'No! I'm not going to tell you!'
'They have to be running a diversion, Draco,' said Sara. 'We don't know what it is they're doing with Eddie, but they're doing something. We didn't get that part.'
'It'd better be a good trick,' said Draco. 'For your sake, asshole.'
Orlando reckoned he'd held out long enough to be plausible. 'All right, okay, I'll give you the code. I can download, just show me your input device.'
Draco grinned. 'Oh, no. Sorry, asshole, that's not going to work. The military took my chip when they discharged me. You're going to take me in there.'
Grace and Orlando knew what Eddie had done, to deal with the horrible burden he had been given. Maybe it was grotesque in human terms, but they were experts on the twisted paths of pleasure, and they could understand. Eddie could not bear what happened to the thing in the cell, he couldn't bear the part he had to play, as the code trigger to that brutal harvest. So he'd rerouted the experience. He had plugged all the helpless guilt and powerless compassion he felt into his libido. When the alien got milked, poor soft-hearted Eddie got his rocks off.
It wasn't Eddie who designed the human brain, and he wasn't the first to make use of the paradoxical contiguity between sexual excitement and other violent arousal. Actually, she felt bad about deceiving him. But she knew Eddie would forgive her. The rule is, there are no rules. But now what? Where's the way to Eddie's heart? It couldn't be that his only pleasure came from watching a flayed, truncated human being get fisted by a robot. Eddie wasn't really like that.
'Won't you sit down?' said Eddie, shyly.
She looked around. The cabin was lovely, even with its boring decor. Everything was exquisite, and delicate, and- oooh, this figures - distinctly sexless. Orlando and Grace genuinely did empathy rather well; it was part of the augmentation they had chosen when they got themselves fixed up as near-twins. Her glance lit on a convoluted shelf unit that held, protected from the vagaries of gravity failure, a very pretty tea set, in shades of dark blue and rust.
'Could we have tea?'
Eddie's cheeks turned pink, his eyes shone. 'Oh, yes! Indian, or China, or I have some Earl Grey, or would you prefer a fruit, or herbal blend?' 'I would love to try your Earl Grey,' she told him, very warmly. 'Oh, wow, Eddie. Can that be -is that early Wedgwood?'
Nice Eddie's lips parted in unfeigned delight. His breathing quickened.
Draco walked Orlando to the Wall, Sara Komensky on point, a few paces behind. Draco had his hands in the hip pockets of his padded jumper. Every so often he nudged Orlando in the small of his back with the muzzle of the plastic shooter.
'Go ahead, Orlando. You're the one with the key.'
'I can't, I daren't,' protested Orlando, feebly resistant. 'The AIs will spot us, this was never meant to happen this way.' The muzzle of the firearm dug into his back. 'Okay! Okay!' He summoned virtual Eddie to the forefront of his mind. The Wall opened and Orlando and Draco and the bot passed through. They reached the antechamber with the window looking into the cell next door.
Draco stared hungrily at the horror squirming there.
'Now what?'
'That's milking behavior,' said Orlando. Beads of sweat were trickling down his face, and he didn't dare to wipe them. He had no need to pretend to be terrified. 'Th-that means G-Grace… it means she's on target. Now we have to go next door. The alien is milked once a day. Eddie is… his brainstate is linked to the robotics. The copy of Eddie I have on my implant is a reduced instruction set, enough to get us in here, but now I have to patch through to the real Eddie, and he has to be in kind of a particular state of mind. Do you remember, Draco, when you were a little boy? The military recruited you because you had the wiring they could use, and they tweaked your brain further out of neurotypic, so you would feel killing all those people as just a big rush of pleasure, pleasure, pleasure?'
'Shut the fuck up,' said Draco. 'Take me to the robotics chamber.'
So Orlando, with the real Eddie riding him like a tremulous, quivering psychic parasite, took Draco around to the robotics chamber. The wiry red hairs were standing up on the back of his neck, because if things didn't go totally, completely according to plan in the next few minutes, he -Orlando-was going to be at the very sharp end of Draco's distorted pleasure principle. And he didn't want to die. But for some reason he looked behind him, over Draco's shoulder. His terrified glance met the bot's big blue eyes, and though he knew 'she' was only a virtual sextoy, she seemed to be saying, hang tough, we can do this.
'What's with this anti-information, Draco?' he asked, for something to say. 'That's a weird concept. Isn't all information the same?'
'The thing from NGC 1999 came through from another universe,' said Draco. 'Where it comes from, everything is flipped the other way round, in terms of what is real and what is virtual. That's what the fucking science says.'
'You mean, the exotic material they harvest here started out, over there, non-material, like, pure code without a medium, or unreal ideas?'
'What the fuck. That's just shit-for-brains talk. It's treasure now.'
The robotics chamber opened up, and the wall sealed up again behind them.
Orlando felt waves of sweet, moist, sensual happiness flooding through him, making a very weird cocktail with the fear of imminent death. It crossed his mind to wonder what Grace was actually doing to make Supercargo feel so nice. But they were an open couple, and he didn't mind.
'There you go,' he said, standing back. 'The sealed unit will drop into that chute. You have to grab it on the way, like pulling luggage off a band.'
There wasn't much to see. The waldo-hands stuff was happening inside a smooth box on the wall. The harvested material would be delivered, in a small, heavily shielded container, onto a belt beneath this unit, and the belt would convey it to a chute and thence, through a totally automated process, to its secret destination on Earth. On a CCTV screen, you could see the inside of the cell in monochrome. The milking process had begun. Draco put the gun away in his jumper pocket. He opened a compartment on his gadget belt and took out a coil of fine jagged wire.
'What are you doing? Hey, you don't open it. Just grab the box!'
The playpen soldier ignored Orlando. He continued to fit together a power saw designed for the toughest cover operations in the world. Just because he'd done his real work by remote didn't mean he hadn't had access to training materials.
'Oh shit, Draco, are you insane!'
'Asshole. Did you think I was going to be satisfied with a few drops of the juice, when I can get the motherlode? That's a gateway. I'm going in.'
The saw whined like a mosquito. The thing in the cell shuddered in monochrome, and around it every dimension of real space-time fell apart.
'Sara!' cried Orlando, in panic, his legs giving way with terror. He slipped down against the wall, crying, 'Stop him! Oh God, he'll kill us!'
The bot just smiled her sugar smile: and vanished.
If anyone on Earth was watching this, there was nothing they could do. Earth was far away. Draco Fujima sliced his way through the ceramic fiber, and the machinery took no notice. Eddie Supercargo was touching bliss; that was all the machines needed to know… Sara Komensky flew through the code that knit the Panhandle's computer systems together and materialized in Jack Solo's cabin. The pilot was sleeping, because somebody in the saloon had dosed his liquor to make sure he was out of commission on this fateful afternoon. Anni-mah crouched on the cold, hard floor in a corner, wearing the soiled nightie outfit that Jack liked best. She was dozing like her master, whimpering fitfully in her sleep. 'Jack didn't do it, poor Jack, oh, hit me harder big boy, yes, yes-'
'Hey,' said Sara. 'Hey, Tinkerbelle, wake up.'
Anni opened her bleary eyes and cringed automatically from the blow she was programmed to crave, with a pleasureless itch.
'Huh?'
'Look, I ain't got much time babe. I don't even know why I'm fucking doing this, but you look to me like you could do with a change and so, if there is anything autonomous going on in there, come on. Take my hand.'
The bot looked at Jack and then at the dataglove that held the fx generator where her code was stored,
