Content Warning: Dubious Consent

  After eating and discussing our plans for the near future, Makesi dismissed us for the night. I wanted to have a longer talk with them at some point, because I knew Vivi mentioned this was going to be a recruitment when we first met. Part of me was glad they weren’t forcing the issue. I needed some time to sort out my thoughts on everything before I made any commitments.

  That was probably why they hadn’t even brought up the subject of my being hired by the REB. If they had just put another collar on me… I found myself tensing up at the thought.

  Then I remembered Vivi’s reaction when I pointed out the collar and relaxed a little. It was unlikely they would go that route if she felt that way. Also they probably would have done it already.

  Walking back to our cabin on the plane, I connected my Interface to the internet available on the aircraft for the first time in a long time. Vivi wiped the default firmware from Atlas’s standard model and replaced it with her personal, modified variant in exchange for a favour. Ever since my incarceration by Atlas, they had activated some kind of blocker that restricted me from doing anything except confirming my identity and checking my calendar. It felt like I had been missing a limb until now.

  I had missed over five years' worth of memes. I was going to be so behind current trends. There was no way I was going to show my face on any of the old forums I used to browse until I relearned the new lexicon.

  First, though, I checked the news. Because Atlas had just nuked Toronto, and that would obviously be a subject of great interest. I mean, the whole city was gone, and I was fairly certain this was only the sixth time nuclear weapons were deployed on civilian populations. Or maybe the seventh? I wasn't that big into ancient history.

  Oh… apparently, people had other concerns. Toronto being vaporized wasn’t even mentioned on any of the news sites I could find with a cursory search. Atlas controlled all of North American news media, so maybe they were censoring any information about it?

  The biggest news story was about something happening in what used to be called China, but was now a conglomerate of corporate entities known as the Tiānlǜ Group, which was apparently experiencing an outbreak of anomalous fuckery. Except instead of being straight up with what was happening, the media was framing it as an experimental weapon test failure. But there was really no explanation I could think of that made any goddamn sense other than something anomalous happening.

  No wonder we were headed there. Makesi had told me we were leaving North America to avoid reprisals from Atlas. I was pretty sure, based on the way he said it, that he was just being accommodating for me and Aurin. There was no way I wanted to be anywhere near an Atlas facility unless it was to eliminate their executive suite to the last man.

  That might be true, but there was a good reason to head over to the territory of the Tiānlǜ Group. If they were even capable of solving it, the problem was on such a wide scale that I wasn't sure how that would even work.

  A large swath of the country was practically just gone. There weren't even any reports on what happened beyond mere speculation about some superweapon failure. It was as if the entire southern coastline had just vanished from existence. The only reports I could find were satellite images, which showed only a large white field spanning hundreds of kilometres. It looked like either sand or snow from the pictures.

  I was okay just following along with the Provisional Operation Group wherever they went for the moment because I didn’t actually have anywhere else to go or any money to keep myself alive anymore. I checked, and my bank account had been cancelled and all my funds seized. I even received a polite email telling me all of this.

  Also, all of my old friends, if I could even call them that, that I could potentially contact had probably died by means of nuclear hellfire… not that I even had their contact information anymore to confirm that fact. Who actually memorized their friends' phone numbers, much less remembered those numbers after five years of no contact?

  The only issue was that, given we were headed right back into the line of fire, I’d have to make sure that our safety was assured.

  “Did you see what happened to the territory of the Tiānlǜ Group? It’s all over the news right now,” I asked Aurin.

  “I… don't know how to connect to the internet,” she responded, reminding me that I never installed memories relating to using electronic devices into her mind. It had never come up before.

  “Sorry, I completely forgot about that. I can give you my knowledge on how they work if you’d like,” I told her as we approached the cabin that Makesi assigned me. He didn’t mention Aurin, so I assumed she was supposed to bunk with me.

  In fact, they had been really evasive about her this whole time. I wasn’t sure if it was a ‘reincarnating immortals not wanting to build connections with transient individuals’ thing or some other reason.

  “Yeah, that would be nice. While we're at it could we just connect minds for a little while? We haven’t done that in a long time, and I kind of miss being that close to you,” she asked with a quiet voice.

  “Of course!” I replied, with everything that happened, I felt like Aurin was the only anchor in my life, keeping me sane. She had held that role for a long time now, but with all the changes happening lately, there would obviously be a level of tension, especially since I was her anchor as well. I could see cracks forming in her mental conceptualization. They were just hairline fractures at this point, but it was an indication of the stress that she was under.

  Even if we were finally free, in a manner of speaking. We'd probably have to hang out for a while with the REB agents… no, wait, wrong term, they're called Contractors.

  Would they even let us leave if we asked?

  Well, they'd probably be happy to dump Aurin at any point. If she decided she'd rather go live a life somewhere else, they had no incentive to stop her. But me? I was apparently worth a lot to them, as Makesi pointed out, and why would they just let something of incredible value walk away? I didn't really want to have that conversation just yet, maybe when I got to know them a little better.

  But hey, no collar, which was an improvement. Also, they actually showed their faces to me, which never happened while I was at Atlas. This implied a level of trust, either in me or in their ability to eliminate me before I could subvert their minds. That alone was almost touching.

  In reality, even if they were going to force me to remain, this was still a step up from my previous situation.

  “You gonna go inside?” Aurin asked, snapping me out of my contemplation. We had apparently just been standing in front of the door to our room, and I hadn't even noticed.

  “Yeah, just a lot on my mind as you might imagine,” I said, opening the door to the cabin.

  It was cozy-sized with barely enough room for the single bed that was shoved in here. The bed was larger than the doorway, no matter how you twisted it, and it was all in one piece. Did they just buy the bed and have it teleported directly into the room?

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  That's a level of laziness I could get behind.

  “Well, you can have the bed, I'll take the floor,” I said. Aurin smacked my arm while I giggled, only for her to wrap herself around me.

  “Don't you fucking dare. We finally get to spend the night together, and if you aren't by my side the whole time, I will make your death look like an accident,” Aurin whispered into my ear.

  “Geez, someone's clingy. Where did you get this feistiness? I don't remember putting it into you. Are you finally taking your role as the person to contradict me seriously?” I teased before peeling her off me so I could remove my blood-soaked sweater, finally. I hung it on a hook outside the door and allowed myself to collapse backwards onto the bed.

  It was so soft compared to the plank of wood equivalent that Atlas provided for me. I felt myself sinking into it, my worries drifting off as I curled up on the sheets. My mind, for the first time in forever, almost immediately began drifting off. There was something about being away from my usual sleeping quarters that made my insomnia not as dire an issue. I could just fall asleep right now. It had been a long day.

  Or at least I could if Aurin hadn't dove into the bed on top of me as soon as she shut the door and turned the lights off. Squeaking, I tried wiggling out from under her, but made absolutely no progress in my attempt. She had pinned my arms above my head and bound my torso with her legs.

  All I could do was ineffectively flail my legs.

  “Curses befall you, tall people. It's not fair,” I whined, looking up at her for the first time. The soft pink glow of my eyes was the only thing illuminating her round brown eyes staring back at me, with an unreadable expression on her face besides a faint smirk on her lips.

  “You've been running away from your problems long enough. I think it's about time you finally confronted them head-on,” Aurin told me, one of her hands running through my hair, her nails running along my scalp in that way she knew made me compliant. Her other hand remained restraining me in place.

  “Okay? What have I been running from?” I asked.

  “You already know, but it's okay. I understand that you refuse to acknowledge it. How about you open up my mind and take a look? That might help,” she replied, and I complied, because she asked so nicely and had reduced me to a kind of jelly; using head scritches certainly wasn't helping.

  Reaching to the chains surrounding the lockbox within her mind, I clicked them open one at a time, the key to each being a secret only we shared. Until there was just the box itself left.

  With a click, it opened, and I found myself sliding towards it. We had done this before, but she usually didn't pull me in herself. I didn't even know she could do that, but I trusted her, so I didn't resist. The first time we had done this, it had taken me nearly an hour just to figure out how to wiggle forward towards her, much less actually bind our concepts together.

  As I fell inside the box, I felt it click shut behind me. My thoughts and Aurin's tumbled together, and I felt myself settle as our two minds settled in next to each other. Sensations blended together, concepts folded in on each other, I still couldn't see myself, but I intuitively knew she could see me right now.

  She had never told me what I looked like. I had never asked. I wasn't sure if I would even be comfortable knowing that information. Each person's mental conceptualization was very personal to them after all, and I wasn't a big fan of self-analysis.

  I felt her care for me. She felt my calm, knowing she was likely the only person in the world who had my best interests at heart. The one person who didn't have another motive or was looking for something from me. It was pure in a way, just like I had designed her to be.

  As I scanned over her to ensure she was still perfectly crystalline, not a single flaw on the diamond that was her internal concept. It was only her external concept that was under stress, the shielding I had designed to protect her inner core from alteration.

  Except I noticed something odd. There was a pulse like a heartbeat coming from the diamond. Picking it up with my hand, I brought it close to what could be considered my eye. In the very centre, there was a pink light flashing every so often.

  This had never been here before.

  “Do you see it now?” One of us asked, maybe me, probably Aurin.

  The pink light flashed, consuming the crystalline diamond, and suddenly I could feel what it was.

  How she had hidden it from me until now, I wasn't sure, but I knew for absolute certainty that I would have wiped it away had I seen it in the past. I hadn't even known it was possible for someone to mask their feelings from my gaze.

  This wouldn't do; she shouldn't have been capable of feeling this way. I had tried to make sure of it.

  Because it wasn't… We couldn't… With the power imbalance, I couldn't without taking a big step over the moral line I had built for myself.

  I wasn’t allowed to do that. There was a reason I made that line. I never understood ethics on instinct, only in theory, but I knew I needed them. If everyone in society just decided to use their power to take advantage of others, then society would look exactly like the hellscape it currently is.

  Since I hated the way things were right now and knew with absolute certainty that it could be better, the first place to start was by setting an example.

  Some acts corrupt the actor, regardless of consequence. Honestly, I picked that up from outside my normal ethical boundaries. It was more like common sense than an actual ethical framework.

  I felt tears welling up, but I wasn't sure if they were mine or Aurin's. Her feelings grew around me, filling the space around my mind, but never mixing. I wanted to snuff them out this instant, return it to normal, fix everything.

  But I couldn't do that while we were bound so tightly together. I tried to pull away, but Aurin held me firmly in place. The box was locked, and I couldn't escape.

  I began to breathe faster as I panicked. I didn't want to use Aurin like this. To take advantage of her. I thought I added safeguards to stop this from happening. Glancing around the box, I watched as constructs I had built that were supposed to keep the diamond pure dissolved into smoke.

  “Shh, it's okay. Remember what you said. I'm the angel on your shoulder, and I'm saying this is okay. You didn't make me do this, I chose this for myself. I have agency and you wanted me to use it, didn't you? You were so worried about not violating any boundaries that you forgot that I was supposed to be the one who set them, not you,” Aurin told me as her hand caressed my cheek. Then leaned in to whisper in my ear. “And you couldn't stop me even if you wanted to. Because you’re mine now.”

  As she said that last line, it felt like my mind slammed a wall and every process halted in the same breath. My mental model froze in place for an instant, then with a few probing strikes, I tried to jostle Aurin. To confuse her just for a moment so that I could escape. This didn’t work. I had built her mind to be resistant to these kinds of attacks. Then, I started going through every low-cost trick in my arsenal, because anything high-cost would hit us both.

  Mental nails, setting off a flare, attempting to pick the lock on the outside of the box, setting her mental state to reboot, I went through my toolkit one by one. I could use whatever I wanted without paying any cost to instill the thought in her mind, or having to say it out loud to make her think about it herself, since I was already inside her mind.

  Nothing worked. I tried to physically escape again, but couldn't. She was correct; I was completely under her power, both mentally and physically. Which meant this wasn't ethically on me; she was the one making this decision. I had literally no power right now beyond hitting Aurin's kill switch that would rip her mind from her body killing her immediately.

  I nearly hit it out of reflex to protect her. Only to realize that was ridiculous, why my mind even went there I had no idea. Why the fuck would I consider killing her to be saving her?

  For some reason it felt like ending her life wouldn't cross that moral line that I had built into myself when I made her. I had no idea why I saw it that way, it was as if murder was less ethically charged than this.

  I had killed a lot of people in the past. But I didn't want to kill Aurin. I couldn't kill Aurin. I couldn't even bluff that I would, she was watching my mind right now and would know I was lying.

  Something inside me loosened, and I stopped fighting. My body went slack as the struggle drained out of me, the fear, the logic, the guilt. All that was left was the warmth of her touch and the steady rhythm of her breathing.

  The thought of resistance flickered, then went out. I let it go.

  There was an audible pop in my ears as my mental model shifted slightly.

  Her love for me flowed into my mind as I dropped my barrier formed out of delusion. I had no control right now. She owned me, not the other way around, how long had that been the case?

  As her feelings filled me to the point I nearly felt sick with love, my breathing calmed down, and I looked back up at her. Her cheeks were flushed in that cute way I'd refused to allow myself to notice before. I could feel her breath on my face and the warmth of her hands on me.

  “Well? Are you going to take what's yours?” I think I asked.

  Descending onto me, her lips met mine, and her feelings flowed through me.

  The last thing I noticed before I lost complete cohesion of who was who, was the cracks in her mental model healing the moment our lips touched.

  Apparently, she needed this more than I could have known if it was causing her that much stress.

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