Looseleaf's Diary - 18 / 04 / 2120, cont'd

Someone waited for me as I logged back in. Their avatar was a custom job, angular, as if made up of chunks of worn obsidian, humanoid, suggesting the feminine while not including any specific sex traits. Two dark triangles for eyes in a face like a rounded triangular slab of black glass that reflected the face of my own avatar back at me. As though in a mirror, darkly.

Instinctively, my thoughts turned to my options. There were, theoretically, no weapons in the Matrix. No way one avatar could hurt another. In practice? That just meant hackers had to get creative. There were tools in my arsenal for disrupting another user's connection, even **** a log off or insert some nasty malware if they hadn't secured their own cyberdeck correctly.

Nastier stuff? Most of the stories about biofeedback and physically damaging your hardware were bullshit. Black IC was mostly a myth.

Mostly. I didn't want to put my brain on the line to find out.

The strange hacker didn't make a move, though. Nothing visible, anyway. My feed was registering the constant flow of code around us, all the stuff going on constantly that wasn't part of the mathematical representation of ArdaNet.

"Truce," the voice distorted through software. "I just want to talk."

I cocked my avatar's head. No threatening moves. No one else seemed to be waiting here either. Yet they had tracked me down, had staked out the access node where I'd logged on last time. That was disconcerting. It meant I needed more information.

"Truce," I said after a long moment.

"Carvedinstone," they offered their handle.

"Looseleaf," I gave her mine.

"Your little stunt stirred up a hornet's nest at Drake Industries," Carvedinstone said. "Whatever you were looking for, their corporate hackers are looking for you. They don't know where to look, though."

"And you do?" I asked.

"Saw you follow them back. That was clever," even through the voice distortion, I heard a tone of approval. "I was there, checking out the system. Saw them leave, come back. Saw you approach—though not too close."

One bright eye closed in an exaggerated wink, then opened again. There was definitely something weird about her form—and I couldn't stop thinking of the other hacker as a "her." There wasn't a chest, per se, but the waist was pinched, the chest emphasized, the hips flared as the limbs winnowed down to mere pointed black spikes. Like a ballerina constantly on tip-toe as she moved.

"So you traced me back here," I said. " Guess I didn't cover my trail well enough."

Which was true. I should have added some sort of cut-out, something to obscure where I'd logged in from better. Not being paranoid enough in this game would get you killed.

"Well enough," the obsidian shoulders shrugged. "More to the point, what's your interest in Drake Industries?"

"What's yours?" I shot back. Not wanting to give anything away.

"They have something I want. Something in their biological sciences division. The milspec labs where they keep all the really juicy stuff," Carvedinstone said. "I think we might benefit by comparing notes before we take a run at cracking their system."

Back in meatspace, I sucked in air through my teeth. Aubert's mouth sucked the last of his jizz from my spit-slick pussy. Not that I could feel that, at the moment, all sensations from my physical body dimmed while I was plugged in.

"I'm not looking for a partnership. Or a run at Drake Industries," I said calmly. Then, because they'd given me something. "I was doing some unrelated research and ran across a product code—the search triggered the response you saw. My main interest isn't in Drake Industries, you understand. Just a tangent."

Carvedinstone absorbed this information.

"What kind of product code?" she asked. "A biological product?"

"A tattoo," I said flatly. "Part of the coding suggests military applications."

"Interesting," Carvedinstone said, though her tone suggested otherwise. She paused as if considering. "Would you be interested in a trade?"

"What kind?" I asked, warily.

"I'm planning a run on Drake Industries. Give me the product code. While I'm in their system, I can scan to see if there's anything of interest."

"And if there is?" I asked.

"Then we'll work out a price for it," Carvedinstone said.

That made my jaw clench a little. I could try and crack Drake Industries myself, but they were probably alerted now. This hacker seemed confident in her abilities. If she did get in, it would save me the trouble—but it also meant that I'd owe her for whatever she came across. And if they managed to trace her, she now had my handle and an accesspoint. That was enough data that a good researcher could go back through the logs, learn more about me. Maybe even zero in on my real-world location.

Well, that was a mess I needed to clean up anyway.

"Fine," I extended my hand, and there was a brief flow of silvery script between us as I sent the data and she received it. "I've included the address of a dead drop. If you need to get in touch with me, use that."

Carvedinstone nodded her head.

"Until then, LL."

The logoff was graceful, a slow de-rezz that left no trace of her avatar—or, I noticed, any record of her in the system's logs. A neat trick.

I spent a couple hours learning how to do it myself. Then improving on it.

It gave time for Aubert to shave me. With all the painstaking attention of a master model-painter, he ran the safety razor down my labia and around my asshole. Leaving behind a crotch that was shiny and smooth. When I logged out, I could feel the difference on my skin, pussy lips clammy and cold. Yet that wasn't what caught my attention.

Aubert had my clitoris pinched in a pair of calipers. I blinked. He looked guilty.

"I, um. I was measuring you for a ring," he admitted.