reMix

Chapter Twenty-Two Nerves of Steel

Jude stank of dried sweat. Mind you, Fixx probably smelt too, the erstwhile media star reminded himself. Ghost certainly did, of God knew what but Fixx could smell the kitten from where he stood at a half-shuttered window, staring intently through its gap into the narrow dusty street beyond. On the house opposite a fat iridescent gecko was glued to the whitewashed wall, half in daylight, half hidden in shade. Every so often the lizard leant forward and tongue-whipped a fly stupid enough to get too close.

The kitten wanted the gecko: it just couldn’t work out how to spring the trap.

“Handy for every occasion,” announced the box as Fixx grabbed another tissue. He tossed box and tissue into the bin. It had been two days since he’d last had a pressure shower and body wipes just didn’t do the job, whatever they told you. What Fixx really wanted to do was clean himself off, but he didn’t want to ask in case Jude couldn’t spare the water.

Fixx smiled and stretched lazily. It was amazing what sex could do to improve a situation. He’d come into the CasaNegro prepared to nanchuk it up, if that’s what it took to get the information he needed. Now he didn’t even want to waste the woman’s water. Not without paying, anyway.

“Hey,” said Fixx, turning back from the window to stare at Jude. “You got a water shower that works?”

Jude rolled over and smiled, half happy, half mocking. “Oh sweet honey. You t’k you finished...?”

Fixx grinned and moved back to the wooden bed, hand reaching for a full breast, resting metal fingers softly on its dark nipple, feeling it swell and grow taut. Electric sensors beneath his organic polymer skin relayed sensations of softness back to his brain.

He rolled on top of her, and then laughed as she rolled on top of him. Her full breasts felt good to Fixx so he kept on caressing them and playing with her nipples, and then he did it some more.

“Hey,” Jude said sulkily, “You going t’roll that between your fingers all day?” She took Fixx’s wrist and moved his hand down her body until he could reach between her legs. She was big. Not fat, just big. Nipples thick as thumbs, heavy breasts that one hand alone had no hope of cupping. Strong arms and heavy fists that looked like they could crack heads the way other people opened eggs.

Her thighs and legs he knew all about. When they’d reached round him earlier it had been like being gripped by steel.

“Geneered,” said Jude as she watched him examine her body. “Class geneering and a good full-gravity gym.”

Fixx nodded, looking up at her. Since he’d done aTetsuo, he’d got so used to dwarfing his partners that it felt good to be fucking someone his own size, like he didn’t have to hold back. Fixx slid his hand out from beneath Jude’s legs and reached for a can of Electric Soup.

Jude laughed. But then she’d laughed back at the beginning when Fixx had pulled a can out of her fridge and began to check its label. And she’d laughed again when he had loaded twenty neon-hued tubes into a crate and lugged it to her bedroom at the back of the bar.

She’d listed the ingredients for Fixx. Not that he’d believed her, at least not to start with. He did now, though. One look at the luminous edges to her velvet breasts told Fixx that it wasn’t just ethanol wreaking havoc with his synapses. And the problem was, stripped naked she looked like some vast Greek statue while he looked like some bit-part Tetsuo. Two false legs and one false arm grafted onto a body minced to gristle by a car bomb. Which all seemed cool with Jude, but didn’t change the fact the Fixx had started to hate his own reflection.

She didn’t mind that he was a patchwork quilt of hues and textures. That his legs and right arm were obviously, intentionally synthetic. That the black of their wafer-thin vat-grown skin clashed with the pale white of his chest and belly. In remaking himself to be seen on stage, dressed up in a cloak and surrounded by a swirling sublimating fog of liquid nitrogen, he’d been concentrating on what looked good on vid. And what looked slick as all shit on screen didn’t necessarily look that hot up close.

Hell, he should have got clone-grown new limbs and had a traditional transplant, or just Soul Chipped himself and risked a total redone. He could have afforded it, even without his 1stVirtual insurance policy. It was time he fucking faced facts. Getting Tetsuoed up had been a lousy long-term call.

Rolling himself on top, Fixx forgot all about clinics and bad decisions, letting one hand trail gently down her body. Jude was swollen, wet and beginning to get sore: after three bouts of full-on fucking she couldn’t really be much else. Taking care, Fixx eased his index finger into her, curling his hand so that it cupped the top of her vulva, its heel pressing onto her hooded clitoris. He could feel it like a small bead, rolling beneath his touch. Slowly, very slowly, he moved the finger buried inside her, not in and out like some schoolboy, but side to side in slow rolls that pressed first one side and then the other.

Jude shut her eyes and groaned.

Fixx smiled to himself. At thirty-six it was ridiculous to still be so pleased when things worked out in bed, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t. Pulling back his hand, Fixx swapped wet finger for thumb, sliding that deep into Jude instead, feeling her muscles close tight around its base.

And then, with the freed finger, he reached down between Jude’s buttocks. The woman’s eyes opened wide as Fixx found the swollen starfish of her anus. But Fixx just grinned and Jude shifted her hips to let his damp finger reach the ring of puckered muscle. Round and then stop, round and then stop, his thumb moving gently inside her all the time, feeling the puffy, sticky, swollen floor of her vagina.

“Hey, who you b’n practising this with?” Jude demanded, rocking her hips, vulva tightening round the base of his thumb every time his ringer trailed gently over her anus.

Fixx grinned, kept quiet. The true answer was that he’d learnt it so far back he couldn’t remember. Keeping his hand there, Fixx lifted his lips from her soft mouth and smoothed them down her body, stopping to bite softly into the underside of a breast, tasting sweat, before reaching round to close his teeth on her nipple.

Jude shuddered.

“And this you didn’t learn with anyone either?” Her voice was warm, but something in it said she didn’t believe him and she was right not to. That one he’d been taught by a woman twelve years older than him. She taught music at Juilliard and at twenty-eight she’d seemed so adult to Fixx he couldn’t imagine ever getting that old. Couldn’t imagine what it was like to be that grown-up. Now he was older than she’d been then — and he still didn’t know.

Slipping his mouth down from Jude’s heavy breast, Fixx traced a line with his tongue back to her stomach and down between her opening legs. If there was one thing the music mistress at Juilliard had taught Fixx, it was to taste his partners full on, head buried deep between their thighs, not lap at them sideways like some nervous cat at the cream. That was what she’d told him and no one since had contradicted her. Shifting himself on Jude’s vast wooden bed, he sunk his head between her thighs, pushing her knees back to open her out to him.

She tasted of salt, acid and alkaline at the same time — sex cocktail — her juices and his mixed from their earlier bouts.

Fixx used his tongue to trace up one side of her vulva, tongue just missing her swollen clitoris before tracing down through the sodden fur of the other lip. Jude pushed her hips up crossly, but Fixx kept the circle going, never quite touching her clitoris. He knew just what she wanted. It was what he wanted, too. To thrust his tongue deep inside her, so far that his jaw hurt and his lips got bruised as she ground up against him. But he wasn’t going to, not yet.

Instead Fixx licked gently one more time around the outer lips and then used his tongue to peel aside her inner labia, finishing with the lightest flick of his tongue. Jude jumped and grabbed his head, pulling it hard against her. She was opened right out, vulva swollen with hunger.

Fixx sunk his finger deep into her anus. Jude stopped dead, so Fixx brushed his lower lip up across the exposed pink pearl of her clitoris and Jude jerked back into life again as Fixx sunk his thumb slowly into her cunt, squeezing the floor of her vagina against the walls of her anus, feeling the hard thud of her pulse in the flesh trapped between his finger and thumb.

“Sweet Jesus,” Jude said plaintively

Fixx smiled and then he was pulling finger and thumb out of her and kneeling between her knees and kissing her hard, all the while knowing she could taste herself on his lips. And as Jude’s arms came up to lock round his shoulders, he sunk slowly into her and then pulled out. Going in again harder, for the pleasure of feeling her tighten.

Jude’s legs snaked over the back of his legs, locking her hips against his. It was hard and vicious, her arms wrapped so tight around him that the pressure squashed her breasts almost flat as she rolled her full hips up into him, time and again. She was gasping with the effort, growling in his ear. And then she was done, tipped over the edge in a muffled groan, her vagina rippling in a long roll that tailed away into an after-echo of sudden jerks and tiny spasms.

“All done?” Fixx asked Jude as she unlocked her arms and sprawled back on the bed’s grey foam slab. The woman grinned, her face, breasts and stomach varnished with sweat. She stank of everything he liked. They should have used latex, but Fixx didn’t have any spray and Jude hadn’t volunteered any of her own.

“Yeah,” said Jude, looking up at him. “I’m finished.” Her smile twisted slightly and the expression that crossed her wide face was half resigned, half sad. “Now I s’pose you want to talk about where t’girl went...?”

“No,” said Fixx, pulling out of Jude. “Not yet, I got something to finish.”

He rolled Jude over so she lay face down on the mattress. Her blonde hair splayed forward on the bed, her breasts bulging taut at the side, light though her weight was in one-sixth G.

Pulling himself up on his arms, Fixx positioned himself above Jude’s buttocks and reached down to guide himself. Jude went utterly still, gecko-like and watchful. She didn’t push her bum up against him as he pushed gently against her, and she didn’t twist away: she just waited. For a second, Fixx considered it and then decided not. After all, this was more or less a first date.

Shifting slightly, he slid himself into her vulva instead, feeling her buttocks push up to meet him. The force of his hips as they came down on her curved bottom rocked Jude forward on her bed, sending tiny Shockwaves up the skin of her back. And then Fixx was pounding into her, all subtlety forgotten as he ploughed himself against her behind, driving Jude further and further up the mat, until at last she reached out her hands and pressed them flat against the wall, holding herself in place.

Fixx could feel his heartbeat spiral up over 120bpm, basic techno, as sweat ran down the inside of his arms. Reaching under her with both hands, Fixx worked his fingers between mattress and flesh until he rested on his knuckles, his fingers twisted hard around her soft nipples.

Blood pumped like thunder in his ears as Jude shook and moaned under his thrusts, her whole back stiff with shock each time he entered her. And then Fixx got lucky. Because it certainly wasn’t judgement that timed his spasm just as he’d buried himself to the hilt in her sweat-slicked body. Hands that had been grasping her breasts ripped free and Fixx grabbed her shoulders tight, still pulling himself into her long after the spasms were gone.

“Honey,” Jude’s voice was wondering, “You sure did need that...”

Collapsed along her broad back, Fixx nodded. Yeah, he had, it was years, maybe even a decade since he’d had a straightforward, no-holds-barred animal fuck. It wasn’t bought, it wasn’t earned and it certainly hadn’t been down to who he was or even who he’d once been. It was just sex.

The first Fixx knew something was wrong was when Jude stiffened. Her face tightened and Fixx realized she was no longer there in the room with him. Every scrap of her attention was focused on the other side of that bar room door.

“What is it?” Fixx asked. He was whispering, without even knowing why.

“Listen,” said Jude and Fixx did, unable to hear anything. A split second later he realized that was the point, but by then Jude was already pulling a cotton dress over her head, smoothing the creased material down round her bare hips.

“Wait,” said Jude and was gone, shutting the door on Fixx before he had time to protest. He could hear her outside, giving someone heavy grief, and then there was silence. Not a shot, then silence. Nor a scream, then silence. Just silence, like she’d suddenly decided to stop talking.

Fixx jacked up his hearing, pulling on his jeans and pushing himself into a T-shirt. But even with his skull implant turned right up he could hear nothing but a little heavy breathing and the creak of a cheap polycrete chair as someone shifted uneasily in their seat.

Not even the Cadillac jukebox was working. That in itself would have worried Fixx if he’d known more about the CasaNegro. Fixx quietly opened the heavy wooden door and tried to slip into the bar unnoticed, earning himself a few seconds’ reaction time.

But that wasn’t how things worked out.

A hand reached out to grab his throat, pulling Fixx through the door and tossing him into the centre of the room. Footsteps followed fast behind and then someone in a suit asked him a question.

“WhoYou? The words were swallowed, elided together into a single wet hiss. Only Fixx didn’t have time to notice the suit’s strange diction. He was too busy concentrating on the gun thrust hard against his throat.

An old-fashioned floating-breech Colt, with thirteen-shot magazine and ceramic barrel. Built-in silencer and primitive laser sight. At least, that was what it looked like on first glance: it was difficult to tell for sure when all you could see was a bit of the breech and the top of the handle, where the suit’s hand wasn’t. It was an official-issue Colt, though. Even with the muzzle pushed hard into his larynx, Fixx could see that.

“Me? I’m Fixx,” Fixx Valmont said. There didn’t seem much point in lying. Not that he needed to bother: the clone’s dark eyes remained as impassive as when Fixx first looked into them.

“YouSeenThisGirl?”

Fixx found himself staring at a cheap tri-D of LizAlec with her school shirt undone, her white bra pushed down to show small bare breasts. Behind her head was a poster of Tranquillity and a strapline that read Welcome to Planetside. She was crying.

“No,” Fixx said firmly, but he couldn’t drag his eyes from her face, not even when the gun was pushed even harder against his throat.

“YouSureYouNotSeenHer?”

Fixx shook his head, and then yelped as the Colt punched down on his temple, splitting skin.

“AnswerMyQuestion,” the wet voice hissed. “YouKnowThisGirl?”

“No,” said Fixx sadly, still looking at the tri-D, “I don’t know her at all.” Warm liquid ran sluggishly slow down his face, until he could taste blood, thick and salt, on his tongue. The gash would need a couple of instant stitches but he’d have settled for synthetic skin and a pack of paraDerm.

Behind the clone, Fixx saw Jude reach carefully under the bar, her fingers feeling along the underside of its surface. A taser velcroed into place maybe, or perhaps a little Browning snubPup, it depended how illegal her instincts were. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t be enough.

Fixx could tell her that for free.

“Leave it,” Fixx insisted and Jude froze, a scowl on her face.

“WiseManDeadOtherwise...” the clone said wetly, nodding to a second suit who strode over to the bar and pushed Jude out of the way. He came up with a moby and a simple Ruger stungun. It seemed that for all CasaNegro’s chic, Jude’s taste in weapons wasn’t that extreme after all.

Both clones wore classically cut spider’s-silk Italian jackets, narrow lapels shimmering with black fluorescents strung into the cloth’s warp and weft. The effect was flashy but still restrained. Only three social groups still wore such clothes: senior Japanese politicians, CySat executives and Fourth Reich hitmen. And they didn’t look like executives or political animals to Fixx.

“You,” the first suit said softly, lifting Fixx so far upright he had to stand on tiptoe. “WeKnowYouKnowThisGirl.”

The clone hissed because his vocal chords weren’t fully formed, any more than his skin was thick enough to retain moisture. Hang the bastard out in the sun and he’d dehydrate. Whoever had backed out the matrix of genes for this one hadn’t gone for subtlety or form, the clone was designed for pure ruthlessness. Which meant it came out of some bioWarfare complex somewhere. And that made it strictly illegal. Clone soldiers had been banned under the fifth amendment to the European Constitution: and that had been back before Fixx was even born.

“No,” Fixx insisted heavily. “Not biblically, not personally...” The handle of the Colt sent shock waves rocking across his cranial cavity, dropping Fixx to his knees. What he felt as blinding pain was his bruised cortex swelling against the inside of his skull. Too many more blows like that and Fixx wouldn’t be around to not answer the man’s questions: even Fixx realized that.

“Don’t know her,” Fixx said again, adding, “What a way to go.” But by then he was talking to himself. Blood ran between shaking fingers to drip like Rorschach blots onto the dusty floor. He looked at the drips and then he looked again, but nothing in the blots made any sense, they didn’t even look like butterflies.

Jude had troubles of her own, Fixx realized sadly. The other clone had Jude’s moby to her own throat, its two copper electrodes not quite touching her skin, but the little diode on the handle was lit red and Fixx could see the dancing sparks from where he knelt. Throat jobs were about as nasty as it got without getting obscene. One move from the clone and she’d be biting out her own tongue in a convulsing bundle on the floor.

Fixx could feel Jude’s eyes on him, pale and blue. Shit, he could even see the impotent anger that burnt in them, but that wasn’t going to help him none. Of course, he’d looked death in the face before. As a kid out on the estates, surrounded by cheap crumbling concrete and spavined nags tethered fifteen floors up on dung-covered balconies. And the ones that weren’t on the balconies were hobbled with lengths of wire to keep them from wandering off the tissue-sided allotments.

Back then he’d nodded back to a Gardi who was toiling up a piss-stained stairwell in Adamshouse. That night, back of the bar, Crazy Liam put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Even Liam looked surprised when the gun misfired. The second time was later, in Paris, after lighting a candle for his dead mother in Sacré-Coeur. He’d just finished pushing his way through the tourists and had slid off down a side street when he’d been jumped by a mugger armed with molywire, but he’d never even got the lasso over Fixx’s neck.

Two bullets later, the man’s djellaba was stained red and his corpse was being rolled off the sidewalk by Fixx’s irate bodyguard. Not that Fixx was there to see it. He’d already been bundled onto the back of a Honda Ultraglide, all bulletproof back seat and turbo-boosted engine.

That was the end of his being allowed to wander out on his own, at least until his contract with Sony went the same way as the bodyguard, the Ultraglide and unlimited studio time. But then that was life, or it was his anyway. Fingers gripped his hair and yanked, Fixx rose and kept rising until he was face to face with the same impassive eyes.

“YouNoSeeThisGirl?”

“No,” Fixx said crossly. “NoSeeThisGirl... Okay?”

It wasn’t. The clone released Fixx and sank rigid fingers into Fixx’s solar plexus, fingertips pushing up to shock the heart into silence mid-beat. Fixx looked around once, saw the petrified crowd and then crumpled, his knees hitting the floor before his head did, though it was a close-run thing. The world accelerated away from him down an endless tunnel; as if it had been the roof of a lift and someone had just cut the wire.