growing threat of the hurricanes that were beginning to pin Atopia against the coast of America.
“So you think the Terra Novans are involved?” asked Commander Strong. He’d been drinking again. Things were going badly with his wife.
“We’re not sure,” responded the mandroid.
“So then where is this coming from?” Rick demanded impatiently, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He looked like he had a headache.
“We can’t say for certain yet,” she repeated, “but there’s something too perfect about these storms.”
“Jimmy, do you think you could look into this more?” asked Rick, looking away from the mandroid and towards me. “I need to go and see Cindy.”
“No problem,” I replied. He was about to flit off when I remembered something. “Oh, yeah, I have that date tonight, if you remember.”
Rick looked up towards the ceiling. “Susie, right? That’s going well, huh?”
He smiled. I shrugged.
“I can cancel if you want.”
“No, no, keep the date. You can’t let stuff like this stop you from living life,” he sighed. “Anyway, I know you’ll keep a few splinters around if I need you. I’ll be back later.”
With that he flitted off, and I returned my focus to the storms and our mandroid guest. More than one thing wasn’t right here.
It was my third date with Susie, and for this one, I’d received an invitation to meet in her own private world. It was a sensual, mystical place where the sun was eternally setting. She wanted to go for a walk outside her enclave, to chat, and so I found myself walking through a valley of knotted oaks and blossoming cherry trees that offered hidden glimpses of fantastical canyon walls beyond them. Waterfalls spilled into clouds of mist from high, craggy cliffs, and everything twinkled in shades of silver and gold.
As we walked, she gently brushed aside a patch of yellow orchids that she stepped through as tenderly if they were children at play. The woody atmosphere was perfect and synthetically warm, but slightly cloying under an indistinct vanilla sky. Her long flaxen hair spilled down her back, held in place by a garland of white flowers, and a flowing translucent gown revealing hints of her tiny body beneath.
The breeze swept waves of glittering cherry blossoms and silvery oak leaves around us like a snowstorm, and fireflies sparkled in our wake while we walked through the gathering dusk.
“How is Patricia?” she asked. It was common knowledge we were close.
“She’ll be fine,” I replied with a smile. “She’s very old, these things happen. The doctors say she’ll be back good as new tomorrow, or the next day.”
“Good.” She smiled warmly, but then her eyes clouded over. “And these storms, we’re not in any danger are we? I guess it can’t be that serious if you’re here.” Her smile returned.
“Don’t worry about the storms,” I assured her. “I wouldn’t advise going topside when they get here, but we’ll be fine.”
“Double good,” she laughed. Then she flinched, her side spasming.
It was some event out in the world, some type of disaster that had sparked into her body. She had such an exquisitely tuned neural pain network; it was what had attracted me to her. She smiled at me as the spasm subsided.
“It’s nothing,” she smiled. “I have this…”
“I know,” I interrupted gently. “No need to explain.”
I reached down to hold her hand, and she smiled, watching me.
“So, Mr. Jimmy Jones, my friend Willy speaks very highly of you,” Susie laughed.
I walked with my hands behind my back, formal, slightly stiff, and was wearing my ADF Whites. There could have hardly been a starker contract between the two of us.
She laughed, and spun out in front of me, reaching up to snatch a blossom out of the air. She stopped in front of me, curtsied, and offered me the blossom. Her eyes were full of mischievousness.
“So what would an ADF officer want with me?” she laughed.
“I need your help. It’s hard to explain.”
“Need my help?” she giggled. “I thought this was a date?” She pouted playfully.
“It is.” I looked down and away, trying to appear embarrassed. “I mean, I feel like you’re someone who could be really special to me.”
She danced away from me, trailing her hands through the flowers.
“Oh I’ve looked you up, Jim-bob Jonesee…that incident with the bugs…” she laughed, and then stopped to turn to look at me. “That was a bit odd, don’t you think?”
I winced.
“I was just a kid. I was a kid trying to find a way to deal with my pain,” I tried to explain. “You wouldn’t understand, nobody does…how could you, you grew up with such love.”
She considered me for a moment. “What do you mean?”
I was silent.
“Jimmy?” she asked again, softer this time.
My face reflected sorrowful pain. “My friends call me James.”
She nodded. “Okay then, what is it, James?”
“I’ve never shared this with anyone, Susie. I don’t know why I feel like I can share this with you. Can we make this private?”
“Of course,” she replied, pulling down a glittering golden security blanket around us.
I took a deep breath.
“My mother, well, she…” I tried to say, but stopped as I let a tear glisten in my eye. I sat down on a nearby tree stump. Susie came to sit beside me, and put her hand on mine and squeezed it. She said nothing, but just waited.
“It would be easier if I showed you,” I said looking into her eyes. She nodded and released her subjective control to me.
Suddenly Susie and I we were sitting in a corner of the Misbehave world my mother had created to punish me in.
We were reliving a rendering of my inVerse from when I was barely two, and in front of us, sitting on chair in the middle of an empty concrete room was Mother, suspending my tiny two year old body in the air by one arm.
“It’s all your fault!” she spat in my tiny face, the veins in her forehead swelling. She fumbled with some pssi controls and then reached inside my body to dig her synthetic nails deep into my nervous system, scraping them down the length of the neural pain receptors in my body. I screamed in unimaginable agony.
“Shut up, you little bastard. Nobody can hear you in here. Just shut up!” she yelled at me. I screamed and screamed, my little face purple and apoplectic.
Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, and tears welled up in her eyes.
“Turn it off James, please!” she cried, and then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest, with the cherry blossoms gently settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep grass and swaying flowers.
She held onto me tightly and cried. I sat impassively, and leaned to kiss the top of her head.
“I’m so sorry, James,” she just kept repeating. “I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
“It wasn’t just my mother,” I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little. I looked away.
“What else?” she asked. “Show me.”
So I did. I took her back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world.
It had been a bright and sunny day, and my dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins. Mother was off in another one of her never ending soapstim fantasies, and Yolanda had just finished making us dinner and chatting about the day.
Yolanda liked the dolphins too. I took her on inVerse dives with Samantha, and she would clap her hands and laugh with me.
Later, alone, and with a security blanket settled around the house for the evening, my dad tucked me into
