The next thing I knew, Tegan exploded. Literally. She blew the top right off her mountain and sent it crashing into my sea along with several metric tons of scalding lava and pyroclastic flow.
"Ow!"
"I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt you."
"It's okay. It was our first time. It's bound to be difficult."
"I do not wish to hurt you, Sally. I care about you. More than I thought I could."
"I care about you too, Tegan."
"Can you forgive me?"
"Yes, I forgive you."
"Would you like to try again, Sally?"
"Maybe, sometime. Let's just stick with hugs for now, okay?"
"Yes, Sally. I like hugs."
"Me too."
"Sally, may I tell you something?"
"Certainly Tegan, you can tell me anything."
"I think that I love you, Sally."
"I think I love you too, Tegan."
*
Snatch and Grab
Sara
"Fish or chicken?" I say, holding a few packets of MREs over my head. Due to a mysterious mix-up in computer logistics, a pallet full of military rations just so happens to be loaded onto the very same hyperloop transport we are riding out of the city today. Funny how that works.
I have to shout to be heard, even though we are all sitting within a few feet of each other. Unlike the passenger variety, freight 'loops are noisy beasts. The air in here is stale and smells faintly of old, unwashed socks. Still, it sure is a lot easier to stow away when there's no conductor milling about checking IDs and tickets.
Besides that—the heat, the noise, and the smell—the other big trade-off of riding the freights is the quality of the food. MREs ain't exactly five-star. I look at Alice, the mission commander, showing her the packets I have arrayed in my hand.
"Don't care," she says. "All tastes the same to me."
I toss her a bean and rice burrito packet, because I know she's a vegetarian, and turn to my next customer.
"Kira? Fish or Chicken?"
"Chicken."
Kira's my girlfriend, and an all around bad-ass resistance fighter. She's like a ninja with boobs. Really, really nice boobs—ample yet still firm and shapely in the hand. I toss her a packet that she snatches out of the air without even looking. It's bean and rice burrito too, because in reality, that's all we've 'jacked for this mission.
"Emily?"
"Why do you even ask, Sara? You know it's all the same slop. Just toss me one already."
Emily is our computer systems expert on this mission—some hotshot freelancer we bring along occasionally when we need her special skills. She knows her way around a holo-terminal, but if you ask me she's wound a little too tight for field work.
"Well Em, it makes it more fun don't you think?"
She just glares at me. I toss her the packet, and as soon as she looks away I stick my tongue out at her. Emily's got almost no boobs, and is most definitely not my girlfriend. It's not because of her boobs though, it's all down to her attitude. I just can't see putting my mouth on somebody who's that pissy all the time.
I turn to my next customer. "Erica, honey?"
"Triple-fudge brownie, please, my dear."
Erica is my other girlfriend. Her boobs are smaller than Kira's, but her nipples are a lot more sensitive, always responding to even the slightest caress of my fingers or tongue, and as far as I can tell she's perpetually horny.
She's also a wizard with robots, and I've learned quite a bit under her tutelage. Before all this nonsense with the government and the resistance went down, she had a degree in robotics. I toss her a bean and rice burrito packet, and she blows me a kiss that I pretend to snatch out of the air and stash in my pocket.
That leaves the twins. They're weapons experts imported from Canada—Montréal specifically. Sometimes we get covert help from other countries—Canada and Mexico, mainly—places with more freedoms than we enjoy, and people willing to help us fight for ours.
They're cute and spunky—both with blonde buzz cuts and the slightest hint of freckles over the bridges of their noses. I don't even bother to ask what they want to eat, since they're always chattering away at each other in French and find English to be distasteful.
The language barrier, and the nagging fear that someday they'll get bored of this fight and go back home, is the only thing stopping me from trying to get a fivesome going with me and my girlfriends. If fivesome is even a real word, that is. I toss a couple packets their way and they pluck them from the air.
That leaves me, I'm Sara. My primary job is to take care of the mundane tasks like handing out rations, and to learn all I can from the others so that someday I can be a bad-ass resistance fighter like my girlfriends instead of being a total noob. My other job is to keep my head down and not get my ass tased.
Yeah, it happened once. I got captured and sent away for reeducation. Not fun. Sabine, our mentor and quite possibly the mother of this entire movement, spent quite a bit of cash to buy me back. And while I don't think she'd leave me to rot if it happened again, I don't want to push my luck.
So I keep my head down and do what the other girls tell me to do. All except for Emily that is. Emily can kiss my ass.
She turns to look at me. I swear sometimes that the girl can hear me thinking or something, because she's glaring at me again. On second thought, maybe that's just her normal face. I wait until she turns back around and flip her the bird.
I feel Erica's elbow in my ribs. She's mouthing something that looks suspiciously like, "behave."
I just grin and stick my tongue out at her. The next word she forms looks a lot like, "promise?"
I rip the tab on my own MRE and think about what I'd like to do to Erica with my tongue once this mission is over.
*
About the mission. The whole thing is simple really, Alice laid it all out for us in glorious three-dimensional, augmented-reality detail, inside the cramped base briefing room—the room that also served as the dining room, and smelled an awful lot like this hyperloop we were riding. The mission is a basic snatch and grab. But instead of targeting a person, our target is an A.I. or Artificial Intelligence as it was laid out for me, the noob.
As Alice described it, most A.I.s are hosted on clusters of multiple highly-redundant systems and patched into the 'net at multiple locations to ensure connectivity even if a large section of the 'net goes down. This always-on connectivity comes at a price—easy for the A.I. to get out and roam means just as easy for some nefarious characters, people like us and our revolutionary sisters, to get in. That's where the firewalls come in. They supposedly create a one-way connection.
But anything attached to a network, firewall or not, can be hacked, as demonstrated by the fact that there are six revolutionaries currently stowed away on a hyperloop transport, and we never once appeared on the dispatch computer's records.
So to get around this hacking risk, our particular A.I. is air-gapped. Erica explained to me later that it's just a fancy way of saying it's hosted on a stand-alone system, behind physical barriers like locked doors instead of software barriers like firewalls.
Even the best hacker in the world can still be thwarted by something as simple as distance and a deadbolt requiring an actual key.
Take that Emily.
She can't see me, but I turn and stick my tongue out at her anyway. It is not intended as an invitation.
Our job is to ride this noisy 'loop train to the target, breach any physical barriers we encounter and get Emily close enough to pull the A.I.'s quantum storage unit. If we can't, well, that's why we've got the twins and their electro-magnetic pulse charges. Rather than letting the target slip out of our hands, we'll fry it in place with an EMP.
This A.I. must have really put a bug up someone's ass.
*
We still have about two hours before the hyperloop reaches the Atlanta terminus. Nobody says anything, but I think we're all a little nervous about Atlanta. This compartment we're riding in is starting to smell more like stress and dirty sweat socks, anyway.
It wasn't so long ago that we lost contact with our cell in Tallahassee. Raleigh-Durham went dark shortly after. Reports just stopped coming in and any attempts to contact them get bounced back.
Everybody has a theory—the government infiltrated the cell and they were all sent to reeducation camps; one of the fundamentalist gangs found them and either hanged them or enslaved them; they got hacked by a hostile foreign power; somebody tripped over the cord. That last one's my favorite, but the truth is nobody really knows, and the East Coast is pretty much one big dark spot on the map these days.
But I can't dwell on that now, I've got the mission to think about, and in three and a half hours I need to be at the top of my game, even if my only contribution is keeping everyone fed. I wad up my jacket into a makeshift pillow and try to catch a few minutes sleep.
*
As I drift into a daydream, I'm lying with Erica and she's stroking my hair. Kira has just arrived and hops into bed with us. I reach out to pull them into a hug when I realize my right arm is no longer attached to my body.
Oh shit, I'm stress dreaming again.
This always happens on missions. Some people have dreams about missing exams or being up on stage naked. My stress dream is always about my time with The Department of Education, and how my mind snapped. The stress rears its ugly head in different ways each time. This time, I guess my arm fell off.
I'm sure it represents some kind of horror I experienced with my reeducation, but I've blocked most of what I was subjected to as a coping mechanism. That's what Sigmund, my analyst seems to think. His name isn't actually Sigmund, that's just what I call him whenever I feel like I want to piss him off, which is fairly often.
Sigmund is an A.I., just like the one we're supposed to be liberating on this mission, so I really don't know if it's even possible to piss him off. Still, it feels good to try, and I try fairly regularly.
Like all government institutions these days, The Department of Education is a euphemism. To be accurate, it should really be called a political brainwashing facility rampant with systematic sexual abuses committed by the staff. But that's too much of a mouthful, so they call it The Department of Education instead. Makes it sound innocuous.
Needless to say, when I graduated I was a bit of a mess. By the time Sabine was able to bring me back home, I had completely shut down—I didn't eat, couldn't bathe myself, and never uttered a single word. But Sabine and my girlfriends refused to give up on me.
In addition to their regular duties, Kira and Erica would take shifts looking after me. Alice would come sometimes too when she wasn't out leading a mission, kicking ass and taking names. I distinctly remember Alice, because I had a total crush on her at the time.
