2011
1:16am |
Waiting on the front steps of Acid Burn's place, I leaned my upper body back from my waist, stretching the muscles I was going to use while thrusting my hips. I knew if this secret meeting was gonna be anything like our first, and they all pretty much are, there wouldn't be much time to limber up.
5 min later
Rolling over onto the sheets, I was careful not to spill anything out of the condom.
Acid Burn rolled over too and put an arm across my chest. "Lay down. They can't see you're here." She giggled. "See or hear."
"I work early." The latex pulled at the skin on my cock as I slid it off. I grunted and breathed again when it let me go. "In four and a half hours. Shit."
"I work too." She sniffed my neck.
"Yeah, but your commute is like eight feet."
"I don't feel like being alone IRL right now." Whatever that meant, her voice was urgent. Acid usually kicked me out right away, and I never argued because I didn't want to mess up such a perfect relationship, but the strange thing is, I was a little glad when she asked me to stay.
I dropped the condom off the edge of the bed and gave into the exhaustion that happens after cumming. We laid there for a while. The external speakers of Acid Burn's computer were aimed at its built in microphone, playing Effective Disorder's canned studio version of "Tried Twice For Just One Crime." It was loud enough to drown out the noise we were making a minute before, but there were gaps in the music. I wasn't thinking about that during the fucking. Sarah could have heard. Acid's giant bra cup covered the camera on her desk, but there could still be more cameras hidden in the room. I had to check the surveillance log when I got to the office and find out what the system saw.
Then my mind filled with all the questions Acid would never let me ask. If she wanted me to stay, she could give me some information for a change. "How does the system tell time?"
She yawned. "Oh, don't worry about that."
"Come on, I can help you now. I transferred to the dispatch office, so I have access to a computer." I grinned. Tinkerbell said she was really interested in getting her hands on my computer.
She sat up, and her tits reshaped themselves, dropping down her chest, bouncing with tiny ripples I tried to lock in my mind. "Who took you off deliveries?"
I looked up. "I don't know, Hans? Is the computer smart enough to do that on it's own?" I thought back to my promotion. "I guess it was the Dude's idea, but what does it matter? I'm moving up in the world."
"No. No. That's ridiculous. Are you kidding? Hans doesn't have..." She scratched her head. "Never chat from that computer to one of ours. It's taken all this time to get around the monitoring software we designed. Who knows what other programs are running on that one?"
"Yeah, do you have Fred? It orders me food."
"No, we have HANS to bring us food, except now you're Hans, and we have to keep you out of the loop, except the loop's gonna dry up soon, because we lost our courier to distribute new encryption keys. Just tell me who..." She bit her knuckle and got lost in thought.
I smiled. "I can be a real part of your network now, help tear the system apart and get you all out."
She frowned. "Is that what you think it's for?"
"I thought you were starting a revolution, inspired by our music." I guess we never actually talked about it.
"Yeah. No. Not that kind of revolution. The system won't let me log into Facebook, or Twitter, LiveJournal, anything except what I need to get work done. I think it even shut down my old GeoCities page. I've lost complete touch with the world outside."
"That's alright. I'll get you out."
"You wouldn't understand. You're Eloi, driving around, doing whatever you want. It's different for us."
She was talking about something I didn't understand. "You think I'm that different?"
She bit her lip. "I can't leave." She shook her head, almost in a panic. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself. In here, everything is provided, and the only problems I have to solve are computer problems." She was talking louder. I didn't want the computer to hear us. Her emotion was, I don't know, panic. "Out there, there are people who think I'm weird. Sometimes I want to throw down and get fucked, and I have you for that. And there are times I have to kvetch with people who know what I'm going through, who are as lonely as I am. So I built a separate system, a support group. We don't need people like you there. What we NEED is a courier."
"I thought you would understand how much I lost by coming here. I want to be..." I looked for the words. It felt like losing her, even though I never really had her. "I can't do this alone."
"How can you say that? You're in a band. You don't have to worry about finding cool people to hang out with."
I opened my mouth to talk, but nothing came out. Maybe she didn't know. She's been locked up a long time. Did I ever tell her? "The band doesn't exist anymore."
"What? Why?" She hugged herself, and her knees hid her tits. "When?"
"Casimir's died, like a year ago." I started breathing heavy. "Jesus, more than that." I clenched my hands. I wasn't going to let talking about it get to me.
"A year ago?" Her face cycled expressions faster than I could process. "That's so... What have you... Fuck." She rolled onto me, pressing her boobs into my chest but trapping me under her. "I liked your band. It was beautiful... while it lasted."
I nodded, feeling the pain in my heart. I remembered how bad that was when it first happened, and I wanted to go get a drink, but I couldn't get out from under her.
"Hexadecimal timestamps." Her face was too close to see anything but the smile in her eyes.
"What?"
She patted my head. "Changed the subject for you. You asked how the system counts time. Like, 1 through 9 then A through F. Then the tens go up by one, but our ten is your sixteen."
Editor's note: that's why the chapter numbers for this story are in hex.
It's just something you get used to after a while.
"I don't understand."
She gasped. "You can read Sarah."
"Yeah." I didn't want to make her paranoid, so I tried to sound causal. "I guess I've seen you in there."
"But you could just search for my name. I wrote some of that code."
"I..." I didn't know I could do that. "I respect your privacy."
"Duh-doy. Let me give you a hint, if a girl shows you she's interested, you have to show some interest back." She rolled over next to me, grabbed my hands and held them up like they were on a keyboard. "Control, Alt, Enter." She moved my fingers to hit imaginary keys. "a-c-i-d-b-u-r-n, enter. Should tell you everything the system says about me."
"Don't you wish it would call you Natalie?"
"I don't mind being compared to Angelina Jolie."
I squinted. "Hm?"
"You don't know much, do you? It's a good thing you're hot."
287 min later |
At my desk less than five hours later, the first part of Acid Burn's secret command didn't bring anything up on the screen, but I typed her code name and hit enter.
Suddenly everything was about her. Sarah was transformed. It made me wonder what other keyboard commands might pull up invisible opportunities to change things.
I didn't have to scroll far to find us.
1AB6590F - #AcidBurn and #winston !makingwhoopee
"Is that what you call it? Sarah, you've been hanging around with the wrong crowd."
The log file didn't answer.
