Jacked Across

Journal of Rowana, daughter of Rowetha
01 / 02 / 2120 of the Fourth Age, cont'd

Chrome and a bus ticket away from the farm. That's what the recruiter had sold me, twenty-odd years ago. No more chasing pigs, no more shitty connections to download the day's lessons. I was going to get my own neural jack.

I could still remember the surgery. They didn't even put you under anymore, in those days. Just sat you down in something like a massage chair, your face pressed through this hole. A local anesthetic and a strap around the back of your neck to hold you in place. The buzz of the drill. The little screws that helped anchor it in place on the bone. Below, the screen had blinked into life to show the first of many, many training vids that I'd sit through in the army.

This one was about the care and cleaning of my new neural jack. How long to let it heal. Not to pick and scratch at it, though pretty much everybody did. Most especially, not to jack straight across. I remember the cartoon halfling with the somber eyes staring up at me as they pushed the wires into my brain and telling me of the horrors of young, stupid morons who tied their neural ports directly to one another. No safeguards, no buffers, nothing to protect either of you. Some idiotic kids who mistook horniness for love always tried it, and ended up disappointed and lightly traumatized at the brush with someone else's raw psyche.

There had been a long list of symptoms. Lots of synonyms for "brain damage." Neural seepage had been a favorite. Just that image of the brain oozing out of my ears had been enough to keep me from slotting anything into my jack for weeks, as I got used to the cold spot at the base of my skull. Even on leave, when half the unit went to the "fun tents," our sergeant had warned us to keep our plugs covered. She had a habit of making an example of the first one of us to pop positive with something we'd picked up by ignoring the health and safety briefings.

Now, here I was. The little pin of the optical interface slid home into my neural jack, locked in place.

I was no longer alone in my own skull.

Alien memories flooded my brain, like a waking nightmare. The distorted faces of people in labcoats through the thick glass of my vat. The warm amniotic fluid that I floated in, my developing breasts surprisingly buoyant. The wire plugged in the back of my skull. The whispers of a rudimentary education. The Black Speech of whores, all anatomy and position. Not even the words for rebellion. Flashes of positions, kinks. Out of the vat, undergoing the physical tests. Gloves fingers thrust inside me, to test the tightness of my holes. Half-understood words in Westron as her vat-sisters disappeared, one by one. Some to the surgical bays to be modified. Some just...gone.

Then it was my turn. Her turn.

I bucked beneath Azzie, and her hands grabbed my shaking arms, the mithril wires caught in fight-or-flight-or-fuck responses but with nowhere to go. With incredible strength, she guided my hands to her ass, and as my fingers sank into those plush, muscular buttocks I gripped them like a lifeline. She was on top of me, her fingers undid my belt buckle and slid into my pants, beneath the standard-issue boxers and through over the mons I had lasered free of hair to keep from picking up bugs in the desert.

Flashes from the van. Of erotic instructions. Liquid meals. Bits and pieces of a short life, tumbled together. It was too much to process, and it came at me randomly, scattershot. Yet as her fingers found my clit, and her lips met mine, I finally became aware of something else.

For a moment, Azzie stared up at herself out of my own eyes, the low-light features kicked in, and I knew it was the first time she had seen herself. Beautiful in the darkness, eyes wide, ears flared like a bat's, the dark hair streamed over us both. With consummate skill she began to rub and grind herself against me. It was what she had been bred for, trained for, her reason for being.

Then other things flickered into the stream of consciousness. Old familiar memories, some of them half-forgotten. My first datapad, learning the alphabet in Westron. School lessons, as we went through the Dwarf runes through little games. The first book I'd ever read on my own, as an adult, encoded onto a scuffed chip I bought from a little scrap dealer out in Harad, Queen Berúthiel and the Cat-women. It had gone with me on every deployment, for those lonely nights when I couldn't sleep and wasn't on patrol or sentry duty.

Words. Phrases. Grammar. Azzie's dark eyes seemed to glow from within as she plumbed my brain for every scrap of language I had...and as she did that, she rubbed my cunny with a fierce, aching need that matched my own.

It had been a long time for me. Too long.

That set off a new wave of memories. Ones I didn't want to share.

Aedre had been older than I was, mixed Rohan and Dunlending blood, with fair skin and freckles and a set of mismatched eyes, the result of an IED and a hasty field replacement for a damaged cybereye that she never got around to upgrading. It gave her headaches, sometimes, when the vision-feed didn't synch right. I never knew what we were, exactly. It had started off after a long ranging, out in the sands to one of the old shrines where the Dark Tree bloomed, as they say. Some orcs still painted themselves with the Eye, some Men still worshipped Morgoth in secret. Didn't matter how many died, they always came back, the cults.

It had just been the two of us on that trek, and on the way back I'd seen her watching me, whenever I—I tried to jerk my thoughts away. Didn't want to remember that. The heat, the fire, the blood, the insurgents aflame with mania, the scraps that were left after the oliphant had finished with her, I couldn't even cry with the cybereyes but I screamed blasphemies to the White Tree when I saw her face at the end—

Azzie snapped me out of it. Her fangs bit down, lightly, into the fleshy part of my lip. Just enough to distract me as she pushed her own memories in me. The first shower after decanting, the hot water that had sluiced the goo off her sore, swollen teats. Everything too bright, too sharp, sounds too loud, unable to process all the new sights, sounds, sensations. Just the texture of the towel as she ran it between her legs, over those virgin lips, was almost enough to make me—

My back arched and my brain went blank, cunny clenched hard as her finger vibrated on my clit with surgical precision. The moment seemed to be drawn out for a long time, and Azzie's mouth clamped tight over mine. our tongues twined as it felt as if she shared one breath between us, as our spit swirled together.

I collapsed, gasped, my wires relaxed just a little. For the first time since she'd dragged me into the tent, Azzie made a sound. A satisfied little growl, from deep in the back of her throat. Her hot weight lay on top of me, and despite the chill of the night outside, the tent was steamy and sweat dripped from me as her hands explored my body...and her mind dipped through my memories, and mine hers. Until cyberdreams faded into real dreams, and finally sleep.