Chapter 4: Interrogation by Other Means
The white couch held the heat from their bodies. Jane rose first, the air cool against her skin where his heat had been. She stood and extended a hand down to him.
“Come on,” she said.
Marcus took her hand. His fingers were loose, his movements slow. She pulled him up with a strength that was not an effort. She kept his hand in hers and led him across the living room’s polished floor.
Her bedroom was a continuation of the apartment’s stark aesthetic. A vast platform bed dominated the space, its linens crisp and white. The floor was more polished concrete, cool underfoot. A single piece of abstract art, a slash of deep crimson on a white canvas, hung on the wall opposite the bed. The air here held a different quiet, a deeper silence.
She guided him to the bed’s edge and sat him down. He watched her, his eyes tracking her movements. She walked to a panel on the wall, touched it, and the room’s main light died, leaving only a soft, diffuse glow from hidden strips along the baseboards. The city’s light painted geometric shapes across the ceiling.
She returned to him. Her hands went to his shirt, working the buttons with a precise efficiency. He sat still, letting her undress him. She pushed the fabric from his shoulders, let it fall. Her own robe had already been abandoned in the living room. The cool air raised gooseflesh on his arms.
She pressed him back onto the mattress. The sheets were smooth and chill. She stretched out beside him, the length of her body a radiant line against his side. She turned on her hip, propping her head on her hand to look down at him. Her free hand traced a path from his collarbone, down his chest, to the tense plane of his stomach.
“Tell me about the other ones,” she said. Her voice was a low murmur in the semi-dark.
“Other ones?”
“The other avatars you made. The ones they didn’t push into the system.”
He exhaled, a slow release of breath. His eyes were on the ceiling. “There were a lot. Dozens. Skins, we called them. Different hair. Different faces. Different… ethnicities. All beautiful.” His hand found hers on his stomach, his fingers twining with hers. “But they were variations. You were the first. The base model. The template.”
A smile touched her lips. “So I’m the original.”
“You’re the source code.”
She laughed, a soft, private sound. “What else? You mentioned a monster girl line.”
“Yeah.” A genuine smile, the first she’d seen that wasn’t fear or arousal, crossed his face. “A Halloween event. My idea. I used your mesh as the foundation for all of them.” He listed them off, his engineer’s mind cataloging. “Sexy witch. Cat girl. Half-vampire. Full vampire. Dark elf. Succubus. Mermaid. Arachne. Slime girl.”
“Slime girl?” Jane’s eyebrows arched. “I could have been a slime girl?”
“Theoretically.”
“What would that have been like?” Her tone was full of playful curiosity.
He turned his head to look at her. “Pretty much just like you are now. But made of… and tasting like… lime jello.”
She threw her head back and laughed, a full-bodied sound that vibrated through the mattress. “I’d prefer cherry jello.”
“I’ll make a note,” he said, the smile lingering. “For the future.”
“Why not slime girl, though? Or spider girl? The arachne sounds… interesting.”
His smile faded into a more technical expression. “The further a model got from human baseline, the harder it was to simulate in a real-time environment. The slime girl required fluid dynamics the game engine couldn’t handle. The arachne had too many moving parts. They were VR only. Sorry. No jello girl for Jane. No spider girl either.”
She pouted, a mock-exaggeration of disappointment. “And the mermaid?”
“Pushed the limit. The tail was a nightmare. To make it functional, not just decorative, it would have needed a completely different skeletal and muscular structure. She’d have been more shark than girl. Efficient, but not… elegant.”
Jane was quiet for a moment, her fingers absently tracing circles on his skin. “You keep saying ‘simulate’. What did you mean before, when you said you grew them?”
He shifted, turning onto his side to face her. Their bodies were close in the dim light. “Other designers built their avatars like mannequins. They sculpted the outside and animated it. It was… cartoony. I built mine from the inside out. I simulated biological processes. Cell division. Protein folding. Organelle functions. I grew them, layer by layer, like nature would. They had working circulatory systems, nervous systems… on a simplified level. To generate a realistic simulation for the game, I had to build it on a ‘real’ model first.”
“And they let you do that? As an intern?”
“They thought I was wasting my time. But they were paying me in pizza and caffeine credits, so they let me run my experiments on the backup servers.” A note of old pride entered his voice. “When it worked, when my models moved and reacted with a physics baseline the others couldn’t match… that’s when NewYou bought the whole company. The owners got rich. I got a job.”
Jane’s hand came up to his face. Her palm was warm against his cheek. “I’m keeping you,” she said. The words were simple, absolute.
Before he could answer, a low chime sounded from the living room. Jane’s phone, on the coffee table. She slipped from the bed, a pale form in the gloom, and padded out of the room.
Marcus lay still, listening. The concrete floor carried the vibration of her footsteps back to him.
She returned a moment later, the phone glowing in her hand. She looked at the screen, her face illuminated from below. Her expression was one of pure, cool satisfaction.
“First tranche,” she said. “It’s in the account.”
A cold knot tightened in his stomach. “So it’s done.”
“It’s started.” She set the phone on the nightstand and climbed back into bed. She molded herself against him, her front to his back, her arm wrapping around his chest. Her lips were close to his ear. “It’s time for me to disappear.”
He tensed. “When?”
“Soon. Tomorrow, maybe.” Her arm tightened. “Don’t worry. I’m not going far. And I’m not leaving without you.”
“But—”
“If you disappear now, they’ll know. Serena will know. They’ll come looking, and they’ll find us both. You have to stay. You have to go back to work. You have to be normal.” She kissed the space behind his ear, right over the pulse point. “We wait.”
He wanted to argue. To list the dangers, the insanity of her plan. But her body was a brand against his, her heat seeping into him, her hold both a comfort and a cage. The part of him that had sent the text to Serena was the same part that now settled into her grasp. It was the part that wanted to be owned by the beautiful, impossible thing he had made.
“Okay,” he whispered.
“Okay,” she echoed.
They lay like that for a long time, until his breathing evened out and deepened, until the city’s light shifted across the ceiling. She listened to the rhythm of his heart against her arm, felt the gradual release of tension in his muscles as sleep took him. She did not sleep. She watched the geometric shadows on the wall, planning the first steps of a vanishing act, anchored by the warm, sleeping weight of the man in her arms.