Looseleaf's Diary - 5 / 03 / 2120

In a tunnel of darkness lies a beast of iron.
It can only attack when pulled back.
What is it?

I pondered for a moment. The metaphor. Then it came to me.

"A bullet."

Streams of Elf-script flowed as the door opened. I didn't have much time; back-tracking the connection from the Shire AgriCorp had given me the address of their satellite uplink, but they were off the grid, connections were brief—basically just the smart house automatically uploading data to the mother corporation and receiving software updates. The communications never exceeded about five minutes, always in off-peak hours, probably making use of limited solar power.

Just enough time for me to pop into Rowana Rowethasdottir's home system and have a look around.

I moved through the digital office-space that was the default setting for a Shire AgriCorp system. Pulled up the ledger that represented the system log.

There wasn't much in the home system. A glance at the power supplies revealed why: there were twenty solar arrays and a battery, the backup generator, if there was one, was on manual control. Ten minutes uplink would cause their lights to flicker; twenty minutes and they wouldn't be able to use major appliances. Rowethasdottir didn't log on much; so most of the records involved normal monitoring.

The ground-penetrating radar had been plugged into the system as a preliminary to uploading its data for the Shire AgriCorp delivery drone. Only the final log was sent to the mothercorp, but what I wanted was the other scans...and I didn't have time to read them here. Just highlighted the files with a fingertip and copied them back along the satlink to my cyberdeck.

Four minutes and thirty-three seconds, and I logged out, just before the house killed the satlink. My intrusion had occurred entirely within a routine uplink. Chances that Rowethasdottir would notice the digital break-in were practically nil.

I opened my eyes, back to the cracked plaster ceiling on Rivendell's lowest level. Arms were on, legs were off and charging. I shrugged my shoulders, the cyberarms locked in and strapped into place with a shoulder across my chest and back that helped distribute the weight evenly. Integral enhancements would have been more efficient, but were more than I could afford, at least not without a few more jobs, and would have meant more surgery besides. As it was, the research for this bit of business had eaten up a lot of my off-time. A puzzle that felt like something more than the usual datagrab.

One of the graduate thesis projects archived at the University of the Grey Havens was a program to convert ground-penetrating radar scans to three-dimensional projections and map them against a massive archaeological database. I fed the files from Rowethasdottir's scans and let it process as I scratched my tits.

It was still hard to get used to synthetic fingers. I had some basic sensory feedback in terms of placement and pressure, but the durable aluminum and carbon fiber fingers covered with synthskin lacked anything like the finer touch and temperature sensory suite of real meat. My finger was cold as I rubbed against the itchy underside of my breasts, where the sweat had pooled, and all I could feel was the sense of resistance, not the softness, not the warmth or wetness.

As the cyberdeck worked, I reached down over my little pooch of a tubby to dig into my boxer shorts scratch my pussy. It was colder than Aubert's dick, and the fingers were thicker than my old ones. I could hardly remember what it had been like, when I'd used to touch myself with my own hands. Used to be I'd kept two of my fingernails carefully trimmed, so I wouldn't scratch my labia while masturbating. Nowadays...I was a little afraid to really do any heavy petting. Maybe with finer manipulators it would be okay, but without full sensory response the chance of doing myself an injury was too great.

Fortunately, I had someone else to do that for me.

I maneuvered myself to the edge of the bed, and pulled my boxers off. My leg-stumps over the edge as I balanced on my ass.

"Hey," I looked over at Aubert, who was soldering something, a jeweler's loup in one eye.

"Yeah?" he said, without looking up.

"Come eat my pussy?" I asked.

He looked up. Head oddly lopsided. Basic athleisure gear in his favorite color: black. Little stubble on his beard. His left eye blinked, focused. Took the loup out of his eye socket.

"Yeah, okay," he said.

I laid back and spread my stumps wide. Aubert's utter willingness to fuck was one of the upsides of our arrangement. After my amputations, when my limb ports were healing, I'd depended on him for basically all of my physical needs. In turn, he depended on me to take care of his sexual needs. It had taken me a while to get comfortable enough to ask him to take care of my sexual needs, too.

"You know," I said, as I laid back and felt his stubble scratch against my thighs, and his lips kissed my labia. "If you had asked me when I turned eighteen how long it would take to get used to someone that would eat my pussy whenever I asked, I would have said five minutes."

I could feel Aubert's smile against her skin. One warm finger played with my hole as he ran his tongue up my slit.

"As I recall," he said. "It took you almost two months."

"I was such a prude," I said, as his tongue slid in between my folds.

"It was a big period of adjustment. The loss, the surgery, removing that chemical addiction, the pain..." his grey eyes focused on my clit as a second finger slid into her slit. I was already that wet. "I worried, later. That I pushed you too hard. Too fast."

"Aubert," I said. "You saved my life. You didn't fuck me until after I woke up and we had an agreement. I consented all the way."

He sighed and his lips encompassed her clit. The tip of his tongue flicked over the ripening little bud.

It was something we'd both thought about. It helped that Aubert was such a goober when he wasn't being my personal fuck machine. Almost pathologically sensitive to boundaries. It was why fucking me when I was asleep or in the Matrix was such a big turn on for him. Gave him a safe way to break his taboo. I think, after what he told me about his parents, it boiled down to how he'd been raised. Definitely hadn't been hugged enough.

My cyberdeck beeped. I reached out and pressed a button. Above my head, a three-dimensional model of the underground structure that Rowethasdottir had found. I plugged into the deck and went limp so I could read the full report. The structure was only a few meters long, a rectangular structure reminiscent of Elven architecture of the mid-Second Age. The ground-penetrating radar didn't have any metal detection capability, but there was evidence of a chimney, and the whole structure took on the parameters of a small smithy or goldsmith's forge.

Almost immediately, I got a ping. One of Tû's embedded search algorithms that I'd found and reconfigured to report to me. My search had triggered it when the program accessed the archaeological database. Tû hadn't just been looking for anyone uploading data that matched their parameters—they'd wanted to know who else was looking for it.

That meant that maybe—Tû now knew someone was looking. Or maybe had found something.

"Oh shit," I said, even as Aubert dropped his pants and rubbed his prick against my spit-slick slit. I let him do what he wanted. I needed to work fast to make sure we were secure and Tû couldn't track us down.