Sneak Peek: Constant Book 4, Chapter 35: A Simple Thing

Well, here we are back to content that hasn't been touched since December. This, and subsequent chapters, are the content that will eventually connect with Book 5, the Christmas arc.

This picks up with David at the Empyrean, meeting Darius. This content is... rough? I'm a little hesistant to share it, as it's far from settled and likely to change by the final draft. Darius' character hasn't fully resolved, and some of the plotting around him is in flux. Still, it should give a hint at the sci-fi flavouring that'll influence future chapters. Did I ever mention that William Gibson's Neuromancer was a huge influence, back in the day? I'd argue The Sprawl trilogy (and maybe Burning Chrome) remains one of the greatest works of sci-fi of the twentieth century.

I'm no Gibson, but I think some of that early influence emerges in this chapter.

Enjoy, and as always, would love to hear what you think.

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Chapter 35: A Simple Thing

At one end of the long dark room spread several sofas and chairs, large screens, a table and drinks cabinet. There were figures there, feminine silhouettes indistinct under flickering lights. One sat with her eyes fixed to a screen, playing some kind of racing game pulsing with psychedelic colours. There was another, or maybe two more women over there, but hard to see. In the darkness of the room, it was impossible to tell whether they sat freely or were bound and restrained like me.

            In any case, they either made no notice of my arrival, or didn’t care. There was a steady blink of a small blue indicator light at their ears—some kind of earpiece or earbud, maybe.

            The other end of the room lay almost entirely in darkness. There were lights blinking over there, too and the oppressive bulk of looming machinery. From this machinery came the steady hum and chittering of computers. There was a single, large desk halfway across the room. It was a heavy antique with ornate legs and dark polished surface, on which sat several large screens, their backs towards me. Also, a soft, rhythmic wheezing sound I couldn’t quite place, and a suggestion of cables and tubing snaking into the darkness, out of sight.

            Calves burning from the short, prancing walk in those ridiculous shoes, I stood there uncertainly, Dmytro at my side. He too had an earpiece. His solid presence at my side was reassuring.

            A voice rang out:

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.”

The voice was both familiar and surpassingly odd: that of a man I once knew, yet somehow doubled and very slightly out of sync, with a slight feminine lilt. As the man’s voice finished, “sunless sea” there echoed, beneath, the second voice: “see?”

            With a faint whirring sound, out of the darkness at the far end of the room appeared a man in a bulky electric wheelchair. As he approached, tubes and wires plugged into the back of the seat slithered behind him, leading back towards the heavy machinery.

            “Welcome,” said Darius, as he pulled in behind the desk. A single spotlight glowed into life, casting a pale cone of illumination over the man. “To my pleasure dome.”

            “—doom,” whispered the second voice.

            “Forward.” Dmytro gave a soft pat to my skirted bum.

            Cursing the need for his support, and for the shoes the crippled my step, the gag that silence me and the cuffs that left me helpless—cursing the entire getup that ensured I appeared before this guy as vulnerable, a submissive feminine supplicant—with drool dripping down my chin and onto my chest—I minced forward. I’d planned on this meeting going differently, that was for fucking sure.

            “Sit,” Dmytro instructed.

            I lowered into the seat and posed awkwardly at the edge, arms trapped behind my back, tits forward, long legs together and tilted to one side.

            “Welcome,” the man in the chair said.

            He sat forward in his chair, fingers steepled, elbows on the armrest. A heavy hood, nondescript and grey, covered his face. His hands were thin and bony, the nails long and yellow. There was an overall impression of frailty, of bones and skin wrapped in clothing. This close, the rhythmic wheezing sound became more distinct, and I realised he was hooked up to some kind of respirator to assist his breathing.

            “Coleridge’s best, if you ask me. Laudanum-fueled fever dream, unfinished, or so said the poet. But then, he never finished anything and was an inveterate liar.” He tilted his head slightly, features still hidden within his hood. “Familiar with the poem?”

            I hesitated, then nodded.

            “Of course you are. What was her name—Akiko? Yes, there we go: Akiko. Takahashi Akiko, professor of English literature. Current age: 48. Tenured at Sirocco University. Father: Takahashi Jun, deceased. Mother: Janet Holden, age—” As he spoke, his voice—shifted—momentarily sounding hollow and mechanical, with that odd, almost feminine, lilt rising. There was a pause, and the more familiar voice, wheezy though it may be, returned. “She taught a unit in Romantic poetry in ’41. You were dating her. Fucked her. Learned from her.”

            I wanted to ask how the fuck he knew that; it wasn’t secret or anything, but it wasn’t something I talked about much, either, especially with guys like him. I looked up at Dmytro, who stood in impassive silence, eyes forward, then back to Darius.

            “Commonly, it’s read as a poem about imagination, the creative process.” He leaned closer. From somewhere under his hood, a blue light glittered. “The creative flow of ideas through the unconscious caverns of the mind reaching fertile grounds onto which art blossoms into fruition. The mystical-mythical act of creation in all its violent passion, a ‘mighty fountain,’ seething, panting, bursting with the poet’s inspiration.” He laughed, a horrible, dry sound more like a cough.

            I grunted around my gag.

            “It’s a boring interpretation. Tame. Inoffensive. Personally, I prefer to read it as a poem about sex, because all poetry is about sex, and art too in the end, and all these romantic poets nothing more than horny men trying to dip their quill in any available ink pot. And surely you—a girl—a very pretty girl—are able to appreciate the poem’s imagery, hmm? More so now than in the past?” He grinned, a sickly twist of the lips. “Now that you possess a ‘deep romantic chasm’ of your own? Has your ‘savage place,’ seethed with ‘ceaseless turmoil’? Have you wailed for your demon lover?” Another dry cackle.

            Seething with anger and—I can’t deny it—confusion and uncertainty, I simply glared and waited for him to get to his point.

            He leaned back, and sighed, and suddenly sounded tired. “Yes,” he said, as though listening to an unseen speaker. “I am being rude. So. Fine. A greeting. Hello, Miss Bellamy,” he said, and again the mechanical undertone, a second voice very slightly out of sync: “—me.” Then his head—twitched—once, twice—and from within the shadow of his hood, bright eyes gleamed—one of them with a light all its own. “Or should I say welcome, David Saunders?”

            The man raised thin hands with bony fingers to his hood. The face he revealed was emaciated, cheeks sunken and lips thin and dry. Yet it was a face I recognized, that of Darius Graves. Once, he’d been a tough and wiry bastard; now he appeared sallow and sick. His hair with wispy, the skin waxy. And seeing him, I gasped and jerked back, biting down hard into the gag.

            His left eye flashed with curiosity and amusement, but the other was flat and dead—a mechanical implant, dull grey metal imprinted with a cluster of tiny crystalline flecks that sparkled like sapphires in the dim light. A copper-coloured nugget erupted from his temple, and a thick strip of metal, pitted and wired, extended along his scalp to the back of his head. The entire rear of his skull swelled with metal and plastic, from which plugged wires and thick tubes emerged, some semi-transparent filled with strange fluids that flowed into or out of his head. These tubes either ran into the back of the wheelchair or fell to the floor and wound into the darkness behind him.

            Implants and artificial limbs, all that transhumanism stuff, it’d come on a long way in the past decade. But outside of a few steampunk freaks and futurist weirdos, it was hardly mainstream. Functioning replacement limbs weren’t uncommon, and I’d read in industry mags a year or two ago hyperbolic claims of biomechanical eyes and replacement ears looking and working as well or even better than the real thing, but not—this; nothing like this. But then, a few years ago I hadn’t heard of regenerative sex-changing compounds either, so what the fuck did I know?

            “It seems we’ve both been through some changes,” Darius said dryly, and the left corner of his lip twitched in a sardonic grin—the right side of his mouth twitched feebly as he spoke, as though partly paralysed.

            Fear ran down my spine, and I grunted around the gag.

            “Wouldn’t you agree—Luke?”

            I felt rather than saw Dmytro at my side stiffen with surprise.

            I’d left that name dead and buried twenty years ago. I shook my head, braid dancing around my shoulders. I tried to speak—“aat ah-end oo ou?”—and wanted to chomp down with frustration. The chains at my back jangled and I clenched my fists.

            “Though you’re looking far better for your changes, no? One should be so lucky, hmm?” He tapped the metal side of his head, with a dull tinging at his touch. “I must say, you make one fine-looking bitch.”

            ‘—which?’ said the second voice, coming from somewhere at the back of his throat.

            Dmytro shifted uneasily at my side.

            “Go on,” Darius said, his organic eye never leaving me. “What is it?”

            “Boss? You said… Luke? As in—”

            “Indeed. Don’t you recognize our old friend?”

            ‘—end?’

            Dmytro looked down at me, and I glared up at him, blushing fiercely under my makeup. I felt the hot flush blossom in my cheeks and neck and spread down my chest, and the shame of it filled me. Looking—and dressing—like this, in front of a man—who knew who I’d been—chin shining with spittle, and all-but naked tits out under his appraising eyes—God, fuck, it was too much; I wanted to say something, to somehow explain, and all that came out was gibberish, wet distressed vowels spoken around a gag strapped between my lips.

            He seemed confused, at first. Then, his mouth split in a wide grin of genuine joy. He went to speak—then frowned and looked upset. “Again,” he said, shaking his head with disbelief. “Again, you beat me in a fight.”

            Darius laughed, an unnerving, grating sound accompanied by mechanical clicking.

            “Now, leave us,” Darius said, turning to Dmytro.

            He rubbed at the back of his neck. “Sorry, boss. But I promised—her?—Luke, I suppose; that I would keep him—her?—safe. Escort… them, from the room after.”

            “I know.”

            “Of course.” Dmytro nodded. “Yes. Apology.”

            I gave him a little kick, and when he looked down, nodded towards the door. “Go,” I said, wet and garbled but clear enough despite the gag.

            He hesitated. I shrugged and tried to express the idea that it’d be okay. He looked slowly over me, and I shivered under his eye even though his gaze was neither lustful nor pervy. Rather, he seemed to be assessing my appearance—both clothes and the body beneath—wondering at the apparent changes.

            “There is a story here,” he murmured. “You will tell me, later.” With a handkerchief retrieved from his pocket and using a surprisingly delicate touch, he wiped my chin and the corners of my mouth. Then, his large hand cupped the back of my neck tenderly, affectionately even, as he lowered his lips to my ear. “Do not anger him,” he murmured, his breath hot on my cheek, his scent of spice and sweat sharp and distinct. “He—is difficult, at times. But this time he is giving over to you, it is a gift. A great burden for him, and a sign of his respect for you.”

            After that, he straightened and left the room.

            “Let’s talk openly, hmm?” Darius smiled with one half of his mouth, and there was something sinister to his tone. “So, now, Luke. How is it that I can help you?”

            He made a performance of waiting for my answer, cupping his ear in the palm of his hand, sighing when I didn’t speak.

            “Nothing, is it? A pity. After all that effort to find me, and yet you remain silent. Although, silence truly is golden, is it not? So many—voices, constantly, the chattering of infinite monkeys, all wanting—something. Especially women. Ever so demanding. So much noise: not music or melody, just… discordance. True beauty lies in what remains unsaid; the greatest stories are untold. This is true for all art, but is especially true in women, don’t you think? The ideal woman is the absent woman, the woman of the mind—a shadow, floating midway on the waves. And if she must be present, then let her be silent, for a woman in never so beautiful as when she is silent.”

            His chair whirred as he emerged from behind his desk, moving slowly until he sat directly opposite me. “Or perhaps I should say, she is never so beautiful as when she is bound and helpless and silent. Tied, with a gag in her mouth and cuffs at her wrists. Corseted and crippled in the clingiest of clothes and painted for the pleasure of others.”

            I went very still.

            “Perhaps you have a special insight into this truth, now?” He closed his good eye, and the dull metal eye flickered, compound blue flecks flashing.

            “Because I’d say, this look suits you,” he said. “Much better than the old you. I like it.” A sly look entered his eye. “That’s a fine pair of pleasure domes you’ve got there.” His good eye roamed across my bound frame, and now I saw lust there, hunger and dark thoughts. “Yeah. Damn fine.”

            Frowning, I growled from behind my gag.

            “Something you’d like to say? Maybe you’d like a taste of—how’d he put it—my ‘milk of paradise’, eh, is that it, bitch? Beware! Beware! You want to be my woman wailing, hmm, my maid, yeah, I got something you can play with.” His waxen skin flushed, two dark, reddish-purple patches rising in his cheeks, and his pale tongue flashed out, nervously licked his lips. “Yeah. I know what you want. Cunt. Price to pay—a touch—more….”

            His hand twitched, lifted, reaching towards me in a rude grabbing gesture, as though he was already mauling my tits. His chair hummed. For a moment, it seemed he intended to close the distance between us. There was movement somewhere behind me, the soft step of approaching feet, but I didn’t dare take my attention away. Instead, I watched him warily, ready to spring away best I could. No way I was letting this fucking creep touch me.

            And then something very odd happened.

            His whole body spasmed, once, and he froze mid-movement. His head jerked once, twice and for an instance he seemed to be battling with himself, for control of his own body, every emaciated muscle tensed and drawn.

            “No!” he forced out between clenched teeth, and then his voice turned wheedling. “Please—” he whined. “Let me—he deserves—wants—owes me!”

            And then the other voice spoke again, though his mouth did not move, “no,” and the voice was quiet and feminine in its tone, hard and unyielding.

            Darius sagged back into his chair, his face drooping and lax. For a long time he sat like that, good eye closed, limp in his chair. There was the sound of the gentle, rhythmic wheezing of the respirator. From somewhere behind me, a clink of glass against a table, and gentle giggles: the other women in the room, who seemed to exist in an entirely different world. I resisted the temptation to turn and see what they were up to and kept my attention fixed on Darius.

            At last, he stirred and straightened in his seat. He smiled sardonically and shrugged. “You were always a pain in the ass, you know that, Luke? So fucking arrogant. I hated you. Sakura’s pet project. Her little golden child. Her favourite.” His voice grew a little distant. “And always so keen to please, weren’t you, you little shit. Chasing favours, a needy little prick always sucking up to others. Pathetic loner desperate for friendship. For approval. Especially hers. Always after her attention, her approval, her love—no matter the cost.

            “What would she think, I wonder, if she saw you now?” A thin, cruel smile twisted his lips. “Oh, she’d be so very disappointed, don’t you think? At how far you’ve fallen? Or amused, maybe, by what you’ve done with your life after leaving us.”

            I would’ve laughed, if able. Yeah, whatever. If Sakura saw me, she wouldn’t feel amusement, or anger, or disappointment, or… anything, really. Cold indifference, at best. I’d betrayed her and failed her. You didn’t waste emotions on a broken tool, you replaced it and threw away the broken pieces.

            “So how long has it been, hmm? That you’ve been a woman?”

            An instinct to protest—I’m not a fucking woman—pressed my tongue into the gag, and the chain binding my wrists grew taut and pulled at my throat. And then as I watched, something remarkable happened: he opened his mouth to speak—and froze; his jaw went slack; and then from somewhere at the back of his throat, that eerie, mechanical woman’s voice: “Fourteen February, start. Nineteen September, now.” A shiver ran down my spine. “Two hundred and seventeen days.”

            Then silence, broken only by the background hum of machinery and the steady breathing of the unseen respirator. A sudden ragged breath, and Darius was back, looking angry. Saliva had gathered at the corner of his mouth and now dribbled down his chin and onto his shirt.

            He wiped his mouth. “Fuck, I hate that,” he said. There was a long pause punctuated only by his rasping, deep breathing and the rhythmic sigh of the respirator. Finally, with a shake of his head he brought himself back to me. “Two hundred and seventeen days. Two hundred. Seventeen. Days. Nearly a full year. But is that it? Or has it been longer, hmm, Luke? Something you’ve always wanted, you know? You’ve always been a willful little bastard, used to getting your way. Maybe this—” his hand fluttered in my direction, indicating my bound and feminised form—" is what you’ve always desired, did you ever think of that, you sure seem to have to taken to it, wouldn’t you agree, like you were born to it? Like a duck to water. If the glove fits. Right up your alley.”

            No, I would not agree, and I growled from behind the gag.

            “Still,” he continued. “Two hundred and seventeen days a girl. At first, a disguise after catching Jeremiah Steele on camera putting a bullet between the eyes of Georgio Antazzi. I’ve seen the footage. Very vivid. A means to escape pursuit. Then, a life gained following a life lost at the Asklepios Clinic.” His eye unfocused, as though concentrating on something I couldn’t see. “Your death, at the hands of a mercenary hired by Jeremiah Steele. Mr Adam Fosters: United States Armed Forces, dishonourably discharged following…” He trailed off. “Following….”

            He went silent and sagged in his chair once more.

            I waited. Eventually, he seemed to return to himself. Darius leaned his head against his arm and looked tired.

            “It’s hard, Luke,” he said, sounding exhausted. “To focus, sometimes. So much—information. She feeds it to me, constantly, anything I want to know and compartmentalising it, staying in the here, in the now…” He trailed off. “I know your story, Luke.”

            And he did. In fits and starts and the occasional aside, he told it to me, spoke at length as I sat there, increasingly uncomfortable—not just because of the clothes and the bondage, but also because of the depth of Darius’ knowledge of my situation. From my illicit tryst with Steele’s personal assistant, Amanda, that December night nearly a year ago, all the way through to this very moment as he traced my path through the subterranean passages of his pleasure palace, The Empyrean: he knew, all of it, seemingly.

            “I was… surprised, when Mal contacted me,” he said. “He hasn’t been well. I’ve tried to help him. Send him money. Food. Support for his girl. But then, he is proud. Doesn’t want the help. Can’t accept what’s offered. No surprise, of course. After Blackwater, those of us who survived—the very, very few of us who survived. We’re not very well, are we?”

            I’d been waiting for him to bring up Blackwater. I just hadn’t expected to be silenced in this conversation.

            “Do you remember, Luke? Or perhaps I should call you David. That was your name, then. It was David I spoke to, five years ago.”

            The request to meet came out of the blue. An e-mail one morning as I sat at my desk in the office. A crisp afternoon in March, wisps of clouds racing across a clear blue sky and I can picture it clearly despite the passage of five years. Tailored, grey pinstriped suit, short hair spiked with product—I’d been to the barber that morning—and a chunky, ridiculously expensive watch at my wrist, a recent buy. The image of myself is all the sharper for its simplicity: no fucking makeup, no accessories, no attempt at matching nails to lips to shoes or belt. I read the email, and stared out the window for some time, and then returned to Darius’s message and felt a curious mix of elation and dread. Any voice from the past was a complicated thing to process. Over the many years it’d only happened—three? no, four—times, old acquaintances calling in favours owed, or once and under unusual circumstances, transferring a debt into my care. Darius’s request wasn’t something I could have easily refused. I owed him, after all. After all, he was the bastard that’d introduced me to Persephone.

            But like an old friend whose return indicates—excitement, debauchery, pain and poor behaviour—his reaching out was also a cause for concern.

            We met, later that week, at a bar some distance away from where I worked. Pitch-black glasses and an expensive suit that screamed ‘special agent man’ stood him out from the crowd. I thought he was having a laugh until I drew close. He looked… well, much like he had in the old days only… not just older but aged through tragedy and pain, as though he’d seen and experienced things in his life I hadn’t, and it was obvious he resented me for this.

            Blackwater, he’d said. Three drinks in, face flushed red, he’d eyed me over the rim of a tumble or expensive whiskey and his eyes glittered darkly like slivers of obsidian. Still a wiry bastard, tough like old boots, his hair clipped was short and the way he sat hinted at time in the military. He’d said as much as we touched on the fifteen years since we’d last spoken.

            Codename for a job, he’d continued, a mission, a… situation, like in the old days. Nothing to do with Sakura, obviously. But… important. Very. Very. And needing men and women with specific skills. His job was to assemble the team, source the experts. He wanted me along. He couldn’t tell me much, but he’d consider any outstanding debts cleared. I didn’t have many of those outstanding, at the time—favours owing to the past. But I owed him. Are you calling in my debt, I asked him, and he said no—that the job was too big a thing, too risky; I had to join willingly. Rather, he was offering me a part in something—bigger than any of them—a chance to make a difference, again. A chance to—and here he smiled a tight little smile, unpleasant and knowing—hurt, people who deserve to be hurt; and break, things that needed breaking.

            Anyone else joining up, I asked, from the past: Dmytro, Sophya, others? He wouldn’t say. Later, I came to realised he hadn’t asked anyone else from the past along, only me, the only one of Sakura’s children he deemed—worthy? expendable? or maybe desperate and pathetic enough to contact. He said I could have a little time to think about it. I told him I didn’t need it. I refused, of course.

            I saw the anger in his eyes, and the disappointment. But he didn’t understand. I wanted to go with him—God, how I’d wanted to be part of—whatever the fuck it was—I didn’t care. A chance to recapture something of those days of youth, to feel—alive, again, like I once had. The temptation was nearly overpowering.

            Idiocy. That boy of the past was dead and buried; Luke was dead and buried. He died with Persephone, with Tahir’s brown paper envelope containing everything that made the man that followed. But Darius didn’t want David Saunders—he wanted Luke—Luke, the boy who betrayed his family for a woman he loved, the boy who failed, the boy who broke and was cast aside.

            There was no recapturing the past because the past wasn’t real. The past was a construct built from half-remembered feelings and fragments of memory. A place revisited only in dreams—or nightmares. I wanted nothing of my past.

            Only much later would I realise that I wanted nothing of the future, either. Often, in the years that followed, I regretted my decision. As I grew ever more bored of the man I’d created myself to be, I wondered: what if? What if I’d embraced that last, brief opportunity for—something, anything, that mattered?

            Especially as word began to trickle back along darker threads of the internet, and the name—Blackwater Phoenix—reached me. Clusterfuck operation gone wrong, anonymous government-funded corporate black-site raid, no survivors—a few survivors—nobody had a fucking clue what the hell it was, but the conspiracy trolls loved it. And I knew: it was Darius’ mission. Had I joined him, then, would things have turned out differently?

            And would I be sitting here now, arms bound behind my back, collared and leashed, D-cup titties thrusting out from my chest, cock sealed away behind a prosthetic pussy barely hidden beneath the skimpiest of thongs and tiniest of skirts?

            “Yes,” Darius continued, and I felt the intensity of both eyes watching my reaction. “Blackwater Phoenix.