Carvedinstone's Saga - 18 / 04 / 2120

Carvedinstone's Saga
18 / 04 / 2120

The Matrix mapped itself to Arda. A shared illusion that helped our minds understand and interact with data. My dark form slid over an empty and desolate landscape; and I thought back to decades ago when nerdy Hobbits chewed wooden pencils as they blinked at lambent screens to play their simple games, share their recipes, send their torrid emails. Men and Hobbits had built the Matrix, and it was Dwarves who came along later, bringing the Ancestral Cores online, introduced digital banking to the nascent megacorps. Orcs and Goblins had formed their darknets in the shadow of the growing digital hubs.

Yet out here, in the far reaches of the network, it was easier to see the Matrix how it had been, in the beginning. Hurtling along to connect with the dark step-pyramid of Drake Industries. Physically, as well as in the Matrix, it was located on the far eastern edge of Mordor, in the shadow of the mountains. It could have been part of the Moon City or Barad-dûr networks, but the company had deliberately placed itself out of the way, to discourage traffic.

My stealth program was already running as I arrived at the imposing archway, through which I could see the steps that led up, level by level, each one representative of more security.

What concerned me, though, wasn't the gateway itself, the riddles-upon-riddles that the sequence of gateways suggested. It was what was wrapped around the gateway, the texture of its scales like old, worn slate, the dark eyes closed for a moment.

Megacorps were a law unto themselves. There was no way to regulate their use of Intrusion Countermeasures, and for those who did not trust the fundamental riddle-password system encoded into the underlying architecture of the Matrix itself, there were alternatives. IC that could do more than deny entry or sever a user's connection to the Matrix. That could send out routines that damaged the physical hardware hackers used to connect—or even, it was rumored, the hackers themselves.

Lethal biofeedback. Supposed to be impossible. Yet there were enough dead hackers found stooped over their decks, no obvious sign as to why they had collapsed. Cause of **** listed as heart attack, stroke, cerebral hemorrhage...

...yet we all knew, deep down.

The code-wyrm's eyes opened. They glowed with their own internal light, like great jewels in deep wells. I held my breath, sure I was looking at an Archaic Intelligence. The skulls of ancient dragons were shot through with veins of gold and mithril, forming a network in which some remnant of their terrible intelligence lingered. Not true awareness, but the instinct of a dragon to protect their hoard, repurposed, redirected. And given claws.

I crept slowly. My stealth program held; the eyes did not track me as I approached the gateway.

I am the keeper of secrets,
I am the keeper of truth,
Where whispers hide,
And secrets shine through.

"Silence," I said, and it wasn't a guess. I had been sending off solicitations for Vanessë's new Matrix sexcam shows, with a little bit of code that would record the curious clicker's passwords. It had taken some while to pay off, but eventually I'd gotten the credentials for a junior executive with an Elf-fetish. Enough to get me into the system, at least.

An invisible curtain seemed to part in the archway as my answer was accepted, and the steps beyond were higher resolution, the carvings on the stone more detailed and elaborate. Glad to have that code-wyrm behind me. Aware that there were further dangers ahead.

Busy users went about their tasks around me, unaware as I moved through the system, mapped it, looked for what I had come for. Constantly on the alert for corporate hackers, security programs. I couldn't feel the sweat trickle down my breasts on my meat-body, locked away in a rented coffin hotel in Moon City, or the catheter I'd plugged in so that I didn't emerge from a long, exhausting Matrix run to find myself in a puddle of piss. Again.

I had to go up three levels to confirm what I suspected. The military technology wing of Drake Industries did not have an online presence. I found myself in the junior executive's office-space, rummaging through the digital equivalent of garbage bins. Reconstructing email chains from files that had been deleted but not overwritten.

There was quite a bit of Elf porn, my junior exec spending far too much of his working day staring at Elfkin in the nude, as well as cartoons which were often more explicit. I paused at one, that showed an Elf princess being violated by a series of purple tentacles, the cock-headed ends of which pushed against every hole, sprayed its surprisingly-Mannish-looking seed into her eyes, her cunny, her arse. Perhaps I lingered on that a little too long. Then I found the reference to the Black Labs.

A physical research site. My junior executive Elf-wanker had been included in a secure email chain about an upcoming site visit. Fortified, secure, with its own internal network. That was where their miltech research took place, including their biotechnology research.

Which is where Bob would be.

My heart tightened as I thought of Bob. Wondered what the Drake scientists had done to them, and why. Whether they would even remember me.

There was only one way to find out. I downloaded everything and left the way I had come, careful to erase myself from the logs, level by level, until I stood outside the gate and stared across the dark plain. From here, the White City was barely visible as a spire of light on the horizon. The glowing eyes of the code-wyrm did not follow me as I stepped out...and at last I realized I could stop holding my breath.

With the stolen files tucked away in the cyberdeck installed in my head, I sent a message to Looseleaf. It was time to meet again. Compare notes. No sooner had I jacked out, my body screaming at me from being in the same position for hours, than my phone rang. I sighed and answered.

"Lilja?" Vaness said, with that slightly unsure-of-herself lilt to the end that the Elfkin added so often, even when it wasn't a question. "I'm going to the mall. Can you help me pick out a strap-on? Quillian says she needs to 'work out some things.'"

"Sure, Legolass," I said dryly. "I'll be your Gimli. Give me an hour? I need a shower."

"It's a date!" Vanessë said, before I could say anything else. She made a "mwah" sound and hung up.

I stared down at my body. The inside of the rented coffin cube was sweltering, the thin shirt I wore clung to my breasts, the dark nipples visible through the fabric. The catheter tube was taped to my inside thigh and secured by a strap around the ankle. Showers here charged by the minute, but it would be a good chance to get rid of my piss...and a part of me wondered at how often Vanessë and Daleman were getting together.

A part of me knew I should warn the Elfkin about getting too close to a cop, even one as compromised as Daleman. Then again, they were both adults. If one or the other caught feelings for one another, it was their business.

Fifty-seven minutes later, the cab dropped me off, now freshly showered and in an ankle-length black dress that was a bit more formal than strictly necessary, though the corset helped show off my cleavage to advantage. Vanessë was outside, dressed in some proper hookerwear, the sheer dress exchanged for bright red booty-shorts and a strange top that looked like a leather jacket missing three-quarters of the material, and these knee-high red boots with far too many straps that made her absolutely tower over me. Even Vanessë's hair had been reprogrammed to be a bright, vivid red.

Once, the Moon City Mall had served as a marketplace for the whole Morgul Vale, anchored by massive department stores. Matrix commerce had slowly killed it, and the cavernous building had been repurposed as apartments. Then, as the area around it fell into disrepute, the street found its own use for the space. Individual shops were claimed by grey and even black-market sellers. A White Hands set maintained the building as a kind of protection racket, and the sight of heavily-armed Orcs and Men did, at least, minimize other gangs from moving in.

They said you could find anything in the Morgul Mall. Black market guns, ****, IC-breakers. The front-facing shops were little more than thrift stores, but the back rooms handled the stranger and more illegal trades. Vanessë and I gravitated to a shop on the second story; which still served some of the shopkeepers as apartments. It had no name, though I knew the owner was called Blackstone.

The old Dwarf woman was seated on a cushion, a sawed-off shotgun across the knees of her brightly embroidered dress. Her bushy eyebrows rose as we came in. I showed both palms, less in greeting than to assure her I wasn't armed. She stared resolutely at her two customers as they browsed the sex toys laid out in neat rows. Not just fake cocks, but items of every description. Some of the inventory looked very old, the plastic packaging yellowed with age, but others looked brand new. On the wall behind the old Dwarf woman were antiques carved of wood, stone, Oliphant ivory, and even metal.

"Why are so many sex toys made by Dwarves?" Vanessë whispered.

"When the first seven dwarf-wives awoke, they carved seven phalluses of stone to remember their husbands when they were away," I whispered back. "And every Dwarf woman, when she comes of age, breaks her hymen with the cold stone shaft handed down from her aunt or grandmother. Once you've bled onto the same piece of rock polished smooth by a thousand pussies before you, you'll want something new for yourself too."

Vanessë blinked. Her brow furrowed slightly.

"Is any of that true?" she whispered.

I smiled. Instead of answering, I addressed Blackstone.

"My friend needs a strap-on," I said, in Khuzdul.

The old Dwarf looked at Vanessë up and down, scrutinizing the width of her hips. The bushy eyebrows lowered.

"Giving or receiving?" Whitestone asked, in the same language. An Iron Hills accent.

I repeated the question in Westron to the Elfkin.

She looked, as she so often did, slightly confused. For someone so brilliant with Elven languages, there were days I wanted to shake her until her brains rattled into place.

"Like, can I see both?"

I sighed. Blackstone knew more Westron than she wanted to speak, and reached behind her with one hand and retrieved a black box. She opened this up to reveal something that looked like a police baton in pink plastic, complete with the short, rounded handle that emerged three-quarters of the way from the base.

"Ironhelm Industries. She-Plug model 2019. Memory plastic. Programmable. Neural interface and feedback," she said, in Westron, accent heavy. She pulled off a false finger tip, revealing a neural jack, and plugged it into the base of the device. We watched as slowly the pink plastic inflated and shifted, the smooth pink shaft assuming the shape of an anatomically correct Dwarf penis, your basic 4-incher. Then it became more slender, lengthened, into a generic 6-inch Mannish prick, slightly streamlined and stylized. The pink plastic shifted in color to a muddy green as it lengthened further to a skinny 8-inch prick, slightly floppy, covered with small bumps.

Finally, it lengthened further, darkened to black, the tip tapering out, with small suckers visible on the underside. A 13-inch tentacle squirmed in a prehensile display of erotic technology.

"Ideal for Ironhelm CrotchPlug and compatible interfaces, but comes with nylon harness for strap-on play, adjustable to many physiologies," the old Dwarf said as she watched and felt the sensitive tip wave in the air. "Dwarfwork."

"Which Dwarf?" I said instinctively, as we watched it move. There were plenty of shops in the East that would gladly clone a Dwarf product if they could, for a tenth of the price.

Blackstone unplugged her fingertip and showed the base. Etched into the rim in very fine characters was a signature in Dwarf runes. Loosely translated into Westron as HAMGRIND MADE ME/FEEL NO GUILT/YOU WHO PLEASURE YOURSELF WITH THIS.

"If you don't buy that," I said at last. "I will."