While Gyn had stirred her Americano, Viral had absentmindedly allowed his eyes to focus on the periodic jiggle of her breasts. When she stopped her breasts did too, and Viral woke from his reflection. Quick to cover his autonomic proclivity toward leering, he pushed his lip into his cup and drank. Got damn, the tea was hot. Viral’s eyes watered as the boiling water caught in his throat. He forced himself to swallow and hide any outward sign that his scalded tongue felt like the pavement beneath the bus. To look weak was not his motive. Good for him, hiding his pain served well his more important agenda -- to not show Gyn how nervous a girl his own age made him.
“Waiting is the hardest part,” she said, turning a bangle on her left wrist with the fingers on her right. Still holding his scarred tongue to the roof of his mouth and breathing through his nostrils to hold his tears from breaking past his lids, Viral nodded, without sound. “I just want to start doing something,” she said, “whatever it is; I’m just so wound up I’m ready to pounce."
The way Gyn shook her hands jostled her bosom again. Reflexively, to keep from staring, Viral took another sip from his tea. It had somehow gotten hotter. The burn was worse than before. He wanted nothing more than to keep from yelping like a baby seal crushed beneath the weight of a mother too asleep to notice. He nodded toward Gyn and managed a sound that came out like he was curious to hear more.
“I hate sitting still. I can't stand that anticipation that just builds up. I'm like a racehorse at the start of the track. Shoot the gun. Let me off the leash, you know?”
Viral tried to think of an experience that sounded to him like what Gyn described. Torqued, unrepentant energy caught in the chamber of a piston that couldn't fire. It sounded like thermodynamics to him. Once confident he could open his mouth, expose his raw tongue to oxygen without crying, he spoke. "The first law of thermodynamics says energy can't be created or destroyed."
Gyn smiled. "Maybe that's what Ada and Alan are attending to," she said. "Channelling the pent up energy into something creative." She looked at him for just one second that made Viral wonder if it was possible to wink without winking.
"I didn't mean it like that," Viral said.
"I know," Gyn said. She squeezed his kneecap and shook it. Kind of like she was his baseball coach, Viral thought. Baseball. That was good. He could often find respite from uncomfortable energies inside his ribs and hips thinking about the gratingly dull, excruciatingly monotonous game of baseball.
Gyn put her elbow on her thigh and her chin in her hand. She looked to Viral like she was talking to a younger version of herself. "I just wish I had my bicycle. It was always easy to work out whatever I was feeling by riding through the streets. Do you have a bicycle?" She asked.
Viral shook his head, no. He told her about his bike share on the campus.
"It's good to share things, yes," Gyn said, "Especially considering all the waste we make. But the bicycle that you can keep in your flat. The one that is just for you. It rides so much smoother. It's lighter. Yes, it's more expensive, but sometimes it can matter to have something that's all yours."
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Viral thought about his souped up PC he'd put together in his bedroom before he left for college in the fall. He'd spent months saving up for the parts and learning how to put it all together. It was a 4.2gHz, over-clocked Intel i-9 and Nvidia Titan GPU with enough cores to raytrace the shit out of Lara Croft's pores. But it wasn't like she had any blemishes to begin with.
"I know what you mean," he said to Gyn. He recalled the hours, months, shoot, years, he'd spent lost in his computers. While his mother worked another late hour at the hospital or his dad drank another four glasses of scotch and railed about his son’s shortcomings, Viral merged his spirit with his machine. Through its portal he moved in wires, worlds, logic gates, and bit buffers. While his peers in his high school, and many kids around his age worldwide, wasted the processing power of their phones and tablets on augmented face filters, photo-sharing, and derivative drum loops in Garageband, he shed his skin of identity. He crawled toward pockets of the web where the science of self disappeared beyond the shroud of an avatar. He became electrons on a server circuit; he was the light in the fibre optic. The thrill of losing his body came from the sound of death's echoes following his footsteps. To live inside the machine would be to lose the life outside it, the Reaper’s ghost had said. Viral wondered if life outside the network of the web had any meaning on its own. He looked around him in the cafe of the hotel lobby. The handful of people checking in and out, the frequent fliers pulling suitcases like recalcitrant chihuahas for a walk while staring into their phones; the concierge staff sorting rooms like card dealers to new arrivals -- they were just pushing buttons, entering data into the fields that the machine, the network, the family of distributed servers parsed into an algorithm that could hash a unique key which connected a person to a room, a physical space, one in which the illusion of privacy hung like a pamphlet on the handle to a door.
A door...There was something to that, Viral noted. He made a mental check in the .txt file he kept running in his brain.
"...like love," Gyn had said. Viral refocused his eyes on the material present -- this time her face, not her body. He knew Gyn could tell he'd been off in the nether of his neuronal nebular; he felt grateful that she did not shame him for his inability to keep to a single thread.
"Well, I don't know about that," Viral said, rubbing his palms against the denim of Jaxon's jeans. He hoped the flush he felt in his face didn't show through his skin's caramel finish.
Gyn switched the cross of her legs in her chair and turned to him. "Think about it," she said. Viral did his best to think of anything but the cleavage she'd reintroduced to his field of view. "This feeling I'm describing -- this potential energy poised on this cliff that can't just leap to the bottom. It's tied up, pulling on this chain. Trying to be free. To fall. To where? To the rocks? In love? There is unrequited resolution. Will they return the feeling? Won't they? There is tension there between what could and could not happen. It's thrilling. Don't you just want to jump and find out?"
Viral couldn't tell if Gyn was talking metaphorically about the task to which Monica assigned them or more literally about affection. As he always did regarding matters of emotion, he erred in favor of literalism. "But if you jump from this cliff -- if you're the rock, in your example, though still sentient enough to, you know, feel -- then you could fall and die."
The smile on Gyn's face got wider and the skin around her green eyes creased with mirth. "Or," she said, "You could fly and really live."