Page 53 of Tyton: The Spider and the Dragonfly
Callie squinted, trying to figure out the missing piece.
Talia filled it in for her.“Sesi hasn’t let me go after them yet because we don’t have a plan that she’s satisfied with.It has nothing to do with her disdain for revenge.She understands revenge as well as I do.”
“Then…?”Callie started.
“We broke up because we’re both Dommes.”
“Oh.”
Talia let Callie process that for a minute.Regardless of her decision, all of Talia’s cards had been laid out on the table and she was proud of herself for it.She was fucked up in ways too numerous to count, but maybe she could get somewhere close tookay, at least for a little while.
Talia stood, slouched and off balance like she was still new to her body.“I need to go to work, so I’m going to head out.”She started toward the door.
“Wait.”
Talia turned.Callie stood with her arms open.An offer this time.Not pity thrust upon her.Talia could choose to accept or walk away.
She took the step and let Callie wrap her arms around her, still warm from the bed.Her hair still smelled like sleep.This time, Talia hugged her back.Callie was too good for her.
King of Swords
JANUARY 8 2268
C
allum Black stared at his reflection.Tall.Relatively thin.The jaw, his father had made him tweak in his teens.The same had gone for his nose.
Today, he found his gut unappealing.He could use a DocPod to fix it, but that would be too easy.Exercise showed you had time.Wealth.Status.
“Trevor,” he pulled up his Chief Security Officer on his Opti.“I’ll be jogging at 6 on weekdays for the foreseeable future.Plan a route.”
Callum hung up without waiting for his CSO to respond.
Callum sighed.He knew the problem, and it wasn’t overindulgence.It was stress.And there would be a lot more of that coming.
The shareholders meeting had gone well, but he knew it would be the last.Profits weretechnicallyup.Yet they had sold fewer products.Employee attrition hid the shortfall.Butup and to the rightwas the only thing shareholders cared about.
The underlying cause of both?Population decline.And everyCEO knew it.The only solution to keep that line going in the right direction was to cut costs.Biosigscanners that knew who you were instantly, no matter the weather or what you wore instead of video that required teams to scan and figure out if you’d been DocPod altered.Reduce security detail to bare bones.Replace more researchers with AI.
But even that road was nearing its end.
Callum had had the foresight to understand the problem earlier than most.That did not mean that he could solve it.He and the Natalists had arrived at a mutually beneficial arrangement decades ago, or so he had thought.Modified DocPods for access.The payoff had never materialised.Three dead.Several more stillborn and the last run off, though technically, he still owned her.If they could find her.The Natalists’ IVF experiments with the DocPods appeared to have failed as well.
And so, here he stood, the last Black at the top of NovAITech – originally founded on some overambitious pipe dream of uploading human consciousness that attracted enough billionaires to launch a proper Large Model AI venture.
A house of cards that he hoped he would be divested of before it collapsed.
Talia felt Callie’s eyes on her, but she kept her focus on the device.She had opened her shell a crack, but it had grown attached to the skin.It hurt.She didn’t regret it, but she still needed time to recover.She tried not to let Callie’s feet shuffling in the corner bother her.After a moment, Callie interrupted her anyway,
“What’s that?
The question was innocuous, but it still grated at her.The wound still bled.But if this was going to work, she would need to be vulnerable a lot more often.And heal a lot quicker.She put aside her annoyance.
“It’s a repeater.”
She didn’t ask a follow-up question, but she didn’t leave either.Callie might not understand her, but she was willing to.And that was a lot more than Talia was going to get from most people.
“It, uh…” Talia started.She lifted up the device for Callie to see, but didn’t look at her.“It repeats the injectable that we send out to disable you through your strength amplifier patches.It would take out anyone within range, rather than disabling one person at a time.”
