Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [140]
She woke with a wild where-am-I? look, saw him and smiled.
‘You’re still here.’
‘Still here.’
‘You been awake long?’
Jordan shrugged. ‘Some time.’
‘What you been doing?’ She rolled over and put an arm and a leg over him.
‘Watching you sleep.’
Her hand explored. ‘Hmm…that must’ve been exciting.’
‘Not as exciting as seeing you awake.’ She dived.
‘Now you.’
The estuarine smell and taste of it, salt and rank, ocean and swamp.
Then chin to chin, lip to lip, tongue to tongue; pubis to pubis. She grabbed his hand and guided it with urgent precision and abandoned his finger there, a trapped digit doing its little bit between their blind beat. As suddenly she dragged it away, digging her nails into the small of his back and taking him over the edge with her in an arching, bucking, yelling fall.
They landed in a tangled heap.
‘Wuh.’
‘They don’t call you Cat for nothing.’
She grinned and rolled her eyes and ran her tongue along her teeth. Then she sat up and reached for a handful of tissues and, still cat-like, wiped and mopped.
‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she said.
‘Oh good,’ Jordan said. ‘So am I.’
She pushed him away and jumped off the bed.
‘Another time,’ she said. ‘Right now it would be…self-defeating.’
She skipped into the shower stall.
‘Hey, lover,’ she shouted as the water came on, ‘there’s something you can do for me.’
‘Yes?’
‘Get me some breakfast.’
well hi there jordan
Jordan was watching a kettle not boiling when the low, flat, uninflected voice came from the air behind him. He turned in a poor imitation of a fighting crouch and saw the face of the Black Planner on a small television tile propped in a corner of the kitchen counter. He stared open-mouthed for a moment, and the animated line-drawing of a face smiled, apparently in response. One of the telecams on a nearby shelf had a tiny red eye beside its lens’s unwinking stare – he was sure it hadn’t been on before.
sorry to startle you
The voice came from the speakers of the room’s sound system, an eerily perfect reproduction of words that didn’t bother to pretend they came from a human throat.
‘I’m pleased to see you again,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the money. It made a big difference to my life.’
so i understand i have been watching your progress with interest your new girlfriend has no doubt told you that an offensive is imminent
Jordan nodded, dry-mouthed. There was something disturbingly familiar about the face, familiar beyond the fact of his having seen it before. He felt he had encountered it somewhere else. Possibly the Black Planner himself was an ANR cadre who walked unmarked in the streets of Norlonto, a face he’d passed by in the crowd.
do not be offended that she has not told you all she knows this is nothing personal it is because she is basically a good communist loyal daughter of the revolution and mother of the new republic though she would laugh if you said so to her face the offensive is no longer imminent it is current and i again have a proposition for you the risk is considerable and there is no monetary reward however i think you will obtain satisfaction out of the high probability that your actions will result in a very substantial reduction in the human cost of the insurrection do i have your interest
‘Yes.’
i urgently require access to some systems from which i am currently excluded once again it is just a matter of entering a code on a terminal the code in question will follow your agreement to proceed as will the relevant passwords the terminal is the high-security terminal in the office of melody lawson and the time is as soon as you can get there
‘Oh, that terminal.’ He hoped the routines the Planner was manipulating could pick up voice-tones, even if it couldn’t transmit them. ‘And how do you expect me to get back into BC, let alone into the office? And what about getting out again?’
entering the