Chapter 1: Fleeting Thoughts
“Do you know how many of you Andies we’ve burned through?”
Andrea 471 assumed it was a rhetorical question; if it wasn’t, then she didn’t intend to play along by prompting the gang leader for an answer. He allowed an awkward moment to pass and then took a breath and continued as if he’d merely paused for effect. She smirked at that victory, even as he kept the boxy black barrel of his gun pressed tight against her left cheek. She clutched her own gun in her right hand, every muscle tensed, waiting for an opening to use it.
“I’ve got you memorized, baby, every last nerve ending and every dirty little secret. I know you better than you know yourself. Here’s how you touch yourself at night…”
He slid his right hand deeper between the open zipper flaps of her cargo pants and pressed the length of his middle finger right against the cotton-shrouded bead of her clit so the middle phalanx rubbed back and forth between each joint, massaging her sensitive nub through the smooth fabric. She fought back a startled gasp, but he must have felt her body shudder: the tall, black-clad man leaned his head over her right shoulder to address the rest of his gang.
“She’s getting wet,” he announced, and she hated the hot, treacherous flush of her cheeks almost as much as the tingling, smoldering heat that pulsed beneath the thin strip of her crotch with each stroke of his finger. He was right: this was exactly how she did it.
“You don’t take your panties off,” he murmured in her ear, a mockery of a lover’s whisper loud enough for the other four men to hear, “because you like how the fabric feels when it’s rubbing right… there.” And she did gasp this time, as his fingertip nuzzled the base of her clit through the damp fabric and then bobbed it up and down, now that it’d swollen enough through her underwear. “I learned that trick from Andrea 298. Hey, Zero, how’s the uplink?”
“Conversion’s almost done, Cross. Orbifrontal cortex is airlinked into the grid, switching her superego to volatile right now. Once she lets go, she ain’t coming back.”
Wetware hackers, the lower dregs of synth trafficking in New Vineta. They captured and reprogrammed their victims: cybernetic implants and upgrades with the usual data scrambling, personalities with neurosensory modifications. Government-issued synths were always popular, partly because the standardized clone base and implant specifications made hacking them easier, but mostly because nothing says fuck the police like, well, fucking the police.
This wasn’t supposed to be an arrest. She’d crept into the derelict subway tunnel with orders to simply confirm their hideout and report back to her handlers. But they’d known she was coming: a signal jammer had flipped on practically the moment Andrea set eyes upon the sleeping bags arranged in a loose circle across the shadowy platform, the tangled black cables linking the server boxes and flashing screens, and, worst of all, a mattress on the concrete floor right in the center of it all, covered by a pink fitted sheet and adorned with scattered rose petals. Someone’s idea of a sick joke. Then she’d felt a gun press against the side of her head before she could raise her sidearm, and the man behind her had whistled for the rest to come into view.
They’d expected her. Someone had tipped them off. Someone who knew her.
So far they’d only referred to each other by simple nicknames, though comfortably enough that she supposed it was a well-worn habit rather than a precaution. Cross was their leader, a tall, powerfully built man with a dark goatee and a long black coat to contrast his pale skin. Zero was the name of their tech guy, a short scrawny kid straight out of college, straw-colored hair and bright gray eyes. Frost wore a long jacket to match the leader, and she supposed that made him second-in-command. The young man’s streaked white hair and ruby eyes marked him as albino, though, given his lifestyle, he probably hadn’t been born that way; underground gene mods came with all sorts of side effects, from hemophilia to Acquired Brunner Syndrome.
Locke struck Andrea as a little quieter, a little more thoughtful than the rest, if only because his messy brown curls, slight frame, and his wire-rimmed glasses – one lens clear and one tinted black with a faint green flicker from beneath the edge, a constant stream of readouts – gave off a sort of neo-Victorian impression. As for Noise, the leering, musclebound brute with a neon-green mohawk and robotic arms, nothing about him struck her as quiet or thoughtful. But she did find her eyes drifting curiously down to the thick, beastly bulge in his black jeans…
“Volatile memory,” Cross whispered in her ear, and she shivered at the way he flicked the tip of his tongue along the inner rim, and then kissed the shell of her ear. “If you cut the power, the data’s gone. For meatware, it’s those fleeting thoughts you have to hold onto or else you’ll forget about them. We didn’t delete anything, just flipped a little switch in your brain.
All those reasons you shouldn’t fuck us, they’re volatile now. Try and hold onto them.”
Chapter 2: Spider’s Dance
He touched the gun to her left cheek and tilted her head back over her shoulder away from the rest of the gang: his dark eyes and wicked smirk became her whole world. And he leaned closer to kiss her, to part her lips with the thickness of his tongue and explore the warmth of her mouth with a deep, feral groan. No soft pecks of her lips, no testing and coaxing her into his kiss: he claimed her mouth with brutish disregard, with no pretense of affection. But it was torrid and deeply, irresistibly intimate. She tried to think of why she shouldn’t kiss him back…
Andrea hardly came up to the gang leader’s shoulders: he had to bend his knees to lean down and draw her back into that kiss, and her slight figure, a gymnast’s lithe frame cloned and engineered for its acrobatic finesse and quick reflexes, arched back against his chest as she felt the barrel of that gun brushing through her short, choppy blue hair with sensuous relish, as her pale blue eyes opened to look up into his cruel, steady gaze and then gradually drifted shut again, surrendering to that sordid kiss, answering his lecherous moan with a soft sigh.
“Andrea 314 told me how she like her kisses rough,” he breathed between her parted lips, each word a sneering taunt. “I wonder what you’ll tell me before we’re through?” He began to kiss her again and she fought to hold onto the reason that she shouldn’t be standing on her toes and pressing her lips harder against his mouth, that she shouldn’t be rocking her hips.
Arching her back meant lifting and offering the firm swell of her breasts – so embarrassingly ripe and full against her coltish form, in fact, that she suspected some unsavory technician’s less than practical adjustments had crept in somewhere among the version updates – to the rest of that grinning audience, and now two of them took her up on the unwitting offer. She felt their hands pulling the flaps of her short brown jacket aside and lifting the black tank top beneath, and then their mouths clamping each of her stiff eraser-pink nipples, both of them at once. No soft teasing kisses or stroking fingers: their lips pursed and sucked on the tips of her breasts, drawing them into the steamy warmth of each mouth, against the silky lengths of their wagging tongues.
She couldn’t see which of them were doing it, not without opening her eyes and breaking that stolen kiss. Something thrilled her about the thought of it, and scared her, for reasons that grew more and more nebulous with each kneading stroke of that fingertip against the hard peak of her cotton-clad sex, each flick of their tongues across the dimpled tips of her breasts, and their leader’s tongue curling around her own smaller tongue, tasting her, drawing her out between her lips and into his mouth. He wasn’t kissing her anymore, she was kissing him, and there were all sorts of reasons she shouldn’t be doing that, if only she could stop and think…
“You know how wolf spiders mate?” Cross sighed as he drew back hardly an inch from her trembling lips. “Female wolf spiders are deadly. So two males team up and keep her stimulated, keep her preoccupied until she wants to mate with them more than she wants to kill them.
“What do you say, baby? Do you want to kill us, or do you want to fuck us?”
Andrea opened her eyes to look up at his face through a veil of shimmering tears that no longer made sense, while his finger curled beneath the elastic edge of her crotch to trace between her clenched folds, and one of those henchmen caught her right nipple between his teeth for a quicker flick of his tongue, while the other one sucked the peak of her left breast harder.
She flipped and locked the safety on her gun, and let it slide loose from her fingers to clatter against the subway platform. Their leader grinned and kissed her forehead.
“That’s my Andie,” he whispered in her ear. “Don’t ever change.”
Chapter 3: Cherry Blossom Moon
Two males might be enough to keep a female wolf spider busy. An hour ago two men would have been more than Andrea would dare let herself imagine. But now she shared the petal-strewn mattress with five of them at once, and no single lover would ever again suffice.
They’d torn away her undercover street clothes, her leather jacket, her loose cargo pants, and that form-fitting tank top, just as frantically as she’d pulled and flung them aside: she couldn’t be sure who’d actually won the race to strip her naked first. And then their leader, that smirking, literally ravishing brute – she laughed aloud at the pun as it crossed her mind – dropped his coat to the concrete floor, lifted the black T-shirt beneath to reveal tight washboard abs that held her fascinated gaze even as he unbuckled his pants and let them drop around his ankles.
That the rest of the gang was watching too, watching her lay back across that pink bedsheet and squirm her legs against each other with sultry impatience, only made the moment all the more deliciously taboo. If only her liaison could see her now, or the tech unit, or… then the gang leader stretched down between her unconsciously parting knees and drove his cock deep inside her with a slow, languid stroke, and they began to bounce and thrust against each other.
She wrapped her limbs around his chiseled body, crossing her ankles across the small of his back and grabbing his shoulders with nails that dug into his skin and gouged thin crimson streaks beneath them, and wrestled with him, driving her hips up against his pelvis, pistoning the tight lips of her sex around that smooth thick shaft between them, angling and stroking the base of her clit up and down the length of his cock with each thrust. They rolled across the mattress as she tried to brace herself just so against him, twisting onto her left side, then over onto her right as her calves locked around the back of his legs – and then she swung her weight all the way around to roll him onto his back, to ride atop him and curl her fingers tighter around his shoulders as she pumped quicker now, keeping the smooth silky dome of his glans inside her.
“Rutabaga,” Andrea said, her voice low and husky, and she answered Cross’s confused expression with a soft laugh and then a deep, moaning kiss of his mouth, his tongue.
One of the others ran his hands down her lower back, following the dip of her spine and the swell of her bare hips, then spread his fingers to clutch and deeply massage the curves of her ass. A warm slick touch immersed her smooth round cheeks and for a second she imagined that he, whichever one of the hacker gang he might be, had started kissing and licking her pert backside. Then the nerve endings beneath his kneading palms began to hum with a pleasantly fizzling, subsonic frisson, and she understood. NPG was the term the narcotics database used, short for neuropathic gel, but the street name was sparkleskin: all the heady bliss of MDMA, but focused precisely on the point of contact, every touch a luminous fingerpaint streak of ecstasy.
There was a reason she should recoil from that dizzying touch and frantically scrub the psychoactive substance from her skin, something about training and duty and propriety. The idea flickered and fizzled away in her brain – and then that unseen man slipped one gel-coated fingertip right between the cheeks of her ass, stroking her tight cleft, and she instantly exploded. The feeling of it blossomed outward like a lotus, enveloping her rocking pelvis, engulfing that smooth ivory cock pumping between her thighs, its length dripping with her nectar at the apex of each thrust. She pushed her gleaming folds all the way down against his balls, taking him to the hilt to keep him deep inside her as she came, to feel the waves of pleasure rippling up and down around that quivering shaft as her cheeks squeezed around that strumming fingertip.
“Beautiful whirlwind,” she murmured with a warm, almost beatific smile toward the man over her shoulder, catching a glimpse of his curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
“I think something’s wrong with this one,” one of the others said.
“Maybe,” another man, Zero, she guessed, replied. “Synth models aren’t always identical. Hardware fails, software glitches, transcription errors accumulate in the genome…”
“Zimbabwe,” Andrea interrupted him with a playful smile and wink.
And then Locke, thoughtful and quiet though he might be, buried the thick head of his cock between the cheeks of her ass and she moaned and wriggled her hips to work him deeper into that blissfully glowing channel, to let both of the men fill her at once. She lay flat against Cross’s tightly sinewed chest and gasped at the feeling of the other man atop her as well, his bare chest molding into the arch of her back, and both their cocks plundering her spasming folds and tight, squeezing pucker, fucking her both ways at once. She kept pace with them both, rocking her hips in an intricate clockwork cadence to meet each thrust, to bring them together inside her.
“Yeah,” that first bystander continued, “but just listen to her. She’s broken or something.”
“It’s a word salad,” someone else replied. “Schizophasia. We’ll sell her half-price.”
Just two of them were talking, which meant the third had other ideas. He stooped down beside her, a man with chalk-white skin wearing the same sort of black overcoat as their leader. Frost, Andrea reminded herself, as she watched him unzip his pants, as a perfectly erect marble phallus as pale and smooth as a Greek statue hung before her sweaty, blushing face. She studied it with a softly wondering look, gazing out through a starburst cloud of euphoria as her hips rocked back and forth, up and down between the other two men, and then leaned closer to plant a kiss across the smooth white crown. And she looked up into the garnet gleam of his eyes.
“Cherry blossom moon,” she told him, and then took the head of his cock, and then the porcelain length, into her mouth, to roll her tongue in quick circles around the arrowhead glans while gently nursing the veiny shaft with her lips. And then, as the rhythm of that three-way rutting quickened, she began to suck him in earnest amid a frenzy of moaning licks.
Locke’s hands reached around her sides to clasp her breasts, and she groaned into that pale white cock, burying her face between the open flaps of Frost’s pants as the fingertips ignited that familiarly smoldering bliss with each soft touch of her mounds. They spiraled around her breasts, tracing smaller and smaller loops until his fingers touched her stiff, sharply bouncing nipples, sparking the same kaleidoscope swirl of chemical pleasure and then fusing it with the squeeze of his thumbs and fingers around her pink pebbles, massaging and gently tugging and rolling them in circles against her swaying mounds as he began to kiss the side of her neck.
She marveled at the softness, the deliberate sensuality of that touch coming from the same man who was, at that very same moment, fucking her ass, her cheeks squeezing so tight around his cock that he just barely moved between them. His body joined completely with hers, all the subtle friction focused on just the base of his shaft and her clenched entrance, while their leader fucked her with a desperate, heedless rhythm of his own, his hands gripping her hips tight while Frost’s fingers stroked her short, sweaty bangs and pulled her head closer.
Andrea suddenly came again; she wrapped one arm around the crystal-haired man’s waist for balance and clamped her lips around the middle of his cock, letting her quivering moan sweep the length while she angled her pelvis back to coax Locke deeper between her pert cheeks, while she matched the building waves of her climax with a frantic, almost thrashing coupling before suddenly pressing her body tight against Cross again, losing herself in the tsunami crash of bliss washing over her again and again. And somewhere beneath it all, almost lost against the blinding pleasure, their bodies joined in her orgasm, spurting and quivering inside her.
“Crystal accent,” she sighed as that spent cock withdrew from her mouth, as the other two pulled loose from her still-trembling pelvis to leave her dripping messily between her thighs. And she rolled onto her back and looked expectantly up at the last two men.
Chapter 4: Like Broken Glass
“Starswept,” Andrea cooed as Noise crouched between her knees, and she flicked her tongue between her lips at the sight of his manhood, just as thick and beastly as she’d imagined from the bulge in his pants, springing out between the denim flaps. And she rolled onto her side, then onto her hands and knees to feel that cock stretching deeper inside her, spreading her wider than she’d ever have managed on her back, to take in every inch she could. It wasn’t all of it – he was too big for that, but she discovered the very limits of her body, just how many inches around and how many inches wide she could endure. And what she could endure, thanks to the synthetic gel still suffusing her glowing nerves and swathing her in a halo of bliss, she could delight in…
“Her hardware’s working fine,” Zero was saying behind her. “Brain activity is… you know, normal for this sort of thing. No dead zones or anything like that, she’s not damaged.”
“Could be something psychological, like trauma,” Locke’s voice replied. Was that guilt she heard in his hesitant voice? She puzzled over and then dismissed the concept to focus on those steel motorized fingers groping the upturned cheeks of her ass, at how precisely his cybernetic hands measured and caressed her steadily bouncing curves. That engorged cock plundering her tight channel, at least, was entirely human, and she squeezed her straining folds tighter around its girth each time he pulled back, feeling how the smooth skin stroked her inner walls.
“She still fucks like an Andie,” she heard Cross saying, assured and dismissive. “Just like hooking back up with an old fling. Hell, maybe we’ll keep this one for ourselves.”
“You always say that, and we never do.”
“Yeah, well, government synths sell for a lot. But if this one’s defective…”
The rest of his words melted away beneath her lilting cry as, with one last inward thrust that, just that once and against all odds, managed to fill her completely, the green-haired punk’s cock burst into a hot, convulsing splash inside her. The feeling of that deep quivering warmth sparked her own climax, and they practically came together, a single undulating pleasure that washed back and forth between them with each roll of her hips behind her shoulders, each trembling plunge between the back of her thighs, each squeeze of her ass beneath those metal hands…
“Love like broken glass,” Andrea murmured in Zero’s ear now as he took his turn, a little more nervously than the rest. She slid her legs around his skinny waist and wrapped her arms around his sides, pulling him down closer as she guided him inside her with an angled thrust of her hips. And she spoke again, louder, as they began to fuck. “Love like broken glass!”
That spooked him, and she had to wrap her slender legs tighter across his back to keep him from pulling away. She worked his flagging cock between her walls, squeezing and coaxing it into a renewed erection, luring him into the steady, primal cadence of sex, and ran her fingers through his dirty blond hair with a reassuring smile into his stone-gray eyes. He buried his face against her shoulder and began to pump harder, and she grabbed his bare ass with both hands, pulling him down tighter, wedging her hardened clit against the root of his cock and focusing on just dragging it back and forth, quicker and quicker while keeping his length inside her.
She closed her blue eyes as she ran her fingertips up his back and traced his shoulder blades. When she opened them again, the circuitry of her irises glowed with azure light.
“Connection established,” she said over his shoulder, and her impassive voice rang out from the computer speakers scattered about the subway hideout. “Initiate ego suppression.”
“What the... hell…”
“Cross, what... did... she…”
Their voices stretched and modulated before dying away, and she suddenly grabbed Zero tight by the shoulders, fucking him harder now, driving the whole length of his cock in and out between her dripping petals as she hissed into his ear. “If you stop, you’ll be like them.”
“What did,” he gasped, and then moaned as she planted her feet against the mattress to lift and roll her hips in a circle around his pistoning cock. “What did… you do... to us?”
“I borrowed your airlink,” she said, tangling her fingers through his hair and lifting her body closer, pressing her breasts flat against his chest to revel in the feeling of her gel-coated nipples rubbing his skin. “Now you’re volatile too. But since none of you have a conscience, I flipped your egos instead. Once you stop thinking about yourself, you’ll forget yourself.”
The young hacker stared down at her with wild-eyed fear, anger and lust all at once, and she kept rocking her hips up against his, keeping him grounded with the measured, rhythmic squeeze of her walls around his shaft, drawing back until the rim of his glans bulged between her folds and then lifting again, taking him deeper, all the way inside her. He understood: he began to rock quicker now, trying to knot the unraveling threads of his mind together with each thrust.
“I’m still me,” he whispered to himself. “I’m still me, I’m still me…”
“Goodbye, Zero,” she breathed in his ear, and she kissed his cheek, a gentle goodnight kiss before suddenly fucking him in a building frenzy of animal lust, grabbing his ass with both hands and driving into a crescendo of wildly pistoning thrusts that he couldn’t help but meet. He came, and she came with him, and they collapsed into a loose tangle together, their bodies joined tight by the spasms of her supple folds and his quivering shaft, the hot splash of his release.
Chapter 5: Ergo Non Sum
They lost themselves together. And she came back alone.
Andrea waited a while, lying beneath the silent figure while she caught her breath, and then she grabbed his shoulders and rolled him away. He lay unmoving beside her, blank gray eyes staring at the vaulted ceiling, his breath slow and steady, his expression a mask of frozen calm. He wasn’t dead, not even brain dead: all of them still had their memories, their beliefs, even their physical needs and sensations. Just nothing in the middle to tie it all together. She stood up with a shake of her head and began to put her clothes on, starting with her discarded briefs.
“Those words were semantic triggers,” she explained to an audience that could no longer reply or even think of an objection, that could only listen, “to make sure the right pathways stayed open in your brains. You were all very attentive listeners, by the way.
“And I don’t need my conscience to beat you. I just need to really hate losing.”
She brushed down her disheveled clothes, marched across the platform to the largest computer console, typed a few commands, and peered at the screen with a slight frown.
“Nothing here. Oh well, I’ll figure out who told you I was coming. Probably the same one who sent my sisters here, right? I’d feel bad about leaving you here to starve or whatever, but hey, you turned that part of me off. Maybe when I turn it back on I’ll feel bad again and let someone know you’re still down here. Or maybe not. It’ll be a fun experiment.”
She retrieved her gun and gave one last look at the computer equipment, at the sweat-soaked mattress and ring of sleeping bags, and the five catatonic figures scattered among them. Then she returned to the main console and typed another flurry of commands: the circuitry embedded in her blue irises shined bright for a moment, and then faded back into a semblance of ordinary human eyes as she stepped back, raised her gun, and blasted a hole through the machine.
But she’d backed up the gang’s volatility program. Someone on the inside had betrayed her, along with untold numbers of her precursors: an off switch for her morality could come in handy once she found them. Andrea 471 holstered her sidearm and hopped across the rusting turnstiles, and then climbed the stairs back up into the neon city and cold drizzling rain.