr’s cell phone rang again. “Can you hear it?” he asked as soon as he answered. “Yeah, she was sure.” Zephyr looked at me again. “You are sure, right?”

I nodded. “Positive. That’s the number. It should be ringing.”

Hermes stayed on the cell phone while he kept looking.

Notwithstanding my assurances, I handed the landline receiver to Kai and went back to double check that I’d written the number correctly. And that my computer search was right. Both checked out. It’s a big house . . . Maybe the telephone is kept out of the way . . . But, maybe I just misdialed?

“Those three Sentinels are just two miles back now. Still headed this way.” Blake was beginning to sound tense.

I dashed back to the operations area and took the landline back from Kai. But just as I was about to hang up to redial, Hermes stirred in his chair and opened his eyes. He took in the darkened room and the quiet in an instant. “Status?” he asked Zephyr.

“Three Sentinels within two miles; at least five more in the area. We’re on the ground; minimal power.” He bent over and removed the probe from the back of Hermes’ skull.

Hermes rose. “Good. Shut down everything. Blake’s still in the cockpit?”

Zephyr nodded. “I sent Dakota to the weapons station, too.”

Hermes nodded in approval. “Good. Take over the principal pilot’s station and have Blake co-pilot. Everyone else, secure stations. Comms discipline.”

Zephyr nodded and left; Hermes, Kai, Abhaya and I managed to find our crash seats before all the lights went out.

We were back to waiting, hiding . . . hoping that we wouldn’t be seen. Even if we were lucky, that meant hours of just sitting, keeping quiet in the dark ship, with nothing to do but watch Britt’s death in my mind, over and over again.

Tough, seemingly no-nonsense Britt, who had nonetheless gotten a kick out of pretending to be a stoned deadhead . . . and who had smiled like a girl when I found her some sports bras . . . . The woman who had brought me kicking and screaming into the real world, who had forced my unused muscles to function as evolution had intended, had died forty yards from me. And I had done nothing to prevent it — nor anything to avenge her.

I had run away.

And now we were being hunted by machines. Hardware rather than software, but designed and programmed by the same pitiless intelligence. An intelligence wholly devoid of feeling, knowing neither fear nor hope, love nor hatred. It gave no thought to ending an inconvenient human life. Not Britt’s . . . and not mine.

I must not fear.
.
.
To be continued . . . .

Chapter 6: Zugzwang

“You’ve said it yourselves. All of you. We don’t know whether anything we think we know about the past is true. How can you have so much faith in a . . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.

“A prophecy?” Hermes finished my sentence, then leaned forward. “Our faith isn’t blind. We aren’t proposing to treat this ‘Cleo’ any different than other adults we have brought out. If she can prove that she has some ability within the Matrix – or outside it, for all we know – that we haven’t encountered yet, then we’ll rely on it. Not before.”

It was two days since we had returned to the Belisarius from our disastrous trip to visit Jo. No, I thought. Not ‘Jo.’ ‘Cassandra.’ Better not to think of her as someone I know. Because, sure as hell, I DON’T! The Sentinels had not found us in our hidden location, and as we cautiously brought our electronic systems back online, we had discovered no sign of their presence nearby.

We’d remained in place, extending our probe network, monitoring the Matrix from a solid tap, and pausing to remember, and bid farewell, to our fallen comrade. Britt was cremated in the ship’s incinerator; death during a mission was, sadly, a sufficiently regular occurrence that the capability was included on all ships.

Now, however, it was time to decide what to do with the information Jo had given us, and everyone who wasn’t actively on duty was gathered in the mess to discuss it. Dakota (Cockpit) and Kai (Matrix monitoring station) were listening in over the intercom.

Our entire organization was sufficiently military that Hermes could have simply told us what to do – but he wouldn’t order someone to go on a mission against their better judgment without a compelling reason. And clearly, he had his own doubts about what “Cassandra” had proposed.

I heard what Hermes said, but I thought he was deceiving himself. “How can you say you won’t treat her differently, when you already are? You’re the one who told Cassandra that we don’t attempt to bring people out unless they try to make contact on their own.”

Zephyr responded before Hermes could. “That’s for their protection, not ours. The risk factor to us, to this crew, is no different than it is on any extraction.”

“Except that the first step on this hare-brained mission already cost us Britt!”

“It has,” he replied evenly enough, though the redness in his face suggested he was suppressing his own temper. “But Britt and I both had close calls with Agents on the mission that extracted you. It’s part of the job, Noelle.”

Abhaya broke in, his New York accent cutting like a ripsaw. “Look. You want to fight? We want to fight too. Maybe this ‘prophecy’ is totally fugazy. A fake. We don’t know Jack, and what we think we know may be complete bullshit. I get that. But real talk here. We do know we can’t stand up to the machines right now. If we walk away from this thing, we’ll just keep losing. If there’s even a chance Cleo can find a way to start tearing down the cage, I’m all in.”

Blake was nodding as Abhaya spoke. “A bad chance is better’n no chance, girl, and right now, ‘no chance’ is where we’re sitting.”

Hermes was watching me carefully. “I won’t order you to go back in for this. We can have you on Matrix monitoring while we’re inside.”

I shook my head angrily. “I’m not trying to protect myself, dammit! I’m trying to protect all of you. All of us. Zephyr, don’t you remember what Britt told me, just after our first simulator battle?”

Zephyr shook his head.

“‘Fantasize all you want . . . but go down that road too far, and you just get good people killed!’”

Dakota’s smokey contralto came over the intercom. “Noelle. Britt was a friend of mine, too. Her death was stupid. Senseless. I don’t want that to be the end of her story.”

Kai keyed her mic. “I want to avenge my friends. Not just Britt – I want to avenge everyone – all the people I’ve lost. I want to fight, and I want to do it with some hope – any hope – that we might win. If Cassandra says this ‘Cleo’ can help us fight, I want to try.”

I closed my eyes. They were insane. They were willing to hare off on a wild-goose chase, guided by an old woman’s assurances about a ‘prophecy’ that might never have been made in the first place. It was like Britt’s death had infected the entire crew with a kind of group madness, and I couldn’t get them to see that this ‘hope’ was chimerical.

But all of that was water under the bridge. They were going to take this mission, crazy though it was. The only thing I could do was try to limit the damage.

I opened my eyes again and gave Hermes a resigned look. “Everyone is determined to go, so we’ll go. But Cassandra is right; our best chance for success is if I do the insertion. Cleo at least knows me, and she’s more likely to listen to me than anyone else. And we’ll minimize the downside risk if I go alone.”

Hermes’ expression didn't change, but his eyes seemed warmer. “There’s no need for that – and it’s not feasible anyway. We need at least four people inside to do an extraction safely. It’s not just a matter of swallowing a red pill. We monitor the person’s life signs and trace back their location in the real world when they’re ejected from their pod.”

“I understand,” I answered. “But this is different from your normal case. We can’t expect Cleo to meet me for a drink and swallow your red pill on the spot. I’ve got to feel her out first. If she’s interested, we can set up a meeting that includes more people.”

“I hate to say it, but that makes sense, boss,” Blake said.

Zephyr shook his head. “We don’t send people in alone.”

“But this time you should,” I said gently. “We already know the first part of this mission was blown. The rest may be too. Sending in more people just means there are more people to lose if everything lands in the crapper.”

“You need someone watching your back!” Zephyr looked incensed, which I found somewhat touching.

“Zephyr . . . really. It’s okay. I’m a big girl. You can monitor from the ship, just like we did when Hermes was stuck inside.”

Hermes, who had observed our byplay silently, intervened. “Normally I’d agree with you, Zephyr. But Noelle’s argument is logical. She is obviously the right person for the initial contact. Anyone else would just be there to guard her.”

“She needs someone to guard her! We can’t just hang her out on her own — she has almost no real experience.”

“I’ve actually had pretty extensive experience, even before I met all of you.” I thought of my ‘adventures’ in Africa, Australia and Asia, back in the days before I took the pill that Hermes offered. And afterward . . .

“As far as Agents are concerned, I have less experience than you, but ‘guarding’ against them doesn’t work and you know it. If an Agent shows up, my ‘guard’ would be doing exactly the same thing I would – running.”

Zephyr – bless him! – wanted to protest, but he couldn’t think of a compelling argument.

Hermes nodded sharply. “All right. Noelle, I want you to find out everything you can about Cleo’s alter ego. Where he lives, where he works, family, associates, whatever. When you have some notion of where he can be approached, get the info to Abhaya and Blake, and they’ll work up some sims for us to go through.”

I nodded and rose. “Right, boss.” Avoiding Zephyr’s eyes, I left to relieve Kai at the Matrix monitoring station so I could do my research.

~o~O~o~
Six hours later, I turned the monitoring station over to Dakota and went to grab some sleep, having transmitted the first fruits of my research to Blake and Abhaya so that they could prepare some sim exercises.

Zephyr was waiting by the door to my cabin. “Can I talk to you?”

I nodded, spun the wheel lock and gestured for him to enter. “Official or unofficial?” I asked as I followed him in.

He shrugged. “It’s about the mission, but . . . it’s unofficial. I’m worried about you, Noelle.”

“I appreciate that. Really, I do. But if this thing’s a trap, I don’t want it to spring on more of us than it needs to.”

He nodded, looking no happier. “I understand the logic. It just . . . it doesn’t change how I feel. You don’t think we should be doing this at all, and you’re the one who’s taking all the risk.”

I shook my head, smiling, then stepped in close, lightly circling his neck with my arms. “That’s not what’s bothering you and you know it. The XO understands the logic, but having me go into the lion’s den while you stay on the ship offends your delicate male sensibilities.” I gave him a teasing kiss. “I think that’s very sweet.”

He looked exasperated. “Sweet!!! You’re risking your life!” But he couldn’t help himself. He pulled me in tight, just as I’d hoped he would, crushing me in a hard embrace and kissing me with fierce urgency.

My hands slid down to his back as I returned his kisses with equal heat. His muscles were hard, but knotted with a mix of excitement and worry. I pressed my body into his even more fervently. God, I have needed this so much!

His voice was harsh with passion. “I want you, Noelle!!!”

“Then take me! Take me now!”

He needed no further invitation. Barely restraining his eagerness, he grabbed the bottom of my tunic, raised it and pulled it off in a single, fluid motion. His finger traced the delicate strap of my new bra, then stroked the exposed and satiny skin of my breast.

I shivered, then undid the drawstring that held up my homespun pants, letting them fall to the deck. I freed my feet and then went to work on him, stripping both tunic and pants. His shorts followed . . . .

It was like my dream, at last. I was on my back in bed with a handsome man between my smooth legs, loving me, satisfying my aching desire, bringing me to heights of pleasure I had never experienced in my crazy life in the Matrix, where I had a body that told me one thing and a mind, heart and soul that told me something else. Zephyr’s face didn’t match the dream, of course, but this was real. I was all woman, he was all man, and we were matched – completely – in both our desire and our need.

It wasn’t tender or sweet. We were both too eager and needed it too much. There might be time for that later . . . Or there might not be. We couldn’t know, so we fought to squeeze every last ounce of pleasure from the moment that we had. When I felt him explode, deep inside me, I detonated as well, screaming my release as he clutched me in a desperate embrace.

He bent down and kissed me slowly, thoroughly, then extracted himself, rolled to his side, and spooned into my boneless body.

I lay there, my physical need sated, feeling the warmth of his body against my back, the assurance of his arms wrapped around me. But something deep inside refused the peace and human comfort of that tender moment. Instead, my mind spun and twisted, unfocused, seeking . . . .

He nibbled on my ear. “Penny for your thoughts?”

I stroked his arm. Unable to make sense of the chaos in my head, I temporized. “You might be overpaying.”

“I’m an idiot about money. Always have been. Something you should probably know about me.”

In the AI simulation where we’d both been born and raised, inability to handle money was considered such a terrible thing as to be almost a moral failing. And yet . . . . “All those people, so worried about money and all it’ll do for them . . . . but ‘rich’ or ‘poor,’ they’re all swimming in amniotic fluid in seven by three plastic pods.”

He sighed. “Yeah. It’d make a good joke, if it weren’t so freaking horrible.”

Silence returned, but my brain kept spinning, increasingly frenetic and uncontrolled, like a gerbil on a wheel. “Zephyr,” I said finally, clutching his arm as I tried to rein in my racing thoughts and find the source of what was causing me such unexpected distress. “What’s Zion like?”

He moved behind me, shifting position. Probably trying to figure out where I was going. “It’s, ah . . . utilitarian, I guess.”

“Are there parks? Concerts? Do people go out to dinner? Have parties?”

He was silent, thinking. Finally, he said, “It’s a fortress, Noelle. There isn’t any sunlight. There aren’t parks, because space is pretty premium. People do have some time for leisure, and we try to preserve something of normalcy. But . . . it’s not New York. It’s not even Fresno.”

It was my turn to be silent, though I pulled his arms around me even tighter. “Will it always be like this?” I whispered. “Are our lives just one crisis after another . . . brief moments of vigilant inactivity, followed by running, fighting, running some more . . . until the day our number comes up we get killed?”

He hugged me more closely than before, trying to give comfort with his body that his words couldn’t match.

My voice was soft, and I couldn’t hide the darkness of my thoughts. “In the wars I learned about in school – the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam – things got intense. People suffered beyond imagining. Millions died. But they ended. The wars ended, and people got back to building normal lives that weren’t all about life and death and resistance. Hermes . . . Dear God, Zephyr! Hermes has been fighting for forty years!”

He stroked my cheek, feeling the dampness of my tears. “It’s why we all want to find the One. Sure, we want to kick the machines’ asses. We want to avenge our friends. But more than all of that, we want to just be regular people again.”

“Regular people . . . . Will we even remember how to be like that? God! What have those terrible machines done to us!”

He fell asleep holding me, but exhausted as I was, sleep wouldn't come for a long while. The wave of sadness that had crashed over me hit again and again, pulling me under, dragging me down, down . . . .

I wept for the world that was lost, for the lives that we were forced to lead . . . for the memories of normalcy that invaded my brain. Windsurfing on a perfect summer afternoon . . . Flying a kite in Golden Gate Park with my dad when I was eight . . . eating sushi with Gavin as the sunset reflected off the white tiles of the Sydney Opera House . . . a pancake breakfast . . . finding an abandoned artillery emplacement on Mount Tamalpais . . . .

Memories that weren’t even real.

~o~O~o~
When I went to the mess to meet with Abhaya, Blake and Hermes the following morning, I was able to function again. My existential despair over life in the real world was something I couldn’t resolve, so I put it in a box. Meanwhile, I felt much better physically — less tense than I had felt since we lost Britt. My body had been screaming for sexual release, but I had been ignoring it. Or perhaps, just misunderstanding the signals.

If Hermes saw any of that in my face, he gave no sign. “Alright, Noelle. What have you learned?”

“I searched the deadname that Jo – that ‘Cassandra’ – provided. There’s actually a fair bit of information, and I found a few articles in the Times of London that included a photo. The quality isn’t great, so I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty that Anthony St. Claire is the transgender woman I know as Cleo. But I think so.”

Hermes nodded. “Good enough.”

“Right,” I continued. “This St. Claire is a mover and shaker at Flemings, an old investment house in the City of London. He lives in Knightsbridge, appears to be unmarried and has no children. However, he has a live-in staff at his residence – both a cook and a housekeeper.”

“So . . . what’s your thinking?” Hermes asked. “Do you plan to call him? Approach him at work? At home?”

“I don’t think so. We were always careful at the hacienda not to ask about personal details. If people offered them, that was fine, though it was understood that the information would stay behind Jo’s walls. Anyhow, Cleo never did. Share, that is. So if I suddenly drop in on her, or even make a phone call, it’ll trip all her defenses. She’ll feel like Jo’s betrayed her confidences.”

“Which she has,” Blake observed. At Hermes’ sharp look, he added, “Just sayin’, you know. We wouldn’t have the name, except for Cassandra.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But it looks like our friend has a habit, most nights, of stopping by the Old Doctor Butler’s Head Pub before heading home. I thought maybe I could just happen to be there. It’s an unlikely coincidence, but it’s at least possible. And if she’s alone, I expect she’d be willing to chat with me.”

“Sounds pretty thin,” Hermes observed. “And it's a long way from a ‘chat’ to where we need her to be.”

I shrugged. “I’m open to suggestions, but barring a kidnapping, or slipping her a Mickey, this strikes me as the best option.”

That elicited a grunt from the captain. “Not a chance. I’ll bend rules if I’ve got a good reason too — it goes with the command. But no way I’m unplugging someone without real consent.” Turning his gaze on Blake and Abhaya he asked, “You have a sim ready?”

Abhaya nodded. “It’s rough, but yeah. It’ll do.”

“And you found an insertion and extraction point?”

It was Blake’s turn to nod. “Oh, yeah! It’s a big, beautiful, busy area. I’ve got a couple good locations within two blocks of the pub, with easy backups further out if she needs them.”

“Show me,” Hermes ordered.

We went into the operations area. Hermes, Abhaya and I got in the chairs and left Blake – the natural-born son of Zion – to get us all plugged in and act as control. In a few minutes, the three of us were in the sim, standing in a book-lined office that was only illuminated by the lights coming from the outside window. It appeared to be night.

Hermes said, “Okay, let’s just do a walk-through first. Show us the area.”

“Right,” said Abhaya. “Blake, no traffic or people.” In his Matrix persona, Abhaya presented as a petite Punjabi woman in a conservatively tailored, calf-length saffron dress with capped sleeves that exposed smooth and slender arms. Somehow, this presentation, coupled with his pleasantly warm soprano voice, made his pure New York accent seem even more incongruous. “Let’s bounce.”

The office was connected directly to a hallway. The brass plaque by the door said, “Sidney Westen, Barrister.”

“Lawyers have a bad habit of working late,” Hermes cautioned.

Abhaya smiled. “Not when they’re kickin’ back in Majorca.”

“For?”

“Two weeks. Starting the day before yesterday.”

Hermes gave a noncommittal snort. “Alright. Proceed.”

“Okay. Out the door, you go down this hallway twenty feet, then take a right at this fork.” Abhaya provided commentary as we walked. “Door to the stairwell is only twenty-five feet further.”

We walked down the hall and he opened the door labeled “stairs.” “Two flights down, and the exit is in an outside courtyard, not a lobby.”

“Three flights,” I corrected. We started descending.

“No,” Abhaya argued. “We’re on the third floor.”

“Trust me,” I said, remembering prior trips to the U.K.

When we came to the door marked “Ist Floor,” Abhaya pushed it open as Hermes and I kept going down the stairs. “I don’t get it,” he said a moment later, taking the rear.

Without looking back, I said, “They call the ground floor the ground floor; the floor up from that is the first floor.”

“No wonder we had a revolution,” he groused.

The courtyard at the bottom was just a space between a few buildings. Big pavers flanked by essentially generic urban architecture – concrete, brick and glass that went up six or seven floors.

“Nice place for an ambush,” Hermes observed.

“There is a lobby exit, but I think this one’s less obtrusive,” Abhaya replied.

“Lead on,” Hermes said.

We exited the courtyard and turned right. The sign said “Telegraph Street,” but it was basically a narrow strip of concrete pavers between two “sidewalks” that were simply differently colored pavers set at the same level and arranged in a distinct pattern.

“This’ll take us to the pub,” Abhaya said. “Two blocks, straight shot.”

We walked up the street – or moderately car-friendly pedestrian walkway, depending on your point of view – and crossed something that could easily carry vehicular traffic in both directions. It seemed eerie without any cars or people, like we had wandered onto the set of a post-apocalyptic Stephen King novel. Why not? I’m LIVING in a post-apocalyptic Stephen King novel!

“Moorgate,” Abhaya said shortly. “Keep going straight; the street at the other end of this alley is Coleman.”

The extension of “Telegraph Street” was called “Great Bell Alley,” but seemed to be about the same width as the “street.” We walked past the large windows of several deserted restaurants as we made our way up the alley until it deadended at Coleman Street. The building we were facing, cold and modern in concrete and glass, was breached by a covered walkway through which the sign for the pub was clearly visible. We crossed the deserted street, went through the walkway and found the door.

Inside, the main impression was of very dark wood — mahogany, I thought. The centerpiece of the place, naturally, was a long, curving bar with a gleaming brass rail. It was a substantial room, especially for this part of the City, where rents were eye-wateringly high. The space permitted both booths and chairs with red leather seats. In the daytime it would be well-lit by the large windows that looked out on the square where we’d entered, but in the evening the artificial lighting was subdued.

We walked around, checking sightlines. The goal would be to wait somewhere I could see as much as possible – and be seen as little as possible. One booth, ideal from that perspective, had to be ruled out because it was too far from any exit.

“This one here’s your best bet,” Abhaya said after inspecting a booth that had seats against the wall, good views of the door and the bar, and a good exit very close. “But if you can’t get it, you're probably better off at the end of the bar.”

Finally, Hermes decided that he’d seen enough. “Blake,” he said to our sim controller, “add in a normal complement of people. And traffic on the streets.”

Suddenly, the simulated pub was packed with people and the noise level shot up.

The three of us made our way through the virtual crowd and sat at the booth Abhaya had singled out. The sound of random conversations was loud, but I was glad that we didn’t have to shout to make ourselves heard. It would definitely be possible to have a private conversation with Cleo here.

“All right,” Hermes said. “Let’s see how well this site works if your mission goes south. Abhaya and I are going to exit the sim; I’ve got some things I want him to add. Then we’re going to have an Agent show up, and you’re going to try to make your escape.”

I nodded, but said, “Blake, before you throw the Agent at me, I want a download of everything you have on these buildings – schematics, whatever – as well as the locations of our alternative extraction sites.”

“Ah, you’re gonna go and take all the fun out of it,” Abhaya joked. Then he clapped me on the shoulder, laughed and said, “Good luck, Jim!” And just like that, he and Hermes were deleted from the sim.

I watched the bustle for a moment, waiting for the hyperfocus that would come with Blake’s download. When it arrived, a few moments later, I found the data set was detailed and appeared to be reasonably current. Good.

I was tense, even though this was just a simulation. It felt real, and it was practice for something that was real enough that I could get killed if I screwed it up. And I knew that a simulated Agent would be showing up. I needed to be primed for action when it did.

Just thinking about Agents was making me sweat. Making me remember the crack of a pistol shot . . . the shock on Britt’s face . . . the body spinning, falling . . . the pattern of her blood as it sprayed against the walls of Jo’s gatehouse . . . .

Sitting and waiting was not helping. I got up and made my way through the crowd at the bar. Might as well enjoy what I can. A pleasantly plump young woman in a white shirt and black skirt was dealing with the patrons at my end of the bar. “What’ll you have, Luv?”

That’ll be Abhaya’s doing — such a fine touch with characters, I thought. “Pint of the Bluebird, please,” I replied, trying to get into the right frame of mind.

She took my money, then went to start my pour.

I watched as the rich, brown liquid filled the glass, practically tasting the memory. It’d been a while since I had really good beer.

She returned and placed the drink in front of me. “Here you are, then.”

“Cheers,” I said, raising the glass in a salute. I continued the motion smoothly, discharging the liquid straight into her face – a face that was rapidly starting to change. Before the Agent finished the transformation, I shoved her head, causing her to stumble back.

“Oi!!!” shouted the “patrons” near me. One or two made a grab, but I wasn’t having any of that. I spun away from the bar and sped to the nearest door. Well before the Agent could have regained his feet, I was out and heading towards the covered walkway.

Three steps into the covered area, the Agent appeared in front of me, blocking my escape to Coleman Street completely. I dove through a shop door that fronted the walkway just as the Agent’s first shot rang out. London has strict gun prohibitions, but Agents write their own rules.

I would need to do the same.

In my mind, I pulled up the schematic of the building that Blake had sent me. I leapt over a cheese display and charged down a narrow hallway, turned right, and was back in the courtyard by the pub. The Agent was behind me, gaining ground with every step . . . .

Three doors down, and I charged through another door just as the Agent emerged from the cheese shop. Up an internal staircase. One flight . . . two . . . three . . . . My heart was pounding and my breath was ragged.

I reminded myself that I wasn’t here, that my muscles weren’t actually moving, and that the body I appeared to possess was a complete illusion. I am not breathing. This is not air.

The Agent’s steps were pounding on the stairs below me as I emerged onto a rooftop terrace. I sprinted toward the edge. This is all illusion. It is NOT real!!!! Believe, damnit!

I jumped, planted my right foot on the knee wall, and launched myself out over Coleman Street towards the building on the other side, thinking, This had better work!!!

It did.

As soon as I hit the roof of the building opposite, I started running in an irregular pattern, knowing I was exposed. Sure enough, a shot rang out behind me, chipping the concrete inches from my shoulder. I kept running, heading towards the other side of the building.

I would need to make another leap . . . but Moorgate was wider than Coleman. Significantly wider. I told myself it didn’t matter. It’s an illusion! I can do it!!!

I quailed at the edge of the roof. It’s too far! But another shot from behind convinced me, and I jumped. Again I flew into the night . . . but this time, the arc of my leap was nowhere near flat enough. My eyes were level with the roof I was aiming for . . . and then I couldn’t see it. Suddenly, I was plunging toward the pavement, towards the cars that were tooling along without any thought that it was about to start raining men.

Consumed with panic, I screwed my eyes shut and braced for impact. But instead of unforgiving asphalt, I landed on what felt like the world’s largest goose-down pillow. All sound ceased.

“Bang,” Abhaya said, somewhere above me.

I opened my eyes and looked up. Abhaya’s saffron dress was bright, caught in the headlights of a car that had stopped — as everything had apparently stopped — the instant I hit the ground. “That didn’t go so well,” I acknowledged.

“Yeah, nah. Go back and start again.”

“I don’t know. Feels pretty comfortable here.”

“Well, we kind of suspended the rules. Do that in the Matrix and it’s gonna suck big time.”

“Why? Just how far can we jump?”

He shrugged. “Like Hermes says, we can bend the rules some, but we can’t just go breaking them. We aren’t levitating; we’re just doing a really extended long jump. You did good, getting over Coleman Street. I wouldn’t try it anyplace wider.”

I nodded ruefully, took his offered hand, and got back on my feet. He disappeared again and I went back to the pub . . . .

This time, the Agent came through the front door. I was forced back into the stairs to the roof, but the Agent found another host on a higher floor and beat me there. I dashed through hallways in the building, heading for a window, when I suddenly came on a wall of pure white. Not “a wall that had been painted white.” It was simply an absence of anything, where there was supposed to be a hallway with doors, and a window at the end.

The Agent turned down the hallway and I was trapped with no way out. The gun he was pointing at me seemed enormous.

But he froze. Abhaya turned the corner behind him and said, “delete Agent,” and the virtual Agent vanished. I wish it worked that way in the Matrix!

“I’m, ah, sorry about that,” Abhaya said sheepishly. “I didn’t finish this part of the sim ‘cuz I didn’t think you’d head this far into the building.”

“You mean I fell off the edge of the map?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“Oh.”

“My bad. Buy you a drink?”

We headed back to the pub, where the Agent came out of a door marked “toilet.” This time, I made it through the covered walkway and across Coleman . . . .

We ran the sim at least a dozen times. I lost count. I explored multiple ways to exit the pub and several different routes to possible extraction sites.

I was back in my preferred booth at the pub when Hermes walked over carrying two pints. He handed me one wordlessly and took the bench opposite my seat. After having a drink from his own glass, he said, “You got killed in half the sims.”

“Fifty percent survival rate if an Agent shows up,” I conceded. “But . . . what are the odds that an Agent does show up?”

“Our entry into the Matrix creates a localized anomaly, and Agents will eventually come to investigate. But what happened in Vegas – having an Agent show up so soon after we arrived – is very unusual. Normally it takes four or five days.”

“Then the odds look a lot better, don’t they?”

“Yes . . . but with a significant caveat.”

I nodded glumly. “We don’t know why an Agent showed up in Vegas so fast.”

“Right. Maybe it was a coincidence. But maybe we were compromised in some way . . . and maybe we still are.”

I drank down a good third of my glass, feeling like I’d earned it. “Go/no go on the mission is your call, boss. But if you want to go forward, I’m still the one to do it.”

He nodded, his eyes troubled. “I don’t like it. But nothing I’ve seen today changes the logic of what we decided yesterday.”

“Alright then. I assume you’ll want me to go soon?”

“You’ll need to eat, and rest. Tomorrow night.”

I nodded and rose. “Tomorrow night then.”

To be continued. . . . .

Chapter 7: English Opening

I slept hard, and unfortunately, slept alone. Zephyr had almost all of the shift while I was sleeping. But there would be time for Zephyr and me to continue exploring whether there was something solid between us.

Or else there wouldn’t be. If I wanted any kind of future, I needed to get through this mission first. I focused on that.

Once I was up, I spent more time in the simulator trying out some additional ideas, and did further research on “Anthony St. Claire” through our tap into the Matrix. Beyond that, I simply got myself mentally prepared for my meeting with the person I knew as “Cleo.” The time passed extremely quickly.

Hermes accompanied me as far as the stockroom. This was our own virtual construct, similar to the sims, but we used it to create items that we could take in with us, employing the same hack that we used to jack ourselves into the Matrix.

Zephyr was acting as control, so he keyed up some clothing racks as soon as Hermes and I were in. The dark track suit that seemed to be the default attire of my “residual self image” in the Matrix would not do for a foray into a centuries’ old pub in the heart of London's financial district.

I looked at the offerings and shook my head. “A bit too Wall Street, Zephyr. Cleo knows I do something in IT. And I’m American, so she won’t expect European style sense. Or even British style sense.”

Hermes snorted.

I thought for a minute. “Let’s have some nice blue jeans. Dress shirts with stripes or maybe checks, and button-down collars. And a navy-blue blazer. No ties.”

“Blue jeans?” Hermes looked quizzical. “Aren’t you pretending to be in the City for a conference?”

I nodded. “Yeah. The blazer’s kind of conservative; the jeans are a bit of a counterbalance. IT folks are often even less formal. It’s kind of a way to rub our corporate masters’ noses in the fact that we’re indispensable.”

I was suddenly surrounded by racks of the items I’d requested, and made my choices quickly. Zephyr had thoughtfully included some sundries as well — shoes, socks, belts, wallets, watches. I passed on the latter item. Most people in my office just relied on their cell phones for the time; I hadn’t worn a watch in years.

Next came the dodgier part, since it was flat out illegal where I was going. “Guns. I need . . . .” I thought for a minute. “The Barretta 92SB-F. Two of them. With spare magazines.”

Hermes nodded approvingly. “Dakota told me to remind you to bring a knife.”

“Right. Let me have a folding Paranza Corta stiletto as well.”

A table appeared with all the hardware I had requested. Normally it’d weigh too much . . . but those are rules we can bend in the Matrix.

Hermes looked thoughtful. “You’re going to need to keep all the hardware hidden. Some sort of outer ware, I think.”

I nodded. “Let me play the Yank card again. Give me a duster. Lots of internal straps and pockets.”

It took a few minutes, but I was finally loaded up and ready to go.

Hermes walked around me, checking out the overall look. “Sure you don’t want a ten-gallon hat to go with that?” He was only half joking.

I laughed. “No. On its own, the duster just looks cool and eccentric. Add the hat and I’d look like I was auditioning for a bit-part in Dallas.”

“As you say . . . . Well, you look fine otherwise. Are you ready?”

I took a deep breath and exhaled explosively. “Ready.”

“Zephyr, send her in.”

~o~O~o~
The lawyer’s office – “Barrister’s Chambers” seemed like a pretentious description for such a small space – was as empty as it had been in our sim. Nothing else seemed different either, so I exited soundlessly, checking to make sure that the door wasn’t locked when I closed it behind me.

I might be in a hurry when I returned.

Down the hallway. Turn right. Down the stairs. Into the courtyard . . . into the street. A light rain was falling – more of a drizzle, really, but I was glad for my duster. There were people walking along Telegraph, chatting. Relaxed. Umbrellas were up, and not all of them were black.

I did my best to fit in with the crowd, moving at a steady pace. Not rushing; not dawdling. But I wasn’t carrying an umbrella, and I knew that everything about me – my clothes, my walk, even my facial expression – was alerting everyone that I was not one of them.

I heard an older woman’s voice behind me, in conversation with her friend, and caught the word, “Yank.” Old enough to remember when we were overfed, oversexed, and over here, I thought. Assuming, of course, that any of those memories are real.

Moorgate was busy; lots of traffic going both ways. I waited for a minute or so until it was safe to cross.

Great Bell Alley had some pedestrians as well, and people were checking out the packed restaurants through the tall windows that lined the first floor of the building to my right. The noise of the City was all around me. It was subtly different from San Francisco; more different still when I focused on it.

Coleman Street wasn’t nearly as busy as Moorgate had been. I walked right across and stepped into the covered walkway that led to the door to the Old Doctor Butler's Head Pub. I paused in the doorway to adjust my eyes to the light and my ears to the substantial increase in sound.

Everything looked and sounded exactly as we had expected. The pub’s smell had a certain, immediately recognizable odor — old, varnished wood, people packed in a bit tight, and lots and lots of beer.

There was no sign of Cleo, but I had arrived before we thought it likely she might show up. The two men who were at my preferred table looked like they might be finishing up. Rather than standing around like a vulture, I made my way to the bar and ordered myself a pint.

As the bartender went to draw my Bluebird, an older man to my left gave me a smile and said, “You watch yourself with those, mate — they’ve got a touch more punch than a Budweiser!”

I returned his smile. “I can certainly hope!”

“Won’t find any of that gnat’s piss here!” That was from a younger man in a group to my right. Five twenty-somethings, three and two, who had an air of being office mates rather than old friends.

I smiled but offered no response, and I wasn’t sufficiently interesting for him to follow up. Besides, he looked like he was trying to push things with one of the two women in the group.

I sipped my beer in silence, keeping an eye on both the table I wanted and the front door. My mind wandered to the paradox of how the AI would know what a pub that had been around for a few years would smell like. Of course, if the AI didn’t know, it might have given us the wrong memory inputs, so that the smell I associated with an old pub wasn’t what an old pub actually would have smelled like.

It was all too easy to follow that rabbit hole down, and every time I did it got me nowhere.

I looked around instead, taking in the scene. Lots of white men in nice suits, but it wasn’t all male or all white. The City of London was one of the premier centers of international finance – a capital of capital – and the pub was in the middle of all of that.

But while I didn’t see a whole lot of working class patrons, there were plenty like the group to my right who were the sort of climbers you see wherever office buildings congregate. They hadn’t arrived, not by a city mile, but they all aspired to.

I had been in bars that felt like this in San Francisco and LA, New York, Sydney, Rome and Hong Kong. Well . . . there was probably more beer in evidence here. And why not? It has the advantage of being exceptionally good beer.

The young man who’d spoken to me earlier was pushing the pace too fast for the young lady he was pursuing. It was strange to watch from a distance, like an observer at a play. His eagerness and desire were obvious. It was equally clear that she was interested — possibly very interested, even — but found his direct approach distasteful.

Unfortunately, the frustrated and overeager young man caught my sardonic observation. “Just what exactly are you looking at, Yank?”

The last thing I wanted was some sort of scene. I raised my hands placatingly. “Sorry. No offense intended.”

“If you don’t want offence taken, I recommend you mind your own business!”

I took in his flushed face, his loosened tie, his overly aggressive response and his somewhat slurred but still superior public school accent. He’d clearly had a few too many, and might not let me de-escalate all that quickly.

Still, worth a try. “I’ll do that. Thanks.” I looked away, hoping he’d let it go.

“You can apologize to Miss Lattimer, while you’re at it!”

I turned back slowly.

“Miss Lattimer” was certainly looking annoyed, but not at me. “Percy, stop it! Just stop it! You’re being impossible!”

Quite obviously, he was spoiling for a fight and it was too late for his lady friend to dissuade him. I’d need to watch him, and I had other things I should be watching instead.

In the forlorn hope that it might work, I said, “my apologies to you, Miss Lattimer. And to anyone else in your party who I might have inadvertently offended.”

This didn’t appear to mollify “Percy,” but he seemed to be having trouble finding a reason to object to it. Finally, he gave up in disgust. “Americans! You couldn’t even defeat Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia! The country scarcely exists!”

“I don’t recall being at war with them,” I said mildly. “We just sent peace-keeping troops.”

“Imbecile! I’m talking about football! The World Cup! You’ve heard of it, surely?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow it.”

“You probably fancy gridiron! Idiotic game!”

“You’re not pissed again, are you?” It was one of his other friends, or work colleagues. “That’s four times this month.”

“Bugger off, Aubrey, I’m fine!” Percy said heatedly.

Another one of his companions set down his pint with a crack. “Christ, Percy, are you trying to get chucked out of every pub in the Square Mile?”

Miss Lattimer put a hand on his arm. “Come on, let me walk you to the Tube.”

“We just got here!” he replied angrily, shaking off her arm.

“It’s not the minutes, it’s the pints,” said the other woman in the group. “Please, Percy. Why don’t you let Jane walk you out?”

“Because I’m drinking, that’s why! This is a pub, isn’t it? Or has that toad Blair decided to outlaw that, too!” He stepped towards me, his beer sloshing. “And I’m not done talking to our visitor!” He made the last word a sneer.

“Actually, you are.” The voice came from just behind me, and was instantly recognizable, even unmodulated. “On your way, Mr. Mott. We don’t want a scene.”

Percy’s ruddy face blanched. “Sir Anthony! I didn’t see you there!”

“I rather hope you didn’t. Nonetheless . . . .”

“Of course, sir. We were just going. Weren’t we, Jane?” He looked at “Miss Lattimer” pleadingly.

She rolled her eyes, then looked behind me. “I’m dreadfully sorry, Sir Anthony. He’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“I’m sure he will,” Cleo said behind me. The unstated “he’d better be” was clear enough that even someone as thick as the young man in front of me could scarcely miss it.

I didn’t turn to look until Percy, cowed, had headed for the exit, the rest of his colleagues deciding it was a very good time to leave as well.

Cleo cut a stylish and distinguished appearance as a man. Savile Row tailored suit, conservatively striped tie, snow-white dress shirt with cufflinks in a subdued, lustrous gold. I saw the recognition in her eyes – and the wariness.

I stuck out my hand, playing my Yank card to hopefully diffuse any concerns she might have over being exposed. “I’m Noel Ferguson. Thanks for the timely assist.”

“A pleasure, Mr. Ferguson. One of our — somewhat less dependable — employees, I’m afraid. Legacy hires are more trouble than they’re ever worth.” She reached out to take my hand, giving it a solid single pump. “Anthony St. Claire.” Naturally, she pronounced it “An-tenny Sinclair.”

“Can I buy you a drink, Mr. St. Claire? Seems like the least I can do.”

She hesitated for just a moment before saying, “That would be splendid.” Looking at the bartender, she said, “Good evening, Dick. I don’t suppose you can find us a table in all this?”

“Of course, Sir Anthony,” the man said. “And thank you for sorting that potential unpleasantness just now.”

A quick glance revealed that my preferred table was being bussed as we spoke. “Can we sit there?”

The bartender shot me a strange look. “Certainly, sir. We’ll have it clean in just a moment.” Looking at my companion, he said, “Your usual, Sir Anthony?”

Cleo inclined her head. “Perfect. Thank you, Dick.”

We made our way to the table and took seats opposite each other.

Cleo waited until Dick had brought her drink, took my money and bustled back behind the bar where he belonged. “Noel . . . what are you doing here?”

I’d known this was coming, so my cover story was pat. “I’m in town for a conference and just decided to wander after the session was over.”

“And out of all the gin joints in all the cities in the world, you happened to walk into mine?”

“You own this place?”

“Don’t be absurd.” She didn’t look suspicious, exactly . . . but she didn’t look open or friendly, either. “Quite the evening for coincidences. I go to my regular place, and find both 'Low-Watt Mott'. . . and you.”

“Pretty weird for me, too — although I could have done without meeting your employees.” I leaned forward and spoke more softly, though there was no chance of our being overheard. “Relax. I’m just passing through. I’m not here to cause trouble.” And that’s probably the biggest untruth I’ve uttered so far.

She gave me a long look, then finally smiled. It was a thin smile, but it was at least a start. “Alright. I have to be careful, and I’m sure you do, too. Still . . . it’s good to see you.”

“You, too. You’re well?”

“Business is flourishing,” she responded. “I haven’t seen a market like this in . . . well, ever, really.”

“I know you’re involved in finance of some sort. . . .”

“Investments, dear boy. Investments.”

I waved my hand. “Yeah. Those.”

She chuckled. “You're old enough to have a few – at least, I should hope you do.”

I thought of the substantial stacks of cash I had carefully amassed through my illegal activities. It dwarfed the pedestrian amounts that I had put into the company’s 401-k plan. “A few. Just a few. I ignore them, mostly.”

“You know what they say about a fool and his money, Noel.” She took another sip of her drink, which looked like a gin and tonic.

“Oh, sure. But I’ll be honest, I can’t really imagine retiring. There are never going to be enough IT people – at least, not good ones – to keep up with demand, so I’m set.”

“Yes, you tech types do seem to be on quite the tear just now. Though I’ll have to warn you, the mania for all things technology is starting to feel a bit like budget champagne – all bubble and no bottom, if you follow me.”

I parried easily. “It’s what happens when folks who don’t understand what we do try to put valuations on it. My two cents.” I didn’t care about any of this, of course. But I wanted her to relax, and talking her language might help that.

“Point to you,” she said with a smile. “So you’re doing well, too?”

“I am, though my measuring stick may look different than yours.” I took a long pull of my beer, then set it down. “I can see business is doing well. But how are you . . . ‘Anthony.’”

She looked down, then met my eyes, dropping her default pose of worldliness. “Well enough, ‘Noel.’ It’s hard to take, sometimes. You know that.”

I nodded, remembering. “I sure do.”

Something in her face suggested she wanted to ask something, but thought maybe she shouldn’t.

I waited her out by taking a long, slow sip of bitter. It’s amazing how effective silence can be at getting people to open up.

In the end, she wasn’t able to resist. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Jo lately?”

A vision flashed through my mind — Jo’s face, composed and still as shots rang out at her gatehouse and all hell broke loose. Somehow, I managed to both nod and smile. “She’s doing well. Consuela and Lourdes too.” That lie almost choked me; I remembered Consuela’s agonized cries as she knelt over Britt’s lifeless body.

More softly, I added, “You are missed. You know that.”

“I’ve missed them too. Missed all of you. I’ve just been . . . .” She paused, shrugged, and finished. “Well . . . you know.”

“Busy?”

“Quite.” She was quiet for a moment, sipping her drink. Again, she seemed conflicted about whether to let her one-word answer stand. After a readily apparent internal struggle, she said, “Honestly, though, that’s not it. I’ve been trying . . . that is to say, I’ve decided . . . .” She lapsed into silence again.

It was a silence I recognized. I saw the pain in her face. The shame, the anguish and the longing. I knew that look, and I knew those feelings. Deeply, intensely, and very, very personally. My heart ached for her. “Decided to let Cleo go?”

She took a gulp of her drink, then nodded, spasmodically. “Yes. That’s it precisely.”

“You did a full purge?”

“How do you . . . ?”

“Because I’ve done them,” I said abruptly, cutting her off. “Three, four times. Rounding up every stitch of clothing, bagging them. Leaving them in bins, or the trash.”

She sat silent, her eyes boring into me. Finally she sighed. “I assume from your statement that you found the process didn’t achieve the intended result . . . for you.”

I shook my head. “No. It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing. I can toss clothes until the sun goes nova, but I’m still Noelle.”

“How do you know it’s not just a child’s fancy? A delusion?” Her voice was low; like my own, it was not pitched to carry. A different tone, and the question might have seemed rhetorical, or even derisive. As it was, she was desperately earnest.

“Did it feel like a fantasy to you? Does it feel that way?”

She lowered her eyes, staring down into her almost empty glass. “No,” she whispered.

“Cleo.” My voice barely touched an audible register. “If your heart tells you something, believe it. If the whole world tells you something else, it’s wrong.”

“The whole world wrong? Don’t you see how daft that is?” Somehow, she didn’t sound as convinced as her words implied.

“No. No, I don’t. The place is fairly bursting with idiots. Why listen to them?”

That at least elicited the chuckle that I’d hoped for. “There, you’ve got me. But seriously . . . they can't all be wrong, can they?”

I looked straight into her troubled eyes. “They can, and they are.”

“I wish I shared your certainty. I’d love to believe that the fault is out there, rather than in here.” She pointed to her heart. “Not that there aren’t times . . . .” Again she paused, uncertain whether or how to voice her thought.

“There are times?” I prodded gently.

“I’ll confess, the world does seem off sometimes.”

Promising . . . but I didn’t want to rush things. “Off?”

She stirred the ice in the bottom of her glass and drank whatever liquid was left. “It’s difficult to describe,” she said, sounding uncomfortable. “Just . . . I’ll be at work, and everything will be going swimmingly. And wholly out of the blue, I’ll get the strongest sense that it’s all a mirage. Unreal.”

“Imposter syndrome?”

She shook her head, impatient. Not at me, but at her inability to convey what she had been feeling. “No, not that! I’ve earned my position by being the best, and that’s simply an objective fact. . . . No. It’s more that the world I’m living in is unreal. Do you understand what I’m saying? It eats at me, like . . . like . . . .” She searched for an appropriate metaphor, but it wasn’t coming.

“Like shrapnel in your mind,” I said quietly. “Burrowing deeper whenever you move.”

Her eyes blazed. “Exactly! You do understand!”

I was just about to follow up when Cleo’s pocket chirped. Startled, she pulled out a Blackberry, typed something quickly, and put it away. “I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got to go – I’ve got . . . well.” She stopped herself, thought again, then sighed. “I’ve got a date and I can’t miss it.”

“A date? Really?”

Cleo made a face. “Yes. Past time I did my duty to the family.”

“And that’s why Cleo has to go?”

“The Mater has been most insistent. Practically crazed, since my brother’s death. And she’s right, of course. But if I’m going to do it. . . . marry, have children, all of it . . . I have to do it properly. I have to give up all this . . . this foolishness.”

Dear God! Did she really believe she could make Cleo vanish forever by standing at an altar in a morning suit and saying “I do?” Now that was delusional! “It’s me here,” I reminded her, keeping my voice low. “I’ve seen you. Cleo is as real as I am!”

She looked uncomfortable. “Even so, I must let her go.”

“Does your mother care more about hypothetical grandchildren then she cares about you?”

She chuckled without humor. “If you’d met my mother, you wouldn’t ask. But that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”

“Are you being fair to the woman you’re dating? What happens when she’s your wife, everything’s legal, and you find that Cleo is still with you?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she whispered. “I tell myself it’s just a matter of being strong. Resolute . . . .”

“And you know that’s bullshit.”

She looked at me with pure misery in her eyes. “Be that as it may.” She rose heavily, reluctantly, as if going to an execution. After a fashion, she was. “I have to go.”

I pulled out a pen, scratched my cell phone number onto a scrap of paper, stood and thrust it into her hands. “Call me!”

She looked at it for a moment, thinking, then gently put it back in my hands. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t be wise. A pleasure . . . Mr. Ferguson.” Without waiting for my reply, she turned and left.

I looked at her retreating back in something like shock, trying to understand how quickly our conversation had gone south. Standing there gaping, though, would draw attention I didn’t want, and she might be instantly suspicious if I followed her out. So I went back to the bar and ordered another Bluebird. I could use a moment to collect my thoughts.

Cleo had been so close! She was one of us, I could tell. For all the success the Matrix’s clever illusions had heaped upon her, she still could see through it. She could feel that it wasn’t right. Just like I had.

But she was dating? She knew she couldn’t bury Cleo forever, however hard she tried. There had to be a way to shake her out of her self-destructive path. I just needed to find the right key . . . .

I needed a plan to take back to the rest of the crew. Call her at work? At home? Those didn’t seem like promising options; it would be too easy to duck my calls. Come back another night? Risky . . . .

Without even realizing it, I’d followed my thoughts down to the bottom of the pint. That didn’t take long.

A friendly voice asked, “Care for another?”

And I knew. Even before I looked up. Even before I saw his coal-black hair and his sapphire eyes. Just the voice — that warm, rich, musical voice . . . .

“Davydd.” My voice was soft, but he heard it.

“That’s right. Can I get you another?”

I said yes before I even gave the matter any thought, but then reversed myself. “I’m sorry — no. I mean, I’d love another. But I have to go!”

“Of course. Come by again some time.” His tone was kind, but he was off to the other side of the bar before I could respond. I got up in a daze and found the exit.

The rain had stopped, and I paused in the shadows to let the cool night air fill my lungs. My mind was spinning as if I were intoxicated . . . something that wasn’t possible.

Davydd is here?

I needed my wits about me. I was on a mission, and Agents could show up any moment. I’d accomplished all that I could on this foray. It was time to go.

The first step was the most difficult, but I propelled myself forward. Coming through the covered walkway, I forced myself to check for traffic, left, right, left, before stepping off.

The screech of tires — make that ‘tyres’ — snapped me out of my daze, and I leapt backward. My simulator-enhanced reflexes were enough, just barely, to avoid being leveled by a delivery truck. Make that “lorry,” since it was, of course, driving on the left side of the street. Idiot! “Right, left, right!!!”

I took deep breaths, waiting for a couple vehicles to pass, then made my way across the street and into the alley. Just need to go a little ways . . . . Not too far.

The restaurants whose windows lined the alley were still doing a brisk business. It wasn’t late; my meeting with Cleo hadn’t lasted long. Somehow it felt like it should be later.

Someone was behind me, and my sense of paranoia ticked up a notch. I decided to dawdle, pretending to check out the restaurants. If he was tailing me . . . .

He wasn’t. He kept going at the same clip and passed me by, not so much as glancing my way. Not that he wasn’t a sinister-looking fellow.

I came to Moorgate and was more careful in my crossing. In the AI’s simulation, the pavement wouldn’t feel like a down pillow.

The sinister person had crossed and gone down Telegraph Street, so I decided to take another route. That is to say, I’ve decided. . . . Cleo’s words stuck in my mind.

Left on Moorgate, right at the next street, over . . . . I came back to the courtyard from the other side, and was relieved to see no sign of the man who had passed me in the alley. It was irrational, but I’d half expected to see him here before me.

When I got to the door at the base of the stairs, I found that someone had locked it. Picking the lock would be simple enough, but the courtyard was well-lit. I would be visible from any of the windows in the floors above me. A very stupid thing to have missed.

Thinking hard, I continued walking to Telegraph Street. The closest back-up point was back on the other side of the pub. Easy enough. And I could stop in again on my way . . . just for a moment. . . .

But when I got to Telegraph, I saw my sinister-looking friend chatting with a man who was standing in an open doorway . . . . the entrance to my building’s lobby. I decided to bluff it out.

I walked up to the pair and said, “pardon me” as I squeezed by.

They didn’t even break their conversation.

I pulled up the diagram of the building in my mind and headed up a different staircase than the one we had used before. One flight . . . two . . . three. The stairwell was empty, as was the hallway on my floor.

No one, mercifully, had locked the barrister’s door while I was out, nor were there any people in the hallways to see me enter. I locked the door behind me and sank down into Mr. Westen’s comfortable leather desk chair.

The phone was right there, but I needed a moment of quiet. A minute to process. I should have been focused on Cleo — needed to be! — but it wasn’t her face that kept coming to me, shaking the foundations of my reality.

I saw nothing but thick black hair, generous lips in a face full of angles and planes, eyes made for laughter . . . and loving. Davydd was here. In London, not two blocks away!

Davydd, who I had never seen before in my life.

Never.

Except in my dreams.

To be continued . . . .

Author’s note: As a reader, I know how distracting it can be when a story contains elements that are demonstrably wrong. So I'm very nervous any time I write about things I don’t know intimately. Fortunately, one of the things that is so wonderful about the BC community is how many people are happy to share their expertise. I am grateful to RobertLouis and Rachel Moore for their assistance with this story, and in particular, this chapter. It should go without saying, though, that the fault is purely mine for the inaccuracies that no doubt remain!

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DECISION MATRIX
Chapter 8: Pattern Recognition

I picked up the barrister’s landline and dialed the Belisarius. As my consciousness returned to my real-world body, I considered what to tell my colleagues about my foray into the London Financial District.

Our tap allows us to focus on an area of the Matrix and see what’s happening when we send someone in, but we can’t hear conversations. So they would know that Cleo showed up, that we’d had a drink together, and that we’d left separately. They wouldn’t know what we’d said to each other.

And they wouldn’t know about Davydd at all.

I opened my eyes, unsurprised to find myself in the ship’s operations area, with Zephyr at my side, removing the connector probe from my head.

He asked, “Success? Failure? Something in between?”

Hermes was leaning against the bulkhead, clearly waiting for my answer as well.

I slid out of the chair and turned so that I was able to see them both. “I’m convinced she’s able to handle the truth. She can feel the falseness of the Matrix world, just like I could. But . . . well. She’s dating.”

“An emotional attachment?” Hermes frowned. “That can be very difficult to negate.”

I shook my head. “No, that’s not it at all. She’s doing it out of duty to her class or her mother or something. Cleo doesn’t even hit that way. But she’s running from herself . . . trying to make her trans go away by force of will. Fortitude and pure thoughts, I guess. You get the picture.”

“Yeah,” Zephyr said. “How’s that working out for her?”

“About as well as you might expect. She looks tortured. Haunted. With flashes of ‘resolute,’ of course.”

Hermes made a noncommittal noise, then asked, “How did you leave things?”

“That’s the bad part,” I admitted. “She wouldn’t take my number. Said it wouldn’t be ‘wise’ to speak to me again. That’s when she walked out.”

“Ooof!” Zephyr looked about as gut-punched as I’d been.

Hermes shrugged and detached himself from the bulkhead. “You were in for close to two hours. Take care of business, then join us in the mess. You’ll need fluids.”

I threw him an ironic salute and trotted off to the head.

Hours spent in my misgendered Matrix body made me even more acutely aware of how right it felt to have a form that matched who I knew myself to be. Even something as simple as sitting to relieve myself, spreading my smooth legs, looking between the curve of my breasts and seeing the neat triangle of my feminine bush . . . .

“You are so beautiful . . . So perfect!” His warm voice was full of wonder, the sound of a man who has achieved his heart’s desire. The low light accentuated the planes of his face against the glossy black of his thick hair. His kind eyes were eager and full of longing as I settled back on the bed, naked and welcoming.

I brought myself back to the present moment, startled at both the clarity and suddenness of my waking vision.

I finished my business and took a few moments to clean up, using the time to get my thoughts under some semblance of control. My mind was at war with itself, caught between “Davydd is in London!” and “Who the hell is Davydd?” I knew that Noel Ferguson had never met the man. Knew it. But the memory was there, nonetheless, clear, detailed, achingly real.

It’s realistic, but it’s NOT real! I told myself sternly. Focus on the mission. There are more important things than mixed-up memories. . . . Or feelings.

To which the other part of my brain replied with a sneer, Right. Are you planning to try fortitude and pure thoughts?

The battle raged, but I couldn’t put off work indefinitely. I left the bathroom and headed to the mess, pausing at the door to take a deep breath and school my expression. Then I entered, strode purposefully to the table, and took a seat.

The drink they gave me was designed to restore electrolytes. It must have been exactly what my body needed, because for once it didn’t taste like backwash from a warm beer bottle. I gave them the full synopsis of my conversation with Cleo and fielded questions as I went along.

When I was finished, Zephyr said, “Sounds to me like she might have a hard time walking away from all the bowing and scraping. She’s a very big deal at that investment house. Even the bartender treated her like she was someone special.”

Hermes added, “Her elevated position is also, if I understand your earlier comment, at least part of the reason why she feels a duty to produce an heir.”

“Maybe,” I acknowledged. “But she’s hurting. Hurting a lot. All the success in the world isn’t making her pain disappear.” I looked down at my smooth hands, my narrow wrists. Remembering all the times . . . .

“You are so beautiful . . . So perfect!”

No! Not now!

I managed to wrest my attention back to the problem at hand, and the memories I had been searching for. Noel’s memories.

“Zephyr . . . Did you ever do a purge?” My question was soft. It’s not something every trans person would want to discuss – especially not with a cisgendered person present. But he would know I wasn’t prying for mere curiosity’s sake.

“No. . . Not exactly.” His response was slow and uncertain.

I looked at him, letting my expression ask the question.

“It’s different for trans men,” he said after a moment. “It’s not like we’ve got stashes of ‘forbidden’ clothing. We wear pants all the time. T-shirts, sweatshirts. No one thinks anything of it. . . .”

He was lost in a painful memory, but finally managed to continue. “There were a couple of times, though, when I tried to mentally kill off my male side. When I would wear deliberately frilly dresses and go over the top with makeup. Do something with my hair. Hoping that if I looked like a girl, smelled like a girl, maybe I’d finally convince myself that I was a girl.”

“Can you remember your emotional state, when you were in those periods?”

He nodded reluctantly. “I was young . . . I mean, Hermes red-pilled me when I had just turned twenty. My emotions were always a mess back then. Still . . . the closest I ever came to taking a jump off a bridge was when I was working so hard to be female. To kill off the person inside that I knew myself to be.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s what I mean. That’s where Cleo’s at. If I can just reach her, I think maybe I can save her. AND bring her out, of course.”

“Will she give you a hearing, though?” Hermes asked practically. “It sounds like she thinks she knows what you’re going to say, and has decided that she doesn’t want to hear it.”

“That’s definitely the problem.”

“Suppose . . . .” Zephyr sounded tentative.

Hermes didn’t. “No.”

I looked from one of them to the other. “No, what?”

“No, I won’t consider forcibly detaining her so that you can have a discussion. Not unless we’ve completely exhausted every other alternative.” Hermes kept his voice even, as always, but the strength of his feelings on the subject were clear. If we want people to be free, we had to respect their agency.

Zephyr nodded, looking relieved. “I understand.”

Hermes drummed his fingers on the table for a moment, lost in thought. But nothing came to him, either. “Alright. We’re not going to solve this tonight. Let’s sleep on it and reconvene in the morning.”

I returned to my sleeping quarters, shut the door and leaned against it. My eyes closed tight as I fought the chaos raging inside. The noises of the ship – the thrumb of the hovercraft motors – grew more noticeable as I shut out other sensory inputs. It was deep, rhythmic, mechanical . . . .

The noise was constant, the machinery always active, one shift giving way to another. The Alcan Aluminium job had been a godsend for Tad. We had a place to stay. Food on the table. Things were starting to turn around . . . . Why was he crying? He had a paper clutched in his hand, crumpled. Redundancy . . . .

My eyes flew open as the sound of a soft knock registered. How could I see Zephyr now? When Davydd was in London?

There IS no Davydd! my mind snarled in response. Reality is here. Here! And now!

But my heart cried out in negation, screaming against a boiling cascade of memories desperate to break through. Davydd! Help!!!

The knock came again, louder. More insistent.

I spun the lock, opened the door and pulled Zephyr in, seizing him in a fierce embrace.

“Woa! What’s wrong?” He had managed to keep an arm free and closed my door.

I didn’t answer. Urgently, desperately, I clutched him, kissed him, and nearly dragged him to my bed. “Don’t talk! Please! Don’t ask questions. Don’t think!”

“What . . . ?”

“Please!!! Please, Zephyr! Get me out of my head, before I lose my mind!!!”

He stopped me. “Noelle! This isn’t you. What’s happening?”

I was almost in tears. “Don’t! Please, don’t!”

He gently but firmly stepped back from my embrace, holding my shoulders and staring into my eyes. “No. You need to tell me what’s going on.”

“Is that some kind of order?”

“If it has to be.”

I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Steadied myself. We’d been intimate, but Zephyr was, and always would be, the XO of the Belisarius first. I was acting like a lunatic; he couldn’t just let that pass.

When I was sure I could manage it, I opened my eyes and looked at him with some semblance of calm, of normalcy. “I’m sorry. I’m fighting my own demons, and I had no right to drag you into it. I’ll be fine, now.”

“Noelle. Talk to me.”

I was absolutely not ready to do anything of the sort. What would I say? Gee, Zephyr, I think I met the man of my dreams in the Matrix? Oh, and I’m having visions. “I can’t. Not tonight.”

I could see that he was torn, but in the end, my firmness and calm demeanor must have convinced him that any danger that existed wasn’t immediate. The first officer had no cause to get involved, and as a lover he had no right to force answers I wasn’t ready to provide.

“Okay,” he said, with noticeable reluctance. “If you’re certain you’ll be alright.”

“I’m certain. . . . but, thank you. Really. Just . . . a lot to process. Okay?”

His conflicted look didn’t abate, but he gave my shoulders a final squeeze, released me and went to the door. He gave me one more questioning look, but I didn’t say anything else. “Good night, then.” The door closed behind him gently.

I sank down on my bed, my head and my heart both pounding. Before I dealt with Zephyr — before I dealt with anyone — I needed to process what I’d seen and what it meant. Was I imagining things? Was I having flashbacks?

What’s wrong with me?

“You banged your head, and they’ve got a bandage on it. What you get for playing on river rocks, girl!”

“It’s not my fault, Tada!” I protested. “Davy was chasing me!”

“Sure, and I don’t doubt you were chasing him before then. It’s always one or the other.” I could hear his smile, even though the bandages kept me from seeing it.

Oh, God! How on earth was I going to sleep?

~o~O~o~
Breakfast had never looked less appetizing. Not that it was any different than any other breakfast I’d poured into a bowl since I’d joined the crew. But after a restless night filled with vivid and often disturbing dreams, I wasn’t remotely in the mood.

Zephyr was carefully not watching me. Dakota, Abhaya and Hermes were having breakfast too, while Blake and Kai were elsewhere covering the essential systems. Hermes, Zephyr or both had filled in the rest of the crew on my report from the prior day.

Dakota was looking thoughtful. “I think you’re right, Noelle. I . . . I remember purging all my clothes. I just did it once, and I lasted for almost a year. It was bad, though. Probably the worst time of my life. If that’s where Cleo’s at, she’ll want out.”

Hermes said, “if she feels a strong family duty, or has a powerful emotional attachment to her mother, it could keep her from making the jump, though.”

I shook my head. “She feels trapped. Her mother wants grand babies, and I guess Cleo lost her brother so now it’s on her. But it isn’t what she wants, and she still longs to just be the woman she knows herself to be. What we offer — reality — actually frees her from the trap.”

“Cleo might not see it that way,” Zephyr cautioned. “Her mother will still be in the Matrix, pining for the grandchildren her son’s no longer there to give her.”

“Noelle Bach, you’ve got to listen! There will be other children! You have to live for them!”

“He’s given up, Mam. How can I go on, without him?”

The memory hit me like a sledgehammer, but I suppressed it with a supreme effort of will.

“Her ‘mother’ — one of the two people who presumably contributed to her DNA — is in a three-by-seven pod,” I said brutally. “All that her angst and mental energy accomplish is to provide a bit of electrical power for a bunch of machines.”

“Noelle,” Zephyr said with quiet urgency. He waited until he had my full attention. “They’re captives, but they’re still people. People with hopes, dreams, fears . . . . If Cleo’s mother loses her only remaining child, she will suffer, and that suffering will be real to her.”

“Until the next Matrix reset,” I retorted angrily. “Then she won’t even remember losing her boys. Hell, she might have new memories that include grandchildren! It’ll be 1995 again, but she’ll be five years older than she was the last time it was 1995!”

I found that I was on my feet, almost shouting, and forced a steadying breath before concluding vehemently. “Inside that damned world, our emotions are fake because our memories are fake. Nothing in it is real. Nothing!!!”

Everyone was silent, so stunned by my outburst that they didn’t know what to make of it. Finally Hermes gently said, “Sit down, Noelle.”

I glared at him, but he met my hot gaze calmly. After a moment, I sank back into my seat.

“What happened to you yesterday?” Zephyr sounded confused . . . and hurt.

I bit back a hot denial. I didn’t want to have this conversation. Didn’t want to think through the implications. But . . . they deserve to know. HE deserves to know.

I tried to exclude everyone else from my vision. From my thoughts. “Zephyr . . . do you remember when we talked about dreaming that you were a man, back when you were still plugged into the Matrix?”

Looking puzzled, but encouraged by the fact that I was no longer shouting, he nodded. “Yeees.”

“And when I suggested that my dreams of being a woman had been, umm, explicit, you said something like, ‘Oh, those dreams?’”

His face reddened. “Yeah.”

“Did she have a face? The woman in your dreams?”

“I mean, yeah. Certainly. I’d remember if she didn’t.”

“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

“Of course not. It’s not like it was the same person every time! Just a generic . . . .” Suddenly, he turned pale. “What are you saying?”

I looked around. Everyone was looking at me with rapt attention. “Dakota? Abhaya? Did you ever dream that you were the right gender, back before Hermes rescued you?”

They looked at each other, then at me.

“I . . . I did. Yes.” Dakota’s voice was subdued.

Abhaya shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

“I had those dreams,” I told them. “Back when I was plugged in. I dreamed I was a woman, and that a handsome man was loving me. When I found out about the Matrix — and about my real-world body — I thought maybe my subconscious had been trying to tell me all along that I was a woman. You know what I mean?”

“That’s what I always assumed, too,” Dakota said.

Zephyr appeared lost in thought.

“I was wrong,” I told them. “It was a memory.”

Hermes raised an eyebrow. “You sound certain.”

“I am. Because I saw him yesterday, at the pub. I recognized him immediately. Without even thinking about it, I knew his name, and he answered to it.”

“The man of your dreams?” Dakota asked, skeptically.

I shook my head. “No. I saw him in my dreams, but what I’m telling you is that it’s a memory, not a dream. And ever since I saw him in the Matrix yesterday, more and more memories keep coming to me. Memories of being a girl, of being a young woman. . . . Of being Noelle.”

“I don’t remember what the other people in my dreams looked like,” Dakota said, a tendril of distress creeping into her voice. “You mean it was real?”

“I don’t know!” I threw up my hands. “I have a whole lot of memories that seem equally real, that absolutely aren’t. I remember being a boy in 1975. Playing football in high school in the mid-1980s. But it’s always the late 90’s in the Matrix, so all of those memories are obviously fake. How do I know that the things I’m remembering now weren’t also created by the AI?”

She tried to corral her emotional response and think about the problem. “Would memories from the late nineties be real?”

“Real?” I asked. “What’s ‘real, in the context of that damned Matrix?’”

Abhaya grimaced. “Yeah, good point. Ordinarily, this is where Zephyr would toss out a theory, and Britt would roll her eyes and go pump iron.”

Everyone seemed to be looking at Zephyr, and Zephyr seemed to be looking at the table. The silence stretched.

Without raising his eyes, Zephyr finally said, “if my consciousness shared an experience with another human consciousness in real time, I would consider it a ‘real’ experience, even if it occurred in the Matrix.”

I thought about that. It made sense, as far as it went. “But . . . how would you know which memories fit that description? The AI can generate memories that feel just the same as the ones you describe.”

“I think . . . I think Dakota is right?” Zephyr sounded very tentative. “The AI wouldn’t manufacture fake memories from the late 90’s; the whole point of doing a reset is to restart the clock to sometime in 1995. Pre-1995 memories would be like an AI-generated ‘backstory’ for each new Matrix update, but memories after that would be ‘real’ according to my definition.”

“You think.” My head was throbbing again. “But the AI has the power to overwrite the memories of anyone who’s plugged in, anytime and for any reason.”

Zephyr finally looked up, and he gave me a rueful smile. “It’s just a theory. We don’t know why the AI does things, but everything we do know suggests that it operates according to internally consistent logic. Acting randomly, arbitrarily, is contrary to its nature.”

“I miss Britt,” Abhaya said.

Hermes — the only person at the table who had no experience of being gender-switched in the Matrix — had listened to the discussion without comment. He tapped a finger on the table.

“This is important. I’ve been unplugged for 41 years. I’ve seen lots of Matrix re-sets . . . . I’ve experienced January of 1998 seven different times. And in all that time, I’ve never once seen anyone recover memories that were deleted during a reset.”

He let that sink in before continuing. “It’s important, and we’re going to want to think through the implications carefully. But, we still have a mission, and that has to take priority right now.”

His calm gaze swept the table. I felt myself sitting straighter. Right. The mission. At least that’s something I can understand! I nodded, and saw the rest doing the same.

“Noelle, I want you to work with Zephyr and Dakota to develop a plan for reaching Cleo and for an extraction operation. Use the Matrix tap for research. Abhaya, you’ll need to relieve Kai in the cockpit.”

We all nodded and pushed back from the table. We had a lot to think about, but we had a job to do first. Thank God.

~o~O~o~
We talked. Did research. Kicked around ideas and tried to think of backup plans. But in the end, what Zephyr, Dakota and I brought back to Hermes was less a plan than a set of options, none of which sounded particularly likely to produce success.

Zephyr summarized. “Based on our research, the only places St. Claire goes on a regular basis are work, home, and the pub. She goes other places, obviously, but it’s sporadic and unpredictable. Work seems pretty unpromising – packed full of people and the place St. Claire probably most associates with a male persona.

“That leaves home or the pub. I think attempting to approach her at home and after hours is the best of our bad options, especially since I think – and Dakota agrees – that Noelle should avoid the pub based on her reaction to the man she met there. Davydd. Noelle thinks St. Claire’s staff would turn her away if she showed up at the door, so the home route probably entails a break-in.”

“Which creates the possibility of people getting hurt,” I interjected. “The staff. Cleo herself.”

“And you,” Zephyr added pointedly, looking unhappy. “I didn’t say it was a good option. Anyhow, the last possibility is sending an email message to St. Claire’s Blackberry. We were able to find the number. On the plus side, we limit the risk of someone getting hurt, and maximize the odds that St. Claire – that Cleo – is receptive before going any further. But it’s easy to ignore an email or just say ‘stop bothering me.’”

Hermes looked at me. “How are you feeling?”

I shrugged. “The memories keep coming. Just flashes; nothing coherent. I seem to be able to work around it, but I’ve got a Louis XVI-level headache.”

He sat and thought for a moment, then said, “All right. Let’s start with the email. If that doesn’t work, let’s go with getting you into the house after hours. I don’t like it, but I like the pub even less. Every time you return to the same spot, you increase the odds of being caught by an Agent, and the Davydd connection is a complication you don’t need.”

I grimaced. I didn’t like the fact that people seemed to think I was coming apart at the seams because of my memories, but I’d probably do the same thing in their shoes. I was acting strange. So I went back to the Matrix monitoring section with Zephyr and Dakota and worked on drafting an email. Because I knew Cleo and they didn’t, they largely left it to me.

Zephyr looked at my draft. “Okay, that’s cryptic. ‘I have critical information about our mutual position that you should consider before making the investment move we discussed last night. Is there a place we can meet? Noel.’”

I nodded. “Yeah. We don’t know whether anyone else has access to her Blackberry. And obviously she’ll run if I give away too much about the real situation.”

“Give away too much, and she’ll have to choose a pill,” Zephyr agreed. “Alright, I think it’s worth a shot. Dakota?”

She shrugged. “It feels cold. But . . . I guess that can’t be helped?”

“I don’t think so,” I responded. “Cleo won’t be moved by sentiment right now. She knows what she wants and doesn’t want. But she feels trapped. If I suggest that there are facts she doesn’t know about, she might at least want to hear me out.”

“Well . . . okay,” she said. “Here’s hoping.”

I sent the message through our tap into the Matrix and we all sat for a few minutes, waiting.

Nothing happened.

After five minutes had passed, Zephyr said, “We don’t know how long it will take to get a response. But Noelle, you clearly didn’t get any decent sleep. You should rest for a bit.”

“I’m not sure I can,” I confessed.

“I may be able to help with that.” He made a placating gesture, lest I misconstrue his offer. “I’m a professional quality therapeutic masseur. Maybe if we can get your body relaxed and stop your head from exploding, you’ll be able to sleep for a few hours.”

“I’m on shift for Matrix monitoring this afternoon,” I reminded him.

Dakota touched my arm. “Go ahead, hon. I’ll take it. You’re going to need your ‘A’ game tonight, if we’re lucky.”

Zephyr led me back to his quarters, which were essentially the same as mine. “I’ve got a few things here that will be helpful,” he said as he spun the lock and opened the hatch.

I stepped inside and turned to face him. “Zephyr . . . I’m so sorry. About last night, and about what a bitch I’ve been today. I just . . . I can’t begin to tell you how all of this is feeling.”

He touched my cheek lightly. “It’s alright, Noelle. I’m here for you. Now, go lie down on your stomach. I’ll be able to do a better job if you remove your tunic and your bra, but it’s up to you.”

My feelings were sufficiently conflicted that my head hurt even worse. Was I betraying Davydd by being with another man? Was Davydd even real? Would it really matter if he was? I might remember him, but he wouldn’t remember me. And, inside the Matrix, I didn’t look anything like Noelle.

But Zephyr, bless him, was only offering a massage. And surely I could trust him. More, certainly, than I could trust myself, given how I had thrown myself at him the prior evening. Without breaking eye contact, and without doing anything to emphasize the sexuality of the action, I pulled the tunic over my head, unhooked my bra and set both on his chair. Then I went and lay down.

Whether he had acquired his skill the old-fashioned way or learned it in our simulators, Zephyr was extraordinarily skillful. He used some sort of scented oil on his hands – I wondered where he had gotten it – and they glided over the skin of my back and arms. His fingers found each muscle group and worked through every knot, slowly and gently. He slowly manipulated my neck and shoulders, even my fingers. Then he began on my scalp and my throbbing temples.

He was right. My headache began to recede and my body felt boneless. My consciousness began to separate . . . float . . . drift . . . .

“Oh, God! Noelle! What have you done!!!” Her voice was loud, distressed. But somehow distant.

I couldn’t see her, but that was alright. I couldn’t deal with Mam’s distress anymore. I couldn’t even deal with my own. Little Bronwyn gone; my Davydd wouldn’t be far behind. At least, we’d all be together soon . . . .

I felt my consciousness begin to fray, to dissolve, as Mam’s voice faded away . . . .

~o~O~o~
I woke, momentarily disoriented. Where am I?

Who am I?

I opened my eyes to a dimly-lit room. A homespun blanket was covering me, tucked under my chin. The Belisarius. I’m on the ship. Zephyr’s quarters.

“Zephyr?”

A form rose from one of the chairs. There was just enough light to make out his face when he came to stand by the bed. He stroked my cheek with the back of his fingers, lightly. “How are you feeling?”

I reached up and twined my fingers with his, pulled his hand to my lips and kissed it. “Thank you. How long did I sleep?”

“Three hours, more or less.”

“Any news?”

“You got a response to your email. She wants to meet you again . . . at the pub.”

I thought about that. “I can do it.”

“Not alone, woman! Not this time.”

I smiled up at him. “Will my pixie come with me?”

He growled at the reminder of his diminutive female persona in the Matrix. “Judge me by my size, will you?”

I kissed his hand again. “Never.” My dreams came back to me, and I squeezed his fingers. “Zephyr . . . I think I know why I ended up as ‘Noel Ferguson’ in this last reboot of the Matrix.”

His eyes were lost in the shadows, but I felt his gaze just the same. “Tell me.”

“Noelle – the old Noelle – was married to Davydd. They had a child . . . a daughter. She was beautiful and perfect, and God, they loved her . . . .” I was struggling. It helped to use third person. Yes, it was Noelle. But not . . . exactly . . . me?

“There was an accident . . . a car, a washed-out section of road . . . and Bronwyn died.” My efforts at detachment failed. “My little girl . . . my precious little girl! And Davydd was badly injured.”

My mind flashed the image of Davydd in the hospital bed, heavily bandaged, his left arm completely gone as a result of the terrible wound to his shoulder. His eyes, haunted, avoided mine.

“He gave up. Didn’t want to live; blamed himself. Finally, Noelle . . . I . . . took a bunch of pills.”

Zephyr was gripping my hand fiercely.

“I think I was dying when the Matrix reset.”

“But why . . . why would the AI care?”

“You’ve said it yourself, ‘Professor.’ We can’t know why the AI does what it does. Maybe it was just random chance. But maybe the psychological damage to ‘Noelle’ was so deep that it made sense to just eliminate her from the new Matrix world.”

His free hand stroked my face. “And now?” His voice was full of concern. Care. Love, even. “Can you go on, carrying those memories?”

I thought about that. And the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Not the anger of the morning, which had caused me to pound the table and shout. No. This was a cold anger. A focused and deadly anger. A righteous anger.

The fragment of a song came to me in a flash, one of Noel’s memories. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored . . . .

“Yes,” I answered softly. “Oh, yes! Because I want to crush that damned AI, more than ever. There was no ‘car accident.’ It was just a randomly assigned element in the AI’s video game, after which some algorithm scored Bronwyn as a casualty and assigned Davydd some crippling injuries. He wanted to die. And then I did. But our choices didn’t even matter.”

I looked up at the good man, the fierce and competent man, who had fought and fought and fought, but never stopped asking questions. Never stopped trying to figure it all out. “I want to find a way, Zephyr. If Cleo’s the one, I’ll fricking drag her out of the Matrix and force her to see the truth. Force her to help. The machines must be destroyed.”

He was quiet for a while, thinking about what I had said. Weighing my words, no doubt, with scales precisely calibrated by his fine analytical mind.

He is sifting out the hearts of men, before his judgment seat . . . .

But eventually Zephyr reached a decision that appeared to satisfy him, both as a man and as a ship’s officer. “All right, then. Are you ready to get back to work?”

Be swift, my soul, to answer him . . . .

“Yes, sir. Let’s do this!”

To be continued . . . .

Chapter 9: Queen’s Pawn Pinned

“Hey, Kai – Any idea where the boss wandered off to?” Kai was in the command room, running some analytics on the ship’s systems.

She looked up briefly. “He’s in the simulator.”

“Oh,” Zephyr said, surprised, before adding a belated “thanks.” We went down to what I thought of as the operations center, and sure enough Hermes was plugged in, with Blake on watch, headphones on.

“Howdy,” Blake said as we poked our heads in. “You going in tonight?” He moved one of the muffs of his headset so he could hear us better.

I shrugged. “I think so, but we need to talk to Hermes. Did he say how long he was going to be?”

“Nope. Not that he ever does.” Blake grinned. “This is some seriously light duty.”

Zephyr asked, “What’s he doing?”

Blake took a look at his monitor for a moment, to all appearances confirming what he already knew. “He’s sitting on the grass under a cherry tree.”

“Eyes closed?” Zephyr asked.

“Yup, that’s the ticket. Don’t know what it does for him.”

“We’ve got to do some planning,” Zephyr explained. “I know he wasn’t wild about having Noelle go back to the pub, but that’s what the target wants, so we may have no choice.”

Blake grunted. “Going to go with an alternate insertion point?”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Zephyr agreed.

“Not one of the ones close in, though, right?” Somehow, Blake always looked like he should be chewing on gum, or a plug of tobacco. Not that such things existed in the real world of 2200, or whatever year it might be in the old Gregorian Calendar.

Zephyr nodded. “I was thinking something further out. Draw attention away from the pub, in case the Agents feel anything when we enter the Matrix.” He had explained to me on an earlier occasion that utilizing our tap to jack ourselves inside created an anomaly that generally drew Agents to investigate, but as near as anyone could tell, our continued presence in the Matrix didn’t have the same effect.

Which didn’t mean that Agents couldn’t find a way to track us down once they knew we were in. However, they appeared to rely on more conventional means to do so.

“Well, London’s got that great public transit system,” Blake responded. “We can put her in anywhere, and she won’t have any trouble getting where she needs to be.”

“Works for me,” I said. I’d been to London any number of times, as Noel, and the Tube – formally, the London Underground – was one of the easiest and most extensive systems I’d ever navigated in a major city. Which is strange, in a way, since it wasn’t created as a unified system and the different lines weren’t merged until the 1930s, when some lines had already been in operation for seventy years.

We kicked around some thoughts for a few minutes before Blake said, “Look, if you can spell me for a couple, I can go run a few ideas through our tap and get you some options. Won’t take ten minutes.”

Zephyr said, “I don’t even know if we’re a ‘go,’ yet. Hermes was seriously opposed to having Noelle go back to the pub. More than I would have thought, under the circumstances. I assume he had a reason.”

“Well, all you’re doing is yacking,” Blake replied practically. “Might as well have a plan ready when he’s done pondering the mysteries.”

He had a point. So Zephyr took the headset and Blake went off to the Matrix Monitoring room. After he left, I said, “You think Hermes has a concern other than the ones we talked about?”

Zephyr shrugged. “He might. I’m considered the egghead around here, but Hermes can think circles around me. Who knows what’s got his radar twitching.”

I had a sudden inspiration. “Zephyr – can you get me into his sim?”

“What? No. He’s on 24/7; if he thinks he needs time to meditate, he needs time. Short of an emergency, he gets it.”

I looked at him fondly. The good XO. Perfect, really – though there was no doubt in my mind that he’d make an outstanding commander in his own right, when the time came. “I’m not being whimsical. If he’s got significant concerns about me, about my returning to the pub, about Cleo or Davydd, I need to hear them. And we don’t have a lot of time.”

“He knows what time it is.”

“Does he know about Cleo’s email?”

Zephyr sighed. “I don’t know. Not as far as I know.”

“Well then?”

He chewed on his cheek for a moment, then came to a quick decision. “All right. Saddle up.” Indecisive, he is not.

I sat in the chair next to Hermes, leaned back and closed my eyes. “Okay. Ready.” And the cold probe entered my brain . . . .

“We’re losing her! Lew!!! Lew!!! She’s . . . .” My Mam’s voice, panicked. Hysterical. Terror- and grief-filled.

. . . . And, just like that, I was standing on perfectly-manicured grass, spring green and lovely. A cherry tree’s gnarled and graceful arms were laden with blossoms, stirring in a gentle breeze.

My eyes followed as a single blossom, pink and translucent, detached and fluttered toward the ground. Instead of the green grass, it alighted on Hermes’ blue-black hair, looking like a butterfly about to take wing.

“Noelle. Please, have a seat.” He didn’t open his eyes, which was a bit disconcerting.

As directed, I sat a few feet from him, stretching out my legs and burying my fingers in the rich, fresh-smelling sod. “I’m sorry to interrupt you. You’re entitled to a little R&R.”

“I was expecting you.” He opened his eyes and looked at me without surprise.

“You were?”

“Dakota forwarded Cleo’s email to me. I needed to think about it further, and I assumed you would need to as well. This is a good spot for thinking.”

I still didn’t know how he figured out that I would barge in on him, but it wasn’t really important. “I understand your misgivings about my returning to the pub. Or at least I think I do, and . . . I share them. But I still think it’s the best way.”

“I reached the opposite conclusion,” he said seriously. “Which is why I needed to come here. To think, and think better. Are you prepared to go back?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Then, I agree. Not alone, this time. We’ll want at least one person in the pub with you, and we’ll need to be prepared to do an extraction tonight. That means a full team.”

I nodded. “Okay, I guess that makes sense. Cleo’s got to make her choice, and we have to be ready if she is.”

“You have a plan?”

“We’re working on it. Zephyr and Blake and me.”

“Good. Time will be short.”

Again, I nodded, but made no move to get up. “Hermes . . . what made you change your mind? Zephyr said you were adamant that I shouldn’t go back.”

“A feeling. Nothing more. You, Cleo, the pub, Davydd . . . there are connections there. I don’t know what they are, but I sense them.”

“I don’t understand. Are the connections reasons to go there, or not to go there?”

His lips turned up in a half smile. “Both, of course. The danger is easy to see, which is why I opposed your going back. Adamantly, as Zephyr correctly noted. But danger and opportunity are two sides of the same coin.”

“You think it’s worth the risk?”

“We can’t beat thinking machines by calculating odds, Noelle. That’s their strength. Intuition is ours.”

To say that this was foreign to my way of thinking was an understatement. It smacked of superstition and mysticism, shamanic rites and burnt offerings under a dark and moonless sky. “I don’t know if I can function that way. God knows, I never have.”

“When the time comes,” he said serenely, “you will know what to do, and you’ll do it. Trust yourself.”

“Okay, boss. What are you seeing?”

“There is a difference,” he replied cryptically, “between knowing the path, and walking the path.” He rose gracefully. “Come. It’s time we walked.”

I got up slowly. I had no idea what Hermes was talking about, but I had to respect the fact that he’d been fighting the machines for forty years and he was still alive. If gut instinct is a thing, he has it.

If.

~o~O~o~
Evening found Zephyr and I walking past an enormous stainless steel box that some “modernist” in the 1960s imagined would be a fitting memorial to the scientist Michael Faraday. It was the sort of structure that led me to believe that the base memories the AI gave us at each Matrix reset bore no resemblance to what had happened in the “real world” years leading up to the 1990s. Surely no human consciousness could imagine that such a monstrosity was attractive.

Zephyr looked like a pixie – slender and slight, with short hair sticking out in all directions. I didn’t tease him about it, and wouldn’t, since my residual self-image wasn’t anything I was happy about either. Here in the Matrix, I towered over Zephyr, gangly and blocky.

Not that it mattered; I wasn’t foolish enough to judge Zephyr’s strength in a simulation based on his apparent size and muscle mass. These were the sorts of rules we bent – sometimes, beyond recognition. But he had chosen a different weapon – the Smith & Wesson 9C – because it was a better fit for his Matrix-sized hand. Currently, his weapon, like mine, was concealed in his coat.

We entered the old Elephant and Castle station and took the lift down to the platform for the Bakerloo Line. As it descended, I looked at him and said, “I don’t suppose you brought brownies.”

“No luck. But there’s another trick to dealing with claustrophobia, you know.”

“Do tell.”

“Not minding.”

“Aren’t you a big help!”

But he wasn’t actually wrong. I could put it aside, and the mental discipline that I had learned during my time with the Belisarius helped me to do so. The same discipline was all that was keeping me functional while I was being bombarded by flashes of memory from my life before the last reset of the Matrix.

The Elephant and Castle is an old station by American standards, and bears little resemblance to the massive and modern BART stations I was more used to from my recent time in the San Francisco Bay area. But form must bear some relationship to function, and the areas of similarity were reassuring. A platform is still a platform, and this one had its share of interesting characters.

We didn’t have long to wait for the train to arrive, and we took the second-to-last car. Unlike the last time I had been in a train with Zephyr, I had all the pertinent details about the train, the station, the line, the service lines, and all possible means of escape committed to memory. If an Agent showed up, we were as prepared to flee as we could be.

Of course, the whole reason why we jacked ourselves into the Matrix in Southwark was to deflect attention from the area around the pub where I was supposed to meet Cleo. If, after talking with me, Cleo was willing to meet with Hermes, we would walk to a new location, close to the pub. Then, and only then, would we bring Hermes, Abhaya and Dakota in. If everything went according to plan, they wouldn’t be inside for long.

The ride was smooth enough; the clip-clip, clip-clip, clip-clip of the wheels against the rail ties was almost soothing. I might not like being underground, but it was certainly efficient. Lambeth North . . . Waterloo . . . It was time to get up.

We disembarked at Embankment and made our way to the northbound platform for the Northern Line. Having just missed a train, we had a bit of a wait.

“Mind . . . the gap. . . . Mind . . . the gap . . . . Mind . . . the gap . . . .” The recorded voice of someone long since dead played over and over again as we waited for our train. After the twentieth repetition, I looked at Zephyr and rolled my eyes. “In the real world, do you think they left it like this? Or did they just fix the damned gap?”

He chuckled. “Machines are more efficient than we are. I bet it’s a true detail.”

Charing Cross . . . Leicester Square . . . . Brightly lit stations followed by dim tunnels, steady progress measured in light bouncing off blocks of concrete. We were off the train again at Tottenham Court Road, changing to the Central Line. There were more direct routes, but again, we hoped that our more random-seeming choices would make any sort of pursuit or tracking more difficult.

We left the tube altogether at Bank, less than a quarter mile from our destination. Zephyr dawdled at the station for a few minutes, then followed along, keeping me in sight and checking to see whether I was being pursued.

I walked up Princes’ Street, turned left on Lothbury, then took an immediate right on Coleman Street. From there, it was just a short walk to the pub entrance. Before I turned to go through the covered walkway, I looked back.

Zephyr was walking purposefully, but made no sign. So, safe as far as he could see.

I went through into the courtyard, then walked into the pub.

If anything, it seemed like it was busier than the night before. I did a quick scan and again did not see Cleo.

But Davydd was there at the bar, talking to a customer and laughing. Even from a distance, his laugh lines were merry.

“Oh, no you don’t, Bronwyn, my girl!”

“Tada!!!!” She dissolved into a mess of giggles as he picked her up and spun her around.

“Did you think I wouldn’t see you, angling for the sweets!” He was laughing as he twirled her, his eyes sparkling in the sunlight, his white teeth flashing . . . .

I clamped down hard on my memories and forced myself to look away. Remember the mission! The machines MUST BE DESTROYED!

Slowly, easily, I wandered to the far side of the bar and found a spot to stand that gave good views of the whole pub.

Zephyr came in a couple minutes later and took up station at the other end of the bar. He would be able to spot things I didn’t. I kept him in my peripheral vision, but made sure I wasn’t staring.

“Came back, did you? What’ll you have?”

I tried my very hardest to make my smile natural and my voice easy. Tried to keep the memories from overwhelming me. The grief of it all. “Pint of the Bluebird, please . . . or, wait. Do you have the Tomos Watkin Old Style?”

“A man after my own heart, I see!” Davydd said cheerfully. “Brilliant bitter. Just brilliant! But it’s a bit too Welsh for this lot.”

I smiled in return, and hoped it did not look brittle. “You look like someone who appreciates the better things! Well, a Bluebird will certainly do in a pinch.”

As he drew my pint, he called back, “You didn’t develop a taste for Tomos Watkin in the States!”

I shook my head. “Certainly not. I went to the source.”

“My home country, as I’m sure you guessed.” He put the pint down in front of me and I slid the money across the bar. “It’s lovely, and I miss it, but the jobs are here.”

“Redundancy notice,” he said, and shrugged. “Too much to hope we’d be spared, Cariad. But I don’t know how we’ll make it here.”

“I don’t want to live in London, Davy! I want Bron to be raised here, like we were!”

I don’t know how I managed to keep my face from betraying me, but he didn’t seem to notice anything odd in my behavior. “Well, I for one am glad you’re here,” I said with joviality that I certainly didn’t feel.

He chuckled and moved on, going to the other end of the bar. Where, I was amused to see, a couple young men in suits seemed to be eager to buy Zephyr a pint. Oh, he’ll be hating that!

Cleo arrived about twenty minutes later, just as I was starting to get nervous. I was still nursing my first pint, and Zephyr did not appear to have caused any international incidents.

Cleo looked slightly surprised when she spotted me, but she walked straight to where I was standing. “Noel. How good to see you again. Shall we see if we can find a table?”

“Would you like to grab a drink first?”

“That won’t be necessary.” She had a resolute look that did not bode well for our conversations.

We managed to locate an open booth, though the sitelines were awful. I couldn’t see Zephyr from where we were sitting and had to assume he would move when the opportunity presented itself. “How was your date?”

“Splendid. Which is all I intend to say on that particular subject. You tracked down my number and interrupted my day. Tell me what this is about.” She was brusque almost to the point of rude — a significant contrast from the prior evening.

“I’m sorry for intruding. You just seemed so distressed yesterday, I felt like I needed to get you more information that I’ve learned.”

“I warn you now,” she said in a tone that was icy cold, “I will not listen to any gossip concerning Anne Howard!”

“Who?” I was momentarily confused. “Oh, that’s the woman you’re dating? No. It’s nothing like that. It’s about our, ah, mutual condition.”

She grimaced. “Please. Do you really think I haven’t thought about that? Factored it in? I’ve been living with this at least as long as you’ve done. Read every published monogram. I know what I am; know what I feel. But it doesn’t change what I have to do.” In our current location, there was absolutely no chance anyone would overhear us, so she made no effort to obfuscate her meaning.

She was trying to shut me down, and I needed to change the dynamic. I went straight into it. “Cleo . . . You said that the world seemed to be off . . . to be a mirage. That the sense of wrongness eats at you.”

“A common delusion, I expect. You’ll need to do better than that.”

Do better? What's that about? “Not common at all . . . but unfortunately, one hundred percent true.”

“Oh, bollocks.”

“Listen to me. This isn’t reality. You, me, sitting here in a pub in London. It’s not true. There is a real world out there. You sense it . . . feel it! And it is possible to get there.”

She looked at me silently, her eyebrow raised.

I couldn’t read her expression, so I tried again. “I was sitting in your seat the better part of a year ago. I was given a chance to find out the truth, to see the reality behind the mirage, and I took it. And I discovered that something else I’d always known, but couldn’t prove, was true as well. I am a woman. Not just inside; I’m biologically female, with all that entails.”

“Fascinating tale,” she drawled. “Out of curiosity, was that before or after you evaded arrest by your American security services?”

“What?”

“You didn’t think I’d investigate? After you ‘happened’ to show up at my usual haunt? And then tracked me down the following day?”

“Never gave it any thought at all. And as far as I know, no one ever put out an arrest warrant for me.”

“You’re far too modest, my dear. It wasn’t just any arrest warrant. It’s the sort that results in Interpol getting a Red Notice. Surely that wouldn’t have slipped your attention?”

I was cursing myself for not having an outstanding Matrix query on my deadname. It was certainly possible the feds were after me for some of my hacking activities . . . or some of my even dodgier activities for that matter.

But the last group of goons to come after me, in my pre- red-pilled state, were Agents.

“Listen, I don’t know anything about that. Like I said, I haven’t been ‘here’ for months. I’m concerned with the real world, not . . . this.” I waved a hand, indicating everything around us.

“I’m sure,” she said, sounding skeptical. “But if I may play along for a moment, just for fun, if this ‘world’ is no concern of yours any more, why are you here? And why are you dogging my footsteps?”

“It’s what we do. We try to rescue people, bring them to the real world. The real earth. But most people, by the time they’re grown, they can’t break free. They can’t see past the illusion. You and I, people like us . . . sometimes, we’re able to.”

“I see. Well, so how do we get to this real world, anyway?”

She didn’t sound like she was serious. But . . . maybe? I decided I had to try. “I’ve got someone you need to meet. We can be there in just a couple of minutes, and he’ll explain how it works. Then, you can decide. In or out.”

The look in her eyes was strange. Disappointment? Satisfaction? Had I said something wrong?

“Enough of this, Noel. My government contacts were right, evidently. They were sure you had some scheme to get me alone, after which I would wake up in a warehouse someplace, bound and gagged, whilst you tried to squeeze a ransom out of my mother.”

Government contacts! “What are you talking about? What have you done?”

“They reckoned you’d spin some kind of a tale to catch my interest, but I must say I’m impressed despite myself by your capacity for sheer nonsense. Well, it won’t work.”

I tried to interrupt, but she leaned forward and said, “You need to listen to me, now. If you cooperate, they’re prepared to recommend leniency.”

“Cooperate?” My brain went into immediate overdrive, trying to figure out how Zephyr and I could escape what was quickly looking like a trap.

“They want your confederates. All of them. They specifically mentioned a chap who goes by ‘Hermes.’”

I wanted to grab her by the throat, but . . . The mission came first. No way I could persuade her, but maybe the others could.

Some day.

“Your loss, Cleo. We had such hopes for you.” I rose.

“The name,” she replied coldly, “is Sir Anthony. You’d do well to remember it.” She looked behind me, towards the bar, and nodded her head. “All yours, gentlemen.”

I spun around to find two burly men in suits that barely contained their muscles were rapidly approaching the booth. “Come with me, sir,” one of them said in a condescending manner. “We don’t want to make a scene.”

Well, I for one was boiling mad and suddenly had no objection – none whatsoever – to making a scene that the Old Doctor Butler’s Head would never forget, even if it stood another three hundred years.

Michael Jordan, in his prime, could make a four-foot vertical leap. Straight up. It was amazing to watch and made him an absolute star on the basketball court. The same maneuver has other applications, however, and my equally high leap allowed my anger-driven kick to make solid contact with goon number one’s chin, snapping his neck back and sending him flying toward the bar.

Goon number two was on me before my feet were back on the ground, but I’d anticipated that. As he reached out with both arms to tackle me, I brought my descending upper arm bones crashing down on either side of his neck, right onto his comparatively weak collar bones.

I calculated that the humerus would vanquish even the most well-tempered clavicle, and so it proved. He shrieked – a truly frightening sound – and crumpled, his arms useless and his tackle forgotten.

In the heat of the moment I had managed to tune out the hubbub of the pub, but it hit me as soon as the second goon went down. This was not the sort of establishment that was used to dockyard brawls – and what I’d just demonstrated was on another level altogether.

“Watch out!” Zephyr’s voice reached me, as he pushed through a throng of people streaming to the door.

I spun back to see “Sir Anthony” reaching forward to grab me, but when I turned on him he jumped back, comically unwilling to try me face to face after my display. I shoved the table, pinning him in the booth. “You goddamned turd!”

Before he could answer, Zephyr was at my side. “Let’s go! Back exit!”

Much as I wanted to sweat answers out of Cleo, Zephyr was right. I charged behind him toward the exit, just as I had done in multiple simulations.

Except that in this simulation, the door we were dashing towards opened and a half-dozen uniformed men charged in. “Shit! They had backup!”

Zephyr and I had practiced together. Six humans, locked into their beliefs about what was and wasn’t physically possible in the Matrix, wouldn’t be enough to take one of us, much less two. To give Zephyr room for independent movement, I backflipped over a booth and landed on my feet facing the flood of police.

With the booth now in the way, they couldn’t rush me. The first one to come within reach was grabbed by the wrist, spun and thrown, generally in the direction of “Sir Anthony” as he attempted to get out of the booth. I’ll deal with you later, you aristocratic little shit!

The next one was almost on me. Although I was hyperfocused on his every move, I could hear one of the other officers calling for backup. “Get the AFOs in here NOW!!!”

It’s true that police in the UK are unarmed – generally. It’s not true that all of them are, and the ones who do carry weapons know how to use them. I knew we had to finish this quickly, before some of the latter type showed up.

“Wrap it up, Zephyr!” I shouted as I executed a round kick that connected with the second police officer’s head and sent him sprawling.

“Way ahead of you,” Zephyr shouted back. And indeed, he’d already taken down three. The odds were now two to one in our favor, and the last officer was diving to get out of the way. I was more than happy to let him, especially as his dive was taking him straight at Cleo, who was just managing to extract herself from the limp form of the officer I had thrown at her.

I couldn’t imagine how we’d complete the mission now, and I didn’t have time to process what the consequences of that failure might mean. We need Cleo to fight the machines!

She shot me a last glance, a strange mix of anger and longing. And then, suddenly, terror. Agony.

Her face began to change.

“Zephyr!!! Agent!!!”

More police were coming through the back door. We couldn’t deal with them and the Agent at the same time.

Zephyr dived behind a booth and came up with her S&W in her hand. I dashed in the other direction, knowing it would be harder for the Agent to target us both if we weren’t together.

The Barretta 92SB-F is a semi-automatic pistol that fires fifteen rounds quickly – if you know what you’re doing and are strong enough to handle one hell of a kick. But courtesy of my simulator training, I was an expert shot and had the capability of at least fudging Newton’s laws of motion. I was unloading my first burst at the Agent as I ran, even before he had his own weapon out, aiming — yes, I was that good — for a hit that would disable the Agent without killing the host.

Cleo must live!

I was shooting with inhuman accuracy. Zephyr was firing the S&W from the Agent’s flank, and his shots were even better than mine.

It didn’t matter. The Agent’s form bent, twisted, moved up and down and in and out impossibly fast. Our bullets were dead on target . . . until, just before impact, the target somehow wasn’t there. How is it doing that???

The booth where Cleo and I had been sitting was dissolving under the hail of bullets, splinters and fragments of red leather flying in all directions. Screams and cries of patrons joined with the pounding thunder of our heavy guns, a cacophony of terror.

The Agent was unfazed.

My first fifteen rounds were gone and I was well into my second without any sign of progress. I wasn’t even bothering with precision any longer. Zephyr was only carrying the one pistol and had stopped to reload.

Somehow, the Agent was firing in Zephyr’s direction even while he was dodging the suppressing fire I was putting down!

Then I was out, and Zephyr was out, and there was no time to reload, because the Agent was up and shooting back. This time, at me.

And it came to me, suddenly. I knew how the Agent had done it! It was a trick of the Matrix . . . a simple enough trick if you knew where to look . . . it was almost like I could see the code surrounding me – the pub, the bar, the Agent, the gun, the bullets . . . all just . . . code. And I understood their hack.

The bullets were coming straight at me, and I dodged, bobbed, weaved. It was as if I could see the bullets in slow motion, instantly calculate their ballistic trajectories, and synchronize my movements to avoid them. Left, right, up down . . . . Glass shattered behind me and an entire exterior window came crashing down.

The Agent was in motion too, and at first I thought he was coming toward me. But when I realized what he was actually doing, it was too late.

His gun came up, seeming to move slowly. Deliberately. Like it was part of a ballet. It was aimed at me, to be sure, but there was a secondary target, right behind me. A target I could sense without turning my head.

In the strange, Matrix code world that I suddenly could sense, the secondary target stood out with incandescent brightness. A mere mortal, a hostage to the Matrix. Just another human whose life was spent generating energy for the machines that kept him captive. I could even sense the lines of energy going from him to some distant collection point.

“Noelle . . . They’re captives, but they’re still people. People with hopes, dreams, fears . . . .”

The gun fired and the bullet moved toward me. I knew, somehow, that I wouldn’t be able to snatch it. My mind was processing with blinding speed, and I recognized that for whatever reason, the Agent’s trick didn’t work that way.

A million things had brought me to this moment – roads taken, roads forgone – but I had reached the point in my decision matrix where all that remained was a simple, binary choice: Take the bullet, or dodge.

And if I dodged, Davydd would die.

Death approached, inexorable, and the choice was upon me. In the end, though, it wasn’t hard. I had failed with Cleo; Hermes would have to find another way to reach her. There was no greater purpose to be served, no reason to value my life above my love. I could only hope that Zephyr would make his escape.

My life for you, Cariad!

There was no time for speech. The world was operating at its normal speed, and my words wouldn’t outrun the bullet.

I stood still.

To be continued . . . .
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Author’s Note: I’m posting this installment a bit early because I’ll be traveling and I’m not confident that I’ll have access to WiFi. For the same reason, I may not be able to respond to comments right away, and the next installment will be a bit delayed. It’s my intent to post it a week from Monday, on the 28th of August.

Don’t hate me, Trinity!

Chapter 10: Queen’s Pawn Promoted

The bullet arrived.

It arrived, but I was not there to stop it. Although I didn’t will my body’s motion, I couldn’t prevent it. Not when I was rammed by a compact form arriving at full tilt, propelled by desperation and love.

Zephyr.

I flew sideways, instinctively rolling as my shoulders neared the ground. Zephyr landed more awkwardly, having hit me hard around my left hip as I stood in front of the bar.

I wanted to scream. To cry. I didn’t need to look to know what had happened, when I was no longer there to protect the man behind the bar. Protect him with my body, with my life.

Davydd! I failed you!!!

But the Agent wasn’t finished. His hand was already in motion, tracking Zephyr as he spun towards the ground. I would not fail again!

I completed my roll, using the horizontal force Zephyr had imparted to come back to a crouched position. Without a moment to pause, I charged at the Agent, abandoning my useless handguns with their easy-to-evade ballistic projectiles.

The maneuver worked, as the Agent spun his weapon away from Zephyr to point right at my center mass. He fired, once . . . twice . . . three times.

But I used his damned trick against him, twisting and twitching in such a way that I not only evaded the ballistic paths of his bullets, but I also continued my forward charge.

And when I reached him, I had a different weapon in my hand.

The Paranza Corta stiletto is no slashing weapon. In an attempt to ruin the arm holding the weapon, I aimed straight at the Agent’s right shoulder blade. As before, it writhed and bent, its reflexes inhumanly fast. But unlike a bullet, my hand wasn’t confined to a straight and predictable path. I followed his body’s motion like we were performing a tightly synchronized dance.

The blade rammed into the Agent’s shoulder, severing muscle and tendon both. But I was barely able to keep hold of it as my black-suited adversary spun around, in the process shifting the gun to his left hand.

I tried again. He was bringing the gun to bear, and I whipped the blade towards his left wrist in a lightning quick feint. He spun away, but before I could capitalize on the moment he used the momentum from his spin to aim a round kick at my head.

I ducked just in time then launched myself forward to take advantage of his momentary imbalance. He clutched at me as I hit him, and we both crashed to the floor. The knife was wrenched from my hand, but I managed to extract myself and leap backward, once again landing on my feet.

I became aware again – I don’t know how I had lost that awareness – that the Agent and I weren’t alone in the pub. There were police officers all over; it appeared that several of them were pinning Zephyr to the ground where he had landed heavily. Arms were reaching to grab me, even as the Agent’s face melted, becoming Cleo once more.

But Cleo would never lead an attack against the machines, nor would Sir Anthony St. Claire fulfill his mother’s dynastic ambitions. Her face was still, frozen, and her eyes were open and unseeing. I didn’t need medical training to know that she was dead; whether by chance or by instinct, my knife was buried to the hilt in her throat.

In the odd, code-like world I could now sense beyond my vision, I saw the power line leaving Cleo’s body and going toward one of the officers who was reaching to grab me. The Agent would be operational again in moments, and there was no way – none – that I could either fight or escape it and all of the police simultaneously.

Zephyr was down, Cleo was dead, and Davydd was dying. The mission had failed, completely and catastrophically. We had lost. And we would go on losing.

Forever.

A boot stamping on the human face, forever.

“When the time comes, you will know what to do, and you’ll do it.” Hermes’ words in the simulator came back to me in that moment of complete defeat. Because suddenly, without knowing how, I knew.

The Agents could do extraordinary things in the Matrix – things no human could do. But there were limits in their programs, built-in limits that the AI had designed for its own purposes. With a flash of pure understanding that transcended reason, I realized that the AI hadn’t created me, and I wasn’t bound by those arbitrary limits.

I was done playing by the AI’s rules.

“It stops. It stops now.” My voice was quiet. So quiet no one would hear it, but for the fact that my world was suddenly as silent as deep space and utterly, completely still. Motionless.

I stepped around the police officers who were looking to grab me, ignoring them altogether. They weren’t important anymore. I could have leapt over the bar, but I just walked around it instead. Time was no longer the issue. I would have the time I needed with Davydd.

What was left of him.

I sank to his side and pulled his shattered body into the temporal bubble I had formed in the fabric of the Matrix. He was in shock, the bullet having completely pulverized his left shoulder, and it was beyond clear that he had mere moments to live.

I cradled his body to mine, weeping.

“Who are you?” His voice was a whisper.

When his question registered, my heart ached, recognizing that he couldn’t know what I knew, or see what I saw. Then realization hit me again. I reached out with my mind and broke another ‘rule’ that we had thought to be iron. “Davy . . . Davy! It’s me. It’s your Noelle.” The voice was my own, my real voice, and the arms that held my love were my own arms, smooth, slender, and pale.

My hot tears splashed on his beloved face. His gorgeous eyes, the eyes that had captivated me and held me spellbound, sparked with sudden recognition.

And the memories rushed at me, no longer a trickle but a torrent. I could see them all, like little bubbles – six separate lives, each with a greasy, plastic backstory, now easily separated from the lives I’d actually led. And Davydd was there with me, our spirits twined together like the trunk of a wisteria vine, sharing the memories. So many memories.

It was early January, 1998. A face loomed above me, suffused with ineffable tenderness. I knew that face – every precious line of it. She made a wordless sound, like the coo of a turtledove, and stroked my cheek with an outstretched finger. She was my world, and my mouth, toothless, rooted for her breast. . . .

I was bouncing up and down, for my “stallion,” my Tada, had me on his shoulders and was showing me the meaning of a trot. Up and down I went, squealing with joy, my little dress hiked up, displaying white tights and little black buckled shoes. It was a fine spring day in 1998, and I was five years old . . . .

“You’d BETTER run!” Chasing Davy through what felt like every backyard in Rogerstone, I couldn’t even remember what he’d done to make me so cross. I was seldom cross, really, but Davy did have a talent that way. However scrawny I might be at all of ten, I could outrun any boy my age, and none of the other girls could touch me. It was 1998, holidays had just started, and that devil Davy was about to find out just how fast I really was . . . .

Late September, 1998, found me standing on a bluff, high above the Severn River Estuary. A fresh breeze ruffled my dress, but I paid it no attention. I only had eyes for Davydd, who had always been my best friend. I knew, in that moment, that he would be more than that. So much more! And in his eyes, I could see the same realization strike, like heat lightning out of a cloudless sky. I was fifteen, I was in love, and life was incomparably sweet . . . .

I was staring down at the ring on my left hand – the ring Davydd had just slipped on it, after we had finished exchanging our marriage vows. Silver twisted in a Celtic pattern . . . a modest stone . . . It was perfect. His arm was around my shoulders, warm and welcoming, and his head bent close to my ear as he whispered, “Gyda'n Gilydd Am Byth, Cariad.” It was a fine and cloudless midsummer day in the Year of Our Lord 1998. Our wedding day. . . .

I bent my head, looking at the perfect child I was cradling in one arm. So innocent . . . so beautiful. She took my breath away. I touched her cheek with a single finger, marveling again at how soft her skin was, and a wordless sound of wonder escaped my lips. She smacked her lips and gurgled, reminding me that it was past time.

I raised my top, laughing, worked the flap on my nursing bra, and brought her to my breast. I could not imagine how I had survived twenty-five years, from my birth in November of 1973 until that extraordinary day two months earlier, without this amazing person in my life . . . .

Time stood still as we walked together, as we fought our battles again, as we gazed into each other’s eyes, high above the estuary on a brilliant summer day, as we wed, as we loved . . . . We touched the moments of every life, and everything that had ever been between us, all that had been wiped away but not destroyed.

Not every memory was pleasant, and the last week of our lives together had been utter, unmitigated and undiluted hell.

“Davy!!!!” My scream was full of terror as the car skidded, the wheels hydroplaning, a mechanical screech piercing the dark and rain-drenched night. We spun and slid, and suddenly the road was gone and we were tipping . . . . I reached back, desperate to do something – anything – to shield Bron . . . .

The pain was intense, crashing over us, shredding our very souls as we went through those moments again, and the brutal days that followed. Davydd in the hospital bed, his body and spirit broken; Bronny’s little elfin frame, so tiny in the casket. Oh, Bronwyn!

Despite the pain, I wished that Davydd and I could remain in that place of complete communion. In all our years together, we had never been as close as we were now. But we couldn’t simply live in our past. His spirit, one with my own, shared that realization.

I couldn’t suppress a sob as we returned to the present moment together. “I tried, Davy! I tried to take the bullet!”

“Hush, girl. I know. It’s alright now.”

I thought about what I was doing. With time. With power. Could I save him? Could there be a future for us once more?

He saw it in my face. Maybe read it in my mind, so close were we to each other. “Noelle bach. Don’t.”

“I can’t lose you again!”

His voice was barely a whisper. “I can’t go on, Cariad. I couldn’t then; I can’t now. Please. Please, let me go.” In his voice, I heard the terrible crushing weight of guilt, loss and despair that had destroyed him.

“Davy, it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t! I want to fight back – Help me!”

A ghost of a smile played on his pain-ravaged face. “Always the terror, you were. Go on, now, love. Go on. Just . . . strike a blow for Bronwyn . . . and me.”

I shook my head in denial. “No!”

But all the knowledge in the world, all the clever hacks, all the pleas and prayers, couldn’t stop the light from leaving his eyes. We had shared thirty years of life and love and loss, and now, just as we got it all back, it was done.

My anguished cry seared my constricted throat, chasing after his departing spirit. “Gyda'n Gilydd Am Byth, Davy!” But it was too late.

My beloved would never hear my voice again.

So I was left to face the last memory alone, my mind bringing me back in our flat in Rogerstone, staring at the container of pills. Unable to imagine going on without Bron, who was gone. Without Davy, who had no will to go on.

How could I do it? How could I put one foot in front of the other?

I dressed myself carefully. The dark red wool skirt; the cashmere top, soft as rabbit fur, that he had given me for Christmas one year. The black leather boots that came almost to my knees. I brushed my long hair back, braiding the front quarter on one side. I did my face. One last time. Everything just so. Just the way he liked it. And I stared at the pills.

To be, or not to be?

My tears overwhelmed me as I relived those final despairing moments, a memory which intertwined with the pain of my renewed loss in a tight braid of agony. The control I held on the temporal anomaly I had created wavered, slipped. The sound of the world – furious, panicked – began to return.

Somewhere, I knew . . . . Somewhere, in some God-forsaken tower built on the ruins of a human city, a body was being disconnected from the cords and tubes that bound it to the machine’s world, and flushed like so much sewage. In the bowels of the tower, his remains would find their way to a reclamation center, where they would be turned into fats and proteins, now that his usefulness as a power source was finished.

And with that thought, my tears stopped and my control over the bubble I had created stabilized, silencing the world again. The hole in my heart would always be there, but unlike the young woman I had been before, I would not waste away in grief.

Not when there was work to be done.

“I swear to you, Davydd ap Owen, by the love we shared, and by the love we poured out on our daughter. I will see you avenged.”

I laid him down tenderly, closed his sightless eyes, and bent to kiss his brow a final time. I rose and found, as I knew I would, that world remained still, the tableau substantially unchanged from where it had been when I went behind the bar.

Slowly and deliberately, I walked to the spot I had noticed before, where the spark of the Agent program was attempting to transfer from Cleo’s now lifeless body to one of the police officers. Even the Agent hadn’t made much progress.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” I reached out and plucked the spark from the Matrix grid, the code lines that I saw with my second sight. “You’ve done enough.” My mind reached out and twisted, just . . . so. Severed from the energy lines connecting it to the grid, the Agent was deleted. I could almost hear its shriek of protest as its essence came apart.

Zephyr was face down on the ground, pinned by several officers. As gently as I could, I moved them off of him one by one and carefully laid them down, so they wouldn’t go flying into walls in the version of space time that their consciousnesses inhabited.

Could I extend my temporal bubble to cover Zephyr as well? I mentally reached out, twisted, and it was done.

Zephyr rolled and looked up, shocked. “Noelle?”

“Let’s get out of here. We can talk on the way.”

As he rose to his full – and in the Matrix, not very impressive – height, he saw Cleo. “Well, shit.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He looked at me. Took in my female appearance, and the fact that the world around us seemed to have stopped. “No, I don’t suppose it does.”

The doors were jammed with patrons caught in the moment of fleeing, but that was immaterial. We simply stepped through the window that the Agent’s evaded bullets had brought down. Without a backward glance, we went through the covered walkway and out onto Coleman Street, where all of the cars were motionless.

“Back to the Barrister’s Office?” he suggested.

I shrugged. “Works for me.”

We crossed the street, passing a string of police officers rushing toward the pub, oblivious of our presence. Through the windows of the restaurants that lined Great Bell Alley, we could see diners with alarmed expressions. Many were already out of their seats, mouths caught open in the midst of exclamations. This was London in 1998, not Beirut or even Baltimore. The sound of gunfire was not a common occurrence.

“You’re doing this somehow, aren’t you?” Zephyr asked. “You were dodging bullets just like an Agent.”

I nodded. “What the Agents do is a technique – a hack, of sorts, in the basic Matrix Code. It’s not based on speed. Instead, they’re able to slow time down, compute the ballistic path of bullets and move just enough to avoid them. I don’t know why, but their ability to slow time only works for immediate evasive action. It’s a completely artificial limitation though, and I discovered I’m not bound by it.”

“Can you teach us how to do it?”

I thought about that. “I don’t know. The technique seems simple enough, once I saw it. But I don’t know how to teach anyone to see it.”

We walked in silence a bit further, coming to Moorgate Street, which, again, was full of vehicles, and none were moving. As we weaved around the motionless cars, Zephyr said, “And your appearance? I can’t tell you how much I would love to look like myself when I’m inside the Matrix!”

I reached out to the power lines that surrounded me and made an adjustment. “Like this?”

My deeper voice registered and Zephyr looked back, startled. Then he stopped altogether, for I had altered my appearance to match what he looked like in the real world.

“Holy shit!” His mouth was hanging open. But for the fact that traffic was not moving, he would have been flattened long since.

I switched my appearance back and shrugged. “It’s kind of the same thing. Hermes provided the clue; he stopped aging in the Matrix decades ago, so ‘residual self image’ has no direct connection to your appearance outside the Matrix. It’s just code, and it can be changed.”

“If you can see it,” he amended.

“Right.”

We stepped into the alley that for some reason merited the title of ‘street,’ and continued walking. There were fewer people on Telegraph Street, but they had the same startled and alarmed looks on their faces as the people closer to the pub. The sound of gun shots carries a long way.

“What triggered all this? You didn’t have these abilities before.”

“I don’t know. Not exactly. When I saw the Agent dodging our bullets, I was suddenly able to see exactly how it did it. But I didn’t understand how to get around the limits the AI built into Agents’ abilities. Not at first. Not until . . . .” I faltered. Took a breath. Took another.

We had to get through this together, Zephyr and I.

He was looking at me, his pixie face showing concern as my distress registered. “Until what? Noelle, you look like hell. What happened in there?”

“Davydd died, Zephyr. He was hit by . . . by one of the Agent’s shots.”

The blood drained from his face and he looked sick. “Oh . . . oh, my God! That’s why you stopped dodging. What have I done?”

I didn’t hesitate for an instant. I pulled him into an iron embrace and whispered fiercely into his wild, spiky hair. “You did what you had to do. What I couldn’t do, no matter what was at stake. No matter how many lifetimes I lived.”

I squeezed his slender form as if I could imprint my words into his heart by brute force. “Now listen to me, and don’t ever forget it! Davydd’s death was not your fault! The machines killed him! The machines! Not once, but twice.”

“But . . . .”

“NO!!!” I could barely contain my urgency, my passionate desire to stop him from taking even a single step down this destructive path. “No, no, no!!! I might have saved him tonight. I’m not sure how; I’m still figuring out the extent of my ability to manipulate the forces inside the Matrix. But he didn’t want me to try! Don’t you see? He couldn’t stop blaming himself . . . blaming himself for Bronwyn’s death. Don’t – God, Zephyr, please don’t – go making the same mistake! We need you. I need you!”

I felt a surge of hope, as one arm, then another, slowly, tentatively — even painfully — rose to return my embrace. “I am so sorry, Noelle. So very, very sorry.”

I thought of my last moments with Davydd, and a tear once more slipped down my cheek, sliding into Zephyr’s hair. “Me, too. Beyond words. He was a good man, and I loved him with all my heart. I will never forget him. But that’s why I have to go on. I need to live for all of us now – for Davy and Bronwyn and me.”

His delicate hands slid across my back, providing the comfort that only human contact can. “Can you manage it?”

It was a good question. My rage, my desire for vengeance, was unabated. But was it enough? Could I live for vengeance alone? Did I need to? Should I?

My question came back to me, the one I had asked Zephyr after we’d made love in his cabin on the Belisarius. “Are our lives just one crisis after another . . . brief moments of vigilant inactivity, followed by running, fighting, running some more . . . until the day our number comes up we get killed?”

I cupped his cheek with my hand. “Not alone. Are you with me?”

He brought his hands around to touch my face in turn. “If you’ll have me.”

I kissed him then, even though he looked like a pixie. It’s all just code, and that means nothing. It was a light and gentle kiss, more promise than passion. I had just said my last farewells to Davydd, and I had only begun to grieve.

But I wasn’t a fifteen-year-old ingenue anymore. When Davydd and I had kissed for the first time and acknowledged the love that burned between us, I had thought the world was a beautiful place and we would have forever. I knew better now.

Zephyr and I were engaged in a deadly struggle against fearsome odds. Who knows how long we might have? Whatever time we were given, I was determined not to squander it.

A few minutes later, we stood in the small office that belonged to Sidney Westen, a distinguished barrister and aspiring silk enjoying a bit of holiday in Majorca . . . a human male, lying naked in a lozenge-shaped capsule filled with fluid, powering the machines that ran his life. Who would he be, when the Matrix next rebooted?

“Okay, Noelle,” Zephyr said. “Let’s go home.”

~o~O~o~

Epilogue: First Check

It was a moving service, and it felt like all of Rogerstone was there. Davydd’s parents, Owen and Eleri Carew, were the principal mourners. It hurt to see their once-merry faces so haggard. Again.

They had looked the same, the last time I’d seen them. After the car “accident” that cost them their beloved granddaughter, and tore the very heart from their son. I had stood with them at her grave, and again at his hospital bed, weeping tears that never seemed to stop.

In this version of the Matrix, Davydd had been unmarried and the little corner of the graveyard where I had buried poor Bronwyn was empty. Davydd’s remains would go there now. That, I could not bear to see.

I felt like I knew each and every person in St. John’s that morning. Mrs. Davies, who’d taught my second grade class . . . and who, four “updates” later, had been an older friend in my book group. Devon Terry, who used to pull my ponytail back at Eveswell Primary. Grim old Gareth Roberts, who wielded the meat cleavers at the butcher shop. Mary Hughes, who’d organized food to be delivered to our flat – Davydd’s and mine – when Davy was in hospital. I had memories that attached to every face.

They didn’t question the woman in the red wool skirt who stood in the back of the church . . . it’s the Lord’s house and all are welcome in it. But I was unknown here in this timeline, my history erased. Even my parents did not appear to live here.

It wasn’t home anymore.

I left the church amid the stream of mourners, but walked away, down Kensington Place to Chepstow Road. There, I knew, I would find a phone box, because of course there was a phone box. The big, red, extravagant variety that serves as a symbol of Britain the world over. I crossed the street, a cool wind swirling my skirt.

I stepped inside, closed the door, and lifted the black handset, seeing, a final time, the simple silver ring in a Celtic design on my finger. I didn’t need coins. I didn’t need to dial. I only had to think, to see the lines of energy, the code behind the pleasant facade of a small community in South Wales. Merlin’s own country. To reach out with my mind and tug just . . . so.

I was in contact with the enemy. I knew it was there, and it knew me. From somewhere deep inside, the words came to me. It was not a memory, I was sure of that. And yet the words flowed out, like I had spoken them before, or would speak them again.

"I know you're out there,” I said into the handset, my voice low. “I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.”

I stared across the street, at the small shops that loomed large in the memories of my childhood. I thought about Davydd, and about Bronwyn. I thought about Hermes, about Blake and Dakota, Kai and Abhaya. About Zephyr, watching right now, as my real-world body sat silent on the chair at his side, a cold and deadly probe in my brain. I thought about all the people I had known and loved and lost.

“I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. . . . Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

I replaced the handset, stepped out of the booth, and said good morning to an older woman who was walking her Yorkie, bundled against the chill of Autumn.

Then I looked to the heavens, and willed myself to fly.

The end.

Author's note: So the story ends where the original Matrix movie ended – basically, at the end of the beginning. I believe that the studios made a mistake when they decided to do sequels, following visions of dollar signs as they generally do. The first movie was an artistic masterpiece in every way, and should have been allowed to stand alone.

I want to thank all of you who stayed with me to the end of the story, particularly if you left kudos. My fickle muse generally just gives me the barest outline of an idea before she bounces off on the arm of some other, far sexier, author, so I have to rely on perspiration rather than inspiration to grind it out each week. Knowing someone is actually reading it helps me get through the blocks and over the bumps.

My very special thanks, as always, go to those who participated in the creation of the story by leaving comments – Kimmie, Rachel Moore, Dee Sylvan, Erisian, DorothyColleen, Sunflowerchan, Catherd, RobertLouis, Guest Reader, AlisonP, Dreamweaver, Michelle SidheElf, Eric, JoanneBarbarella, Dallas Eden, Alan, Asche, Dave (“Outsider”), Ray Drouillard, and Leona MacMurchie. Your continued support makes all the difference in the world.

I need to give an extra shout-out to RobertLouis for looking over several key chapters before I posted them, to make sure that my English characters stayed in character, as it were. His suggestions were always amazingly helpful.

Good night again, and joy be with you all!

Emma

For information about my other stories, please check out my author's page.