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Message-ID: <55538asstr$1175706604@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:00:10 -0500
From: "Elf M. Sternberg" <elf@pendorwright.com>
Subject: {ASSM} Journal Entry 062 / 00100  Embassy Tales: Flags (MF)
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Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:10:05 -0400
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Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d

Embassy Tales: Flags
Elenya, Virta 12, 0100
"Can I ask you a question?" Becky asked.

R'Dam grinned. "That is all you ever do of me. I understand that part of
your job is to find out all you can about me but sometimes..."

She kissed his cheek. "I can be a bit too much, can't I?" She smiled at
him. "I'm sorry, sweetheart."

He touched her cheek with his fingertips. She opened her mouth as they
kissed, lingering a little longer than was seemly. The spectacle caught
the attention of the surrounding diners attempting to enjoy their lunch
in the unseasonably warm end-of-March weather. She enjoyed the
attention. "And I'm truly sorry about your job," he said.

"I'll live. The chance to work with you is a bit too much to pass up,
though."

He nodded. "What was your question?"

"There isn't a hint of wind." She pointed across the street to the
Pendorian embassy. "But your flag is flying clearly and calmly. Every
other flag is limp as a rag. Is it just an illusion?"

"No, I don't think so. I never noticed that before. It must be made of
Starkcloth." He glanced over at her, and she was looking at him with
open, curious eyes. "It's a cloth built of microscopic cells. They use
magnetism and the interatomic strong force to deform the cells
internally, just like muscle cells. But they're much stronger. Pressed
into two-dimensional sheets like that, we can stiffen and flex the cloth
at will."

"Is that all?" she asked.

"Starkcloth is one of our miracles," he said. "It isn't a fashion
statement, it's a weapon. Shaped to the body, it can magnify strength
manifold, and when attached to a predictive sensory package can protect
you against bullets, bombs, and some energy weapons. It's the standard
material of our soldiers and bodyguards."

"Oh," she said. "So it's one of those things I don't suppose you'd be
willing to sell to us?"

"Not readily," he agreed with a grin. "I thought negotiating trade deals
was no longer on your list of tasks."

She shrugged. "As much as I enjoy your company, Dam, I'm still thinking
of my world's best interests."

He nodded, eating wholeheartedly from his salad as if it were the finest
in the world. She envied his innocence, his expression of openness, his
lack of inhibitions when it came to, well, anything. He loved Earth
almost as much as he loved Pendor and everything he did revealed that.

And it confounded her more that, with only a few exceptions, the
Pendorians seemed willing to give away the store. Their access to raw
mineral commodities was astounding to anyone familiar with the
commodities market; Dam had revealed that they could dump on the Earth
as much gold, platinum, palladium, uranium, and other industrially
precious metals as were currently available.

That bothered her. Her speciality in college had been political
economics. The Pendorians had basically said that the ships they had
come in had been the local equivalent of the Nina, the Pinta, and the
Santa Maria; there was a crash research program underway on Pendor to
make ships that were bigger, faster, and more efficient. If their
program was as succesful as the model they had chosen to emulate on
Earth, the development of the diesel engine under wartime conditions,
then in less than ten years they would be sailing between Earth and
Pendor ships that could cross the distance in less than three months,
haul a hundred times the capacity of their current ships, and do so with
a minimal crew or, perhaps, even no crew at all.

It had been a good day so far. They had met in the morning and visited
yet another part of the Smithsonian, this time the Museum of Natural
History. Dam had been fascinated by the dinosaurs, but he said that
little was known about more than 1% of Pendor's surface. He said he
hoped that he would never meet something quite so monstrous on his
world, but that it was also entirely possible that they existed.

That Pendor was an artifical world, one so incredibly massive that its
effective landmass was three hundred thousand times that of Earth's, had
shocked everyone. Given Pendor's population, at this time every ten
people could have their own Earth all to themselves. When Dam had
admitted that they were broken up into four occupied territories, the
largest barely the size of Massachusetts, she had given up trying to
wrap her mind around the idea.

Now they were dining in the little French cafe in the Embassy District
within view of the Pendorian Embassy. It had become a hangout of sorts
for the local alien watchers who spent their days waiting for a glimpse
of someone from another planet. It had also become a favorite stop for
some of the Pendorians, who seemingly enjoyed the attention. It drove
the Secret Service out of their minds. There were also the feline-like
bodyguards, the tall, powerful Uncia who accompanied certain members of
the Embassy staff. There was a rumor that some of them were actually
robots, and the Pendorian admission that they could manufacture robots
that were indistinguishable from living creatures, at least on the
surface, only helped to inflame the rumor. Becky was convinced that
there were no robots among the Pendorian staff.

"Hey, R'Dam," she said, "What's the inside of the Embassy like?"

"Are you just curious?" he asked, teasingly.

She returned his grin. "Of course I'm curious. I'm always curious. I'll
probably get grilled about what I see, where they can put microphones,
that sort of thing." That her role' as a "spy" had always been out in
the open hadn't stopped either one of them from enjoying the time they
had together.

"Well, I can show you around the public portions, if you like. It's not
very impressive. We like to do things traditionally."

"I still want to see it."

He flagged down the waiter. "Come on, then. I will show you around." He
paid the bill and they left. She gleefully held his hand as he took her
through the front gate of the Pendorian Embassy, a single, cubical box
of silvered windows. Unlike many of the other embassies in the area this
one lacked the forest of antennas on the roof. Instead, there was a
simple quad of white boxes, each on an independent gimble mount, that
tracked unseen and undetectable objects in the sky. There was consensus
among the Pendor watchers, professional and otherwise, that the boxes
were lasers, bouncing signals off stealthy satellites that kept the
Pendorians in touch with their teams planetwide. The most common number
cited for the satellites was twelve, given that there were four lasers
and line of sight could only provide coverage of at most a third of the
world at any given time. That the U.S. Air Force said they couldn't find
any such satellites, while at the same time they were tracking a lost
glove still in orbit from the Gemini missions, did nothing to lift the
rumors.

Inside the walls, there was the usual courtyard, this one with some sort
of modern sculpture in the front, an unrecognizable mass of marble that
reflected the Springtime sun. "I don't understand it either," he
confessed to her as she puzzled over it. What was striking about the
front yard was the lack of guards. It was something much-commented on by
the pundits, but the Pendorians had thus far steadfastly refused to
comment on it. Every nation had representatives of its military within
the grounds of its embassy. Every nation except Pendor.

Did Pendor qualify as a "nation?" The most common description of it,
even from the Pendorians, was "a well-run anarchy supported by an
automated industrial base that satisfies the basic needs of the
individual. Luxury goods are hand-made goods." When asked how Pendorians
organized to do things like research projects and starships to Earth,
Dam had said, "The way the human body knows to fix an injury. It's not
hierarchal. An idea is proposed, argued about, and so on. If it's good
enough to get the industrial attention needed, it's started. We work on
it until we're done."

"That doesn't make sense," she argued. "How is it paid for?"

"It just is," Dam said.

"How are the people paid for?"

"They pay themselves. Or they wouldn't be there."

Becky had given up.

They entered the embassy, only to encounter a human woman sitting behind
a circular desk. To Becky's eye, something was distinctly amiss with the
desk and the receptionist. It took her a few seconds to realize that
there were no telephones, keyboards, typewriters, displays, monitors, or
intercomms. The desk was bare except for a nameplaque loose on top of
the dark blue marble ring in which she sat. The nameplaque was in both
English and the delicate Pendorian script, and the English read "A.I.
Athena."

Becky looked up, startled. The woman behind the desk smiled, but her
appearance could best be described as a generic receptionist,
unremarkable and only averagely attractive. Her age was somewhere in the
late 30's to early 40's. "I thought..."

"Yes?"

"I thought you were a computer."

Athena grinned. "It's nice to meet you too, Rebecca. Lean over the desk
and look closely."

Becky stood up on her toes and did as Athena suggested. She saw a human
torso emerging from a platform mounted to the floor; there was nothing
below the waist but machinery. "You're a robot?"

"No, this is just an animatronic interface. I'm actually down in the
basement. If you want, Dam might even be able to show you what I really
look like. Not that I'm much to look at even there." She grinned and
handed up from somewhere behind the desk a very commonplace pass on a
necklace, a thick white card with her photograph, name, and a green
stripe along the bottom. "This is only necessary for other people in the
Embassy. We have a small staff here, less than twenty Pendorians and
about a hundred Terrans right now, and everybody knows everybody else.
You should get some interested looks, but the fact that I'm here letting
you wander around without a couple of hulking security robots will
reassure the Pendorians. The Terrans, however, feel more comfortable
with something more visible than my tacit permission."

Becky nodded and pulled the pass over her head. The admission that there
were robots inside the embassy, and that they were used for security,
she quitely filed away. She adjusted the pass under her hair and let it
fall over her blouse. "There."

"You look just like another member of the staff. The green is for
'guest,' of course."

Becky took a good look at the foyer. "Dam? Where did you get all this
darkened hardwood? I thought your people had been insistent about not
using woods that came from threatened forests, which I think one of your
people said was the entire planet."

Dam grinned. "Not quite, but close. Actually, the wood you're seeing
came from a building in Detroit that was scheduled to be demolished. Two
of the people on our staff are master carpenters and we encouraged them
to recycle anything they might find from demolition projects. We're
expert recyclers. We have you as an example of what happens when we
fail."

Becky frowned. She didn't like the sound of that. "So Earth serves only
as a bad example to you?"

"No, no, nothing of the sort. You have a wonderful, dynamic cultural
basis here, Becky, the likes of which we on Pendor have never seen.
We've never known the privations that your people have suffered, and so
we don't really have that mother of invention, necessity. We have only
it's stepparent, curiousity."

She grinned. "Still, it sounds to me like you'd rather avoid what we go
through."

"I think we would."

She nodded. "Where to?"

"What do you wish to see? There isn't much to see, actually. There are a
few rooms I could show you, like the astrogation room, or Athena's
home."

"Then show me those."

He led her to an elevator. The doors closed behind them and without the
press of a button or the speaking of a command the elevator dropped
downwards. The doors opened. "Left," Athena's voice said as they walked
out.

"Blueline, please," Dam said. A line of blue lit up on the featureless
beige carpet, leading them away from the elevator. They followed it
around two corners and through a door. Another door stood before them, a
sign on it in in six different languages: "WARNING. AI Repository.
Tampering with the effects herein constitutes assault and attempted
homicide or actual homicide of a Pendorian Citizen, and persons guilty
of such will be shot."

Becky gulped. "That's serious."

"Athena is a person in her own right. We mean to keep her as safe as we
keep ourselves. Safer, perhaps; she is the glue that keeps us all
together." He opened the door.

Becky wasn't sure what she had expected. It turned out to be more
mundane than she had thought. It was a very clean room, the walls done
in the kind of white usually reserved for the insides of microchip
manufacturing facilities, which should not have surprised her. In the
center was a grey workstation, complete with video screens and a
keyboard marked in symbols she didn't recognize. There was also an
outlet of sorts, massive compared to the parallel ports she had seen on
her office computers. Next to it was a tall cylinder of a milky-grey
color, and it appeared to be moving. "Athena?"

"That's me, in the flesh, so to speak."

"What are you?"

"I'm a radical design in modern Pendorian artificial intelligence. I'm
made up of billions of almost microscopic units working in parallel that
change in accordance with outside data, resulting in massively parallel
computing. It's a design that works at room temperature, making it
useful in environments where power and cost would make systems that need
to be cooled prohibitive. The system works with nearly 100% efficiency.
The tiny failures are due to indeterminate events at the quantumn level
and interference from high-energy cosmic rays that prevent the molecules
that make up my thinking from interacting completely deterministically.
Whether or not this gives rise to a consciousness, as some people claim
it does, is a matter of philosophy. In real terms, I'm indistinguishable
from you as a conscious being." There was a distinct sense of pride
coming from Athena's voice.

"Wow. You said 'radical design?'"

"Yeah. Most Pendorian systems are based on interatomic interactions.
Harder to track, but easier to initialize and can be compressed to much
smaller sizes. Liquid intermolecular systems like myself are easier to
design up front and we can be scaled to incredible sizes without much
loss of parallel processing efficiency. And the cryooptical systems,
which are the original Pendorian AIs, tend to be less introspective,
more mechanistic. We're still trying to figure out why. Anyway, thanks
for visiting. I hope this information is useful to the guys at the
Agency."

Dam laughed, and Becky managed a smile. They were so casual about her
being coopted by her own government to report on people she liked, and
yet she found herself resenting those very people that she was reporting
to. The whole project stank, she thought, and she wanted to get out of
it.

Dam interrupted her thoughts. "Come on, I'll show you the astrogation
chamber." He led her into another room. This one was an eggshell white
in color, with rounded corners. "Okay, Athena, give us the tour."

Becky gasped as she found herself plunged into darkness. "This is the
universe that we know," Athena said as stars appeared all around Becky,
even in the space between her and Dam. "Here is Earth, and here,
Pendor." Small arrows appeared to float in midair, pointing at two
stars. "We have sent several small, automated probes out to the more
promising looking stars, but there isn't much to go on and many of the
systems we've explored have had only a few gas giants and airless rocks.
To date, nothing like the Earth or Pendor has been found within the
eight light year sphere that Pendor has explored.

"The pace of our exploration is slowed by the need for manned ships.
AIs, it seems, do not do well alone, although there are a few exceptions
and there is now a crash course in discovering what it is about
interstellar travel that makes AIs susceptible to erratic behavior.
Pendor does not as yet have many manned vessels, but we're building new
and better ones even today."

The world seemed to tilt and whirl as she watched the approach of the
Pendorian vessels to Earth. She saw them slow down as they approached
the Earth, shedding their velocity with incredible efficiency, dropping
off parts of their ships that would make a six-month run around the sun,
collecting as much energy as they could and using it to make tritium
before they came back to Earth, fully refueled, ready to take the
Pendorians home.

The lights came back up slowly, as they would in a planetarium. Becky
had found it all fascinating. "It's not really meant for this," Dam
said. "Our intention when we installed it was to make this a useful
navigation tool fifty years from now when we need to go places other
than the Earth. But for now, it's a good projector. And we miscalculated
its utility. Athena, please load Arctangent One."

The lights brightened momentarily, and suddenly Becky found herself
standing... outdoors? She looked around. There was no wind, nor was
there any sound. "Athena surprised us when she showed us that she could
produce this scene so accurately. One of our carpenters is considering
installing speakers to add to the effect so that will probably happen
soon. Wind machines might be a bit much."

Becky looked around. Overhead the sun (the sun? A sun, she decided)
blazed down upon... she was standing on what must have been the roof of
an incredibly large building. A glance behind her told that it might be
some kind of aircraft carrier. There were two white, gleaming aircraft,
military by their look although they had no obvious missiles installed.
They were handsome looking machines, rakish in profile. She watched as
the rear nozzles on one extended back, then rotated to almost 45
degrees, then executed a perfect circle. In concert, they promised a
craft that could perform almost any maneuver.

She looked past the planes and realized that this must be an image from
Pendor itself. The land shot out in front of her, straight on forever
until it curved upwards into a milky haze where the clouds blocked her
view of the land. Looking even further up she saw the land clearly
again, now with a good view of the clouds soaring over that landscape as
if she were above it. She realized that her eyes were looking at the
land across millions of miles. The implications staggered her. "Turn it
off, Dam."

The vision went away. "Are you okay?"

"It was... too much to take in. How... how much of Pendor could I see
there?"

"About a third. A hundred thousand terrs, or Terran surface areas. A lot
of it."

Becky gasped. "A hundred thousand times the surface area of the Earth?"
Dam nodded. "And you have less than three million people?" Dam nodded
again. "My God, no wonder you people are so different. You have the
playground to yourself and the power to defend it."

"That's what we're afraid of," Dam said. "Complaceny. Jealousy.
Misunderstanding. We want to be more like you, Becky, not less, but we
don't want all the other things that come with being like you."

"I know, Dam, but... God. You people. I can't help it."

Dam smiled. "Come on. It's been a busy day. I'll show you to my office."

They spent a short time in Dam's office. Becky enjoyed the view, looking
out across the Embassy District, and enjoyed talking to Dam as he plowed
through paperwork without a hint of holding back. Not that he told her
anything at all about what he was working on. It was all in a squarish
form of the Pendorian script anyway, which she couldn't read. She had
the strangest feeling, though, watching him, that he was somehow doing
more than merely shuffling paper. There was something else going on,
something in the way he seemed to be grinding his teeth as he worked.

"Done," he finally announced. "Nothing terribly important, although I
have to go to France next week. Would you like to come?"

Becky was flattered. "I'd like to, Dam, but you know I can't afford
something like that."

"I can. I'm permitted one companion on my budget. You could be that
person. Better you than someone from the staff, someone whose very air I
shared for six months while trapped in a spinning steel ball."

Becky smiled. "Merci', then," she said. "I accept."

"Athena?"

"Got it," a voice said from out of nowhere. Athena had been listening
the whole time and Dam had never once mentioned it. That was what it was
like, living with the Pendorians. Becky thought she could get used to
it. She also thought that she would like to get out of there, get Dam
someplace a little more private, and have her way with him. Or let him
have his way with her. Something like that.

Becky took Dam's hand as he led her out of the Embassy. With eager
smiles they walked back to her aparment, keeping the late- afternoon
habit they had fallen into so very quickly and easily. Becky had come to
appreciate just how casual Dam was about sex. With her. He made it seem
easy, and for her that was a first.

Inside the door, he drew her into his arms and kissed her. She gave a
little sigh of pleasure at the touch of his arms around hers and the
press of his knee against her thigh. There was nothing at all
threatening about this half-man, half-cat. There was just strength.
Becky surrendered to it, betrayed her upbringing to it, allowed herself
to be swept away by R'Dam's welcome touch. There was nothing to stop
her, now, not work, not family, not even the pressures of her future.
This would end someday but she hoped in would not be ending too soon.
She liked the priveleges of it, the pleasure of him.

Dam took her hand and led her to her bed. What had been tentative two
months ago was now passionate. He kissed her throat, his fingers
expertly at work on the buttons of her blouse. In seconds he had her
chest exposed. The fur that covered his arms, usually hidden by the
tailored suits he wore, now stroked at her breasts.

And she was permitted by his very freedom to participate, to respond to
his needs with her own. His own moan greeted her as her hands slipped
inside the belt of his trousers, sliding along the fur of his belly
until she found his semi-erect cock and its furred, completely
retractable prepuce.

Releasing him, Becky lay back on the bed and let Dam do the work of
removing his clothes. She watched him as he stripped, warm assurance in
every gesture, an indescribable grin of anticipation on his lips. He had
never said he loved her and she didn't care. She didn't think she loved
him either. Instead, she liked him. They were immune to each other; he
couldn't impregnate her, they couldn't share diseases. There was nothing
to hold them back from giving one another pleasure, and so they did, as
much as they could.

As he removed his clothes and put them aside, he exposed his chest,
furred white with a ring of orange at the sides and across the
shoulders. He lowered his pants and then his undershorts-- boxers, of
course-- revealing his erection to her. She was always fascinated by it,
almost completely human in appearance, the thin fur at the base
thickening as it deepend into his belly and thighs.

Dam crawled onto the bed, covering her body with his as he stepped,
hands and knees, over the sheets, over her. She reached up to caress the
fur on his chest. It was like petting a cat, a cat with a hard-on,
intelligence, and desire for her. His face was human, though, and even
his eyes were rounded, although he had said that there were Satryls with
slitted eyes. He kissed her neck, her breasts. She liked the way he
plastered her body with kisses, covering her in little circles of
coolness that faded with the summer heat.

Her hands were on his body, stroking his cock. "Oh, yes," he moaned as
she wrapped her hands around it. "Yes, Becky, wow." She looked into his
eyes and felt connected to him. He was just warming up and already they
were getting into that groove.

He turned, peppering her belly with his kisses, his mouth lingering
longer below her navel, kissing his way into the thicket of hair she had
around her pussy. He kissed the mound at the top, then dipped his head
between her thighs and kissed at her lips. She felt a surge of warmth
right where his lips touched, and a tiny trickle of fluid between her
legs.

Her hand stroked his cock and balls almost absently. She took her time
examining the lightly-furred scrotum and bare cock of pale skin. She
liked the way he looked, and although she had never had an uncircumsized
lover she had quickly come to love what he could do with his cock. She
stroked it, touched it, loved the loose skin around the head.

She shifted her shoulders to get underneath him, struggling to fit her
head under his legs, to reach that incredible cock with her mouth. The
smell of him-- musty, feline, not at all like a man-- was something she
had grown to love in the short time they had had together. She reached
up with her mouth and kissed the head of his cock. His moan, muffled by
her sex, told her that she was doing well. She licked at the head,
teased the underside. Her tounge played with the small stretch of skin
that seemed to anchor his foreskin.

She wrapped her lips around his cock, sucking him down. He responded
with a playful nip of her vulva. She squealed. "Cheater!"

His laugh was light and as wonderful as always. She returned to his
cock, sucking him into her mouth, playing with the head. A pearl of
precome hovered at the tip of his cock and she licked it playfully. In
was salty and sweet. She sucked down hard on him, wanting more. The
sounds coming from between her legn told her she was doing well.

And reminded her that he was hard at play down there. Distracted for a
moment, she let herself be swept away by pleasures that must have been
building for quite a while. She wondered how she could not have noticed
them as they stormed into her, occupying her attention. She made an
half-hearted attempt to wrench her attention back to him but it was too
late; he had her, as he always had her by now, her orgasm coming on
strong, thundering through to her soul.

She was spent from that but stil she wanted even more from him. "Dam,
get inside me. Please?"

With a grin he turned around in bed, lifting her legs until her feet
were pressed against his shoulders, and in one swift motion thrust
himself completely inside her. Becky rolled her head from side to side,
unable to control herself as the thrill of his thrusting cock within her
kept sending wave after wave of pleasure through her.

Dam was a true cocksman. She had read stories about men who, by their
cocks alone, could give incredible pleasure, and she had never believed
it. Dam had proven it to her. His cock was an amazing instrument, backed
by a hard body that could go on without pause, and he liked it that way.
He could go fast, then slow, hard, and soft, that beatuiful smile on his
lips, his eyes glazed like someone in the throes of his own religious
ecstacy, communing with her lust. They pressed against each other, each
thrust forceful and loving.

"My God, Dam, you're... more..." She was whimpering, begging to feel
that shaft keep thrusting within her, in and out, in and out. "More,"
she whispered until her voice was gone and then, "more," her lips would
form without breath. Between gasps her body would act, her legs around
his hips, pulling him into her, tilting her hips to him.

She could tell when he got closer. His whole body would start to quiver
like a harpstring, holding back the energies that he had created with
his lovemaking. She could feel it inside him, feeding him, and feeding
her, as it built incontrollably towards his climax. He came with a shout
of joy in a language she didn't even know and didn't need to. She knew
"yes!" when she heard it.

Dam held himself up, a tiny bead of sweat just about to fall off the tip
of his nose. He looked down at her and smiled. She smiled back. He let
go a laugh of pure joy, and she joined him in a final celebration of
their adventure together. "Oh, Becky," he sighed. "And it is only
getting better."

"Yeah," she said. "You are getting better."

He chuckled gently. "Magnificent." He turned over and collapsed onto the
bed, his demeanor confessing that, for once, he was spent.

Becky sighed, profoundly content. This was one part of their
relationship that she had no questions or qualms about, although it was
certainly the part of her relationship that confounded her "handlers"
the most. They had agreed on that; she had told them that he was
completely, and like all Pendorian species deliberately, built to be
compatible, and that it was none of their business what she did with him
in the privacy of her bedroom. They had reluctantly agreed to take her
word that she would faithfully report anything he said that was of
interest to national security.

"Mmmm..." she moaned. "What is it with you? I've never felt anything
like what you drive me to." She felt between her legs, running her
fingers over her pubic hair. It was sticky, predictably, but it also
felt warm, there. Fulfilled.

"I don't know," he answered, sounding honestly bewildered. "There's
something special about you, too, Becky. I can't put it into words but
when I'm making love with you I feel... content. Happy."

She turned over and rested her head on his shoulder. "I love the fact
that you don't hold back, Dam. When you want to make love, you do it
like it's the most important thing in the world."

He smiled. "It is."

"I know. Lots of people say that. But it's not. Not really. They're
afraid that the other person will think bad of them, think they're a
whore or something because they cut loose. The way you do."

"Is that why you're sometimes so quiet? Because you're afraid I will
think less of you? Or is it because of the people recording us?"

"WHAT?"

"Your people, they put microphones in this room. I assumed you knew."

Becky's outrage kept her from putting together a coherent sentence for a
moment. "They're listening? Right now?"

"Yes, right now. I assumed you knew."

"No, I did not know. In fact, I explicitly told them not to listen in
here, and I wanted my privacy respected!" She seethed angrily.

"Just a moment them." Dam went curiously quiet, his eyes losing their
focus for a moment. "There," he said as his eyes retrained on Becky.
"The listening devices have been disabled."

"What did you do?"

"I asked Athena to turn on the masking devices our people put with the
listening devices. We wanted to make sure that we could turn them off at
any time. Although Pendorians are used to being part of a mutual
exchange environment all the time, Terrans are not part of our system
and we're not about to treat them the same way."

Becky felt a strange chill run up her back. She sat up straight. "What
is a mutual exchange system?"

"I thought I explained. From anywhere on Pendor you can find and read
any book, see any movie, hear any story being told. The AIs make this
possible. And they respond to our requests because they are listening
all the time. Athena is part of that."

"You mean to tell me that Athena is listening to us now?" she asked.

He nodded.

Becky shivered. "Big Brother for real."

"You may look at it that way. Look at your own culture. What I imagine
is important to you-- what you read, what you wear, what you eat-- is
all knowledge stored in the records of your credit cards, records anyone
with enough time and money has access to. Your neighbor could know
everything important about you, if he cared to dedicate time to finding
out-- whether you read pornography, or the Communist Manifesto, or the
Bible. But he would probably not know if someone were brandishing a
knife on you one night. This difference distinguishes the AIs on Pendor.
They keep private when it is not our business to inquire, and raise the
alarm when it is in our best interests to make knowledge public."

"So, how did you ask her?"

"I just spoke it quietly, subvocally." He pointed to his throat. "I have
small implants in my jaw and ear that make it posible for me to talk to
and hear her whenever I want to. She can also hear everything going on
around me."

Becky felt her mouth fall open. She hadn't realized that the man-- mel,
she habitually reminded herself-- who she had cuddled up to so often in
the past two months had been allowing his supercomputer to listen in on
their every word, every act, and recorded it all. And that the radio
itself was inside his body; it couldn't be taken out, couldn't be turned
off.

Growning colder by the moment, she got out of bed and grabbed her
clothes, pulling her pants on in a hurry. All of the wonders of the past
hour forgotten, she ignored his protests as she buttoned her shirt and,
without her socks, stepped into her shoes and fled. In a fast but
controlled walk she left his residence, fled down the stairs and out
into the street. She continued walking until she saw a bus going by. She
boarded it and allowed it to take her away from R'Dam.

            *            *            *

Becky groaned as she rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. "Another
day," she sighed. Another day to enjoy a healthy income without actually
doing anything and without anything to do. The CIA had agreed to pay her
through the year, and then she would be free to pursue whatever career
she wanted, although probably not one in government. Still, she had had
a good career in the State Departement; as long as her private life
stayed out of her resume' (as if that were possible) almost any company
in the world would want her as an international customer contact.
Financially, she was set for life as long as she found something to do.

But her body ached for R'Dam's patient hands. She couldn't help but
close her eyes and wish for his loving mouth against her lips. She
dreamed of his strong body against hers. Her fingers strayed down
between her thighs even as she thought of him. "Oh, Dam," she sighed.
Finally, she knew that nobody was listening to her, because there was no
part of her life that anyone cared about. Not anymore, not now. Her
fingertips pressed against the swell of her vulva, touching between her
lips. Her body was already rehearsing where it would go if Dam were to
mysteriously show up on her doorstep. It encouraged her, asked more of
her. She bent her knees and drew her feet up, allowing the flower of her
vulva to open. Fingers, her fingers, brushed her already liquifying
pearl. Small and obscene shudders flowed through her thighs.

R'Dam's phantom mouth touched her breasts, his hands upon the outsides
of her hips. As her own fingers began to circle in on her pearl she
dreamed of his cock, average in size but so talented in action, entering
her, knowing where it should go, knowing what inside her it should
touch. Her insides began to melt at the intensity of the memories, at
the strength of her own caresses of her inflamed pearl. A hard moan
filled the room with her climax.

Even before the tremors completely subsided, Becky sat up. Kneeling, she
turned around and lifted the venetian blinds over her bed. She looked
out onto the narrow, brownstown-lined street that had been her home for
the past six years. She would be leaving it all soon. She would go
someplace where nobody listened. She wanted it that way.

She turned away from the window and wept silently.

----------------------
The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik 
and Related Tales.

The entire archive of stories can be found at:
http://www.pendorwright.com/journals

Copyright 2000 Elf Mathieu Sternberg.
Distributed under the Creative Commons License BY-ND-NC/1.0
Some Rights Reserved. 

--

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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