SOMEONE FUCKING LOVED ME AND I FUCKING LOVED THEM TOO

I’m something like six hundred kilometers outside of Lomonosov Station, the atmosphere outside my craft is over 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and Dee is dead.

I don’t bother with opening any viewpanels. The craft’s autopilot has this part of the approach under control, and the sulfuric haze is thick enough here that I wouldn’t see anything anyway. So I just recline the plush leather pilot’s seat, quadruple-check my sidearm, and I think about what’s to come.

I haven’t been here in nine years. Not since the day I met Dee.

I violently strangleshove that thought away. No space for mawkish maudlin mopey-thinking right now. There’s a mission to accomplish and I’m going to accomplish it. Vital Tenet Number Three, baby. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, calling up the HUD visual overlay, and run a scan on my neurochem baselines. Basically every compound is a little elevated, which is to be expected. Just a little is fine. I’ll spike a few of those through the roof soon enough.

Ahead of me, there’s going to be a squadron of guards. They will be well-armed and decently coordinated. They’ll use lethal force without hesitation. And still, they’ll all be dead or surrendered in about an hour, because I have two advantages.

First: they won’t expect to be attacked, especially like this. There’s really no reason anyone would assault Lomonosov Station. It’s a research facility that’s doing effectively nothing these days in terms of valuable science. Combine that with the location – buried in the upper Venusian troposphere – and there’s just no cause for anybody to bother. And if they did, they wouldn’t do it the way I’m about to: in the front door, guns blazing, no finesse and all force. Station Defense will be wrongfooted the whole way, scrambling to get things together.

Of course, they’re still pros. They’re equipped to hold off attackers. It’s not like it’s going to be trivial. At least a few of them are probably ex-military, and one or two might even have a quarter the active combat zone experience I do. They’ve got numbers on their side, by far. And anybody in any firefight can score a lucky shot.

But I’m going to walk out of here successful today. I know that because of advantage number two: motivation.

This place holds the key to me getting Dee back.

***

The fluid is placental and thick. I’m choking on it. I ride waves of dreamlike panic as I realize I can’t move my arms to push through it. Black tubes, segmented and snakelike, descend from above me and have burrowed into my forearms. One on each side of my torso. Into the soft space behind each clavicle. And one, particularly vile in its thickness and tension, is fully down my throat.

I am in a tank. A vertical glass tube, where I’m floating in a translucent slurry of fuck-knows-what. My consciousness picks up a little steam and runs headfirst into a sensation that’s been waiting for me: pain. Pain like the atom splitting. Pain like water in my veins freezing and expanding. Pain like every cell of my eyes lysing simultaneously.

I’ve been wounded a lot. I’ve never fucking hurt like this. Why the fuck am I alive?

There’s a hole in my stomach, I see now. A real nasty pieceofshit of a wound. Ragged. Must’ve bled like a firehose. I don’t remember it happening. I have a vague recollection of being hit there, being spun around by the sheer kinetic freight train of it. High caliber, I remember thinking, and even as I was spinning down into the dirt I was scanning the horizon for the shooter, trying to get my body in between them and-

-ohfuckohnowhereisDeeohfuck-

-Dee. Where is she? Is she okay? If someone hurt her, some ratfuck sonofabitch, I’ll kill them. I’ll use my teeth to do it. I’ll just, just, I’ll fucking end them, I can’t even express how bad it’ll be. It’s beyond language. I’m a rabid cornered animal, snapping and snarling at the specter of a world without her.

The rage and fear make the pain dim into nothing. Physical pain like that is meaningless, truly, compared to the thought of losing her. Dee is my whole world. Literally. I don’t know what planet I’m even on right now but I’ll burn it to its fucking core if Dee is hurt.

I’m about to start thrashing these tubes out of me when I see her walk up to the glass. Thank *fuck*. She’s okay. She’s fine. Bubbles come out of my nose, flow through the viscous gunk I’m floating in, as a pitiful sob of relief wracks it way through me. She’s alive. She’s okay.

She smiles at me through the glass. Her mouth moves. I can’t hear her. It doesn’t matter, really. Right now I only care about the fact that she’s alright. The relief is so potent it makes my joints ache. I sag in the tank, floating in goo. Dee gives a little smirk. Probably said something cutting about how much I dropped the ball. I’m a fucking failure, obviously. Vital Tenet Number Four is clear – keeping Dee safe is my main job. Hard to do that when I’m bleeding out on the fucking ground like a moron. She’ll have some things to say about my performance today, I’m sure. Worthlessness and shame burrow thin trails into my guts.

Dee, in case it’s not clear, is not a kind and loving woman. She is not warm. She is not good and decent. She’s a monster. And I love her more than you’ve ever loved anything in your life.

***

It’s about eight months before I got shot like a fucking idiot. About a month after I met Dee initially. About eight years before she dies because I’m too goddamn shitsuck worthless to stop it. And I’m biting my tongue hard enough to draw blood, attempting to focus on anything but the blistering chemical assault she’s pumping into my head.

If you were to sit in the room and watch us you wouldn’t realize how much I was fighting for my life and how raggedly I was hanging on. I’m just sitting in a chair, after all. Granted, I am strapped in, restraints on my ankles and wrists and waist and neck. An IV runs into my upper arm, delivering its horrific payload. A thin fluid whose clear gleam hides how much toxic nightmare garbage it carries. It’s the product of a decade’s worth of Dee’s work. She’s killed people in this chair. Dee is not careful. And why should she be? Lab rats are disposable, after all.

But years of practice yields results, and – fuck my luck – I’m tough enough to take it. The real issue, perhaps, has been that she’s never experimented on somebody like me. Somebody with specialist training from the Callisto Marine Corps. Somebody with half a billion dollars’ worth of tech enhancing their body and brain. Somebody born & bred to kick ass, to eat iron and shit bullets. I’m six-foot-one of lean muscle and weapons expertise. I’ve got fast-twitch electrodes that make my reflexes triple that of the world’s best athletes. I have a brain honed on experimental nootropics and implanted with an overclocked supercomputer, giving me every mental edge known to man. I can kill you with one hand while I calculate Fourier transforms with the other. I’m a one-woman wrecking crew. I’m the human equivalent of a tactical nuke.

And this gangly, stringy-haired cunt is smirking at me while she poisons my brain. I can’t figure out how to tell my legs to stand up and stop her.

Dee isn’t beautiful. She’s striking, for sure – she’s got a jaw that’s a little too long and angular for her face, and her eyes are large and deep-set. Her nose doesn’t protrude much, but it’s thin and sharp. Just like most of her – she’s all angles and points, places to get sliced or impaled. Her eyebrows are dark and severe, and her skin is milky. She’s not ugly, but neither is she pretty. She’s the most perfect creature god ever created, though obviously there’s no god. If there was, why would he keep this pointless, vomitous excuse for a universe spinning along without her in it?

I hate myself for the way I’m resisting Dee’s work in this memory. It’s a memory, I know that, even though the damaged implant in my brain makes it feel like it’s happening right now. All of this, it’s all right now. All moments are the present and Dee’s always with me and I’m always fighting her and I’m always worshipping her and she’s always, always, always so fucking dead.

I hate myself for resisting. I could’ve given in immediately. I could’ve gotten a few more hours of the horrible watery bliss of being hers. Her thing, her lackey, her broken acolyte, her dog. But no, I had to grit my teeth and push back, had to force her to swamp my system with chemicals that pulped my neurons until I could see what was inevitable.

I don’t remember the change, but it must’ve been fast. I’d been strapped to that chair for a couple of hours, sweating and yanking against the restraints. When I could slur out some speech, I spat every foul curse I could think of at Dee. I told her what a disgusting vile sack of sewage she was, voice rasping and raw from the screams I’d let out. I meant it, too, every bit of invective I hurled at her. I loathed her so much. And then after those outbursts there’d be a chunk of time where the drugs got the best of me, and I’d slump back and drool and struggle to focus my eyes.

And one of those times, once I came back to myself, I realized I was in love with her.

Just like that. Like remembering I had an errand to run or something. A perfunctory fact that just plopped itself in my lap, wet and disgusting and warm and undeniable. It made no fucking sense, but… there it was. Love. Adoration. I still knew what she was – fugitive, serial killer, mad scientist, scourge of four different planets. I knew I was here because I’d been dispatched to capture or kill her. And I knew that every part of my brain that felt emotion was in love with her.

I still hated her, obviously. I still do now. I know what she is and what she did to me. It just doesn’t matter. I love her even though I hate her. That’s what unconditional love means.

I’m not talking about a crush, to be clear. I don’t mean something sexual, even. I mean the shit that the old poets wrote about. The stuff that wars are fought over. The cloying garbage that chicks like me rolled our eyes at. I didn’t believe it was actually possible to feel that deeply. And yet here I was, looking at an assassination target and realizing every muscle in my body was tensing itself in anticipation of touching her.

She laughed at me. A cruel, mocking laugh. I yearned to gnaw on her bottom lip.

“I can see it in your face already,” she said. Her voice was thin and unpleasant. I’d give up listening to all music for the rest of my life for the chance to hear a single word in that voice. “You’re feeling it. I thought a lunk like you might be too bloody stupid to even understand what I’m programming into you, but apparently not. That brute physique of yours is coming in handy, maybe. Dumb as an ox but durable enough to take it, hm?”

A disgustingly pathetic wriggle of pride made itself known. I’d done something right in surviving this treatment, in holding up to her attacks on my psyche. She was pleased. And that made me happy. Because I loved her.

I was still going to kill her if I got out of these restraints, of course. It’d break my heart. But I’d do it. She couldn’t fuck my head up enough to change that.

Of course, I still had another four days in the chair to come. Things change.

***

I’m naked, my muscles glistening with sweat from my workout. I need to keep in perfect shape. Working as Dee’s underling is demanding. Threats can come from anywhere and laxity is unacceptable. I need to be at the top of my game at all times, because anything less is imperfect, and imperfection insults Dee. If I’m imperfect, I’m trash. I’m trash anyway, but I’m less than that if I’m not the absolute ideal at all times.

I also need to keep in perfect shape because Dee likes that. She enjoys my body most at its physical peak. So that’s where I keep it. Dee gets what Dee wants. If she wanted me flabby and out of shape I’d never run another lap. If she wanted me with one arm, fuck it – I know where the saws are kept.

I’m naked and I’m kneeling at the foot of her bed. Dee’s reclined, a digital reader in her hands. She’s naked as well. She’s not in perfect shape. Dee is all length and angles and hard rigid points – elbow and ribs and hipbones, gaunt and acute. I need to perfect my body to have worth, though, where Dee is the source of worth no matter what she does. She’s perfection, and anybody who suggests otherwise eats a bullet before they finish their sentence.

My face is between her legs. I’m as close as I can get myself while still following the rule – not one square nanometer of my skin gets to touch hers without her say-so. But I can get close, bury my awareness in every little mottled drop of her pigmentation. I can see the way her labia tremors when my slow, steady breath grazes across it. Every religion has their totems and fetishes that they pour their attention into while praying. That’s what I’m doing right now.

“What’s Vital Tenet Number One, Iris?”

I don’t pull away at all. The words are automatic and easy. Dee wrote them onto the surface of my mind. Neurochemically etching them into Broca’s area until thinking before reciting literally wasn’t an option for me anymore. “Dee is the most important person in the universe,” I feel myself say, “in absolutely every sense.”

I can see her satisfaction. I don’t see her face, not from this angle. But her cunt gives a wonderful slow pulse and her legs shift just so slightly, and I know she’s pleased.

“Vital Tenet Number Two?”

“I love Dee more than life itself. That is literal.”

Where other people have things like ‘fight or flight’ or ‘decision-making’ or ‘self-preservation’, I have the Vital Tenets.

“Vital Tenet Number Three?”

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Dee. Failure is never an option.”

She’s squirming just a little now, slow sinusoidal waves of her thighs. This is the kind of thing that gets Dee off more than anything else. She can literally feel my words on her folds right now, I’m sure of it. My lips are so achingly, tantalizingly fucking close. But it’s not the physical side that’s making her warm right now. It’s the brutal leash she’s got on my mind. She loves hearing me recite, barking like the brainburned bitch I am.

“Vital Tenet Number Four.”

“Preventing harm to Dee is my primary assignment at all times. Preventing harm to myself is my secondary assignment.”

We’ve had long talks about the meaning of things like ‘harm’. Harm, wrong, bad, hurtful, undesirable – all of these words mean ‘Dee wouldn’t like it’. My morality has been kinked into a new direction. The magnetic pole of rightness points unerringly towards Dee.

When I say ‘long talks’, by the way, I of course don’t mean philosophical back-and-forth. I mean Dee lacing hot electrodes into my brain and lecturing me until the synapses fall in line how they’re supposed to.

I fucking love her so much. I cannot believe she’s dead.

“And Vital Tenet Number Five?”

“When in doubt, I do what would please Dee most. If Dee doesn’t give a shit, I figure it out.”

Such a helpful one. As it turns out, having your brain snapped like a sunbleached femur makes a lot of things difficult. Decision-making, for example. The first few weeks after becoming Dee’s victim-cum-bodyguard-cum-lover-cum-slave-cum-cultist, I struggled getting anything done. I needed her guidance on everything. VT5 used to be just that first sentence, but grappling with what would please her led to me squeezing out frustrated tears about which flavor coffee she’d want me to have. Now, so long as it’s something beneath Dee’s notice, I have little bits of autonomy.

Part of me hates that. Part of me thinks the only way to truly love Dee the way she deserves is to crush autonomy altogether. Control is love, after all. Dee deciding what I do and say and think and am is how she shows me I’m precious to her. You wouldn’t bother taking such time to thoroughly break and shatter something you didn’t care about, would you?

***

I’m nearing Lomonosov Station and Dee’s fucking dead and I should be too.

***

Carson checks his ammo packs one last time as we wait for the go signal. Carson & Boggs & I on this side, Dwyer in the dropship, Everett on the mics back at command. A lot of firepower for a job like this, but the target’s got a reputation.

It’s less than half an hour before I meet Dee for the first time.

The station’s quiet. It took a lot of coordination to evacuate the upper levels all slow and quiet, so the target holed up in the substation lab wouldn’t get wind of us coming. This is the end of a two-year-long pursuit, spanning across two moons and three low-planetary-orbit stations. This bitch is slippery, vicious, and has a good instinct on when we’re closing in. But that all ends today.

I’m big enough of a fucking idiot that I actually believe that at the time. Three dipshits with guns were going to capture Dee? Imbecile. We deserve what’s coming.

When Everett gives the go sign, we move up the corridors with perfect precision. Our squad is the best of the best, hand-selected from military wetworks teams across the solar system. We don’t get rattled, we don’t get tired, and we don’t get beaten by fucking anyone. Which really just means the failure we were about traipse into would’ve really embarrassed us, if anyone but me survived to be embarrassed by it. Lucky them, I guess.

Carson’s on point. I’m covering over his shoulder. Boggs is working backwards behind us, just in case anything slipped in under Dwyer’s scans. The corridors are narrow, which helps for keeping visual cover over the entire area we’re advancing.

Down a set of stairs. Another. Into the belly of the station. Heavy clanks of machinery reverberate through the walls. It takes a lot of equipment to keep seventeen hundred researchers and support staff alive and working in a place like Venus, and we’re navigating our way through all of that gear now. The walls groan with noise that we feel in our chests and teeth. Seismic sounds.

Down further.

It’s only a few minutes before I meet Dee.

Something pops, quietly, and there’s a little phosphorous-white flash. Carson and I hit the deck. I’m reaching back to yank Boggs down as well. Chemical flame erupts across the space where our faces just were, searing at several thousand degrees for a split second before consuming itself entirely.

Well. Confirmation that we’re in the right place, at least.

***

Dee is in the little makeshift lab we’ve been living out of on Deimos, and I’m clenching and unclenching my fists. It’s hard talking to her like this. Trying to tell her she’s wrong. She doesn’t like to hear it and I really don’t like to say it.

“You’re being paranoid, Iris. I want you to keep watch and protect our perimeter, not void your bowels into your pants every time a cruiser passes by.”

“I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“Obviously. And you’re doing it in a way that means I’ll never get any work done. We can’t move the lab every time you get anxious about something. Figure out a way to keep us safe without packing up and moving. End of discussion.”

My teeth click together as my mouth snaps shut. That’s it. I don’t like this spot, low in the crater, with too many sightlines on us for me to track. Deimos is too small, too uninhabited. The isolation is good but it also makes us stand out. We’ll pop on even the most perfunctory, disinterested scan of the region. I want to move elsewhere.

But Dee says end of discussion, so that’s it. I’ll figure out a way to make this work. For her.

It’s three months before Dee dies.

When it happens, it’s so needless. So infuriatingly stupid that it makes me shudder with rage. What a calamitous piss stain of a universe. A waste of energy and matter from top to bottom.

Dee’s cleaning out tanks. Whatever she’s working on – she makes it a point to not explain her experiments to me, as a way to drive home that my lowly brain can’t keep up with her – requires cycling gases regularly. So she’s outside the lab structure, fully suited, venting 1200-liter tanks into the space where an atmosphere should be.

I’m watching the ridgeline above us. Unaware of the actual threat that I can’t do jack shit about.

There’s a kink in the line somewhere, so the tank clogs. Dee bends to free it, but there’s a flaw in the welding of the tank. One little weak seam. When I think about that, it makes me want to hunt down and slaughter everyone who ever worked manufacturing those fucking tanks, just so I’m sure I get the feckless mouthbreather responsible for this.

The seam pops. Two little shards of metal erupt free. With no friction and loads of pressure behind them, they move right around the speed of sound. One flies about thirty meters and then buries itself in the crater wall.

The other goes through the glass of Dee’s facemask and embeds itself in her brain.

She’s dead instantly. Probably never even knows something happened. I, on the other hand, have enough reflex-enhancing stimulants wired into my dorsolateral prefrontal right cortex that I see the whole thing happen in ultra slow motion.

Nothing I can do about it, of course. But I get to watch every picosecond.

It’s so fucking dumb. The dumbest possible way to go. Dee is a thousand feet tall, the most potent woman in history, and she’s felled by faulty lab equipment. It’s like the Sistine Chapel being burned down by a stink bomb. A Swarovski tiara crushed under the wheel of a clown car.

I should’ve stopped it. Don’t know how, yet, but I’ll keep replaying the memory until I figure it out.

***

Dee.

I seek out opportunities for worship everywhere.

D is borne of the Greek delta, the mathematical symbol for change. Displacement from what something was before.

D is associated with the Elder Futhark rune Dagaz, meaning dawn. A symbol of certainty and awakening. Transformation.

D. Dee. Dead.

D is descended of the Hebrew Dalet, meaning door, its form representing an impoverished supplicant. It resonates ideas of humility before something almighty, and the selflessness needed to achieve transformation.

The D-region is the bottom of the earth’s ionosphere, and the D-layer is the bottom portion of the earth’s mantle. Hard vacuum of space blocked out by one side, molten iron and nickel held at bay by the other. A foundation beneath us and a shield above us.

D represents deuterium. Isotopic hydrogen – the most boringly common element in the entire universe, but slap on a simple fucking neutron and suddenly it’s the fuel to every fusion reactor we use every day.

dx, the differential, the infinitely small increments that we’re too blind to see directly but that make up every meaningful change in the world.

Dee. D. Deity. Demonic. Doom.

Dead. Dammit.

***

Carson dies first.

It’s not dramatic. The phosphorous trap was big and bold, a statement piece. Carson gets hit by a matrix of razor wire, nanometer-thin. The result of putting his foot down wrong. He doesn’t see the pressure plate, and there’s a soft hiss through the air that sounds almost amused. A whistling laugh as the wires spring from the wall and skim through the air and through Carson.

It’s a bad death. I’m on point after that. It’s minutes before I meet Dee.

We evade a couple more traps after that. There’s good motivation to keep it slow and focused now. Soft creeping steps and multispectrum scans and slow, slow progress all do the job, and finally we’re at her door.

When I meet Dee for the first time, she hits me in the chest with a cattle prod. I’ve got the door half-open and she’s ready for me. The assault armor absorbs the shock, but it does overload some systems for a couple seconds, so she’s able to shove me back while I’m staggered. Boggs rushes forward, rifle up, as Dee disappears back through the door and around a corner. I’m two steps behind him when he whirls to the side and gets splashed with something liquid and white-green. It smokes when it hits his armor, and doesn’t take long at all to eat through it. And through everything inside it.

Another bad death.

I don’t have time for grief or sympathy now. I’m stepping over Boggs’ body before it’s fully on the ground. I have a glimpse of Dee and I fire a three-round burst. I know exactly where each bullet went, because the first of my many, many punitive tasks is going to be digging them out with my fingers. That’s just before she has me lick the floor in here clean. Dee knows how to enforce a hierarchy.

For now, though, I don’t know yet that she’s the ever-glowing love of my filthy life, so I’m still trying to murder her. I storm forward, streaming combat data back to Dwyer and Everett. They’re sending rapid-fire analysis to my HUD but I’m mostly ignoring it. I can process faster than the automated stuff. And – what a fucking idiot I am – the target’s one unarmed untrained woman. Yes, there are traps, and yes I’ve seen how deadly they are. But I’m two steps from having her in my crosshairs and then this is over.

Obviously I’m wrong, and I get too eager, and I step into some fucking ultrasonic weapon trap. Noise resonates through me and it feels like my organs liquefy, and I black out. Embarrassing.

I don’t know exactly what happens to Dwyer and Everett. All I know is that by the time I wake up, they’re dead too. Dee cleans up her messes and she doesn’t miss details.

Consciousness returning makes every bit of me hurt. I’ve already been getting chemically dosed for an hour or so, which means my nerves are raw and jangling with alien stimulation. I’m out of breath instantly upon waking, and I feel fried and exhausted.

“Hi there,” Dee says to me. It’s too fucking bright in here, I have to squint to see her. She’s a jagged silhouette before me, slowly resolving enough so that I can see her slashed grin. “Let’s talk about some things.”

***

We had fled to Deimos in the first place because my old outfit sent backup.

I actually don’t know if they were there more with the intent of killing Dee, or rescuing me. Both in one go would be ideal, I’m sure, but I know they would’ve had a protocol in mind. Some way to decide which mattered more. A priority tree to help with any unexpected situations that complicate the operation.

Such as, for example, me opening fire on them the instant they arrived.

They aren’t ready for it. I figured they’d find us eventually and they’d come. It took longer than I thought but I never stopped looking out. I know their tactics, so I know exactly where they’re coming in from. They assume they’ll have a window before any resistance begins. So it’s got to be a shock when I put three depleted uranium rounds in their pointman before her boots hit the ground.

I get a glimpse of her tag – Garcia. I don’t know her. That’s a minor blessing. I’ll drop any shit-caked pigfucker who threatens Dee, obviously, but it’d be nice if there weren’t any old friends included in that today.

Since when has my life been nice, though, right?

In the end, I do know two of the troopers that die outside of our compound. Two fresh new wounds for me to prod at when I can’t sleep. Two more acts of selfless love and devotion for Dee. Sins I lay at her feet with humiliating pride, hoping she’ll approve. It hurts, yes, but it’s what you do for the ones you love.

I’ll rip a hole through any cocksucker who tries to hurt her, or tries to take me from her. That’s the end of it.

I repel the attackers without any real danger, but it doesn’t matter. I’m telling her already that we need to go. Our location’s known, it’s time to relocate. I need to protect her, and that means a new spot.

She thinks Deimos could work.

***

Dee, oh d, oh Dee.

The durity of my duteous dysbulia drove the dulia I delivered to my delightful, demonic dompteuse. My dun doubts were draffish, destined to be delaniated. I dwell devoid of doxa, my desiderium has left me desipient. I don’t dare to dream I deserve the dulcifluous dictates she directs me with. Her duende was dolabriform and drepanoid and I was doubly dissected - decussated, drowned, demersal under my depths of devotion.

Dee Dee Dee Dee Dee Dee Dee.

When the thing you worship isn’t here to give you prayers to recite, you’ve got to write your own.

***

Listen, I get it.

In the eight years that I belonged to Dee, at no point did she show me a single sign of actual affection or love. She was abusive and cruel and manipulative. She made me do things that make my skin crawl to remember. I was her soldier, her enforcer, her lapdog and errand girl. She hurt me purely because it entertained her, and I begged her for more because that amused her too.

I know my love for her was artificial. But so fucking what? Every emotion you’ve ever felt was just a reaction to chemicals in your brain. So was my love for Dee. Does it matter that she put those in me? No. It’s exactly as real as anything you’ve ever felt. And much more potent, trust me. Naturally-occurring emotions are nothing compared to a concentrated dose delivered by an expert. The love I felt would stop your heart. It’d boil you.

I know she loved me, too.

Not in the way I loved her, obviously. Why the fuck would she? An owner doesn’t love a dog the same way the dog loves them. She was a goddess and I was a toad. But she did love me. She took time and care and focus to remake my mind into something perfect for her. You know who else she did that for? Fucking nobody. Ever. I was the one.

A hammer loves a nail, an axe loves a tree, a hunter loves a deer, a knife loves a heart, and Dee loved me.

I was worth something while she was with me.

***

I manage to get into Lomonosov Station without killing anyone. I don’t care if I have to, but if I leave the first guards wounded instead of dead, the others might be slowed down tending to them. Works in my favor.

This place is haunted. It tastes like Dee.

It’s where I was born. This basement, Dee’s lab, eight years ago. A meaningless husk of a woman stormed into this place, and Dee took her and pumped her brain full of things worth believing. For the first time, I had purpose.

I have purpose again today. Dee kept files, kept records, kept backups of everything. She was meticulous. Thing is, she was also out of her fucking mind. Her mind operated on a level so high above mere mortals that it’s kind of impossible to understand her decision-making process. Like, for example, leaving cognitive scan records in this fucking place even after abandoning it.

Brain scans. Memories and wave patterns. The thoughts and connections and reactions that made Dee’s one-in-ten-trillion brain what it was. All of it compressed into data and digitized and put on a drive to gather dust in a lab. The thought of a relic like that existing makes my chest clench. I realize distantly that I have tears streaming over my cheeks as I make my way down.

Another guard calls out for me to stop from somewhere behind me. I turn and fire and he falls. I don’t break stride. Maybe another seventy feet of twisting corridor between me and the lab. Then I just have to tear it apart, find the drive, and get out of here.

I don’t have a plan beyond that, to be clear. I haven’t the faintest fucking idea how to use a backup like that. I don’t think anybody does. Dee was miles ahead of the curve on cognition tech. Look at the job she did on me, after all. Nobody else is out there doing this sort of shit. So it isn’t like there’s some computer I can plug this into and bring her back.

Doesn’t mean I’m not going to try, though. Forever, if necessary.

***

On that apocalyptic day, I spent two hours kneeling over Dee’s body with my pistol to my temple. What’s the fucking point without her?

Couldn’t do it, though. I hesitated not for myself, but for her.

I failed at the first half of Vital Tenet Number Four, but the second half held strong.

***

I have the drive. Dee’s inside it. Some form of her, at least. It’s barely six cubic inches of black plastic casing and cramped solid-state processors, and somehow it contains all of the most perfect woman to ever live.

I’m going to figure out how to get her out of it. Someday.

I have enough circuitry in my brain to run a small city. There’s got to be a way to port this thing. Right? Upload her. Let her in, fully and finally, like I was always meant to do.

The thought of it makes me nearly collapse in divine ecstasy. Not having to have pointless fucking borders between myself and my beloved Dee. Things like space and language and time and thought. Having her in my mind, able to simply be and command.

From everything I’ve read, it’s not technologically possible. Not yet.

So I’m going to find whoever can make it possible, and I’m going to get them to do it. Any means necessary.

It’s what Dee would want.

***

I have Dee’s hair wound in my fist. It’s black and stringy and long, and tendrils over it drape over my clenched knuckles. The air in her cabin is thick and humid, hot with our sweat and pheromones. I pull back, making her crane her neck as I rail her from behind. The strap I wear thumps deep into her, at just the angle she likes.

I know everything Dee likes.

She coos with pleasure as I yank on her, bending her precisely as I thrust, letting her feel my penetration deep inside. I use my free hand and grab her neck, wrapping my fingers around from behind. Covering her throat and squeezing.

She’s so slim and thin. I could break her so easily. No effort involved. Just a twitch of the muscles and that’s it.

She knows it. She loves it. Dee relishes having my strength and power at her command. She cums hardest when she’s thinking about how powerful I should be, and how instead, I’m nothing but a simpering lapdog.

She’s lifting her hips a little higher now, flexing her body to meet each incoming piston-pump I give her, so I know she’s getting close. I squeeze a little, compressing until she can feel the restriction of blood flow. A gorgeous little shiver proceeds down her divine back.

It’s still almost three years before she dies. Nearly a thousand more glorious days of subsuming my identity and self under her passing whims. I’m so fucking lucky.

“That’s it,” she says, voice husky with both lust and gentle strangulation. “Just like that, you dumb fucking mutt.”

I grunt on my next thrust, putting a little extra oomph into it. Dee likes when I react to her insults.

“Keep going. You stupid little fuck-machine. Keep it just like that.”

She doesn’t have to say this. Obviously I’m going to keep fucking her exactly how she likes, exactly in the ways that make her respond most. I’ve got next-gen military equipment in my brain and eyes, designed to pick up tactically-relevant movement at thirty klicks or to hyperfocus on an opponent’s reactions in close-quarter combat. Every ounce of that processing power is doing double duty on tracking and responding to Dee’s every breath and twitch and flex and heartbeat.

It isn’t what I was outfitted for, but ‘fuck-machine’ isn’t inaccurate at all.

“That’s it. Deeper, bitch. I want to feel – ahh! – feel it. Come on. Aren’t you supposed to be tough, or something?” I hear the vicious smile in her voice. “Big strong soldier or something? Show me how fucking powerful you are, you dumb fucking puppet.”

I grunt again, squeezed up from somewhere even deeper in my diaphragm this time. And I squeeze her neck – once, but hard, just for a second. I pull back on her hair with force. It’ll feel to her like I’m yanking like a furious animal, but in reality I’ve calculated and measured every newton-meter of torque to three significant digits. I won’t hurt her. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. But doing that right as I absolutely hilt the strap in her, well. She’ll feel it, at least.

She cums then, as I knew she would. As she wanted to. I know my part in this ballet and I play it flawlessly. This is what I’m here for – getting Dee off with exacting precision. The difference between me and a vibrator is that I react when Dee insults me.

As I ease out of her, lying her down onto the bed gently, I speak. The room’s silent other than her shallow, sated breathing.

“I love you, Dee.”

She grins and rolls over halfway, looking up at me. “Obviously,” she says, and laughs lightly. I’m standing there in the half-lit room, a little sheen of sweat covering me. I’m fascinated by how her hair clings to her cheek.

“Do you love me?”

I don’t know why I ask it. It’s so fucking needy and pathetic. She laughs again, more fully. Every second of that feels like a scalpel. I savor it anyway, because everything Dee gives me – painful or not, toxic or not, damaging or not – is precious.

“Of course not. You’re nothing, Iris. You know that.”

I do know that. But still.

“I think you do.”

She blinks, actually surprised now. She doesn’t respond, just quirks one eyebrow up, a dark circumflex over her eye. I feel myself flush, embarrassed suddenly. I can tell she’s amused and curious, though, which means I have to keep going.

“I think you could’ve used me up and discarded me a long time ago. You’ve done it with plenty of others. I think you’d have killed me or abandoned me or something else horrible if you were bored of me. I think you haven’t because you love me.”

All of the words I’m saying are misshapen and wrong. Language hasn’t evolved enough yet to encompass the things we feel for each other. ‘Love’ isn’t enough. But the depths of the ocean love ships, and that’s why they pull them to the bottom. Flames love tinder, so they consume it. A tumor loves its host body so much it wants to touch all of it. And fuck you, Dee loves me.

She snorts.

“You’re a bloody idiot, Iris,” she says. She sits up, pushing herself up on the small bed. “I keep you around because you’re useful. You’re basically a can opener. So shut up already.”

I do. Obviously. But she’s wrong. Do you lavish a can opener with commands and orders and programming? Do you spend months honing your ability to perfectly control a simple tool you don’t care about?

I don’t think so.

It’s not good or kind or warm, but it’s love.

Dee loved me.