The Reflex

Keila sauntered through the bar with an easy grace, savoring the smell of cheap booze on the air mixed with smoke so thick it actually hung in front of the dim lights in a haze. It was a cheap, tacky dive, just her kind of place--well, it would be, wouldn't it? She wondered how the other patrons saw it.

She eyed the men and women sitting at public tables, even as they eyed her. They were the usual mix of people--a cat-person here, a lizard there, an elf and a biker and a tattooed devil-beast with horns the size of Alsatians. She passed on the tacky and the obvious and swung herself into a seat across from a tanned, athletic man with wavy blond hair and icy blue eyes, one who identified himself as "Wave-Rider". He wasn't wearing anything but a pair of swim trunks, and the bulge in his crotch looked satisfyingly large. She wondered if he really looked like that in real life--lots of people underwent body-sculpting to look like their favorite avatars, but there was no rule that said this was his usual look. For that matter, there was no rule that said he was actually a he.

Keila gave a mental shrug on a level that didn't translate into the virtual reality simulation. She didn't care who he was in real life. She was just feeling a little restless, and wanted to satisfy that urge before it became a distraction. That was what he wanted, too, or he wouldn't be in the "Consequence-Free Sex" chatroom.

Even so, she liked it when they showed an interest in her as a person first. "Hi," he said, smiling. "I like your avatar. The red hair looks very natural."

"Thanks," she said, returning the smile. She didn't bother telling him it was based on her actual body, instead of the other way around. He probably wouldn't believe her. "Yours is nice too. Lots of very good detail work."

The rest of the bar began to fade out around them, as he decided to make their table private. That was fine by her--she wasn't much in the mood for an orgy right about now. "So what do you do for a living?" he asked.

"I work for the government," she said. She always left it nice and vague. Nobody ever liked hearing that the woman they were about to fuck was actually a troubleshooter. They got nervous and edgy, even if they weren't actually guilty of anything, and that spoiled the mood. Sometimes they even just unplugged as soon as they found out.

He nodded. "I'm in manufacturing, myself. Boring job, really. Nothing you want to hear about right now." The table faded away between them, giving her an unobstructed view of his body. His cock was already stiffening under his trunks.

"I think you're right," Keila said, letting her own clothes slowly dissolve into mist. She kept the mist for a little while longer, though. She liked the thought of him being able to touch, but not see. It turned his exploration of her body with his hands into a process of discovery. She slid across to him and ran her fingers along his chest. He smelled good when she kissed him, like baking bread. It was an interesting choice, but Keila found she approved.

She felt his cock pressing up between them, rubbing slightly against her belly. It felt like a nice length--way too many guys went overboard on the cock, just because they could. After a certain point, it stopped being erotic and just started looking silly, like they were planning to log into a track-and-field game and got lost on their way to the pole-vaulting event. But he'd chosen a nice, thick nine inches. Keila shifted herself onto it with a swift, easy motion. Her eyes fluttered slightly in pleasure as it slid into her. One of the perks of being a troubleshooter--your cyber-dildonics were top of the line.

"Ooh, that's nice," he said, brushing his hands against her nipples beneath the fog. "Oh..." He bucked his hips up into her in an easy rhythm. "I never thought a civil servant would be...unnnh...this good in bed." He must have adjusted the sensation settings, because she could still feel his hands on her tits even as they slid down to fondle her buttocks. "Guess you can never tell what a girl's like when she's off the clock, huh?"

"Who's off the clock?" Keila said playfully. "My boss doesn't care how I use my downtime." As a matter of fact, it went even further than that--Strawberry actually checked to make sure Keila was getting her rocks off regularly, just to make sure sexual tension didn't affect her when she was in the field. "You know what they say, all work and no plaaaaiii..." Her words trailed off into a moan as his cock started to thrum and buzz inside her. The wonders of virtual reality, she thought loosely as her pussy clenched around him.

The tingling in Keila's clit became a throbbing, now, a second pulse that seemed to pound louder than her heartbeat as he fucked her. She could feel the orgasm building, and she wondered just how many they'd have time for before she had to--

Strawberry's avatar appeared behind Wave-Rider, a geometric construct that was invisible to him but strobingly bright on Keila's end. "Sorry to interrupt," she said, in calm but brisk tones. "But we're dropping out of warp now, and I need to brief you before we enter the system." Wave-Rider, the bar, the table, and most importantly and depressingly of all the cock inside her faded into non-existence to be replaced by the coffin-sized cabin of her private ship. "Don't worry--I've already installed a virtual representation of you into the chat room to carry on the encounter without you. He'll never know you're gone."

Keila practically growled with need. "But I'll know he's gone! Damnit, Strawberry, couldn't you have waited five more minutes?"

Strawberry's alert brightness began to fade back down into ready-mode. "A troubleshooter's work is never done, Agent Li." Keila felt Strawberry running a full diagnostic check on her brain and body. "Oh, my. You were close, weren't you? Can't have you going into action like that."

And with that, her cyber-dildonic harness went into overdrive, sending orgasm after screaming orgasm through Keila's body. The pleasure hammered into her, leaving her shaking and writhing in her support harness, grunting and moaning into her internal microphone as she spent what felt like forever cumming and cumming and cumming, every drop of bliss wrung out of her by a machine intellect that could precisely monitor her brain and knew exactly how much sex she needed right now. Finally, she went limp with relief in her harness as Strawberry ceased stimulating her. "There we go," Strawberry said soothingly. "All better now?"

Keila nodded. "Uh...uh-huh," she whimpered out. She was all too aware of a dopey grin spreading across her face that definitely didn't fit the hard-as-nails troubleshooter image. Keila might love the unpredictability of sex with another human partner (or the virtual version thereof), but nobody knew a how to satisfy a girl like her spaceship. Especially when the two actually shared a mental link.

Strawberry pumped stimulants and detoxifiers into her bloodstream, helping to clear out the exhaustion of the free-floating endorphins and replace it with calm alertness. "So where are we today?" Keila asked.

In response, Strawberry downloaded the briefing into her skull. As always, it took Keila a moment to translate the mass of raw data into ordered thought. "A missing scientist," she said after a moment, thinking out loud.

"Not missing," Strawberry said. "Non-responsive. She might be exactly where she's supposed to be, but she hasn't answered any calls, not even the priority alerts. Either she's unable to answer, or she's refusing to."

Keila sifted through the data a bit more. "And we're suspecting the latter. Doctor Fallon Sindel, suspected subversive tendencies, known associations to underground organizations like the Technocracy and the Ordered Galaxy...why was this woman given an unsupervised research project to begin with?"

"Check the qualifications," Strawberry responded. Even as Keila did so, Strawberry continued to flag the important information verbally. "She's got an intelligence score that's on the outer edges of the charts, and a history of brilliant, if unorthodox research. Personality profilers judged that her sociopathic tendencies weren't out of line with people of her intellectual capacity--in short, she doesn't tolerate fools and she has a hard time finding people whose intelligence she respects. That both justifies her suspect tendencies and makes it necessary to send her off on solo projects."

Keila nodded. "But now she's not answering the phone. Well, a troubleshooter's job is never done. Do we have a location?"

"Affirmative," Strawberry said. "Running passive scans now." Keila's ship paused briefly, and Keila felt a moment's disorientation as she patched into the ship's sensors. Suddenly, she could see everything the ship saw, and that was a lot of sensory information even compared to Keila's souped-up senses.

Keila spotted it just as Strawberry did. "Fusion generator's still running," she said. "Base camp's still established, perimeter's holding--she's even got maintenance robots walking around. If she's incapacitated, it hasn't been for long."

"Heading into low geostationary orbit," Strawberry responded. They both knew that an active scan wouldn't reveal much more than the passive scans did, and might let Doctor Sindel know someone was coming. (The thought that a civilian might detect Strawberry in passive mode, from orbit, Keila immediately dismissed.) The only way to find out what was really going on was to go down there and find out. "Prepare for drop."

Tiny waldos spray-sealed her combat suit onto her body--they were in low enough orbit that Keila wouldn't actually be exposed to hard vacuum, but the altitude meant she'd need an oxygen generator for the first part of the drop. The sensory harness retracted as she felt the flight pack, combat belt, and various other parts of her arsenal snap into position on her body. By this time, they felt like a second skin to her.

She knew that Strawberry was monitoring her body and mind now through the combat suit as closely as any doctor watched a patient, and that her ship probably already could tell from her heart rate, posture, and neural patterns that she was ready to go. But protocol demanded that she verbally acknowledge, "Prepared for drop," before Strawberry's access hatch opened and she fell out into the night sky over the planet Solitude.

As usual, she flipped over in mid-air so that she could watch Strawberry seem to recede into the night sky for a few moments. It always felt a little strange--she spent almost all her waking moments between missions cocooned in Strawberry's pilot compartment, the two of them linked so completely that it was sometimes difficult for others to be sure where ship ended and pilot began. Watching herself leave her ship helped center her and remind her that even though she could call for the ship at any time, even though she could feel Strawberry's comforting presence inside her thoughts, she was on her own again.

The ship looked like a child's toy now, albeit a child's toy designed to look as intimidating as humanly possible. Keila knew the psychological factors that went into designing troubleshooter equipment and starships--it had saved her life on more than a few occasions. When you're operating on your own, it helped to look tough as well as be tough. That was why the ship's transponder labeled it as 'Thunderhead', even though in the privacy of her mind, Keila would always think of it as Strawberry.

Finally, she flipped over again, kicking the flight pack into action and heading down towards Doctor Sindel's base. She barely noticed the thin air and heavy gees she pulled in decelerating; her body had been upgraded with synthetics pretty seriously to fit her job, and Keila had estimated at one point that she had no more than thirty percent of the internal organs she'd been born with, tops. Not that she minded--Nature had done a pretty good job building her, she thought modestly, but the human race had come up with a few improvements over the centuries. A thought popped briefly into her head, a reminder of an old 2-D film she'd seen about cyborgs. She couldn't believe they actually thought they'd just use bits of metal.

She landed lightly just outside of the habitat dome of Doctor Sindel's facility, and stepped up to the door. After a brief argument between Strawberry's lock-breaking software and the dome's security protocols, the door opened, and Keila slipped inside.

"Hello," Doctor Sindel said, without even turning around. "You must be the troubleshooter. I'm a little surprised--I thought they'd have sent one out a few days sooner."

Right, Keila thought. Highly intelligent. "Doctor Fallon Sindel," she said. "I'm Agent Keila Li. I'm here to make sure you're all right."

"I'm better than all right," Doctor Sindel said as she turned around. She was a very striking woman, with an imposing face that Keila could tell had been slightly body-sculpted to make it even more coldly beautiful, and long black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. "I'm brilliant. The research I'm doing here will revolutionize the galaxy. And to anticipate your question, that's why I didn't bother responding to the messages. I'm a bit too busy doing ground-breaking work to stop and chat."

Doctor Sindel might have been brilliant, but she was a lousy liar. Well, at least as far as Keila was concerned, she was. When you could actually watch the blood vessels around the eyes expand micro-millimeters in an uncontrollable anxiety response, it made it easy to tell when someone was telling the truth. And Keila knew in that moment that Doctor Sindel didn't just get too involved in her work to answer the phone.

She didn't betray it, though. "I see," she said. "So exactly what have you discovered that's so ground-breaking?"

Doctor Sindel looked at her appraisingly. "The reason there are no predators on Solitude. I presume you got a file on the planet downloaded into your head?"

Keila opened the file and let the information flow through her at machine speeds. "Right," she said, nodding. "Initial automated probes indicated that Solitude's dominant life-form is a docile herbivore about half a meter in length, with no predators discovered." She paused, thinking back to the many hellish planets she'd dropped onto over the course of her career. "Alright, I'll grant you that's unusual. Evolutionary pressures should have filled a predator niche. But ground-breaking?"

Doctor Sindel nodded. "Here, I'll show you." She headed towards a door that led deeper into the dome, gesturing for Keila to follow. "It's more complex even than that. When I first got here, I did non-invasive scanning of the planet's fossil record, and discovered that there were, at one point, numerous predator and super-predator species on Solitude. They all died out, though. Went extinct in practically a couple of generations. And then the interesting thing happened when I went looking for a specimen of the dominant life-form--what I call the Atarax."

Keila followed her as she walked into another room, this one partitioned off with a translucent force-field. Behind the field, a small animal that looked like a cross between an otter and a cat with fur patterned in cream and white played with a small red ball, batting it around the room and then sinuously loping after it. "The robots found me two hours later, carried me back to base. I couldn't even remember it happening. No wounds beyond a few scratches where I'd fallen into a thicket, no toxins in my bloodstream, but I was confused and disorientated to the point of amnesia. It took me the better part of a day to regain my equilibrium."

Keila watched the little animal play. It seemed totally oblivious to her presence; the force-field must be opaque from the other end, preventing the atarax from noticing them. "I went out a few more times, tried it again...every time I got out to where the creatures congregated, that was the last thing I remembered until I woke up at base, groggy, blissed out and confused. Finally, I had to reconfigure a mining robot to capture specimens for me."

Keila looked at the animal, busily play-biting the ball with teeth that looked too flat and blunt to do anything more than nip. "And the animals were causing the effect?"

"Oh, yes," Doctor Sindel said. "I tested and retested. I exposed myself to the animals singly and in groups, and believe me, I've never been happier to have maintenance robots and recording devices." She pressed a button on her wrist-remote, and the force-field faded away. "This one's been with me a long time--he's used to me, although the domestication process isn't easy. They're quite skittish things."

Keila watched the atarax as it suddenly spotted her. It hunched back a little, and suddenly Keila felt a wave of dizziness pass through her. It wasn't unpleasant, though; on the contrary, she suddenly felt warm and muzzy all over. She struggled to think with a head that now felt thick and sluggish. "I...um...it's doing it. To me."

Doctor Sindel nodded. "Yes, I thought it might. It's used to my scent, but you register as unusual, and dangerous. It's odd that their fear reflex hasn't faded over the generations, but I suppose that every time they start feeling safe enough not to use it, predators start springing up and then they just start lashing out with it again."

Keila's eyes fluttered, reminding her incongruously of her sexual encounter back in the bar. "Whazzit..." She tried to control her speech, but her jaw felt slack, and all her muscles with it. "What's it doing to me?"

"Oh, nothing harmful." Doctor Sindel patted her on the shoulder, and Keila was briefly alarmed to realize she hadn't even noticed her approach...but the warm, sleepy pleasure just swamped the panic clean out of her head. "It's just the creatures' reflexive response to anything they perceive as a threat. They lash out with the reflex, and suddenly the thing that was hunting them feels a bit too dizzy and happy to think about hunting anymore."

"Reflex?" Keila repeated stupidly. She tried to focus. She'd been trained to deal with will-sapping drugs, hypnotic techniques, brainwashing, even sleep deprivation due to extended field service, but this...this was nothing like anything she'd ever felt before.

"Telepathic reflex," Doctor Sindel replied. Keila had to struggle to remember what the question was. "That's the ground-breaking part, Agent Li. The atarax are telepathic. Little Cindy-Lou here, she's not dosing you with a toxin or emitting some sort of pheromone. I've ruled all that out. She's actually reaching in with her tiny, primitive, animal mind and touching your thoughts, making them all sleepy and fuzzy and confused. I'm sure you can see the practical applications. Well, I'm sure you could if you were thinking a little more clearly at the moment."

Keila's body felt like she'd had too much to drink, and the combat-suit wasn't compensating for it with purifiers for some reason. She took a halting step, but unfortunately it was in the direction of the atarax. The hazy sensation between her eyes intensified. Keila felt like her brain was wrapped in thick gauze by now, but she focused her whole will on the connection between her and the ship, and sent to Strawberry, Request diagnosis and correction.

She stood there, swaying slightly as she waited for Strawberry to notice the irregularities in her brainwaves and correct them, with...she didn't know what, she couldn't think anymore. But Strawberry would know. Strawberry always knew. A girl's best friend was her spaceship.

Strawberry sent back. Um... Somehow, that single syllable was the most terrifying thing she'd ever imagined.

After what felt like forever in machine time, the ship continued. Data-link...corrupted, she said in a slurred parody of her normal crisp tones. Receiving...packet data...affecting all systems...