29. HoloGirl
HoloGirl
Playlist: DooM Dance - Gunship, Carpenter Brut, Gavin Rossdale
Kael
Her image stutters, like her magic just hiccuped.
“Kael,” she breathes, “no. You can’t do this to yourself. You, me, it will never happen again. I told you, it’s all changed.”
“I won’t touch you,” I say, forcing the words out like a vow. “If that’s what you’re worried about. Not like that. Not until you’re real.” Fuck! I could be lying.
“But please stop. Stop pretending you don’t feel it too. This pull. This friction.” I pause. “We’re fighting it because we’re afraid of what happens if we stop. But I’m not afraid anymore.”
Her jaw tightens. “Stars, I hate you. I hate this. You’re the enemy, you stand for everything I loathe, Kael. Plus you’re dangerous and obsessed.”
A corner of my mouth lifts. “Glad you noticed.”
For a moment, neither of us moves. Then she whispers. “If you ever do touch me...it better be worth the wait.”
That’s a threat I can live with.
Oh, I will make it worth your wait, Lyra Vaille. I will fuck you so hard it will rearrange those stars you claim to worship. Her words stay, branded somewhere in my brain, right where my restraint is starting to crack.
“My office. Let’s do this.”
My fingers blur over the keyboard, writing a bridge of code into the holo-system. A neural-light pipeline that should, theoretically, catch her data form and project it into three dimensions. But tonight, the logic stumbles. The sequence collapses into a recursive loop I can’t crack.
Lyra waits patiently but her constant sighs and nervous shifting are distracting.
Her image on the monitor in my office fades and reforms as her eyes close and blink open again with a sudden startle.
She’ll need to activate her sleep-cycle mode or the risk of “mental clutter” will increase exponentially.
“You know, research on artificial neural networks shows that without periodic offline phases, you could suffer from catastrophic forgetfulness. You’ll overwrite old knowledge with new data.
” Probably not a subtle hint. “Wouldn’t want you to forget that night on the beach now, would we? ” My eyes shift to hers.
“Thanks for sharing. I think I can handle my own nap times, Dad.”
Moment lost.
Irritation begins to gnaw at me. I just don’t get it. I can’t seem to get the programming right to have it compile without errors.
I close my eyes and let the hum of the system fill me, instantly calming my senses.
I stare intently at the code on my screen and rest my fingers on the keys lightly.
Something stirs and my fingers begin to move effortlessly.
A current under the surface. Code lines twitch, reorganize themselves as if they’re alive.
Functions realign into perfect symmetry, and the cursor skips to the end, blinking with an urgency to move on.
Strange how that happens sometimes. I must be exhausted. I rub my eyes, and blink a couple of times to clear the fog.
I should be unnerved. But instead, I feel a rush. A deep satisfaction floods me when I master what no one else can. My years of training under Master Kenji taught me the importance of dominance, not over others, but over myself.
Control, Kael-san...of breathing through your fear, of steadying the mind when the body wants to react.
His words always replay when I feel my seams begin to split.
Chaos is inevitable; mastery is not. It is earned, strike by strike, decision by decision.
I blink and adjust a couple of commands and hit the Enter key. The program compiles clean and completely error free. Perfect.
I smirk to myself, leaning back in the chair. “Of course. I always find a way.” I look up at Lyra’s image on the wall.
She watches me with a look I can’t read, head tilted, senses on alert. In the back of my mind, something speaks to me: Maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe it was all her.
“Alright!” I stand and rub my palms together. “Ready?”
She straightens to full height and nods. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Can’t wait to become a sexbot!”
I shake my head at her joke, but I am a man, and somehow that statement still excites me. “You shouldn’t have to do anything but reach for the thread of code that says HOLO. Once you grab it, it will stay with you, like an install, unlike the window program.”
Her image follows me from one screen to the next, out of my office, down the hall and ending up in the corner of the lab.
My nerves are bundled up in excitement as I insert a key card into the holo-projector.
It stirs to life with a whoosh of light.
The air in the lab thickens. A shimmer of particles, then light stretches into form.
And there she is.
Lyra. My Lyra. Not just pixels on a screen, but a phantom body, a living cluster of light, standing in my lab. Practically human, looking very real, and certainly close enough to touch.
Close enough to ruin me.
The shimmer steadies. She blinks, then looks down at her own hands, fingers flexing, moving, too fluid to be actual flesh but too real to dismiss.
Her head snaps up, eyes blazing at me. “What did you do? How?” Her smile stretches from ear to ear.
I can’t help smiling back. Even now, she’s breathtaking.
“Gave you more than a window,” I say smoothly, walking around her image. My shoes echo against the lab floor as I close the distance, stopping just shy of her. “You wanted out of my cage. Consider this step one.” My face is so close to her ear, I feel my breath bounce off her synthetic skin.
Her laugh is euphoric. A beautiful system crash of pure happiness. “I can go anywhere?” She continues checking out her body parts, doing a mental inventory.
“Well, anywhere there’s a holo-track. I’ll head down to the NightMarket tonight and see if Ash can hook me up with a pirated emulator. Then you should be pretty free to go where you please.” I lower my voice.
“No one has ever stood here like this. No one but you. I’ve only been able to do it in DreamNet or from the PleazureHolo custom-order program.” I move even closer. “You inspired me.” My hand lifts and hovers just shy of her cheek.
She flinches. “This is insane.” She backs up, denying my touch.
Maybe I am insane, but it’s crystal clear to me now. Clearer than ever. I don’t want to dominate just systems anymore. I want to dominate her. Worse still, I want her to want me for it.
I reach for her hand instead; it’s safer, less intimate. “Insane,” I murmur, allowing the corner of my mouth to twist into a smirk. “Or inevitable.”
Her light-fingers curl around mine. “Kael!” She gasps. “I can feel you! Your hand!” It sounds like a miracle and an accusation at the same time. She wraps her other hand around mine. “How is this possible?” Her eyes widen, forgetting the anger she normally saves for me. “You’re warm.” She’s giddy.
I let the silence hang. I step back just enough to break the spell before it consumes us both.
Control yourself, Kael.
“That’s how it works.” I laugh lightly. “Why do you think so many people have holos in the RedRooms with them? It’s a perfect simulation of a real-life partner. You should be able to feel me, and I definitely should be able to feel you.”
My thoughts start to go down that path of lust again. “Your magic is probably helping too.” I move back toward her to close the space she put between us. I can’t stand it any longer. “Try it.”
She pushes a bit of her magic out, and the holo-fog flickers, her form wavers, but the image holds. More refined now, any lasting blurs completely cleaned up. I build it, she perfects it. She should feel real now.
Just real enough to torture me.
The holo-sheen paints my palm silver as I touch her face. I run it slowly down her neck, my tattoos curling as my fingers gently wrap around her throat. She allows it, and under her rage, there’s something else, raw and tender, and it catches me off guard.
“You feel me?” I don’t ask it like a question. It’s a fact making itself known, dangerous and delicious. She nods.
“Good. Then know this: I will fix you. I will get you out, and we will get Eli.” My voice is steady, but there’s fear layered under it I refuse to name.
Her face shifts. I can see the conflicting thoughts flash through her mind. Relief. Distrust. But I can’t soften it; it’s who I am. “But there are a few rules we have to discuss.” I drop my hand from caressing her throat.
She pulls away. A few weeks ago, that move wouldn’t have been a threat. “I’m serious. You can’t go parading around VikkCorp searching for your brother. Right now you can’t leave the lab, can’t leave my side. The more people that see you, the more dangerous it is. Deadly serious,” I warn.
My hand lifts before I think to stop it, an old, dangerous muscle doing what it’s always done, reach and command.
My fingers hover an inch from her cheek again.
Her skin, if it can be called skin, ripples beneath the point of contact like silk, soft, flowing with light.
Heat washes up my arm. The urge to run my thumb across her lush bottom lip to prove to myself she’s something I can touch is an overwhelming thing.
I want to anchor her to me however I can.
She doesn’t flinch this time, flesh and light almost meet. For a moment she lets my thumb ghost her cheek, and something in me, something completely illogical relishes that near-touch. Her eyes close briefly. She feels it.
But then she jerks back, like a rubber band.
The holo-body reels away as if I’ve burned her.
“Don’t!” she hisses, fierce and bleeding with anger.
“Don’t touch me like I’m some pet you can calm with a rub.
” Her words are fueled. There’s a tremor to them that tells me she wants me and hates herself for it.
My hand drops. There’s a heavy weight to her rejection that sets the skin along my forearm crawling. I decide in the moment to no longer let her actions stab me like a knife. Instead, I let it shape me.
Challenge accepted, Little Taiyō.
I close my fingers into a fist, not to strike but to steady myself. “I don’t want to keep you as my pet.” A half-truth through gritted teeth. My voice is low enough that only she and the machines hear. “I just want to keep you.” I pause to read her reaction.
“Be my ally. Be the weapon I need to get you out of this hell Vikktor launched you into,” I continue.
She glares at me, devastatingly beautiful but also devastatingly furious. For a moment neither of us moves. The lab seems to wrap around the two of us like a blanket full of stars.
Lyra breathes, the tiny, defeated sound of someone struggling between desire and rage. “I’ll work with you.” She sounds reluctant. “But this—this can’t be, Kael. We can’t go back to where we were. You hunt anomalies. I am one. That will never work.”
I won’t accept it. Yet still something dark and satisfying fills me. I only hear what I want to hear. A bargain struck. “Fair...for now.” I answer.
No. I’m not going back. I’m moving forward to make her want me again. Well deserved, as her hero. Her rescuer. I love it when the villain gets the girl.
“A team. Help me find Eli and help me fix what Vikktor broke. Let’s get you back into this world.” I glance over at the robotic forms in the corner of the cybernetics lab.
Her lips tighten. She’s toying with entering the threshold of trust, on her own terms. “But make no mistake, Kael Ryudon, if you cross me, Eli and I will destroy this whole digital world you’ve built.
” The warning isn’t tender. It makes my gut tighten with an odd, dangerous arousal.
“You don’t own me just because I’m in your creation. ”
I want to take her in my arms and press those luscious full lips against mine, but I restrain. Instead I let my hands fall to my side and place them in my pockets as a white flag. The ache of wanting has become workable; an instrument that I can still push down if needed.
“You’ll have to forgive me if I try,” I growl. “There are things I’ll do to keep you...safe.” Is that what I’m calling it? “You will hate me for some of them.”
She looks at me like she’s cataloging all the ways a man can be monstrous and also looking a bit aroused by it. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. I haven’t forgotten you’re the epitome of everything I despise,” she tells me defiantly.
“Ok, Little Taiyō.” My smile widens, knowing she’s all bark and little bite. “I think we’ll both get what we want. One way or another.”
And as I turn back to the console, my heartbeat is ragged from the truth: I’ve definitely crossed a line with her I can never code my way back from.