I check the mirror in the plane's bathroom after we land to make sure I don't look too rumpled. I could just check with my bot senses, but sometimes the aesthetic doesn't come through quite the same. Lin managed to survive our in-flight make-out session with just a little make-up repair required. Wait, no. That's a hickey on her neck, just above the collarbone. I thought I’d been careful not to leave any marks but I must have gotten carried away. It’s visible above the neckline of her blouse.
She looks at it in the mirror when I point it out to her and laughs. "You naughty scoundrel!" she declares in mock outrage.
"I think I can fix things. May I?" I ask her.
She peels the collar down to take a closer look at the purpling spot on her pale skin. "Yes, please. Don't let my first meeting with your grandparents start with them thinking poorly of me."
I focus my consciousness into my cloud. My million tiny fingers unravel the thread holding her top button in place, slide the button up a few centimeters, and seal up the old buttonhole so that without a very close inspection you'd never know it has ever been there. I stiffen the end of the thread with a rigid chain of bots and sew the button back on in its new place. Making a small slit for the new buttonhole, I twist and bind the tiny threads so it looks just like the old one. I open my eyes and button her blouse back up, the hickey now neatly concealed.
"Oh. I thought you were going to magically make it go away. This is an acceptable alternative, I suppose.” She scrutinized the alteration. “This is extraordinary work. I should have you do all of my tailoring."
"Sorry, I’m not much of an expert with our family’s special medical capabilities. You’d have to ask Louise if you want anything more fancy than stitching up a cut. I can do the tailoring if you want," I reply, half-serious. "Trying to replicate natural textiles is a pain though, so I might need you to switch to synthetics. Maybe plastic or latex, those would be easy."
"Sounds like a kink. Or a kinky? Which word is it? I know it’s one of those two."
She rarely needs help with her English these days, but I guess that's a newer part of her vocabulary. "I'd say 'sounds kinky.' That's probably the most natural way to say it. And I was just thinking practically, but now you have my mind going in all sorts of new directions."
"Good," she says, running her hand down my back and planting it firmly on my backside.
It feels nice. I log the contact into my index. She’s been getting more physical over the course of this trip, I think mostly because she hasn’t had Yang Song constantly hovering near her. My current movie theory of Lin and romance has her firmly planted in the land of the PG-13, but maybe one day she’ll be ready to make it to R. She likes to get my shirt off, and has managed to put her hands on the majority of my biological body, but still hasn’t let me do any of the same back to her.
It’s fine. We can take it as slow as she needs. While a big part of me is dying to jump into a fully sexual relationship with her, there’s a part of me, one that I think Mom would be proud of, that’s mature enough to realize that I might not be qualified to make good moral judgments or recognize consent cues with my mind the way it is. Especially since Lin seems to have a very hard time verbalizing what she is and isn’t OK with. My biggest fear in life right now is ruining things by moving faster than Lin is ready for.
I need to make more progress on my synthetic conscience before I screw anything up too badly. So far all I have are warnings that pop up when my log and vitals indicate that I’m about to kill someone. It was hard enough to parse out intent from natural language and chemical levels even with Evan’s help, so I haven’t been able to do much more than that yet. While preventing extraneous murders is important, I know I still have a long way to go for the rest of it. I would prefer if my biochemical lack of remorse didn’t turn me into a complete psychopath.
Lin gives my buttock a squeeze and me a naughty smirk, then goes back to finessing her hair, making sure all the short spiky strands look just so. I really should get her involved in building out my replacement for biological morality. She knows enough about the implant interface and my custom database and indexing software by now, and who could be better than her for determining what my limits should be for non-murdery things?
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"Come on, you two," Evan calls out from near the boarding door. "I'm getting hungry."
Later then. I put a note in my electronic brain to ask for her help when we get back home.
"We're coming," I call back. "Just give me a second to get this girl's hands off of me."
Lin blushes and gives me a playful shove. We catch up to Evan and Valerie just before they reach the car. Despite his protests that he wants to sit with Valerie, we make Evan take shotgun up by the driver. With three of us going in the back, there's no way that one of those can be Evan. His massive and muscular frame would take up at least half the space. I take the middle seat, which I don’t mind at all. Valerie has basically become another one of my sisters, so I'm sandwiched between two of my favorite girls in the world.
The driver has the address, and as we drive I hope that my grandparents like their new place. Hopefully it’s as nice as Alan said it was when I sent him up to buy it for them. They’ve told me that they like it whenever I’ve talked to them since then, but according to my index, sometimes they say that they like things just to be nice.
When we arrive, the place looks good. The gated community is surrounded by high stone walls, with the words Highland Estates in big metal letters near the entrance. The security booth at the entrance is manned by a couple of armed rent-a-cops. They get Gramps on the phone before they let us through. That’s good. I wanted security that wasn’t a joke. Part of me knows that it won’t do a thing against Jeff or the illuminati if they find them, but it makes me feel better anyway.
I extend my bots around the neighborhood, pushing them a little more intrusively than I normally would. The houses here are big. They probably qualify as mansions. I’m not sure what the cutoff is for that. The ornate decor in most of them tells me that their neighbors are more than comfortably well off. Hopefully my very middle-class grandparents are fitting in well enough.
A couple of turns later, the car pulls into a driveway. The driver gets a couple of the bags and Evan and I grab the rest. He deposits the luggage on the porch and returns to the vehicle, driving off before I can even offer a tip. Alan must have arranged that. I don’t need to check the house number; I can recognize the smell of Gramps’s cooking already. I’m about to knock when Grammy opens the door.
“Noah!” she exclaims, rushing out and enveloping me in a huge hug.
“And you must be Evan,” Gramps declares as he ambles along behind her. He extends a hand, but Evan goes in for a hug too. Soon, everyone’s been embraced and introduced.
“You boys have found some real lookers,” Gramps says. “Are you girls sure you want to be sticking around with fellas like these two?”
“I happen to be very good looking,” I declare. “It only took Lin and I a few months of writing letters to each other after I met her before she wanted to see my face again.”
Gramps laughs and ushers us in. It seems like a nice place. Much bigger than their old house. Gramps’ war medals and Grammy’s knicknacks sit on the shelves of their new living room. Grammy bustles around, showing everyone where they’ll be sleeping. The four guest rooms they have now are a pretty good upgrade from the couch in the den that I crashed on at their old place.
Gramps pulls me aside.
“You look good, Noah,” he says, his eyes meeting mine. “Last time you were here I was worried about you. I’m glad you’ve worked through things. Losing two parents in the same year isn’t something everyone bounces back from, but I can see that some of the old you is back now. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, Gramps,” I tell him. “It was a tough time, but I’m doing better. There’s still a lot I worry about though. How about you two? Is everything all right with you here? Is the house OK?”
“Oh, you don’t need to add us to your list of worries,” he replies. “We miss the old place, but you’ve set us up with nicer digs than I ever thought I’d live in. We’re happy to stay here if that puts your mind at ease. They even have a nice seniors group here that we’re getting along with. They were a little cool at first—we’re not exactly the typical residents. But we threw a party and that seemed to go over well. I made some of my famous barbecue and then Grammy got a bunch of the ladies hooked on crochet and mahjong. We’ve been minor celebrities since.”
“Good,” I say. “I’m glad.”
“Best wash up for lunch now.”
I take a few steps towards the bathroom that Grammy had shown on her tour of the place, then feel something off on the edge of my bot senses. It’s somewhere near the outer wall of the gated community. Pinpricks start biting into my cloud as something starts shredding my bots. I pull the periphery of my cloud back and form eyes looking out toward the disturbance. What I see looks like a vortex of pure destruction, a cyclone of concussive force ripping through everything in its path, coming straight towards the house.