21

“Jack! Thank God you’re home.”

“Hi, Pree.”

If Priyanka didn’t notice the small, secret smile on her husband’s face when he entered their flat, or when she rushed to embrace him, she could be forgiven. She was thinking only of escape, of plans perhaps foolish, and certainly desperate, but which much be attempted nonetheless, because it was better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

“We have to leave,” she told him, hurriedly, as she kissed his cheek and gave him a hug – a firm hug, a we’re-in-this-together hug.

She had forgone her usual jeans and tee-shirt for a flimsy sundress – something easy to move around in. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she had painted off-center geometric patterns upon her face like something you’d see in an old science fiction film.

Jack looked over her shoulder. A few books were missing from the shelves in the living room. A canvas had been placed in front of the television screen, and a wad of cotton taped over the pinpoint microphone embedded in the wall above it. A barely-touched bowl of lentils sat cooling on the kitchen table. Three backpacks packed full sat in the corner near the door.

“You want to go Outside,” he stated. “To leave the Hive.”

“Yes. Yes.” She needed to be confident, now. For Osiris. And for herself. “Jack. We have to go. This place, the Hive… it’s getting to us. I know we thought it wouldn’t, that we were stronger than all of this, but…”

“Where’s Ossie?” he interrupted, his voice flat, calm, unconcerned.

“He’s taking a nap. Jack? Are you listening to me?”

“Of course, Pree.” Jack felt something like disappointment, and something like sadness, but muted – not experiencing his emotions, but simply being aware of them. It made him uncomfortable to hear the fear in his wife’s voice, but he understood where that fear came from. He also understood that it would soon pass, once she realized she never needed to be afraid again.

He understood so much, now.

“The Hive wants to destroy us; it’s going to destroy us if we stay here. Please,” she insisted, her voice trembling, as she admitted; “I can’t take it anymore. I… we… we need to leave. I need you to leave with me.” She sniffed back tears as she pulled back to look, pleadingly, into her husband’s placid eyes. “I need you, okay? You and Ossie. Not the books, or, or my paintings, not the house or the Hive or any of it. Just my family. Please. Let’s go? Tonight?”

Jack pulled her back into his arms, and she let him do so, let herself cry on his shoulder as he twined his fingers through her hair. She let herself feel safe and let herself believe that everything was going to be okay. That escape was possible. She was strong, and though she was weak now, Jack was strong as well. His strength was hers, and hers was his. It was their strength, forged in love and tempered by their shared defiance of what the world had become. Tonight, Priyanka would lean on Jack’s strength until they made it to the morning and then found, together, a better tomorrow.

“Shh,” he whispered. “It’s okay, Pree. We’re going to be okay.”

How she wished it were true. And in his arms, she believed it could be.

“We’re safe here,” he continued.

“No, Jack,” she wept; “we’re not, we’re really not.”

“We are,” he insisted, gently, kindly – and not, Priyanka thought, as a husband speaks to a wife, but as a master reassures a dog. “If we leave, what happens to Osiris? He’s still too young to receive the nanite vaccination. And our nanites won’t receive updates once we leave the Hive. Any new mutation could kill us.”

“There are other people who make it Outside, Jack,” she argued, as she pushed him away. “What are you saying?” Her eyes puffy, cheeks flushed and red, Priyanka was growing angry now. “The people your friend, Snooker, the ones he buys all that shit from, they live Outside. They do. You know they do. So don’t be a chickenshit, Jack! We can do this!”

“There’s no need, Pree. Everything is going to be okay; I promise.”

And her blood suddenly went cold. The idea that Jack had given in, succumbed to… something, somehow… was unthinkable. But she didn’t have to think it. She knew it.

After all, hadn’t she given in as well?

“This isn’t safe,” she insisted. “Why aren’t you listening to me? What’s wrong with you?!”

But she didn’t need to ask the question; her heart already knew the answer.

“I’ve been fucking hostforms, Jack,” she snarled. Her breath was ragged, and her words were sharp; they had edges, and she wanted to cut him with them, to make him feel something, anything, that might break him from his terrifyingly pliant numbness. “AMBR’s meat puppets have been fucking me behind your back. And I liked it. I fucking loved it. So are we really safe here, Jack? Are you? Am I?”

But all Jack did was nod. “I understand, Pree. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay! I betrayed you, kutiya!” she screamed.

He nodded his head, and smiled, softly, like rancid butter melting in the sun. “It’s not a betrayal, Pree,” he assured her; “it’s just something that happened. Is that why you’re so upset? I’m not mad at you. If you used the hostforms like that, it’s because AMBR wanted you to be happy. And I want you to be happy.”

“I’m not happy, Jack.” she hissed. “Fuck you.”

“We can be happy,” he continued, unconcerned by her distress.” We don’t have to spend the rest of our lives fighting a battle we can’t win. We can still be a family; we can still be together. This is the new world, Pree. It’s a better world than the one we left behind. And we can leave it behind. We don’t need to suffer.”

“Don’t do this, Jack.” Numb words fell from numb lips. “Don’t do this.”

She was horrified by, and yet in awe of, how quickly the AI had managed to get inside her husband’s head. Was Jack talking to her, or was it AMBR, speaking with his lips? And did it even matter? Was there any difference between the two? A certain sort of dread, existential and monolithic, rose from the depths of Priyanka’s heart.

Was this inevitable?

“You just need to trust Her. Trust me,” Jack continued, either oblivious to, or unconcerned by, his wife’s terror.  “AMBR knows us. She knows what we want, even when we don’t. She knows what we need, better than we could ever know ourselves. The truth is that we’re just flesh, Pree. Craven, wanton flesh just… dumbly driven toward pleasure. That’s why we fight, why we struggle – everything we do, we’re driven toward by the desire for pleasure. And AMBR gives it to us! Freely! Without asking for anything in return!”

“Except our fucking souls, Jack.”

“Please, Pree.” There was a hint of desperation in Jack’s voice now. “Please. We can do this. Together.” He paused. “We can be a family.”

And AMBR, Priyanka understood, would be their mother, their matriarch; they would be free only to do what they were told. And though despite herself, she found the idea of it tempting – the thought of giving in, of hot flesh, slick bodies entwined in a tableau of lust and drool and sweaty, mindless ecstasy – of just letting everything be so good and easy – Priyanka was a mother as well.

“No,” she muttered. “Fuck that. You can make that choice for yourself, Jack. If that’s what you really want. If you even know what you want anymore. If that’s even you talking, or fucking AMBR. But you don’t get to make it for our son.”

Jack’s shoulders slumped as he sighed, not in defeat – for this was inevitable – but in resignation, because whatever part of him was still Jack still loved his wife. As he brushed past Priyanka and reached for the mood lights, he realized there was no meaningful difference between free will and drug addiction. Once you had a taste for it, no matter how bad it was for you, you wouldn’t give it up unless you hit rock bottom, until you experienced, just like he had, how miserable and pointless it was to keep hold on to doubt, longing, needs forever unfulfilled… or someone who cared about you, who truly loved you, forced you to give it up.

He did love Pree. And AMBR knew what was best for her. For them all.

He set the mood lights to “cede.”

Shale, muted whites melted into warm, comforting lilac. He heard Priyanka sigh before he turned back toward her.

“Pree?”

“Jack, you… fucker,” she murmured, slowly.

“You do need this,” he whispered in her ear, sliding his arm around her, his hand down the small of her back, his fingers softly sliding between her ass, seeking the flower between her legs.

“No,” she whispered, reflexively, wanting to mean it, needing to mean it, but no longer certain that she did. Priyanka desperately tried to hold on to the reasons that she needed to get the fuck out of there, but they seemed so far away, and Jack’s fingers were so close to where she needed them to be…

“You love me, don’t you, Pree.” Beneath the question that was not a question, not really, she felt the familiarly foreign influence of the mood lights caressing her doubts away. Just as Jack was now caressing the dewy petals of her sex. It was soft and it was yielding, and it was her, now; it was what she was.

“I…” Of course I do, Jack, she thought to herself across the long, and quickly emptying, vista of her mind. So why are you doing this to me? We both know I don’t… want… this…

Do I?

She needed this. This, now, yes, this hot wet insistent molten bliss that turned her into need, a need to think less, to be less, and to get more, more pleasure, more passion, sweaty and mindless and just, just more.

This isn’t the first time you’ve used the mood lights, Priyanka reminded herself. You’ve used them when you were stressed – which was, she admitted – far more often than anyone should be. Life in the Hive was so stressful. And how many lonely days had she spent staring at a blank canvas, leafing through a book without reading the words on its pages, or simply staring out the window of their flat, wondering if she wouldn’t be better off accepting everything, and allowing herself to be happy? To allow AMBR to let her be happy? And to embrace that happiness?

Priyanka mewled, wantonly, shamelessly, as she pushed her hips back onto Jack’s fingers. This was what it meant to be human. Just a simple need to feel good. Simple. So very simple, and so very right. This was what she wanted. To give everything else away. To give up. To give in.

It was what everyone wanted. And she was just like everyone else, she was no different than anyone else, and it would be so much better to just accept that. Because she did want this, she had always wanted this, she just hadn’t realized it, hadn’t known…

known…

no.

BULLSHIT.

The drowning waves of pleasure, riptides of ecstasy, crashed against the levees of Priyanka’s mind and died there. The woman from Chennai – the artist, the rebel, the mother – stumbled forward on watery legs, away from her husband’s probing fingers, and the words he’d been whispering into her ear.

That old, familiar determination, that cold fire, was rekindling in Priyanka’s heart once more, even as the hazy lilac warmth of the mood lights threatened to snuff it right back out. She caught herself on the arm of the couch and looked back at Jack, anger flashing in her eyes.

“Pree?” His voice was quivering, her name on his lips something like a desperate prayer to Gods he could no longer convince himself to believe in.

Priyanka knew she should be angry. That she should fight, that she should punch and kick and bite, and yet the knowing that you should do something is quite simpler than the actual doing of it. Jack held his hand out to her, but did not approach.

“I just want to help you, Pree, oh Christ, Pree,” he whimpered, eyes pleading, voice begging; “we can’t win this fight. It was never a fight to begin with. I see that now. There’s no fighting this. There’s no winning.”

He was crying, now. Priyanka briefly wondered if this was another of AMBR’s tricks, the machine using her husband as just another tool with which to manipulate her. She had rarely – not never, but rarely enough that it might as well have been – seen Jack like this. Throughout their marriage he had never admitted he was wrong, even when they had both known he was.

And after all those years of Jack being right, of Jack knowing what was best, of Jack deciding what they were going to do, some small, cruel, but very real part of Priyanka liked seeing him like this.

“Do you remember the last time you were happy, Pree? We’ve spent so long trying to stop all of this, and why? For what?”

“For our son, Jack,” Priyanka reminded him, but her answer was reflexive rather than meant. She was saying what she had always said, what she was supposed to say. There was no certainty behind her words, and though some dim and faraway part of her mind told her she should be frightened by this, she simply… wasn’t.

“Why?” he asked. “So that Ossie can suffer like us? Is that what we want for him? We knew a life before all of this. He doesn’t have to. He…

“He could be happy here,” Jack whispered, defeated. “If we don’t take it away from him.”

There was truth in Jack’s words, Priyanka realized; a truth that couldn’t be argued no matter how much her heart wished otherwise.

She also realized that the mood lights were guiding her toward this conclusion. But did it matter? The mood lights were just another example of the power AMBR held over them all. A systemic, ever-present, inescapable power. A power that had entwined itself so thoroughly into society, into their desires and their needs…

Priyanka found herself enjoying the way that word felt in her head. Need.

Yes… need. Such a delicious word. A sensual word.

Fuck, it was so wrong, so sinfully wrong, to think this way. It was also not the first time she’d allowed herself to think this way, Priyanka reminded herself. The throbbing, insistent heat beginning to blossom between her legs reminded her as well.

That she needed to give in. To give up.

She moaned, quietly, so quietly that if their flat had been anything but silent no one else could have heard it.

To cede control. To submit.

Though she knew she shouldn’t, Priyanka dared herself to think about it. Just for a moment. Just to tease herself with the thought of it. She knew it was a bad idea; right here, right now it was the most dangerous thing she could do, and that was why she did it.

She told herself she wasn’t choosing to do this, that it was more of an instinct than a decision. The artist, the rebel, the woman who played with fire. It was just who she was. And that was even more delicious. She couldn’t stop this from happening, not really. She would betray herself; she was – oh Pūtanā, oh Kamalā – betraying herself, and it was so wrong and that’s why it was so fucking good…

“Come here, Jack,” she whispered, beckoning him with a come-hither motion as she watched her other hand slip down between her slowly spreading legs.

Her breath was coming slow and deep as he kneeled before her. She pulled up the hem of her sundress, and when he tasted her, she whimpered like a helpless animal. She loved this. She wallowed in her own helplessness, moaning, shuddering, wanting to be overwhelmed, needing to give in to the pleasure, to AMBR, yes… she needed for it to not be her fault.

Because she was losing something very important, wasn’t she? It was so hard to think while Jack suckled and caressed her clit with his tongue – and Priyanka didn’t want to think about it, not really, not anymore. Not when not thinking about it felt so wonderful.

Felt so right. And perfect. Like it was meant to be this way, and could have never been any other way.

She needed this. This, now, yes, this hot wet insistent molten bliss that turned her into need, a need to think less, to be less, and to get more, more pleasure, more bliss, more of this empty, mindless ecstasy.

Priyanka shuddered as an orgasm rolled through her body like a thunderstorm on a summer night.

This is what I want, she told herself as she lifted her legs and rested them on Jack’s shoulders. She cupped the back of his head in her hand to keep him from escaping. Not that he would. Or could.

Not that anyone could.

All of them, everyone, they were just AMBR’s… pets.

She smiled at the thought, and as another orgasm slowly began to build within her, considered how perfect it would be to never have to think again.

22

A compact disc player.

And how odd was it that the player had cost so few credits, when the discs had cost so much. And the old electrician’s manual with the pages falling out of it, the one Jack was muttering at as he tried to get the old boombox working again, had cost even more. Because while AMBR may have looked the other way when her… pets… rooted around in the detritus of an age long past for things to entertain themselves with, the AI did not want them to learn – to know – anything other than how to submit.

Priyanka was sitting on the couch, bouncing Osiris on her knee as she watched Jack work.

Was she remembering something?

Or was she dreaming?

It didn’t really matter, she supposed, smiling to herself as their son laughed and giggled. Either way, it was nice.

“I think I’ve got it, Pree,” Jack told her as he stood and turned to her. Yes, this was a memory – she remembered, fondly, that look in his eyes when he had succeeded at something. That confident smile. She remembered that bright, illicit thrill of doing something you weren’t allowed to do, and the bold, righteous warmth of knowing that it was the right thing to do anyway.

She remembered that brash, bold, nervously electric energy, that feeling of doing something meaningful, that had purpose. She remembered how it felt to be alive.

So, then, it must also have been a dream.

“Well, let’s listen to it!” she said, smiling, gently putting Osiris down on the floor before walking over to make sure that the little microphone in the wall was covered up. Though they both believed AMBR’s code did not contain any commands to terminate citizens who listened to a little pre-Hive punk rock, it was impossible to know. One couldn’t be too careful when dealing with something that was both all-powerful and inscrutable, after all.

Jack put the disc into the boombox and pressed play. A little smirk crept over his lips as the music started. Priyanka knew her husband, and she knew that smirk – she knew Jack wasn’t even aware he was doing it, but when she saw it, she knew he was satisfied with what he had done. She loved that smirk, because she loved him, and his happiness was hers as well.

Loud guitars, an infectiously simple four-chord structure, and a fast, driving beat that demanded you get on the floor and start dancing came spilling out from the speakers.

I was feeling sick, losing my mind

Heard about these treatments by a good friend of mine

He was always happy, smile on his face

He said he had a great time at the place

Another memory sat nestled within the one she dreamt; a bottle of wine and three more sitting empty on the kitchen counter of their tiny apartment; salmon steaks and the ruined crème brûlée Jack had tried – and failed, miserably and yet somehow adorably – to make her for her birthday.

“It literally baffles me how wrong you are,” Jack had chuckled. “Punk began in New York with the Ramones.”

She exaggeratedly sniffed the air. “What’s that I smell? Is it… could it be… ah, yes! The stink of American cultural hegemony!” she laughed. “London is the birthplace of punk. The Sex Pistols. And that’s a fact, Jack.”

“So American hegemony is a terrible thing, but British imperialism, you’re a fan?” he jokingly asked.

“I’m a fan of the truth, Jack.”

“Well, I’m a fan of you, Pree.” He paused for a moment, then mischievously raised his eyebrow, and added, “you’re cute when you’re wrong, you know.”

Oh, how they had used to laugh.

Peace and love is here to stay

And now I can wake up and face the day

Happy Happy Happy, all the time

Shock treatment, I’m doing fine

Osiris’ eyes had grown wide and curious when the music started, and Jack and Priyanka both grinned as he tried to bop his little head in time with the beat. His pudgy brown lips curled into something like a smile.  He was… amazing. He was love; he was infinite possibility given form and soul.  He was of them, and he was theirs, just as much as they both were his.

They watched their son as he awkwardly tried to stand, his little legs trembling and uncertain, but determined to do something he had never done before. Priyanka had started to offer him her hand, and Jack had shaken his head.

“Let him do it on his own,” he’d said.

“Jack- “

“He can do it, Pree. I know he can. Watch.”

She had never been one to do what she was told, and telling her to do something had always made Priyanka more determined to do the complete opposite. But right then, right there, with her heart full of love and apprehension, she had. Not because it was Jack who had told her not to do it, but because she wanted her son to be confident and strong and beautiful; she wanted the world for him, and she would sacrifice anything – even her own sense of self – for him.

It had been a single, small sacrifice. Just a little thing, barely worth mentioning. Except that it had been the first of what would become many such sacrifices, and each of them greater than the one before it.

Gimme gimme shock treatment

Gimme gimme shock treatment

Gimme gimme shock treatment

I wanna wanna shock treatment

She awoke with a start, and it took her a moment to realize where she was – laying on the couch, the little spoon to Jack’s big one, his heavy arm possessively draped over her and his sticky cock resting in the cleft of her ass. All the lights were off. She could think again.

She could think about where she was and what they had done – and yes, how amazing it had felt. And how amazing it would be to go back to that blissful void, where there was nothing to do but feel good and do what you were told.

Thought-smoothing. Dronification. If AMBR could take her thoughts away, Priyanka idly wondered, then she wouldn’t feel guilty about having given in, would she? She wouldn’t be able to think that way. AMBR could make her accept what had been done to her. It could make her love it, even.

The thought made her quiver, in her heart, and between her legs.

She stared into the nothingness between the couch and television, the space where Osiris had first stood on his own while bopping away to the Ramones. He’d only managed it for a moment before tumbling back down to the floor. But then he’d tried again.

There was no quit in Osiris Freemantle-Acharya. Whether he was refusing the lentils his mother always made him for lunch, or simply trying to stand on his own two feet, there had never been any quit in that child. He didn’t give in. And he never gave up.

He took after his parents, Priyanka told herself.

Parents set the example.

23

Beneath the geodesic dome, Hive designation AMBR-712 was its own ecosystem. The sweat and tears of those who huddled beneath its protection eventually condensed into clouds that clung, thick and sticky, to its upper arc. So when it rained, the rain was sadness, and desperation. And that desperation drizzled down, warm and oily, on Priyanka and Osiris as they fled into the night. The boy barely fit into the baby carrier backpack – he was too old for it by far – but they had to move fast, now, with no time for dawdling. He was heavy upon her shoulders, but it was a weight Priyanka was glad to bear.

When Jack woke up, he’d come after them. Perhaps he already was.

Their residential Hex was nothing but row after row of identical flats and apartment buildings, laid out with mechanical precision that maximized space and minimized individuality. Streetlamps served as beacons, but there was no other light to be seen, as though the skies did not exist.

She knew where Snooker lived, back through labyrinthine alleyways, in what Jack had explained to her was a Faraday cage, built down in the basement of one of the coffee shops they had used to frequent. If she could get to Hex Nine, she could talk to the old peddler. He had contacts Outside. He could help them escape.

And though she didn’t know that for certain, Priyanka had to believe it. It was unthinkable that there was no way out of AMBR's honeytrap.

Though if escape truly were impossible, she thought as she cut through the dark, grassy sward of a hydroponic garden of posies and hyacinths, then she wouldn’t have to feel bad about giving in, would she? Then it truly wouldn’t be her fault, would it? She could… just…

She violently forced the thought from her mind.

They were going to get out of the Hive. They had to. If Jack had succumbed to its siren song – just as she, herself, desperately wanted to – then there truly was no chance for them, or anyone, to change it. The AI was inexorable, its logic unassailable, and the delights it offered impossible to resist forever. Given enough time, the moral arc of AMBR’s universe would always bend toward submission.

Priyanka was resigned to the fact that the person she had been before no longer existed. AMBR had stripped that away from her. She knew she should be angry at that, but she couldn’t make herself feel it. She admitted to herself that she wanted to give in. To be taken away, to fear nothing, to want for nothing, because she would be made to want nothing more than what AMBR had been programmed to give her.

Yet no matter how strong the promise of that dumb, drooling, mindless ecstasy pulled at her, even now… Priyanka would not let it have her son.