The Snow Boy

Sydney, Australia

2009-06-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

Prologue

14 years ago

I had already known for quite some time that this wasn´t going to be a break-up like the others. Until now, every time my allotted three or four years had passed – and most often far less than that – it had already been in the natural course of things to move on and usually no one had been unduly hurt. Unfortunately, it couldn´t be avoided every time, but then what could I do? When people thought you were barely fifteen when you first met and just eighteen when you said goodbye and vanished never to be seen again, there was no chance to start a real serious relationship including a mortgage and a dog and who knew, maybe even an adopted baby or two.

This time, however, things were different.

I was sitting in the living room of Alex´s bungalow style house in Clovelly, an Eastern suburb of Sydney. The ocean was only a few blocks away, and the famous Bondi beach where we had first met was close enough to walk when the weather wasn´t unbearably hot. It was early spring, and the windows to the patio were open and the curtains were billowing in the ocean breeze that always reached deep into the suburbs. I rarely actually sat outside in the patio, not after I´d seen what the bite of an Australian spider could do to your leg when one of Alex´s friends had been hospitalized with a hole in his thigh that could have easily accommodated four fingers. Despite the insidious local fauna I loved Sydney and hated the idea of leaving, especially this time of the year. I had a no-frills passenger cabin reserved in a Dutch cargo ship leaving for London before midnight, obviously unbeknownst to Alex, and it would be the beginning of the worst part of the year in the Northern hemisphere when the ship finally arrived. A just punishment for me, undoubtedly. I had toyed with the idea of South America, but in the end I´d decided to return to Europe. I´d never lived in Greece and thought it was time to see what the fuss about their islands was all about.

First I´d have to get there, though. The thought of having to leave Alex behind took my breath away every time it crossed my mind, and there was precious little else to think about during these final hours in Sydney. He had no idea I was leaving, and right now he would be finishing up the daily business at the bank where he worked, perhaps planning for a movie or dinner out tonight. I had even considered leaving without a word, or maybe calling him from the harbor and promising to explain everything once I reached London. Of course, there would have been only more lies instead of an explanation, as I could never tell him the truth about the last four years.

We had met on the beach when he´d been twenty-two, younger and leaner than most of the guys who usually caught my eye. Swimming was his sport and he never developed the pumped up round muscles that I most liked in men, but with him it didn´t matter. His father was a third-generation Italian immigrant and his genes had clearly had the upper hand in designating Alex´s looks, and as if that hadn´t been enough, half of the Bondi beach had been transfixed by the bulge in his speedo. After the initial look of surprised interest when he´d first seen me, he´d dismissed the idea of even bothering to talk to a fifteen-year old and it had taken a certain effort from my side to change his attitude and to convince him that the age of consent was nothing but an artificial legal construct. Or more straight to the point, he just needed to take his chances as I was worth it. At the time I had just arrived in Australia, and it took another year before my passport dates caught up and we didn´t have to pretend any longer that we were just friends.

My eyes wandered around the familiar living room. The furniture had clearly been put together by someone who knew what he was aiming for but didn´t have the necessary means quite yet. Everything was simple and very comfortable despite the geometric looks of the couch and the armchairs, and there was not a single piece of bric-a-brac in sight cluttering tables and shelves. The only concession to adornments were a few framed photographs in the bookcase, of the two of us together. One was from the Bondi beach, taken last summer, another had been snapped in front of the Sydney Opera House in spite of his protestations of looking like a tourist, and there were three more from birthdays and anniversaries. I looked utterly identical in each of the photos; one more year and he would have started asking serious questions instead of merely looking at me with a puzzled expression every now and then.

They had found me in my home town, Luleå, on the coast of the Northern Sweden, in the middle of one of those bitter winters before global warming took hold. I was on my way back to the “dormitory” as it was called, a euphemism for orphanage, worried about the scolding and possible punishment I´d get for having stayed too late in the town indoor swimming pool and missing the 9p.m. curfew. At fifteen, I was a typical resident of the dormitory: parents dead, or helpless alcoholics who had nevertheless hung around in drunken stupor long enough for the kid to be too old to be adopted by a foster family. Located in a suburb, adjacent to a high school, the dormitory wasn´t within easy reach from the city center and I had to take a bus every time I needed to go somewhere, which was a drag with the northern winters. It was a clear night in January, my breath freezing into a cloud within seconds in the frigid cold, and the stars were blazing in the crystalline sky with just a hint of shimmering northern lights high above. The snow under my boots made a funny scrunching sound as it always did when it was really cold, and I wished I had dried my hair more thoroughly before leaving the swimming pool in a hurry to catch the bus.

The man had stopped his brand new Volvo Amazon almost in front of the dormitory, right under a street light, and he was so tall that he had spread a map over the roof of the car to see it better. I should have realized something was not quite right as no one in their right mind would have stepped out of a heated car just to look at a map, but he happened to glance at my direction as I was approaching and I was captivated by the exceptionally handsome and unmistakably foreign face. Suddenly I was glad that in the hurry I had left my glasses in the sports bag as I hated the total nerd look they gave me.

He waved a gloved hand at me.

“Hey kid,” he said with a deep rumbling voice, “could you please help me? I think I´m lost.”

I approached warily. He was about 6´5”, well-dressed, and the thick belt of his long coat was fastened around hips that were remarkably narrow in proportion to his wide shoulders. He looked like some over-grown athlete, and I found I couldn´t place his face geographically.

He threw a glance at my bag. “Coming from practice?”

“Swimming,” I answered. “Where do you need to go?”

He gave me a street name I didn´t recognize, and needlessly added that he was new in town and didn´t know his way around.

“Where are you from?” I asked, curious.

“Originally from Brazil,” he said, and tapped at the car with a dazzling smile.

I got the joke and smiled back.

“Where´s the swimming pool you go to?”

I stepped closer – crazy people don´t have sense of humor, so I thought I was safe – and pointed at the right street on the map. Standing next to him the difference between us was disconcerting as I was on the short side myself, only little over 5´6”, and I hadn´t grown an inch for the last three months. It´s OK to be small when you´re fifteen, but I suspected that my height was going to bother me quite a lot me when I grew older.

The man thanked me and started refolding the map. I stepped back, half relieved and half disappointed that this handsome Brazilian was going to disappear now and all that was left of the evening was to face the surly warden waiting for me.

With a frown, the man glanced at the dormitory. “You live here?”

I nodded, and he could tell from my face that further questions about the subject weren´t welcome. He finished with the large unruly map and gave me a strange, inquisitive look before opening the car door.

“Thanks again. I´ll see you around,” he said, and clearly happy to back in the warm car engaged the clutch and, with some trouble, switched to the first gear. He couldn´t have been using the car for more than a day.

I watched the Volvo drive away. There was no reason why the encounter shouldn´t have been anything but casual and yet I couldn´t shake the feeling that he´d been waiting for me. The conversation had been perfectly normal, he hadn´t done or said anything weird, but it was as if there had been another, wordless conversation going on from the moment he first looked at me. However, my thoughts were soon directed back at the problem in hand as the exposed part of my hair was now freezing in earnest, and I had to get in before I risked catching a cold. With a sigh, I dragged my feet towards the front door of the dormitory, hoping I was somewhere far, far away.

To my surprise, it was only two days later when I saw the Brazilian again. Fond of beaches and sea like all his countrymen, it probably was only natural that he´d spend a lot of time in the local swimming pool, or that´s what I told myself as I was taking off my clothes and nearly fell over with my foot caught somewhere in my trousers when he walked into the locker room and dropped his bag down on the bench, just a couple of yards from me. Suddenly my heart was beating too fast and too hard, and I had to look away because I didn´t want him to see my face. Besides, I still hadn´t tucked my glasses away into the locker. Only after I´d pulled on my speedos and gotten rid of the glasses I dared a glance at his direction, and was welcomed by a smile.

“Hi kid,” he said. “Thanks for telling me about this place, it´s nice.”

I nodded, and closing my locker door hurried towards the showers, cursing my lack of nerve to stay a while longer and see what he looked like naked. I needn´t have worried as I was still in the showers, getting ready to go to the sauna to warm up, when he followed me and chose the shower head right next to me. This time I couldn´t help myself and stole a glance at his direction, and thought that my heart was going to burst at the sight. I had instantly noted the muscular beauty of his body, but it was his sex that drew my eyes. I´d never seen anything like it.

The size was stunning. The organ was long and thick, and the way the massive dark shaft hung over the large balls you could tell it was heavy. The foreskin seemed to be drawn back by the sheer size of the cock and allowed for a glimpse of the tip of the glans. He was an exceptionally tall man, but the whole thing seemed disproportionately large just the same. A thick vein ran along the back of the shaft all the way to the foreskin, and I must have imagined it but I thought I could see his pulse throbbing along the vein.

Politely, he pretended that I wasn´t staring, and only after I´d torn my eyes away from him did he try to start conversation. However, he had only had time to ask one question about my school before I had to rush away, to find refuge in the sauna as my quickly growing erection had already become an embarrassment. Luckily, I was alone and no one else was there to see the way my dick swayed side to side as I climbed up to a corner seat at the back of the sauna. Get a grip, I told myself while trying to find a position that would hide my erection at least partially should someone come in and sit right in front of me. Which, of course, he did.

I dropped an arm between my legs, feigning a relaxed position, as he climbed up and took his seat. God Almighty the man was good-looking.

Fully aware that he got me, as I couldn´t possibly stand up and leave, he asked, “What´s your name? I´m Mauro.”

“Jonatan.”

I couldn´t figure him out. What the hell was going on, was he making a pass at me or not?

“Can I ask you – how come you live in that dormitory? What happened to your parents?”

I was taken aback by the personal question, but saw no reason not to answer him. On the contrary, this might be a chance to shut him up if he wasn´t hitting on me.

“They were never officially married. Dad passed out drunk in the snow and froze to death last winter. Mom´s probably somewhere down in Stockholm, drunk or doing heroin under a bridge. If she´s still alive.”

Mauro cleared his throat. “I´m sorry to hear that.”

There was a moment of silence.

Somehow it didn´t surprise me when he didn´t give up. “But you´re kind of free, then, no one´s nagging and telling you what to do.”

“If only that was true.”

Some small talk ensued, but I remained as confused about his intentions as before. He knew I was sitting in the corner with a boner for him, but there were no leading questions or suggestive glances. And as big as his dick was, it definitely remained unaffected by my presence. Yet he kept chatting me up, and I could tell he was doing his best to quietly charm me.

“But don´t you have any other relatives, uncles or aunts? Brothers or sisters?” he was asking.

I shook my head. “Nobody. Why are you so interested in my relatives?”

“I just think it must be hard for a kid like you to be alone. Or are you the kind of person who can get used to it?”

I had no idea. I thought about it for a moment and still couldn´t answer him. For some reason he didn´t seem to mind. For a moment I thought that he was pleased with my answer, but why would he care about something I didn´t know the answer for myself?

Finally the sauna exhausted me to a point where I could get up and leave, but not before I thought I was getting close to fainting from the heat. The cool spray of water at the showers quickly revived me and then it was time to go to the pool. He was soon there, too, swimming laps methodically like a professional, but at certain point I lost sight of him. After a while, and a little annoyed with myself, I cut my workout short and followed him. However, he was no longer neither in the showers nor the sauna, and when I got to the locker room the was no sign that he had ever existed. Dejected, I started getting dressed, and sitting on the bench and tying my shoelaces I swore I´d get out of that small boring cold backwater town as soon as possible.

I left my locker key at the reception and walked out into the cold January night. And there he was in the parking lot, leaning back on his car which had its motor running with the white exhaust smoke thick in the cold air. I walked straight up to him.

“Need a ride?” he asked, and I nodded.

This was it. He was into me after all. Heart thumping, I got into the car. It was obvious that he had never driven on icy roads before as he revved the engine and almost buried us into a snow bank when the wheels suddenly gained proper traction.

“Damn,” he muttered. “I´ve almost killed myself here twice already. Listen, kid, would you like to have dinner with me at my hotel?”

This would be the second time I´d miss curfew in the same week. There would be hell to pay, but of course he had no idea, and right now I couldn´t have cared less myself.

“Sure,” I answered. “Which hotel are you staying in?”

“The President.”

It was the most expensive hotel in town. “Um... I don´t think I´m properly dressed for their restaurant.”

“We´ll get room service.”

“All right.”

He didn´t bother to give the reception any explanation why a fifteen-year-old boy would accompany him to his room, and there were no questions asked even though the uniformed young man threw me an annoyed or perhaps envious glance as soon as Mauro turned away. The room was on the top floor, and it was clear that it was among the most expensive they had: quite spacious, with a couch and a small dining area for two, and a wall to wall window with a view over the frozen sea. In the harbor, a brightly lit icebreaker was being prepared for a mission, and the northern lights were back tonight, a hazy curtain of light shimmering towards the north, clearly visible despite city lights.

“Baked potatoes, steaks and salad all right with you?”

I nodded, a little surprised as I had expected the food to be nothing but a ruse. He phoned the room service, and once he was through he gestured me to sit down on the couch as I was still looking out to the sea. He sat down next to me and a moment of awkward silence followed, and worst of all, he didn´t try to make a move on me.

“Why am I here?” I asked, unnerved.

“I want to offer you a job. No, not that kind,” he added quickly when he saw my expression.

I actually wouldn´t have minded the least, but decided not to tell him.

“Go on, please,” I said, quite curious now.

“I think I should show you something first. It´s sort of like a calling card,” he explained as he got up and walked to his suitcase.

He picked up a curious object from the side pocket – which actually looked quite a lot like a secret compartment – and brought it back to us. It was shaped like a stylish pair of sunglasses that wrapped tightly around your head, but at a closer look the thing mostly resembled thick blindfolds made of rubbery black plastic.

“A calling card?” I asked, a little puzzled, as he handed them over.

“It´s a type of a 3D viewer, like that toy ViewMaster,” he explained. “There are 12 images. Please go through all of them without removing the viewer, and don´t be surprised if the images start a bit fuzzy every now and then while the viewer focuses the lenses.”

I put the viewer on and it sort of automatically wrapped itself tight around my head. The feeling was a little disconcerting but then the first image appeared and I felt a smile spread on my face. The 3D illusion of the satellite photo was fantastic. I was watching down on a huge white hurricane with a perfectly formed eye, the clouds distinctly layered over deep blue ocean. Then, for about half a second, the image went slightly fuzzy before returning to normal. After a second or two another image was displayed, this time a magnificent rosetta window of a catholic church, sunshine flooding in through the painted glass. The colors flickered a little bit, and then it was time for the next photo, this one a desert road that my eyes followed until it met the horizon at a distant point.

When the slide show was over the viewer released the grip on its own and I took the amusing toy off. Mauro was looking at me, with a pleased smile, but now it was his face that looked a bit fuzzy. I blinked twice, but the fuzziness remained.

“Don´t be alarmed,” he said quickly. “Those images can play tricks with your eyes. Just wait a couple of minutes and everything will be back to normal.”

I blinked again. “Are you sure... I feel a kind of pressure in my eyes. It´s weird.” Another two blinks. “If this is the product your company is selling, you need to work on it a little more.”

He laughed. “Just wait and see.”

And so I did. The fuzziness started clearing away. After about two minutes, it was all gone. Another minute passed, and more fuzziness went away. I glanced at the brightly lit icebreaker far in the harbor, and gasped. I was seeing every little object and detail on the deck of the boat.

“What the hell-”

Mauro couldn´t help laughing again at my expression. “Kid, you can throw away those glasses that you hate so much. You´ve got 40/20 vision now.”

“Please explain.”

“Those fuzzy parts in the images were testing your eyesight, and the bright flickering lights were actually an array of lasers that remodeled the lenses of your eyes.”

It took me about five seconds of quick thinking to understand what he was saying. There was just this one hell of a big question: where did this device come from?

The logical answer came to me immediately, but I sure as hell wasn´t going to blurt it out until I had carefully thought this thing through. If this was a job interview – and suddenly I was very interested – I would have to make sure I wasn´t going to say anything stupid. A lot of new stuff was being invented especially now that the Americans were well into their Apollo program and should be sending a man to the moon within a year or two, but still... I was undeniably a bit of a nerd with my glasses – glasses that I might never wear again – and so I more or less knew what was possible and what was impossible, and this clearly fell into the second category. So, was I going to say it out loud?

“Who do you work for?” I asked, my voice sounding a little weird.

“I guess you could call it a Faculty of Anthropology. Or more precisely, a guild of anthropology faculties working together,” Mauro answered.

“Anthropology – as in the study of human beings?”

“Yes.”

That made sense. I didn´t say anything, though. My whole world had suddenly become a pretty shaky place.

“We should put that away before the room service gets here,” Mauro said quietly and picked up the viewer, or however the gizmo was actually called.

I watched as he placed it back into the side pocket. When he returned, there was no sign of the pocket on the side of the suitcase.

“Tell me about the job.”

“I think ´cultural interface´ is a good expression for it. The Guild has been studying us for quite some time, but the problem is that mere observation has its limits. Then, about two hundred years ago, the Guild decided that they desperately needed a deeper understanding when the sudden acceleration in the development of science and technology only seemed to be making things crazier and crazier down here, instead of the other way around.”

Luckily, there was a knock on the door. The room service had arrived, giving me more time to think this over while the dinner was being set on the table. I had no reason to doubt anything that Mauro was telling me; one quick glance at any direction with my new eyes and I knew this was no joke. Mauro tipped the waiter handsomely and we sat down at the table. The dinner was excellent by my dormitory standards, but I had hard time focusing on the food.

“Someone with your qualifications is not easy to find,” he said after a while. “It took us more than three years to track you down.”

“And what are those qualifications?”

“First of all, no family or relatives, preferably no close friends. Even though what we´d really need is insight into young people, fifteen is the youngest that we ever recruit and only after very careful consideration. In any case, it´s very rare.” Mauro set down his knife and fork, and looked me straight in the eyes. “You being gay is the exact job opening we have, and of course it doesn´t hurt that you´re very attractive.”

I added up the qualifications, and the result was rather disreputable. “So tell me more about this job,” I said, unable to keep sarcasm from my voice.

“We´d like to implant a biological neural mesh into your central nervous system. Filaments from your brain would run down along the main nerves of your arms and legs and work as a low-power transmitter. That would give us access to all your perceptions, emotions and thoughts.”

I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. “Are you crazy?”

“The job has benefits-”

“OK, you fixed my eyes, that´s great, I´m grateful, but don´t think that-” something in his eyes made me stop. He was amused.

“Would you hear me out?” he asked.

I nodded.

“As long as you work for us, your aging process will be stopped.” He paused, allowing the words to sink in. “Actually you can choose any age you wish, but we´d really appreciate it if you chose to stay your present age, for the time being.”

Now that was a fringe benefit not easily turned down. I stared at my half-eaten steak and salad. Neither of us spoke, and after a couple of minutes I continued eating, still silent. A series of relevant questions continued popping up in my mind, and I resumed the conversation to play time and think about it a little more.

“So, are you, um...”

“I´m human, just like you. My boss is, too. But her boss is not.”

“What do they look like?”

“I have no idea.”

“How old are you?”

“187. I still keep count.”

I didn´t let that slow me down. “Earlier you said, ´a job opening´. What does that mean, exactly? Was there someone else before me?”

I could tell this wasn´t something he had wanted to tell me so early on. “There are about two hundred of us, in different countries, cultures and social positions. Most are utterly regular people, nothing unusual about them, just as one would wish in our line of study. However, learning about normal reactions in normal situations doesn´t tell you the whole story, so we also have a special division that´s called, I´m sorry to say, the ´Reps´.”

“Representatives? What, is that some kind of a swear word for the Guild?”

“Um...” Mauro stared at his plate and soldiered on. “It stands for reptilian, meaning the reptilian brain. Deep primordial instincts are just as important for understanding human behavior as higher cerebral functions. Sometimes more so.”

I stared at him, appalled. “So what do you want to do with me?”

He laughed at my suspicions. “No, we´re not planning to grow you scaled skin and a bifurcated tongue. Instead, what we´d like to do is to intensify your looks.”

I stared at him, uncomprehending. “What does that mean, intensify my looks?”

“For example, you´ve got that beautiful blond hair. But Nordic hair is often thin, and once we´re done, yours will be thick with spectacularly healthy shine and a slight curl to it.”

“I see.” Being a ´Rep´ didn´t sound all that bad.

“That goes for all your features. The scope is to turn you into someone who provokes strong enough reactions in people for us to ´read´ them. That´s in addition to studying your own reactions, obviously.”

I thought about it for a moment. “It sounds kind of fun.”

“Intensifying your looks comes with a price, though.” Mauro said reluctantly. “The reason for the job opening is that your predecessor, well, he died.”

“What happened?”

“Someone got obsessed with him.” It had been three years, but the memory still clearly bothered him a great deal. “One of our own people, actually. Goes to show how dangerous this thing can be. We´ll talk more about that during your training.”

“So you think you´ve got me?”

“Some people do turn us down. Not very many.”

“What happens to them?”

“Nothing,” Mauro said, a little taken aback by my suspicious tone. “They tell a fantastic story to their friends, and nobody believes them. Sometimes an optometrist is puzzled.”

I had finished my dinner, and leaned back in the chair. “And the salary?”

“You lead the life you want, wherever you want. Within reason, of course. And there´s a generous severance package if you ever choose to quit.”

“No monthly pay?”

“I don´t see the point. But if that´s what you wish, that´s how it´ll be done.”

It all seemed very accommodating.

“You need to think it over, seriously,” Mauro warned me. “You´ll receive special training along with the formal education we provide, but it still remains a relatively high-risk job.”

I threw a poignant glance at the ice age taking place outside. “I´ve made up my mind. Get me out of here.”

“There´s something else I have to tell you,” Mauro said cautiously. “The signal your neural mesh sends out is extremely weak, and you have to keep a satellite relay transmitter either on your person or within a hundred yards from wherever you are. The satellite relay uses technology that cannot be triangulated, but the neural mesh signal can, and there are people who are looking for it.”

“Who?”

For a moment, Mauro searched for the right words. “A partially antagonistic culture, yet part of the Guild. They are most often called the Axiom. They will consider you mentally enslaved to us once the mesh is in place.”

“But it was my choice,” I protested.

“Under duress. You´ll grow old and die unless you join us, and if it weren´t for that you´d never let us into your mind.”

I took a deep breath. “True.”

“They have a technologically evolved, quasi-religious hive mindset which has extremely strict rules about mind-to-mind connections. Yours will be an abomination from their point of view. Unfortunately the neural mesh can´t ever be removed once its there, so the only way to liberate you is to exterminate your body.”

“Not good... How often does that happen?”

“Only once, so far. We learned our lesson and took precautions.”

“Such as?”

“You´ll be surprised by how long the list is,” Mauro said. “Especially for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have to keep you from becoming a well-known member of the international gay community. I´m really sorry, but that means very low profile, and you´ll have to avoid big cities with lots of tourists who may have already met you somewhere else. And believe me, once you´ve been intensified, very few people will forget the way you look.”

Goodbye Paris and New York, then. “Is Nice too big?”

Mauro smiled. “With precautions, it would be manageable as your first city.”

I died two days later. Having gone skiing on the sea ice, a crack had opened under my skis and I´d fallen through. I had tried to save myself, there were scratches on the edge of the crack, but to no avail. In the refrozen ice of the crack, my hat and a single mitten were found.

Nine months after my fake death, I was standing in the bathroom, studying my reflection in a full-length mirror. The first part of the training, and the rest of my freshman year of high school, had taken place in a small town in the Swiss Alps called Locarno. The town was located near the northernmost tip of Lago Maggiore, which I thought was the most beautiful Alpine lake imaginable even though people said that the near by Lake Como was even more picturesque. The lake extended into Italian territory in the south, and the people of the Canton Ticino spoke Italian. The large country house where I was staying had a magnificent view high over the river valley, and even though it was about five miles away from the town center I could easily take a local train which tenaciously - and punctually - climbed up and down the steep Alpine slopes. I´d been home schooled, of course. I couldn´t have friends during the first part of my training, and most of all, during the physical changes that had been taking place since my arrival in Switzerland.

The doctor, or Engineer as he jokingly liked to call himself, had just declared his job finished. And there it was in the mirror, the new me. I still looked like myself, I hadn´t been turned into someone else, but the results were quite shocking just the same. Despite my initial pleas, I´d allowed my height to be left untouched because Engineer wanted to underline my apparent age. I was still just 5´6”, but my lean swimmer´s build had been pumped up to make me look like a champion gymnast with narrow hips and wide, round shoulders. The abs were there, and the biceps, and the pecs and the legs, and the best ass I´d ever seen on anyone. The whole package, perfectly proportioned. And then there was the hair, like Mauro had promised. Thick and glossy, with large angelic curls, cut short on the sides and the back. But the most remarkable yet subtle changes had taken place in my face.

Everything was somehow more geometrical, my jawline, cheekbones, and even my eyes. Their color was lighter and more intense blue than it had been, almost as if there was a light shining through, and the lashes were definitely longer and darker. The lips were full and curved, and my mouth looked a little bit wider. And yet, somehow, there was more going on than these barely visible changes. I was – I couldn´t find a word – mesmerizing. I had to laugh at myself. Was I going to fall in love with my own image like that silly Narcissus? But now that Engineer had finished with his genetic tinkering, I could clearly see why my predecessor had died on the job. These people knew their way around human DNA.

Naturally, I had also asked for a bigger dick. Engineer had complied: it wasn´t as big as Mauro´s, but then, that would have looked ridiculous on a small kid like me. Even so, the size was just a little bit freakish in proportion to my body, and it would undoubtedly drop jaws at locker rooms and showers. Not to mention how difficult it would be to manage to stuff it into a speedo.

All in all, I had to admit that apart from the height I couldn´t have been more pleased with the outcome. And the time had come to test it. I´d been assigned to visit the town this afternoon without my usual array of sunglasses, caps and baggy clothes. It was September, and the weather was still quite nice. I´d be wearing just a pair of shorts and a well-fitting t-shirt, and as some degree of trouble was expected I´d be discreetly followed by “someone” to make sure I was all right. Not that I´d be alone in any case; in addition to the visible changes, Engineer had tested the neural mesh and found it completed. The relay transmitter was hanging around my neck in a chain, appropriately enough, and it looked like an ancient Roman coin. The semblance was perfect, but as soon as one picked it up the weight supposedly revealed that it was just cheap plastic, prompting anyone who might casually find it to throw the thing away without a second thought.

I could never get used to the view when I walked down the road to the train station. The house was located high enough for me to see all the way to the lakeshore town, across the long river valley between mountains that were mostly covered by lush green vegetation and only occasionally showing the rock beneath where the slopes were at their steepest. The late afternoon sun was hanging low and warm over the mountains, and there was but a scattering of white clouds in the sky. I reached the station and as punctually as ever the train arrived within five minutes. I found a seat, and only then glanced around the almost empty carriage. There were two teenage girls who quickly turned away when I noticed them staring. One of them threw a second glance over her shoulder, and hunched closer to her friend to say something, and they giggled.

Great, I thought to myself. My giggle-inducing powers have been multiplied. However, I was aware that the thought wasn´t entirely spontaneous, but intended as a self-deprecating remark for the people who were following my progress as I couldn´t suppress a small twinge of satisfaction at the girls´ reaction. It would take a long time to forget that I was no longer alone in my head.

I decided I wanted a panino and a coke at one of the lakefront bars, and then I´d go to see a movie if I felt like it. I got off the train at the small central station and walked towards the lake, keeping my eyes to the ground. Then I heard laughter and looking up saw a group of four boys a few yards ahead, all of them about seventeen or eighteen years old. They were staring at me, and none of them looked away as I walked closer. Instead, all of them made eye contact as if to challenge me.

Just as I walked by one of them said, amused, “Carina la bimba!”

I resisted the urge to turn back and smack his face for having called me a “pretty baby girl”. It had been half a compliment and half a tease, and if I knew anything about Italian boys – well, technically they were Swiss – they had just let me know that they´d be willing to have their dicks sucked all evening long. My own reacted immediately to the thought, as if my bulge wasn´t fairly obvious as it was, and I walked a little faster to get away from imminent embarrassment. However, overcome by curiosity, I glanced back at them after a moment and saw that the group was lazily sauntering down the street after me. This was starting to get pretty weird, right away. I had expected to maybe have some girls following me, had I flirted a little first, but four straight guys was – weird. For the first time I thought that maybe I´d gotten more than I´d bargained for. Now I noticed that all the passers-by were looking at me, a few of them quickly, the great majority allowing their gaze to linger, but almost no one was too preoccupied with their own affairs not to note the blond foreign kid.

I reached my favorite bar and found a seat at an empty table outside, despite there being quite a few people enjoying aperitivo already. Locarno prided itself for being the warmest town in Switzerland, and after a summer spent there it didn´t come as a surprise. Masses of subtropical flowers were blooming everywhere, and there were even palm trees, in Switzerland, who would have thought? The waiter brought me my panino and a coke, and I tried to focus on them even though I couldn´t deny I was getting more and more nervous by the minute. People were staring at me. I´d been used to getting a regular amount of attention, and this was not it. The banker – he couldn´t have been anything else – kept trying to make eye contact, and pretty much everyone else seemingly couldn´t help glancing regularly at my direction. At any given moment, at least one or two people were staring at me, and it gave me the uncomfortable feeling of being constantly under a spotlight, or on stage. It was maddening. After a few minutes I figured out the pattern: I was just a slight distraction to women over eighteen, but teenage girls were prone to bouts of giggling, and all the men past puberty were slightly puzzled and perhaps even annoyed by the way they found themselves repeatedly throwing a glance at me. Apart from the banker, of course, who obviously knew quite well why he liked what he saw. I wondered if Engineer might be offended if I asked him to undo some of his work. But then, this was what being a ´Rep´ was all about. I couldn´t wait to get to the dark movie house and away from the staring people.

The sun had slipped behind the mountains and the evening had arrived. I walked around the town center to check out the movie theaters, and my choice boiled down to either 2001: Space Odyssey or Rosemary´s Baby. Slightly unsettling choices both, under the circumstances. I went for 2001, and when I emerged from the theater almost three hours later the town had quieted down for the night. I supposed there were still people at the lakefront bars, but decided to take the shortest way to the nearby train station. I hadn´t walked more than twenty meters when I saw the familiar group of four boys coming from the lakefront direction. They noticed me too, and after quickly conferring among themselves crossed the road with a clear intention to intercept me at the next street corner.

“Ciao, come stai? Dove stai andando?” asked the one I immediately dubbed Romeo.

I did speak halting Italian even though the main language up at the house was English, but decided this was not the moment to display my talents.

“Sorry, my Italian is really bad,” I answered.

“Where, go?”

“Home, hurry and hungry,” I lied.

“Where live? No tourist?” Romeo´s taller friend asked.

Damn. Now I would have to explain. I pointed up towards the mountains, but they didn´t seem very interested in my answer. I was now surrounded by the foursome, and starting to feel uncomfortable. All four of them were quite good-looking and no strangers to sports, and suddenly I was no longer sure how this was going to end.

“Alessandro´s family not home,” Romeo said, pointing at his tall friend. “We go there. You come too.”

I shook my head. “Hungry.”

“We make you eat,” Alessandro said, and the others chuckled.

“No, really. I must go.”

Romeo gave me a crafty smile. “We know you want.”

He lay his hand on my shoulder, and my dick was suddenly swelling against my underwear. I shook my head again, and his hand slipped from my shoulder to my arm and took a gentle hold of my tricep.

“Come. It´s near.”

Like hell was I going to suck off four guys in a row, on my very first day on the job, no matter how good-looking they were and even when I suspected that my employers would place high scientific value on the observations. My dick was clearly siding with the scientists, but I wasn´t going to do it just the same. The group had surrounded me and now they were herding me into a short side street with very little in the way of lighting. As soon as we were away from the bright lights I felt a hand drop down and feel up my asscheek. Someone else´s hand followed suit instantly. These guys weren´t going to settle for mere blow jobs any longer, and I still hadn´t figured out a way to extricate myself without making a scene.

“Cazzo che bel culo,” one of them muttered, appraising my ass, and that was it.

I jammed my elbow into his diaphragm, and the heel of my shoe on someone else´s shin. Two yelps of pain followed, and I yanked myself free and sort of trotted back towards safety as my pride didn´t allow me to break into actual run. Within seconds, however, I heard them coming after me, and I quickly ditched my pride and sprinted back into the wide street. I turned the corner, running, and found myself right in the headlights of an approaching police car. I instantly slowed down to a walk, but they had already seen me and the flickering blue lights came on as the car came to a halt. A policeman stepped out from the passenger´s seat, and a moment later the driver was outside too, standing behind the car.

“C´é qualche problema?” the policeman next to me asked.

The evening was turning out to be a total fuck-up. During the training, three rules that stood above everything else had been driven into my brain: avoid police, avoid doctors, and don´t tell anyone about yourself.

“My Italian is very bad,” I said, gave them my brightest smile, and started towards the station.

“Wait,” the policeman standing closer to me said, and I had to stop and turn back to them.

Both of them were watching me very closely, and I noticed that their eyes lingered around my groin. I realized that I was still sporting a quite visible semi-erection. I tucked my hands into my pockets to make it less visible, and realized that the driver bore a striking resemblance to Alessandro from the group of four. They had the same Greek nose, and he was in his late thirties, the right age to be Alessandro´s father. The other policeman was quite handsome as well in his police uniform, with a shock of unruly dark hair pushing out from under his cap and a stubble that probably was frowned upon at the station.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Um, well, there were these kids who were sort of harassing me,” I answered with a shrug. “Nothing serious.”

The policeman with the stubble translated, and after exchanging an inscrutable look with his colleague he stepped forward and took a long hard look at the side street. Of course, the group was long gone.

“Ma sará un culatone?” the driver asked.

Culatone was one of the Italian words for gay. I pretended I hadn´t understood.

“Sicuramente é piú bello di tante ragazze,” his colleague answered and turned back to me. “Where are you from? Are you staying in Locarno?”

So he thought I was prettier than most girls, which was a nice compliment, but it certainly didn´t help me to calm down. Experienced policemen, they had naturally figured out that something wasn´t quite right and I could only hope that they thought it was the apparent teen-gay-hormones angle of the story that was making me nervous.

I gave him the address of the house, and the driver said, somewhat disapprovingly, “Ah, la casa degli stranieri.”

I thought that was going to be it, but the stubbled policeman launched into a series of questions. A night patrol in a town as wealthy, clean and law-abiding as Locarno probably wasn´t too exciting and I imagined they were doing their best to kill some time with this minor mystery. The questions, however, had very little to do with the aggression and quite a lot with me as a person. I fed them my cover story about the student exchange program for kids without parents, hoping that I wasn´t messing up the details. I could tell they weren´t totally convinced.

“Why were you in the movies alone? Where were your friends?”

“I don´t really know many people here,” I answered, puzzled by the turn of the questioning.

“Not even a girlfriend?”

I felt my face flash red. “No.”

“A blond kid like you? Strange.”

What was he getting at with these questions? My dick seemed to be smarter than me, as there was a sudden definite stirring in my underwear.

Then, right out of the blue, the driver said, “Lo portiamo da qualche parte?”

This time it took all my willpower not to turn and stare at him. I couldn´t believe they were actually discussing about ´taking me someplace´.

The stubbled one opened the back door of the car and said, “Get in the car, please.”

“But-”

“Please.” His voice made it clear there would be trouble if I didn´t obey.

I climbed into the car, frantically trying to figure out something to say to stop them, but the door slammed closed before I came up with anything. There was no door handle on the inside. Damn... Here I was, my first night out, and already sitting at the back of a police car, not knowing if they were going to take me to a station and, who knew, maybe somehow find out that I was supposed to be dead. Either that, or some secluded mountain road. It soon became clear that it wasn´t going to be the police station, as the car first turned towards the river and then took the road to the mountains. I sat in the back seat, arms folded across my chest, wondering what they were planning to do with me. Would I be forced just to suck their cocks, or would I find myself bent over the hood of the car, two uniformed policemen taking turns fucking me? And should I tell them I was still, somewhat embarrassingly, a virgin? Would that deter them, or only excite them more? I suspected the latter. One moment I was so nervous and scared that I thought I´d fall flat on my face if I was asked to get out of the car, and the next so horny that I just knew I´d be right there on my knees as soon as they opened the door, begging for it. My dick was so hard that it was aching inside my trousers, and the bulge would have been instantly visible if one of them had looked over his shoulder. I was so tense that when I dropped my hands to at least try to cover the bulge my arms almost refused to obey. The men were discussing something, presumably my fate, but their Italian was too fast for me to follow and even though I picked up a word from here and there I had no real idea of what they were saying.

The road gradually climbed higher and higher. The men had stopped talking, having reached an agreement, and when the car stopped at the beginning of the long driveway to my house instead of passing by and taking us to somewhere more remote I was at first flabbergasted and then, suddenly, crushingly disappointed.

“Would you like us to have a chat with your wardens?” the stubbled policeman asked, turning back to look at me.

He couldn´t help noticing my hard-on, and threw a sidelong glance at his colleague as if to say they´d made the wrong decision.

I shook my head. “No, but thank you.”

For a moment, I just sat there, not realizing that I´d been dismissed. Then I made a move as if to get out of the car, and the stubbled policeman stepped out to open the door for me. Standing up, my bulge was even more obvious.

I looked at him, flustered, but he was back in his professional mode and only said, “Have a nice evening,” and added with just a touch of paternal feeling, “Don´t forget to be careful.”

He got back into the car, and they were gone. I stood there at the roadside, feeling like an idiot. Maybe I should have stayed in the car just a little longer, to see what would happen, but it was too late now. I cursed at myself for being so stupid; sexually abused by two uniformed Swiss policemen would have been a great first time story to tell for the rest of my life.

I would have waited for a moment to allow my erection to subside, but the headlights of another car were approaching. I retreated and started along the driveway, but instead of passing by the car turned into the driveway as well and came to a halt next to me. I looked inside, and saw a familiar face.

“Mauro – what are you doing here?” I asked goggle-eyed as he pushed the car door open for me.

“I´ve been following you all night,” he answered with that smug smile of his. “You could have picked a shorter movie, but otherwise I´d call the evening a success. More than one doctoral thesis will be written about the emotional stress reactions you went through tonight.”

“Um... that...”

“You´ve given us some great visuals, and your own signals have been peaking like crazy all night,” he said as I climbed into the car. “If there were pay hikes in our business, I´d get a big one for finding you.”

“Glad to hear that.” I still had mixed feelings about the people in my head. “Is everything on track with the school? That´s why you´re here, right?”

“Everything´s ready in Nice, and I´ll be there with you to make sure the transition goes smoothly.”

“Excellent,” I said, getting excited.

The French Riviera, for the next three years. I turned to Mauro to let him know how pleased I was, but there was something about his expression that stopped me.

“What´s going on?” I asked.

“We have some new intelligence,” he said with a scowl. “The Axiom. They have figured out a way to use your neural mesh as a receiver.”

The concept was logical, as the mesh extensions into my arms and legs already worked as a transmitter, but it didn´t sound good. Not at all.

“Now, don´t freak out,” Mauro tried to calm me when he saw my expression. “The mesh was never designed for that, so they need a gigantic signal strength to get through. We pick that up, instantly and anywhere. Planet-wide. That means they can only use it in specific situations for a very limited time.”

I was afraid to ask. “What does it do, exactly?”

“Not much. No mind control involved. All it can do is debilitate you for the duration of the EM pulse because it´s quite painful.”

I could live with that, sort of.

“The range the device can affect you is only five meters,” Mauro added. “They have to limit the strength because the pulse kills all electrical systems near by, and if it were any stronger it would take out any planes flying overhead, all the pace-makers in town, you get the picture.”

I thought about it for a moment. “What happens if you pick up a pulse?”

“We´ll be there in thirty minutes, at most in one and half hours.”

“Anywhere on the planet?”

“Yes.”

That strongly hinted at a some type of permanent orbital capacity. However, a lot of things could happen in an hour and a half; basically, what this meant was that I´d be done for if the Axiom ever found me.

“This has nothing to do with what happened to my predecessor?” I wanted to make sure.

Mauro shook his head. “No. This is new.”

Main topics had been covered, and he started the car. Once he had parked the car next to the two Land Rovers and the Jaguar in front of the house, he turned to me.

“Now don´t you worry. Nothing´s changed, really. We´ll make sure they can´t get to you in any case.”

Mauro had kept his word. I´d lived around the world in numerous places, always keeping low profile, always in small or medium-sized towns to avoid bumping into someone in New York I´d had sex with ten years earlier in Madrid. Both New York and Madrid were high in my list of desirable towns, but they were just too hazardous, and I knew I would never be allowed to live in them. The only exception had been Sydney, as it was so far away from everything, but even so Australia would still be off-limits for me for the next forty years. Nice had been large enough to earn me a ban from France for decades as well.

I opened the windows to Alex´s patio, and studied the beautiful spider-infested garden and the clear blue skies. I smelled the ocean in the breeze. It would be forty years before I could even start planning my return. Alex would be almost seventy, and even then I´d have to make sure I never ran into him again.

I heard his car enter the driveway, and with a sudden certainty I knew I was going to tell him everything.

It had been madness to think I could go through this, to break us up with yet another lie, and just walk away. The reasons for not telling anyone were running through my mind like the last straws one grasps at, all the figures and projections that had been rammed into my memory. If the biotechnologies that had gone into making me were turned loose in the world, the results would be utterly catastrophic. Could one trust humanity with an easily constructable virus that could wipe out, say, everyone with black skin, or blue eyes? Or people with a genetically inherited sexual orientation? The answer was self-evident. If, by miracle, all the fanatics and petty dictators held back, just one single crazed microbiologist would do. Presently, the most reliable Guild AI projections gave a 98 per cent chance for genocide involving more than one billion people in the next ten years if advanced biotechnologies were to become widespread.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, I muttered to myself as I paced back and forth across the living room. Could I trust him? Would he sneak a sample of my DNA to a big pharmaceutical company in exchange for a million bucks? And if he wouldn´t do it now, what if we broke up later? I heard Alex slam the car door outside. He´d be inside within seconds. I would have to make the decision right here, right now. I heard his keys click into the back door, and I grabbed the framed photo of the two of us in front of the Sydney opera house and raced to the hall. There was a creak as Alex pulled the weather-beaten kitchen door open, and careful not to make any noise I clicked the front door shut behind me and ran.

Le Cinque Terre, Italy

2009-06-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

Present day

Patiently, the taxi zigzagged up the narrow road that tenaciously clung to a steep wall of craggy rock rising straight from the Mediterranean Sea. The mountain wall was scattered with sea pines and occasional bursts of greenery, and even a few flowers even though it was the second week of December. The flowers were hardly at their best today, as a winter storm was approaching from the sea and the first gusts of wind and rain were already spraying the windshield of the car so badly that I wondered if the driver would be able to keep us from plunging down into the rocks far below. Eventually we reached the house, I paid the driver and got out of the car. I was back home.

The old, ochre stone house was small, with just a living room, kitchen and one bedroom, but it had a disproportionately large terrace with a magnificent view over the sea and the sliver of a beach far below the house. In the summer, the terrace was my absolutely favorite place in the world, with vines from the overhanging trellis casting green dappled shade over an old but comfortable divan that had come with the house, and a table and two chairs I´d found in a second hand shop. There was also a hammock for reading, but the view usually distracted me until I just grew drowsy and eventually fell asleep in the summer sea breeze. Today, I had no time to check out the view as the storm completely drenched me during the short dash across the terrace to the double glass doors of the living room. I had left for Rome just two days ago, on Friday, but the house was already as cold as if it were uninhabited, and I wished that the slightly bent old wooden frames had provided a little more insulation against the elements I forced the creaking doors closed. The bulky semi-portable heating and air conditioning unit in the corner of the living room would however warm the house up in fifteen minutes, and I switched it on as the very first thing. Then I dragged my suitcase to the bedroom, got rid of my wet clothes and pulled on a pair of baggy jeans and a warm sweater. Once I was no longer in danger of catching pneumonia – not that I could actually catch anything, with my enhanced immune system – it was time for a large cup of hot chocolate. I took the steaming cup to the couch facing the terrace glass doors and settled down to watch the storm and wait for the house to warm up. All the shutters were now rattling like crazy in the wind, and the roar of the deluge hitting the roof would have made conversation impossible. I loved my house.

My well-planned week in Rome had turned into an utter disaster on the very second day. I didn´t visit big cities very often, no matter how much I´d have liked to, but I´d been cooped up in the Italian Riviera for most of the autumn and winter without a boyfriend and thought I deserved a few days in a big city with all the gay bars and possibilities for fast and easy sex. And even though Rome was not completely without its risks, it wasn´t like London or New York where one was bound to run into people met everywhere else in the world. Even in Rome there was the danger of my neural mesh setting off passive Axiom detectors that they habitually inserted in major traffic hubs like airports and main railway stations, but as long as I used local trains and switched into a taxi far in the suburbs I would be all right. The Guild would naturally do a preventive security sweep if I asked, but a disabled detector was pretty much as telling as my mesh signal.

The getaway had started great: thanks to a strikingly handsome Sicilian waiter from the hotel restaurant who visited my room after his shift was over I didn´t even have to go out to bars. The handsome Sicilian joined me for a late night walk to revisit the Colosseum and to wander by the Roman Forum to the tacky yet stunningly monumental Altare della Patria built by the crazed Mussolini, and as we slowly sauntered by the Forum he pointed out various features that I would never have recognized without a guide. As I stared down at the historical area – the modern city is built far above the ancient ground level – I couldn´t help wondering about all the people who had been right there, under my eyes: Julius Caesar, Hadrian and his famously beautiful yet doomed lover Antinous who had later been drowned in the Nile, and hadn´t even Cleopatra herself passed through the Forum during her famous visit to Rome? The Sicilian laughed at my bug-eyed expression, and herded me along because he was getting cold.

On Saturday, I had to get up early to make sure I could spend as much time as possible in the Vatican Museums. I was at the famously long ticket line before 9a.m. and discovered that on rainy winter Saturdays one could get in after waiting just a few minutes. My favorite part was always the Pio Clementino Museum, with Laokoon, Hercules and the Belvedere Apollo, in front of whom the pious Vatican staff had once shockingly discovered none other than Michelangelo jerking off, “publicly aroused in defilement”. When I emerged from the Museums in the afternoon a warm front originating all the way from Sahara had rolled over the city, and the sky was clear and the wind surprisingly warm. I pulled off my sweater and headed for the hotel for a nap and dinner before going out later in the evening with the Sicilian.

He took me to a club called Dungeon which had opened only a few months earlier, in the picturesque Trastevere neighborhood. However, just as I had suspected, very few people were following the intended dress code as only those with the very latest in fashion accoutrements were actively shunned by the doormen. Italy was just too sunny a place to cultivate a large enough leather and SM community to fill a good-sized club. There were several interconnected, low-ceilinged rooms with bars, and one of them also functioned as a dance floor. The staff would most likely kick me out well before midnight as my present passport stated my age a few months short of eighteen, and even that was already looking like a forgery.

The place was popular as a first stop of the evening, and it filled out quickly. I was having excellent time with my Sicilian even though he kept introducing me to his friends, which was never a good idea: they´d remember me for a long time. However, I didn´t mind him being unable to keep his hands off me as I was already planning to invite him for a weekend in Le Cinque Terre. I finished my Pepsi – the bartenders refused the give me anything alcoholic – and went to get another in the least crowded of the bars. When I got back the Sicilian threw his arm around my shoulder and gave me a kiss before continuing an animated discussion with his friends. They were speaking Italian too fast for me to follow, and I let my eyes wander around the room.

Something was wrong. Suddenly my heart was beating too fast, and my fingers were tingling. Surprised by the strong and seemingly irrational adrenaline shock I scanned the crowd, but everything seemed to be all right. The Sicilian must have felt me tense up as he threw a quick glance at me before resuming the conversation. Then someone about ten yards away moved sideways, and I saw him. My heart rate picked up in earnest.

He was now in his late thirties, with a military style short haircut and a stubble, and he was toying with that thin line between someone very muscular and an actual bodybuilder. There was a tattoo on the side of his neck. He was wearing a simple t-shirt and a pair of jeans, and when I remembered what he was carrying between those thickly muscled legs the pit of my stomach felt as if I´d suddenly fallen off a cliff. He had turned himself into the kind of guy I jerked off to on the net when I´d been in the house alone for too long. Not that I´d ever been objective when it came to Alex, but I thought he had to be one of the most handsome men I´d ever seen.

Then it happened; as if from nowhere, the old feelings that I´d had for him were back, like a firebomb shattering and exploding inside of me. I was burning as if I´d last seen him in Sydney just yesterday, and I wanted his big arms around me like I´d never wanted anything else in my life.

I was vaguely aware that the Sicilian was looking at me when Alex felt my stare and turned towards me. He recognized me instantly, and for a split second there was an immense joy in his eyes, but just as soon it was followed by a moment of confusion and the realization that something was horribly wrong. Then he understood what it was and his face turned to stone. What he was seeing was inconceivable, it was impossible. It was wrong.

He got over it, if only for the time being, with a remarkable show of cold blood. Then, like in the old days, we clicked together like two pieces of a puzzle and just by looking at me he knew exactly what I was feeling. But instead of a hint of a smile, or a nod, or stepping over to me, he just stood still. His friends, disconcerted, were starting to turn to follow his gaze, and the Sicilian was saying something but I didn´t understand the words. Then, with a shock, I recognized the emotion in Alex´s face. It was hate, slowly but inexorably growing behind his eyes. The full extent of all the lies I´d told him was finally catching up with me.

My training kicked in. There was only one thing to do in a situation like this: run. Now.

I took a step back, breaking away from the Sicilian´s hold over my shoulder, and just as I turned my back I saw Alex spring into action. He stepped forward, an arm reaching out to grab me. Our relationship had been stormy but he´d never hurt me; now that had changed. He´d turn me into bloody pulp if he caught me.

For once, I was glad I was so small. I could cut through the crowd faster than anyone else, let alone someone as big and wide-shouldered as Alex had become, and I was already running up the stairs to the exit when I heard the first cries of protest from people Alex was roughly pushing aside. As I reached the top of the stairs I heard him shout my name, obviously a name that wasn´t really mine, and I was out of the club, abandoning my jacket in the cloakroom. Grateful that the club was in the Trastevere district, a Medieval maze of cobblestone streets, I was out of sight from the club exit within seconds. I needed to catch a taxi as soon as possible and check out from the hotel before Alex had time to return to the club and interrogate the Sicilian about where I was staying.

Furious at my own weakness, I burst into tears at the back seat of the taxi. The driver threw a couple of glances at me through the rearview mirror, but said nothing. I got to the hotel, crammed my things into the suitcase and checked out, knowing that the first local train wouldn´t leave until 6a.m. from the suburban station I used when visiting Rome. For an hour I tried to find a vacant hotel room, dragging my suitcase along, but with no success. In the end I gave up and took a taxi to the suburbs, and spent the rest of the cold night waiting at the station, on a bench in the platform, huddled in all the warm clothes I could scare up from my suitcase.

While I was waiting, Mauro called me.

“I heard what happened,” he said.

“What do we do now?” I asked. “Do I have to leave Italy?”

“Alex has a ticket reservation back to Sydney the day after tomorrow, and I doubt he´s going to tell anyone what really happened. He knows no one would believe him. So, unless the Sicilian knows where you live and told Alex, you´re safe.”

Hearing that Alex was flying back the day after tomorrow didn´t make me feel any better.

“We´re OK,” I said. “I didn´t tell the Sicilian about Le Cinque Terre.”

“What´s wrong?” Mauro asked.

“It´s really cold in here,” I answered, trying not to make my teeth chatter.

“I´m sorry I can´t help you with that,” he said. “But you´ll be back home tomorrow. It´ll be all right.”

It was the longest and coldest night of my life, despite all the long winters I´d lived through back home in Sweden. The thought gave me a lopsided smile, “back home in Sweden”... How many decades would I have to live all over the world, never revisiting my native country, before I stopped thinking of Sweden as “home”? There wasn´t any actual place there I could consider home, and yet the thought persisted.

However, Le Cinque Terre was my present home now, and I wouldn´t have to leave for another year. I still had one long summer ahead of me in my favorite place in the world, and then I would go to Osaka for a year. Mauro and his boss were still mulling my proposal over, big cities being banned and all, but I thought that after running into Alex they might be glad to send me to some faraway place for as long as possible. I finished my hot chocolate, and switched my sweater into a more comfortable t-shirt now that the heater unit had warmed up the house. The storm was reaching its full power, and I sat back in the couch and watched the show. There were even a few lightning strikes despite the late season. As soon as the rain stopped I would wrap myself into a blanket and go to the terrace to watch huge waves hitting the beach down below. One day, eroding rock would collapse my house into the sea, but with luck it would be another thousand years before that happened. At least I hoped so.

The framed photo was hidden in a cupboard in the bedroom. I shouldn´t have kept it, as it was the only thing I carried along that could pin me on a certain place and time in the past, but nowadays I could explain it as a Photoshop job. I dug it out and decided to keep it on a living room bookshelf for a few days since no one was going to enter the house anyway. The colors were already faded, and there was a crack in the corner of the frame, but the smiles were still the same. We´d been so happy that day. Alex looked better nowadays, though, with his short hair and that tattoo and the muscles... I noticed that my hands were shaking a bit, and set the photo down. It was so easy to think that it had been a mistake not to tell him, but then, who could really know? He´d always had a bit of a temper, and looking back I found it totally plausible that he might have sold me out after a bad break-up. You just never knew with people.

The scooter made deafening noise as it dealt with the steep tight hairpin curves on the way up to the house. My own scooter, which was about twenty years younger that this museum piece, was being repaired in Vernazza but luckily the mechanic´s cousin had rented me his old one for a few days. Whenever I ran into the cousin in town without his girlfriend he was all smiles and full of questions, many of them about my ever-absent family and how I was getting on always all alone, and he´d told me more than once that if I needed any work done on the house he was very good at ”fixing things”. His girlfriend studied in Pisa and spent only weekends in Vernazza, and more than once I´d been tempted to invite him over with the excuse of the creaky terrace doors. He´d been down on the beach today with two of his friends, and so he´d played it cool, but we both knew that one of these days he´d show up on my doorstep with a perfectly plausible cover story if I didn´t invite him there myself first.

It felt good to be flirting and having fun again. Ever since my disastrous trip to Rome I´d been doing pretty much nothing but moping around the house, watching the winter turn to spring and then to early summer. I refused to believe it was just Alex; there had been something more to it, a pause for reflection, or a bout of depression or whatever. Even though I had played with the idea, I had never seriously considered leaving the job as the benefits were just too good. Of course I could quit any moment I wanted to, but then all the tinkering they´d done with my DNA would have to be removed as they would no longer be keeping an eye on me and making sure I didn´t have an accident and end up in a hospital where staff might figure out that something weird was going on.

I parked the scooter, took off my backpack and walked to the edge of the terrace to have a quick look at the beach down below. The cousin and his friends were gone, too. I was hungry and thirsty after the beach and decided I would prepare an enormous feta cheese and green salad and wash it down with a gallon of Dr. Pepper. Trying to remember what exactly I had in the fridge, I unlocked the terrace doors and stepped in.

Someone had been in the house. I stopped dead on my tracks, and listened to any telltale sounds that someone might still be in the kitchen or in the bedroom. There was no immediate visible sign of a visitor; everything was where it was supposed to be, but some kind of animal instinct knew otherwise. Maybe it was just a trace of an unknown scent in the air, maybe things had been moved only a fraction of an inch, but I knew. Slowly, I stepped forward and looked into the kitchen. There was no one, which left the bedroom as the only possible hiding place. I picked up a knife from the kitchen table, and only feeling more wobbly for it, circled the living room to gain a view into the bedroom. No one was there either.

I stood still, heart still thumping, and checked out every detail. Nothing was out of place. I walked around the house and double-checked. Even though I kept my house tidy, I wasn´t the most conscientious duster and in the end I did find that something had been moved. It was the framed photo on the bookshelf. Someone had picked it up and then set it down, without noticing that he´d misplaced it just a little, leaving a telltale sign in the dust behind the frame.

Far from conclusive, the evidence certainly didn´t warrant a call to Mauro. Or did it? Someone had been snooping in my house. I couldn´t count on the judgment of whoever was receiving the signal from my mesh as I suspected I´d been relegated under the watchful eye of an automated program. No one in their right mind would be following live feed from me, as Jonatan moping around the house surely rated far less than D- on the interest scale of anyone.

Tonight, I´d ride the scooter to Vernazza and talk to the cousin about replacing the lock on the terrace doors. Until then, there was nothing else to do but get on with my early dinner.

The cousin, however, had taken a train to Pisa and wasn´t coming back until the day after tomorrow. The mechanic was visibly upset with the thought of an intruder in my place and offered to come and fix the doors right away, but it was already late and I adamantly refused to bother him. I´d be careful, and his cousin could come and have a look whenever he got back from Pisa. For the next two nights, I kept the terrace lights on and made sure that no one could get into the house without waking me up in the process. Then, as arranged, I met the cousin on the beach two days later. He was with his friends again, but this time there was a legitimate topic of discussion and I was invited to sit down with them to tell about the intrusion. It was all very business-like, and he told me he´d be over at my place at 6p.m. which would leave him plenty of time – he added off-handedly – to get back to his parents for the dinner. That was when his two friends exchanged a look, and I left hurriedly before they noticed that my face was turning red.

I started getting hunger pangs around 5:30 and left the beach after a quick ´see you later´ to the cousin and his friends. The earsplitting but otherwise reliable scooter took me home, and when I turned the last hairpin curve I saw that there was a Rent-A-Van parked in front of the house. I got off the scooter and stared at the van for a moment. This was not good. I hadn´t heard from Mauro, which meant that my situation hadn´t been red-flagged, and as I couldn´t be sure that someone was watching live feed I considered calling him before going in. On second thought, my adrenaline level was so high that even the dullest of programs would be alerting someone to see what was going on. Calling Mauro would make little difference, and it would only make me look like a wimp if there was an innocuous explanation for the van. When it crossed my mind that I could get back on the scooter and drive away a sudden anger washed over me. Someone was in my house, what the hell were they thinking! And besides, if this was the worst case scenario, my mesh was transmitting a hundred-meter-radius advertisement about my presence and I could hardly get away in any case. Most of my training had gone into how to avoid the Axiom and very little into what to do if they did track me down. Basically, all I could do was to count minutes and hope the cavalry didn´t arrive too late.

I took a deep breath and walked into the terrace. The doors were open. The living room appeared dark compared to the sunlight out in the terrace, but I could tell someone was sitting in the couch. I took the last two steps and recognized him, even in the relatively dim light of the room. It was Alex.

I was about to say something witty or snappy or whatever, but my throat just closed up. I merely stood there, watching the familiar face with the new body, and he didn´t move either. There was a protracted silence, and then he stood up and walked up to me. I stood my ground, while trying to figure out how angry he was, but there were no visible signs yet. He´d had time to think it over.

He stood in front of me for a moment, looking down at me, and then, tentatively, lifted his hand to the side of my face and ran his fingers into my thick engineered hair.

“So it´s true,” he said in the end, as if he´d started to doubt himself in the months since he´d seen me in Rome. “You look just the same.”

He wasn´t going to hit me. I had so many questions, but I knew which one would have to come first, for the record.

“How did you find me?”

“Jonatan,” he said with a humorless smile. “I know you. It was a given that you´d be living by the sea, so I´ve been combing every Italian coastal town for the last six months with one of your old photos. Hit pay dirt here in Vernazza.”

“Have you told someone?”

“Of course I have.” His voice was so controlled that I could tell he was getting angry again. “What, you wanted me to keep quiet about this? For the old time´s sake?”

“Christ, Alex... You don´t know what you´ve done,” I said, shaking my head.

“And why is that? Yeah, right. Because you never told me what the fuck is going on.”

“Listen. We have to get out of here, now.”

“Why? Aren´t your people supposed to get here in about thirty minutes?”

I felt a chill run down my spine. “How do you know about them?”

Seeing how shaken up I was, he decided to answer me.

“About a year after you disappeared two men knocked on my door,” he said, after a quick glance at the clock on the wall. “They showed me a drawing of you and asked me to call them if I ever saw you again. I would have thrown their number away but they paid me five thousand dollars just to keep the number.” He shrugged. “So I did. Then I saw you in Rome, and called them. Two of their associates came to visit me in Sydney, and we had a long chat.” He stared poignantly at my unbuttoned shirt. “That Roman coin you´re still wearing... that´s now your GPS tracker, right?”

So he didn´t know what it really was. They´d lied to him, too, but the tiny flicker in my expression had told him what he needed to know. “Alex, this is bad. Let´s go.”

He didn´t budge. “So you´re not going to tell me? The truth, for once?”

“I can´t. Not now. There´s no time.”

It had been the wrong thing to say. He´d made his mind up. “I was told to get you out of here within twenty minutes, and smash your GPS tracker before leaving.”

“You can´t...”

He had pulled a clunky, dated cell phone from his pocket. He pressed a button before I could stop him and I hit the ground instantly; it was as if thousands of large needles had instantly injected my nervous system with powerful acid. The bastards had given him the EM pulse emitter that could overwhelm my neural mesh. For an interminable second or two he kept the button down, and then my audio system let out a loud explosion of sparks and short-lived flames, immediately followed by the TV. In quick succession, the clock radio in the bedroom as well as the clock in the living room wall, microwave in the kitchen and my cell phone – in my goddamn pocket – all let out crackling sounds and then fell silent. My laptop held out the longest, but it also made the loudest sound as it exploded, cratering the table with shards of chassis. Thin but foul-smelling smoke started to fill the room.

Alex was on his knees, leaning over me. “Are you all right?”

I tried to speak but couldn´t, and my arms and legs weren´t functioning either. Luckily, I didn´t feel anything near the dead cell phone in my pocket, so it probably hadn´t burnt my leg.

“I´m sorry,” he said. “They didn´t tell me it was that bad. You´ll be all right in a couple of minutes. Don´t be afraid.”

He undid the chain around my neck, and set the Roman coin on the floor. When his heel came down on the uplink relay there was a soft crumbling sound and suddenly nothing was left of the coin but black soot. For a second Alex stared at the result, aghast. It was starting to dawn on him that maybe he hadn´t been told the whole truth by his friends either.

“What the fuck-” he muttered, and after glancing at the stopped electric clock on the wall turned back to me. “Here we go.”

He picked me up effortlessly, like a rag doll, and carried me out to the terrace. Realizing that with the commotion he had forgotten to first open the back door of the van he muttered another curse under his breath and set me down on the hammock, leaving me there to swing helplessly back and forth with my head hanging over the edge. The door only delayed him a couple of seconds, and then I was back in his arms and being hoisted into the van. There was a mattress on the floor, and two pieces of instantly recognizable equipment. Black leather wrist and ankle restraints to hog tie a person, and a bit gag. We´d fooled around with similar equipment a few times, ages ago.

“I´m really sorry about this,” he said while fastening the restraints around my wrists.

I was coming back to my senses. If I was lucky, the cousin would be here in time to stop Alex if I managed to stall him even for few minutes.

“D-don´t...” I stammered, but once the bit gag locked my mouth open nothing but unintelligible yelps came out.

Alex kneeled over me. “There are no windows, so you´ll probably get car sick. That´s the reason for the bit gag, it won´t smother you if you have to throw up. Don´t worry about it if you do, I´ll clean up the mess.” He caressed my hair for a moment. “ I´m sorry.”

Then he was gone, and the back doors slammed shut. He´d turned on the overhead light, so at least I wouldn´t be in the dark when the car started zigzagging down the road and messing with my inner ears. I heard the engine come to life, and we were moving. I was too frightened to get car sick; without my uplink relay there was no way security could follow the ultra weak signal my neural mesh was emitting. The team would be down at the house as soon as possible, and that was the sum of what they could do for me. There had been no chance to ask what the Axiom had told Alex, but then, all things considered, it wouldn´t have been too hard to make me look like a fiend. And it wasn´t as if I had never considered smashing the uplink relay myself and trying to walk into the Karolinska Institut to have my DNA extracted and studied by genome specialists, even with the predicted consequences.

It didn´t take me long to completely lose track of the direction we were going, no doubt helped by some fancy driving by Alex. I knew we weren´t on the Autostrada because the road kept going up and down, and for the endless succession of steep curves. After a while I lost track of time, too. When the car finally stopped and he opened the back door of the van sun had already slipped below the mountains and the sky was quickly turning dark blue. We were in a some kind of a rest stop, maybe in one of the inland national parks, and from my narrow point of view I could see a river valley sided by lush green mountains. It seemed that for the time being there was no one else in the parking area.

Alex was kneeling over me, and by the way he was looking at me I realized he was getting turned on. I let out an ugly gnarl and struggled to free myself, and he unfastened the bit gag.

“You fucking bastard,” I growled at him. “Listen to me, and listen to me carefully.”

I told him everything, or as much as I could fit in three minutes. At first he regarded me with a sarcastic smile, but after a while the smile started to look a little forced. Halfway through, his face went blank, and I hadn´t even finished when he was already undoing the restraints. I often liked my men big and stupid, but Alex had never been the latter.

It was too late, however. There was a glint of light down the road, behind clusters of trees, and when we turned to look we saw the headlights of a car on its way up the tight hairpin curves leading to the rest stop.

“Hurry up,” Alex said, his eyes wide. “We have to-”

“Too late,” I interrupted, and thought quickly. “They can track my mesh signal. I can´t get away. But you can.”

“I won´t leave you-”

“Shut up,” I snapped and started refastening the ankle restraints. “Listen. They will let you go as long as they think you fully believe their story. We put these back on, and you pretend we never really talked and you walk away.”

“I won´t-”

“Fuck you Alex! You got us in this mess, and you have to get us out, and this is the only way. My people will come for me,” I lied to him again, “but they´re not here yet so you´ll have to get out on your own. Put these back on!”

He fumbled with the wrist restraints, trying to find a fault in my logic. He couldn´t; he´d believed yet another one of my lies. The headlights were closer now and we´d only have a few more seconds before the car would reach the rest stop. He locked my wrists behind my back.

“Do it,” I said as he picked up the bit gag, and he followed my order.

He was still leaning over me, eyes fixed on mine, when the arriving headlights lit up the back of the van. He turned to look at the car, shielding his eyes with his hand, and the lights went out. It was an ambulance. He threw me one last glance, and climbed out of the van to greet the people stepping out from the other car. There were three of them. Each one looked like an accountant; average height, nondescript suits, receding hairlines, and two of them were wearing glasses. You´d never notice them in the street, and even after a meeting you´d struggle to remember their faces.

“Mr. Rayner,” the first one said. “The money has been transferred to your account.”

I could see Alex´s shoulders stiffen. He knew I´d heard. For a moment, he stood still, and then he nodded. The men came forward, and one of them took a syringe out of the pocket of his jacket.

“You´ll have your car back in just a moment.”

The whole scene seemed to be happening to someone else. The man climbed into the van, uncapped the syringe and injected my arm. Within seconds my muscles relaxed, but otherwise I was feeling perfectly alert. The restraints and the gag were removed, and two of them carried me into the ambulance while the third one chatted with Alex. As I was being lifted into the ambulance I caught a glimpse of him, the edges of his mouth white but otherwise focused on the man talking to him.

The moment I lost sight of Alex, my memories end.

---You can access the following chapters either by clicking on "older posts" below or through the blog archives in the sidebar---

White

2009-06-19T17:27:00.001-07:00

White.

Not harsh, gleaming white, but pleasant. Soft. I wasn´t thinking in words, though. This was merely a sensation, vague and distant like a memory once held.

Much later, I was flying inside white, sun-lit clouds. I couldn´t see the sun, but I knew I was inside a cloud so I had to be flying. Even then, words didn´t exist. It was just a vague image in my mind, flying in the clouds, even though I wasn´t sure I knew what clouds were, but it didn´t matter. It was all right.

It went on for a long time.

Every now and then I felt something strange, not pleasant, but I didn´t know what it was. Eventually, it always went away. Little by little, however, I grew worried, as it seemed that the feeling kept growing stronger whenever it came back. Then, I don´t know when, I realized that there wasn´t just one but many different unpleasant feelings, one after another. They all went away after a while, however, so I stopped worrying too much. I was in the clouds, after all.

Then, I was breathing. I didn´t like it. And it didn´t work well; the clouds were very high now, and there wasn´t enough air. I was afraid. If I went any higher, bad things would happen. I lay still, and focused on breathing, afraid.

Time passed.

The clouds slowly grew thicker, and I was less afraid when breathing became easier. Maybe I wouldn´t fly so high any more. I couldn´t be sure, though.

Gradually I realized that I had a body. I could feel it. I had two – they were called arms, I thought – and two, what, legs? The unpleasant feelings were often somewhere in the middle. And in my head. Sometimes.

More time passed.

There were times when I wasn´t in the clouds. When I returned, I knew I had been somewhere else, but I couldn´t remember anything. The return was called waking up, but from where? It was very confusing. I watched the clouds and soon I wasn´t thinking about it any longer.

At another time I woke up and realized that what I´d thought were clouds, were in fact white walls. I was flying in an airplane! It was a big airplane because the walls weren´t very close. Where was I going? I´d been flying for a long, long time, so long that I would have reached any place already. So I had to be flying for fun. I never saw anyone, though. Who was flying the plane?

I flew around the world a couple more times. That´s when I realized that I could move my eyes and look around. I´d been wrong. This wasn´t an airplane, it was a movie theater. There were three white walls, and on the fourth there was a large screen, with splashes of black and blue and white. I couldn´t figure out what movie they were showing, but it didn´t matter. Nothing much was happening; it was a very slow movie.

When nothing ever happened in the movie, I gradually understood that they weren´t playing it. They had stopped it at the very beginning where films told which studio had made the movie, except that here they´d been very careless: they´d forgotten to put the name of the studio in the picture. It was a Universal picture. I found their blunder very amusing; I felt like laughing but when I tried to do it one of the unpleasant feelings came back and I stopped.

It was such a beautiful image, though. I could watch it for hours and hours.

I slept again.

A room

2009-06-19T17:26:00.001-07:00

Sunshine woke me up. I looked around, and figured that I was in some glorified farm house: the walls were whitewashed, the dark massive beams of the roof were visible under the tilted ceiling and there was a large, empty fireplace. Girls would have loved the frilly “country” style of the furniture. I made a face, and imagined myself ripping off all the lace and cross-stitching and bric-a-brac and tossing them into the fireplace. The room would have been handsome without them. I threw aside the white frilly blankets and sheets, discovered that I was wearing nothing but white underwear and my Roman coin, and climbed down from the large mahogany bed to have a look out of the window. I was on the second floor. The sky was quite restless, with clouds and lots of ragged blue patches, and as I watched yet another cloud glided in front of the sun and raindrops started pattering against the window. The landscape was nothing but rolling green hills, no houses or roads in sight, and I thought I saw a few sheep in the distance. This place could only be Ireland.

How I´d gotten in the middle of these green pastures from Italy was a mystery, and more pressingly, I had no idea who had brought me here. Alex had sold me to the Axiom, then there had been that vague interval in the clouds and a movie theater, and now I was here. I quickly backpedaled to the clouds and the theater. Now that I was clear-headed, the only explanation for what I´d seen was having been in some kind of an orbital facility, watching the Earth through a large window or a porthole. How lame was that, having been in orbit and not remembering it? I could have kicked myself.

There was a knock on the door, and with my heart suddenly thumping I turned and said, “Please, come in.”

I was half expecting one of the Axiom accountants, but to my great relief it was none other than Mauro.

“Hi Jonatan. How are you feeling?” he asked, with a barely discernible undertone of worry.

“I´m fine. Surprisingly fine,” I answered. “Recent memories are a bit fuzzy though. How did you get me away from the Axiom?”

Mauro let out an unhappy sigh, and sat down in the only armchair in the room. I climbed back into the bed, leaning my back against the headboard, and pulled up the covers. They didn´t seem to have central heating in Ireland.

“We didn´t.”

“I don´t get it. I´m here, aren´t I?”

Mauro let out another sigh, looking unsure how to go on.

“The Axiom killed you,” he said finally. “You are in a clone body, with Jonatan´s personality and almost all of his memories.”

I let it sank in for a few seconds, and realized that somewhat surprisingly I wasn´t all that upset about the clone part. What threw me was the ´almost´. I did a quick memory scan and everything seemed to be all right. But then, I wouldn´t know about the parts that were missing, now would I?

“All your memories from between the activation of the neural mesh and the destruction of your uplink relay transmitter are perfectly intact. Everything was recorded and now has been re-coded into your brain,” Mauro explained, keeping an eye on me. “What happened-”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “I have memories about what happened after Alex smashed the coin, up until I was taken into the ambulance.”

“They are a construct, created from the most detailed account Alex could give us. I´m so sorry, Jonatan.”

So Alex had come out of the situation all right. “What happened in the ambulance?”

“We don´t know.”

I could see he wasn´t telling the whole truth. “You can do better than that.”

“We know what the procedure is, but not what actually happened, so it really makes no sense to-”

“Tell me.”

“The procedure is to anesthetize the subject and perform a vivisection to study the mesh in vivo. The subject is then terminated before the extraction.”

“You are saying I was conscious during the vivisection.”

“Yes.” Mauro let out another sigh. “I´m so sorry.”

A silence ensued. At a certain point, I thought I was going to throw up but got hold of myself in time.

“Listen, I need some fresh air. Can we go and take a walk?” I asked, and Mauro nodded.

“Sure. There are clothes in the cupboard. I´ll wait for you downstairs.”

I pulled on a pair of jeans, a thick cable-knit sweater and a windbreaker, and followed Mauro, with new questions popping into my head all the while. The rain had stopped, but another shower would catch us any moment. We started along the country road even though there was obviously nothing else to see but the gently rolling hills and a sheep or two if we were lucky.

“My memories from the time before the mesh seem to be intact, too,” I started. “How is that possible?”

“Everything that crossed your mind while you had the mesh – while you have the mesh, I really should say – was recorded, so all your most important memories are there. But if you try to remember, say, what your junior high school physics and chemistry classroom looked like, you might draw a blank.”

I tried a few things, and realized that he was telling the truth. It was starting to really hit me now that I was someone else. The real Jonatan was dead. I was nothing but a slightly imperfect copy. We trudged along the muddy road for a while.

“How long was I in orbit?”

“Cloning your body took six months, and then the real work started,” Mauro said. “A virtual model of your brain had been created, and it took almost a year and a half to rebuild your central nervous system, molecule by molecule.”

I´d been dead for two years. Or I was just two years old, depending on the point of view.

“Does Alex know?”

Mauro shook his head. “It´s your call to decide if you want to tell him or not. As of now, he thinks you´re dead.”

That served the bastard right. I would have to tell him, though.

“Where is he?”

“He took a liking to Italy during the time he spent there looking for you. He´s working for a financial institution in Milan these days.”

It seemed that another rainshower was about to hit us. “Let´s turn back, shall we?” I said.

We headed back for the thatched cottage, which looked quite nice from the outside.

“Where are we?”

“Ireland,” Mauro answered to my satisfaction. “Of course the exact location is need-to-know.”

“Of course.”

We were halfway back to the house when Mauro glanced at me and said, “We owe you. From now on, you´re retired with full benefits.”

“Full benefits?” I was surprised.

“Yes,” Mauro said. “Your DNA modifications will remain online, and no one is watching your signal any longer apart from a quasi AI program which will alert us when you get into trouble. If you get hit by a bus, we clone you again. And there will be a generous allowance.”

“That sounds nice.”'

Mauro gave me a long look. “You don´t sound too happy about it.”

“It´s just...” I started, searching for words. “I´ve been feeling useless.”

“Useless?”

“Did they tell you that I spent the last spring, well, I mean two years ago, just moping around the house?”

“No, that would have been none of my business. I only get told if you´re in real trouble.”

“It´s just that I feel like I want to do something instead of just uploading raw data. And now I won´t be doing even that any longer.”

We had reached the house, and tried to get rid of the mud in our shoes before going in.

“I´ll see what I can do,” Mauro said. “But now, let´s get some lunch.”

The cottage had a small but efficient staff, and after lunch Mauro said his goodbyes and told me he´d be back within a couple of days. In the meanwhile, I was to relax and figure things out. I´d need some time for that, he warned.

He was right. The rain was beating down hard now so there was nothing else to do but climb back to my room to discover that someone had thoughtfully built a large fire in the fireplace. Apparently, psychologists couldn´t imagine a better place for introspection than watching fire slowly burn itself out, in an isolated cottage in Irish countryside, with rain softly tapping on the roof. Once I had turned the armchair to face the fire and discovered how comfortable it was, I had to agree that the psychologists probably were right. I kept my mind wandering for a bit as there were too many things I didn´t want to think about, but eventually I would have to face them. Even though I considered myself Jonatan, I couldn´t help asking myself what the original version would have thought of me and the answer was that I wasn´t him, I was someone else. And who else would have known better what he´d have thought of me than myself? The crux of the matter was what had happened after I´d been taken into the ambulance. Who cared if a few irrelevant childhood memories were gone when no one even knew how long I´d lived after my memories ended. An hour? Two? A week, in a cellar that had been turned into a clinic? Mauro could not give me definite answers. Jonatan was dead.

Milan, Italy

2009-06-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

It was the second day of the stakeout, but I was still so excited about my first job that I hadn´t gotten bored yet. Besides, there were only two hours I had to wait each day in the café across the street from the target´s gym to see if he´d show up, and as steroid-addicted as he was the chances that he´d be there today after yesterday´s no show were better than good. I had to give Mauro high marks for the choice he´d come up with for the start of my new career. He´d returned to the cottage two days later when I already thought I couldn´t take another second of green hills, fireplaces and never-ending pitter-patter of rain. We´d gone up to my room where he threw a couple of glossy, large photos on my bed, looking rather pleased with himself. The photos had been taken through a window with a telephoto lens, and showed a handsome dark-haired man in his mid-thirties wearing gym gear that showed off a carefully sculpted and tanned body. I was intrigued, needless to say.

“Tell me.”

“Carlo Brambilla, the chairman of the European Union Science and Technology Commission,” Mauro started. “He´s on our list of the ten most important Europeans. Only two of the actual EU Prime Ministers are on the same list and neither one ranks higher than Carlo. The man himself doesn´t know how important his job is.” There was a pause. “A way to influence his decisions would be useful.”

“You mean something like pillow talk...?”

“I´m afraid I´m talking about something more blunt.”

A staff member knocked on the door, and brought us a tray crammed with tea and sandwiches. Once he was gone, Mauro turned back to me.

“I need to know something first. Do you believe that our superiors are acting in good faith?”

I didn´t have to think about it. “Yes, I do. And I´ve been working for them for a long time.”

“Even if they did something that doesn´t seem right?”

“At first sight, you mean?” I said, thinking it out. “I suppose they take a longer view to things than us.”

“This is really important,” Mauro continued, driving the point home. “If you´re not totally convinced, this job is not for you, and if you choose not to go forward obviously you´ll keep all your benefits and in time we´ll try to figure out something else for you to do.”

I didn´t hesitate. “Tell me more about the job.”

Carlo Brambilla´s black BMW entered the gym parking lot after I´d been waiting for him less than half an hour. When he got out of the car I saw him in person for the first time, and was once again surprised by the high quality of his plastic surgery. Apparent age at most 35, real age just shy of fifty, without any signs of pinched or permanently surprised looks. The same meticulous care had been applied to his body as well, and he made quite a figure walking across the parking lot to the glass doors of the gym. From a Milanese high bourgeoisie family, he was discreetly out of the closet and his sexual orientation had never been a problem during his rise in the ranks of the EU bureaucracy. I set down my Corriere della Sera and headed for the café door with my gym bag.

Outside, the late July sun was unpleasantly hot, and I hurried across the black asphalt towards the refuge of the air-conditioned gym. The access control machine read my brand new membership card and welcomed me with an approving beep, and I sauntered casually towards the locker room trying to ignore the stares. Italians weren´t afraid to gape at you just as long as they wished, and once again I was bewildered by the efficiency of all the slight enhancements that Engineer had devised for my looks. Nowhere else was this as evident as at the locker room where patently heterosexual Italian males fumbled with their shorts and shampoos as if the latest Miss Sweden had inadvertently strayed in from the showers. Some days it made me want to laugh, other days it was aggravating, but most of the time I couldn´t deny that it was a turn-on to cast men who considered themselves totally straight into agitated self-doubt.

I casually picked a locker that wasn´t too far from Carlo. His eyes had widened for a split second when he´d noticed me for the first time, and then he´d quickly turned his back. Perhaps this wasn´t going to be as easy as I´d thought. After careful consideration, I´d decided to wear something that was ticklishly retro yet sexy at the same time, which in this case meant 1970s. Very short but somewhat baggy blue nylon runner shorts with the characteristic splits in the sides, with a white jockstrap underneath, and a tight brand new tank top that ingeniously managed to show off every single muscle while underlining the V-shaped torso of a seemingly professional gymnast. The sight of the jockstrap dropped a couple of jaws in the locker room because it definitely didn´t belong to the traditional Italian wardrobe, but Carlo annoyingly insisted on remaining with his back turned. Not that it was an ugly back; perfectly proportioned and thickly muscled, tapering to narrow hips and perfectly curved buttocks. The man was a total package. I was glad Alex didn´t know about him.

The gym had previously been a three-story car dealership, and at the center of the building a spiraling ramp ran all the way up to the roof. The ramp now lined a disorienting array of cardiovascular equipment, and offered a view to all the various weight and exercise rooms. I fooled around with a treadmill until I saw Carlo leave the locker room and head up to the top of the building, which had been divided in two between a sun deck and an outdoor weights room with a canvas roof to protect the machines and clients from the elements. I waited a few minutes and followed him.

The weather was slightly too warm to be comfortable even with the light rooftop breeze, and there was no one but us in the weights area. The tricks from Engineer´s devious playbook inevitably started working their hooks into Carlo, and he was soon having hard time trying not to stare at me. I played it cool, pretending I was engrossed by the workout and oblivious to my surroundings. Nothing could have been further from the truth, and as soon as he started with the pec deck it was time for my bench press exercise. The pec deck sat facing the bench, and I felt Carlo´s eyes on me while I loaded the barbell with half the weights I could comfortably lift.

Lying on my back, I jack-knifed my legs to position my heels on the edge of the bench. Inevitably, gravity pulled at the legs of my ´70s shorts and exposed a slice of my speedo tan line and the fact that I was wearing a white jockstrap. I didn´t look at him, focused as I was on finding the right grip on the barbell – it took me quite some time – but I knew there was no way in hell he could ignore the sight. I started the exercise, and after eight reps, each slower and more laborious than the previous one, allowed the bar to settle down on my pecs.

“Uh...” I grunted. “Help, please...”

Carlo didn´t move. Now that was such bad conduct at a gym that I just couldn´t believe it. I had to repeat my plea, sounding more choked this time, before he stepped down from the pec deck and moved to help me. The reason for the delay was immediately obvious: he was sporting a massive boner in his soft cotton shorts. I had to hand it to him, he carried the potential embarrassment off with perfect poise, pretending that nothing unusual was going on as he planted his legs astride my head and helped me to lift the barbell. This time it was I who couldn´t stop staring. Mauro hadn´t mentioned that the man was hung like a horse. My own cock was quickly reacting to the sight and realizing what was happening Carlo was in no apparent hurry to move away from the bench. After a few seconds I stood up and flashed a smile up to him.

“Thanks-” I didn´t have time to finish the sentence before I saw movement at the edge of my vision. One of the instructors was climbing up the ramp.

Carlo gave me a quick nod and walked to the back of the room while I quickly sat down on the bench. My legs were feeling a little wobbly, as often happened after a particularly quick and strong hormonal stab. The pesky instructor remained upstairs for the rest of our workouts, and once I´d finished with my abs I walked by Carlo on my way back to the locker room.

“What´s your name,” I asked.

“Gianni. And yours?”

“Jens. See you downstairs?”

He nodded, and I escaped before he could see my amusement. Gianni and Jens indeed. A seasoned plutocrat, the man was used to planning ahead.

I took my time in the locker room, and was only halfway through stripping off my gear when he appeared. I got rid of my shorts and the jockstrap and grabbed a towel and soap before heading for the showers. Carlo took his place in the stall in front of mine half a minute later. We stood under the warm jets, checking each other out as there was no one else in our direct line of sight. I struggled to keep myself from getting a total erection, lost the fight at a certain point, and had to stand with my back turned for a while.

When I could turn around again, he asked, “Where are you from?”

“Sweden,” I answered truthfully. That was pretty much the only truth he was going to hear from me. “My parents moved here in December, but last month my dad, he´s an engineer, was sent to China for six months to oversee one of their hydroelectric plant construction sites. Mom went with him, but I absolutely refused to move there. The whole region doesn´t have a single English-speaking school.”

With some effort, Carlo managed to look appropriately worried. “Who´s looking after you? I mean, how old are you?”

The age of consent in Italy was sixteen. “I´m fifteen. A housekeeper comes in around noon to clean the house and prepare meals.”

He looked suspicious. “So practically you´re living on your own?”

“Scandinavian kids are independent,” I said with a shrug.

Back in the locker room, I made sure I was ready to leave before him and merely nodded a salute on my way out. Once out in the street, my hurry vanished and I wandered lazily towards the nearby subway station. As expected, the black BMW came to a halt next to me well before I reached the station.

“Where do you live?” he asked. “Can I give you a ride?”

I got into the car. “I live in that high rise in Porta Romana,” I said pointing at a skyscraper already in sight far in the distance.

“Nice,” was his comment.

“Do you want to come in for a drink or something?” I asked without wasting time.

He seemed a little taken aback by my outspokenness and said nothing for a moment, probably calculating the probabilities of getting away with bedding a jailbait. Then he glanced at me, quite serious this time.

“You´re fifteen,” he said, shaking his head.

“I thought I looked old enough in the showers,” I joked.

“Hell yes... I don´t know how I managed not to rape you right there on the shower floor,” he admitted and then thought he´d gone too far. “I was just joking.”

“Too bad,” I quipped, and he laughed.

“You´re a bad boy,” he said, playing stern. “Some discipline might do you good.”

There was a rather small fly sitting on the edge of the dashboard. I stared at it for a moment, and it took to flight and disappeared somewhere.

“You may be right,” I said.

The apartment was in one of the top floors, facing north, and the view over the city and the Alps was spectacular. I opened a bottle of white wine and we took our glasses to the balcony, but it was just too hot there and we soon returned to the living room. He set his glass down on the coffee table, drew me into his arms, and kissed me. We were both hard already, and as he pressed me against his muscular body one of his hands slid down along my back and cupped my left asscheek, while the other slipped into my hair and grabbed a fistful of blond curls. I managed to clear my head enough to quickly think ´Is the drone here with us´ and a few seconds later there was an almost inaudible buzz and the small fly settled on the coffee table for a moment before flying away again. It recorded video that was indistinguishable from a mid-range handheld video recorder of a well-known brand.

Fifteen minutes later I was wearing nothing but my tight white briefs. He was one of those people whose main interest is the ass, and he couldn´t get his hands off mine as I lay sideways on top of his legs, on my belly, on the black leather couch. The hottest ass he´d ever seen, he´d repeated several times while playing with my glutes. When he pulled my briefs down and started skillfully spanking my ass, a muted “You Could Be Mine” by Guns n Roses started playing. My cell phone.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “I have to take that. Probably my parents.”

With a groan he released me, and I went to look for my phone in the heap of clothes next to the couch. Once I´d found it, I glanced at the display.

“Hi Dad,” I answered before Mauro could say anything.

There was a moment of silence. “I just wanted to let you know that we have all the material we need. You can bail out any time you want.”

“Everything´s fine,” I said. “Listen, I´m in the middle of a pizza... Tell Mom I said hi.”

Mauro rang off, and I turned to Carlo with a sheepish grin. “Parents...”

His jailbait talking to Dad on the phone during sex had only turned him on more, if possible. “I want to see your room,” he said, stroking his huge hard-on.

Of course, I nodded.

The room had a couple of video game posters on the walls, a Star Wars fighter model hanging from the ceiling and an assortment of superhero action figures on shelves. The footage of him fucking me amongst the teenage paraphernalia would be excellent.

Pity that no one else but him would ever see it. The blackmail would be just a bluff, even though undoubtedly efficient, not only because no one had any intention of destroying his career – he was more useful where he was, after all – but also because my photo and video could never be allowed to land on tabloid sites.

I loved my new job.

Things hadn´t turned out as well as I´d wished with Alex. He was no longer under security surveillance and I had only been given his address with no further information. It was my first day in Milan and after dropping my bags in the Porta Romana apartment, stunned by the view of the setting sun over the city, I called a cab and gave the driver Alex´s address. He lived in Corso Sempione, in a rather modern 15-story condo that didn´t fit all that well among the more traditional Italian buildings. I checked the buzzer to see the number of his apartment, and when someone unlocked the entry door electronically from the courtyard I pushed the door open to see an elderly lady on her way out. She gave me the once over, and as I didn´t match her image of a hoodlum she only said, “Buona sera,” and let me in. I took the elevator to the 13^th floor and, after collecting myself, rang the doorbell.

Music filled the stairwell when the door opened, and a perfect stranger said, “Come in.”

Only then he gave me a closer look, with a slightly baffled expression. Who was this unknown foreign kid on his doorstep?

“I´m looking for Alex Rayner,” I said, trying not to appear taken aback by this undeniably good-looking stranger answering Alex´s door.

A group of people, all holding glasses, entered the hallway from a door. I was interrupting a party.

“Just a moment,” the stranger said, now starting to look somewhat suspicious, and left me at the door while he went to look for Alex.

And there he was. Wearing a pair of blue jeans and a loose white shirt, he entered the hallway and stopped dead on his tracks when he saw me. Neither of us moved or said anything. Then I thought his eyes were getting moist, and not noticing his friend´s deepening frown, he simply said, “Jonatan.”

“Yes.”

So once again, the first thing I´d said to Alex was a lie. Perhaps I was the real Jonatan, after all.

His friend cleared his throat, and when Alex still didn´t react, asked with less than perfect tact, “Who is he?”

Alex snapped out of his shock, and introduced us. I was a `friend´, and Fulvio was presented to me as his boyfriend. Fulvio had the regular Italian good looks, dark hair, handsome face and a well-proportioned body. A few people were gathering in the hallway, and I was getting a lot of wide-eyed stares. Fulvio´s frown was back, big time.

“You look familiar,” he said, and I felt my heart sink. Had he seen me somewhere, years ago?

“That photo, from Sydney,” he continued, turning to Alex.

“Oh, yes, that´s probably my father,” I intervened. “People tell me he looked just like me at my age.”

Fulvio raised an eyebrow at Alex. “You went out with this kid´s father?”

“Listen,” I intervened once again before Fulvio had time to ask what on earth was I doing in Milan and the situation got totally out of hand. “Could I possibly steal Alex for a moment? We could go downstairs for a chat in that bar across the street.” Seeing Fulvio´s expression I had to add, “It´s really personal.”

“Sure, let´s go,” Alex said. “I´ll be back right away.”

“It´s my birthday party so you better be,” Fulvio snapped, fully aware that something fishy was going on.

We got into the elevator. “I´m sorry about that,” I said. “I didn´t mean to-”

“Don´t worry about it.”

“Do you have a car parked near by? I don´t want anyone eavesdropping on us,” I said.

Alex nodded, his eyes never leaving me. We walked around the corner, and got into a red Alfa Romeo.

“When in Rome, do as Romans do,” he joked about the car, and then turned to me. “They told me you were dead.”

“They weren´t lying.”

I decided to try to stick to the truth, as far as possible.

“What´s that supposed to mean?”

I just looked at him. He was smart, and he´d realized the answer before he´d finished speaking.

“You-” he started, but the words refused to come out at first. “You´re a – clone? A some kind of copy?”

“I have Jonatan´s personality, and all of his feelings and memories,” I said, preferring to leave out some minor details. My decision not to lie hadn´t lasted long. “I´m identical to him, even though there´s no actual physical continuity. It´s up to you to decide if you think I´m him or someone else.”

Alex was staring at me, looking horrified. “They – I mean, I – got you killed for real, then? I always thought – that maybe – ”

“That´s all in the past. I´m here now, in the present.”

“You must know I didn´t do it for the money.”

“I know. And I knew it then. I know you, Alex.”

He swallowed. “They told me this crazy story, but what else could I have believed? It was you there, in Rome, and...”

“Stop it,” I ordered. “I didn´t tell you the truth, so why shouldn´t you have believed them? Let´s just drop the whole thing. It´s in the past. Let it go.”

Then I just couldn´t take it any more and crawled over to him, the gear stick and the steering wheel be damned, and his big arms closed around me. I lay my head on his chest. Neither of us said anything for the longest time.

The very next afternoon Alex came to see me in Porta Romana, obviously behind Fulvio´s back. After that, more than two days never passed without us finding a way to see each other, but it soon became clear that our meetings were based on nothing but sex. Alex couldn´t get over the fact that I wasn´t the Jonatan he´d known, and no matter how hot our sex was once he´d shot his load he´d look at me with a mix of amazement and barely concealed horror for having just fucked something that was a copy of Jonatan, and the original being forever gone. Even when we were just talking, I sensed him keeping an eye on me, trying to discern a word or an expression that Jonatan wouldn´t have used. So many years had passed that of course there had to be differences, and each and every one of them alarmed him. Yet we couldn´t stop; in time, it seemed, we´d only grown more sexually compatible than ever before and the closet of my room was quickly filling up with leather gear, restraints and toys that he picked up from various sex shops on his way over to my place. Every time he called me and told me he was on his way I was instantly so turned on that my hands were shaking when I put the phone down, wondering what kind of new surprise he would be bringing along.

Almost three weeks had passed when Mauro called and told me that some bureaucratic blunder in Brussels had finally been cleared, and Carlo was about to begin his summer holidays. I was relieved. My waking hours had become structured around the possibility of seeing Alex, and getting my own life back seemed like a wonderful thing. However, there would be no reason to stay in Milan after my job was done; and if I did, it would come with the price of living as a prisoner in my own home as the risk of seeing someone I´d previously known was too high in a town as big as Milan. Mauro had told me that they could engineer me to look like someone else, but I didn´t even want to hear the details. I could still see the original Jonatan in the mirror, and would not let that go.

Then Carlo arrived, picked me up from the gym and after spending a long, wild evening in my place, was out of my life. I needed a new assignment.

Paris, France

2009-06-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

November wasn´t the best time of the year to see Paris. Deep into the fall, the days were short and when it wasn´t raining, a general grayness either in the form of a fog or low gray skies seemed to hang over the city. I´d been told that bright crisp autumn days actually weren´t all that rare, but after a couple of days with no sign of the sun it was becoming clear that this visit was going to be meteorologically ill-fated. Yet I couldn´t complain about the view: the top floor apartment I was using was right smack by the Rive Gauche of Seine, with the Louvre and Jardin des Tuileries across the river. The high-ceilinged apartment was painted all impeccably white and had four bedrooms, a working fireplace, a stainless steel Italian kitchen, and the entire furniture consisted of a single mattress on the wooden floor. The windows were floor-to-ceiling and led to a narrow balcony, perfect for observing the stressed-out tourists thronging the Louvre courtyard.

It was the second night of my stay in Paris, and I was lying on the mattress surrounded by the contents of my suitcase and listening to music on headphones. The apartment was in the dark, and outside a cold hazy fog had blanketed the city, turning the streetlights into misty globs of yellow and making the Tuileries seem more like a graveyard than merry gardens. The telephone call would come around 10pm if the job was confirmed. I had a selection of the latest teen fashions ready, with a matching backpack for different lubes and a couple of surprising toys to go along with the more traditional ones. I´d been told condoms wouldn´t be tolerated, but that was all right as I couldn´t catch anything anyway.

Mauro had come over for lunch in the Porta Romana apartment the day after I´d met Carlo. We´d stayed in, naturally, to avoid exposure to anyone who might recognize me, and we´d set the table in the balcony as the sun was hidden behind impending storm clouds and there was a cool breeze at the height of the apartment. He brought a mozzarella and tomato salad with crisp French bread and a bottle of wine, and by the time we´d finished eating we were both just a little inebriated to celebrate the previous night´s success.

“So, what will I do next?” I asked.

“That depends entirely on you,” Mauro answered. “However, I do have a potential candidate for you to check out.”

He produced a photo of a big, tall man with rough-hewn face, surrounded by four others of the same type. The only real difference with the man in the middle and the others was that he was the only one wearing an ill-fitting gray suit whereas the bodyguards donned far better tailored black ones.

“Another politician?” I guessed.

“Nazer Yegorov.”

The name didn´t ring any bells.

“He´s the president of one of the former Soviet Republics in the Caucasus,” Mauro illuminated me. “The country is swimming in oil, except that all the revenue ends up in the Swiss bank account of our dear leader here. He´s doing his very best to atrophy the country´s already feeble movement towards democracy, and according to our projections his dictatorship will collapse into religious fundamentalism within a generation. A domino effect in the region is likely.”

“Your people aren´t very much into religion, are they?”

Mauro shook his head. “To put it mildly.”

“What makes you think he´s susceptible to Engineer´s tricks?”

“The staff of his Presidential Palace includes a sixteen-year-old waiter boy who lives in fear of night shifts.”

“I see.”

“We can´t use the footage, of course. The boy and his family and relatives would vanish within hours.”

I wondered if it would be unprofessional of me to ask to see the footage, given the fact that my real motivation was anything but professional. Rough-hewn as the man was, he still had the kind of overmasculine, square-jawed alpha male looks that frequently turned me on.

“There´s been talk about his country joining the NATO, and he´s been invited to a top-level meeting in Paris in November,” Mauro started. “Some time before the meeting, he´ll come into possession of a phone number for Octavianus Models, an excruciatingly secretive agency that specializes in beautiful boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen.” Seeing my expression, Mauro added with a smile, “Of course, the agency doesn´t really exist.”

“I´m glad to hear that the Guild hasn´t branched out in that direction.”

“Now, there are some things you need to consider first,” Mauro continued, rather ominously. “In addition to the video drone, you´ll go in with four similar-looking defensive ones. They´re capable of lethal response but they won´t use it, except on you.”

“Me?” The idea of going in with defensive drones which would target me instead of trigger-happy bodyguards was counterintuitive, to say the least.

“Only if you end up fatally injured at some point,” Mauro reassured me, with a choice of words that perhaps wasn´t the most heartening possible. “You must understand that these are just precautions, there´s no reason to believe things won´t go as smoothly as with Carlo. It´s just that we can´t back you up with a private army. If things go wrong, all the traces have to stop at you and your fake persona.”

“That´s reasonable,” I had to admit. “Who will I be? An orphan from Hungary?”

“Something like that.”

The telephone rang and woke me up. It was a quarter past ten. The fog outside had grown so thick that Rive Droite had vanished from sight, and the sound of the traffic was muted as if a thick blanket had been thrown over the city.

“You´re on,” Mauro said.

Every sound echoed disconcertingly in the nearly empty apartment as I prepared myself for the night, my heart beating faster than usual. Before leaving I double checked my papers and the key card to the safe room in the hotel where Nazer Yegorov and his entourage were staying, then bundled up for the cold and damp night and walked to the nearest metro station. Despite the late hour and the fog the traffic along the Seine was heavy and I wished I were in one of the warm cozy taxis instead of the empty sidewalk but, as usual, walking and the metro were the more anonymous choices. I got out at a station in La Défense, the American-looking district outside the city center and packed with business high rises. Le Nouveau President hotel wasn´t far, in the wide central Esplanade, and once again I was struck by how ugly the five-star hotel was. A huge mind-numbingly dull concrete slab from the 1980s, it nevertheless was the hotel preferred by security-conscious visitors to the city and therefore a favorite among politicians and heads of state. Tonight security had been beefed up for Yegorov and the NATO meeting, and I had to show my papers twice even before I got to the main entrance and passed through a metal detector. In a clear sign of racial profiling, the security personnel at the door barely gave me a half a glance and then ignored me as I walked to the elevators. I supposed they were right; after all, the only Swedish terrorists that the world had ever known had been in a Sophia Loren movie. Excluding Vikings in their time, naturally.

Once inside, one would never have guessed how drab the hotel looked outside. Everything about the interior design was first class, albeit suitably conservative and anonymous for a hotel that specialized in politicians and bureaucrats. The safe room was on the second floor, low enough for me to bail out through a window if necessary, and the tight black gloves and the piece of rope in my backpack were included mostly for this purpose. I needed to visit the room to let out the drones, but I was also glad for a chance to collect myself for a few minutes before I had to move on. I sat back in a comfortable armchair and let my eyes wander around the room, trying to pick up the drones, but with no luck. The little devils were too smart for that. I´d been surprised to learn that they weren´t remotely controlled but had independent quasi-sentient AIs running them, even though obviously connected to whoever was running the operation. I could only hope that the AIs wouldn´t develop a sudden dislike of me halfway through the proceedings.

Then it was time to go. I threw a last glance at a mirror, checked what I considered my teenage costume, and left the room.

Nazer Yegorov was staying on the top floor. Presidential Suite, naturally. When the elevator doors opened the first thing I saw were two huge, armed security guards in black suits standing in front of me, with a barely concealed sneer on their faces as they directed me towards the suite. Two more of their kind, albeit seemingly less judgmental, were standing guard outside the door. I was shooed in. Faced by two more guards towering over me, this time I was asked to stand still while they slowly and methodically frisked me after removing my outdoor gear. These two were clearly more sympathetic to their boss´ pastimes and took their time running their hands all over me, taking special care that I wasn´t hiding anything around my glutes. I cleared my throat when one of them went over the area for the second time, and he gave me a cold stare in response but stood back and gestured me to move into the suite proper.

If it hadn´t been for the dark gray Armani suit – he didn´t seem to have objections to wearing tailored suits in private – I would have taken Nazer Yegorov for yet another bodyguard. The same face and body, not to mention the attitude, which wasn´t all that surprising as he was known to run his political party as if it were a crime syndicate. He was sitting back on a couch, a drink in one hand and the other placed on an armrest, and his powerful legs were casually spread to tell me that I belonged between them, on my knees. My throat went dry, and I could feel the pressure of blood rushing into my cock. He gestured me to move forward and stop in front of him for a visual inspection, and then with a small rolling movement of his finger I was ordered to turn around and show him my backside. The bodyguards had vanished into another room.

“Very good,” he said with rumbling and heavily accented English. “You´re even better than what they told me.”

I turned to face him, and his eyes dropped briefly to my trousers to size up my growing bulge.

“Take off your shirt.”

One by one, I removed my clothes until I was only wearing my white underwear, stretched tight over my hard-on. During my slow amateur strip show, a bulge of breathtaking size had grown in the left leg of his trousers and I was having hard time trying not to stare at it, which clearly amused him. With a cock like that, no wonder he always appeared so self-assured on every video I´d seen. To protect the anonymity of the boy I hadn´t been shown any of the footage from the Presidential Palace, but I was soon going to see for myself what this man could do.

“Turn around.”

I obeyed. A prolonged silence ensued.

“That´s one beautiful ass,” the man then said, and I heard ice clink in his glass. “No, don´t move.” Another silence. “Do you see the envelope on the side table?”

“Yes.”

“There are five thousand euros in it. Your bonus.” More ice clinking. “There´s no reason to report it to the agency.”

I bit my lip. I wasn´t a pro, but the bonus seemed suspiciously high even considering the huge sum the fake agency was already charging him. What was I supposed to do to earn the bonus?

I swallowed, and nodded. “Thank you.”

“Good.”

I heard him shift on the leather couch behind me, and there was a slithering sound as he pulled off his belt.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

I followed his orders, and felt him loop the belt around my wrists and then secure it tight. Only now I felt his hands on my ass, studying the muscles, then slowly caressing them. He didn´t pull down my underwear, and I thought my dick was going to rip the seams if he didn´t let it free soon.

“Turn around.”

His eyes widened a little when he saw how big my bulge had grown despite being held back by the tight fabric. He ran his fingers along the side of the thick shaft and I felt my dick squeeze out a big drop of precum as it reacted to the light touch.

“Impressive. Now, on your knees.”

I sank on my knees between his strong legs. He sat back on the couch and, teasing me, took his time undoing his trousers and pulling out his monster dick. It was so thick I couldn´t have wrapped my fingers around the shaft even if my hands had been free, and as I watched the shaft throbbed visibly, causing the tight foreskin to slip back and reveal the perfectly shaped head. A drop of precum glistened at the tip, and I leaned over and caught it with my tongue. The man tasted sweet, and I wanted more. My mouth started dripping with saliva as I licked at the tip, then wrapped my lips around the shaft and massaged the underside of his dickhead with my tongue. He let out a groan, clearly into what I was doing, but soon he wanted more. I felt his hand grab a fistful of my hair, and the huge cock started slipping deeper into my mouth, stretching my throat to its limits around the hard, veined shaft. He forced me to suck his dick for some time, then guided my tongue to worship his balls. They were in the same league with his dick, large and heavy, and I barely managed to take just one when he began stuffing my mouth with them. Globs of saliva were dripping down to the floor as I struggled with his smooth heavy ballsack, trying to take both of his balls into my mouth, in vain. Then it was back to cocksucking, and he soon had me gasping and spluttering with my efforts to please him. All the time, I knew this wasn´t what the bonus was for, and I grew both more anxious and excited when his rock hard cock began to leak mouthfuls of thick precum and I knew he´d soon have to switch the action somewhere else. He managed to hold back longer than I would have thought, but eventually he couldn´t take it any more no matter how hard he tried, and he had to push me away, on the very brink of shooting his load. Alex had taught me well.

He stood up, his cock dripping a mixture of saliva and precum on my upturned face, and pulled me up to him. I´d been kneeling in front of him for so long that my legs were shaking, and with one big arm he held me tight against him while his fingers first played with my lips and then he slowly pushed his hand into my mouth, deeper and deeper, until my face was all scrunched up and my jaw almost breaking. Enjoying my attempts to pull back and fight him off when I could no longer breathe, his big arm only wound tighter around my body like a constrictor snake. Too big and strong for me, I felt his massive hard-on rub against my stomach as I squirmed his firm grip. Finally, with a smile, he let me go. I gasped for breath as his hand slipped out of my mouth, and I tried to step back, but he didn´t let me.

“I think you should sit down.”

Still wearing his suit, with only the zipper open, he easily set me down on the couch. I thought he was going to pull down my underwear but instead he got on his knees on the couch, straddling my legs. His huge hard-on slapped against my face, and for a while I was again forced to lick his heavy balls. With my hands tied behind my back, and his strong legs pinning mine against the couch, I was completely at his mercy. When his balls were all slick and dripping with saliva, he massaged my lips with his glistening dickhead and then slowly thrust with his hips until I had a mouthful of his massive, leaking shaft.

“That´s a nice coin you´ve got there,” he said, unclasping the chain and throwing it on the heap of my clothes on the floor. “We won´t need it.”

I felt a stab of anxiety for losing the coin, but as long as it remained within the range of hundred meters I´d be all right. Then, with his eyes locked on mine to see when I´d realize what he was doing, he undid the knot of his tie and started pulling it off. I tried to ask, what are you doing, but his hard-on in my mouth worked as a gag and only a slobbery mumble came out. I tried again, and he pushed his cock a little deeper into my mouth, to drive the point home. When he started wrapping the other end of the tie around his left hand to form a garrote I panicked and tried to wriggle myself free, but with his weight on top of me it was utterly useless. I felt spit run down from the corners of my mouth and drip on my chest as I attempted to talk to him, to beg him to stop, but I could tell he was only being turned on more by my fear. Without pulling his dick out of my mouth, he wrapped the Italian silk tie around my neck, and then folded the other end of the garrote around his right hand. Very slowly, watching me closely to savor the moment, he started pulling the silky rope tighter.

I felt blood begin to pack into my face, swelling my eyes and lips, and his shaft grew even harder in my mouth when he saw the first signs of strangulation. Gradually, my windpipe started to tighten under the pressure and as I sputtered and fought to draw a breath he slowly fucked my mouth, each thrust a little deeper than the previous one. For some time, he allowed me just enough air to continue fucking my throat, and then, without a warning, he pulled his dick out and instantly tightened the garrote to keep me silent. Suddenly I couldn´t breathe at all. Staring down at my face wet with tears, spit and his precum, he smiled. Then, just as he loosened the garrote to allow me to breathe, his thick hard-on was back in my mouth. He liked to play with me, to see how long he could keep me silent either by his hard-on or the garrote. Even in my panicked distress I realized that his smile was growing harder the longer he kept me on the edge of strangulation. There was worse to come.

Finally, he shifted all his weight down on my legs, bringing his face almost at level with mine. I was completely immobilized, and I could tell from his expression that the warm-up was done. The serious part was starting now. He pulled the garrote tight around my neck, but didn´t stop at the point where I could no longer breathe. He was going further. The world was starting to get black around the edges when I couldn´t take it any longer and had to relay the order to the drones.

Less than two seconds later, Yegorov suddenly pulled back away from me and jumped on his feet. With an expression mixed with alarm and pain, he reached for his back, at a spot somewhere between his shoulder blades. That was the safe area for the acid-like injection: for three minutes, before the substance would evaporate without leaving any trace, the pain would be so severe that if he could reach the area he might tear off patches of skin and tissue just to get rid of the invisible source of pain. After just another second he couldn´t stop a guttural scream of pain as he frantically pulled off his jacket and popped the buttons of his shirt, thinking that the origin of the pain was somewhere in his clothes. I scrambled on my feet just as the two in-suite bodyguards barged into the room, guns raised. Yegorov let out another scream, this one far louder, and threw himself against the back of an armchair only to rub the substance deeper into his skin. He fell to the floor, writhing in pain. It was instantly clear to the guard that I couldn´t be the origin of trouble of this magnitude and they lowered their guns.

“Please,” I asked one of them, showing him my bound wrists.

“You stay here,” he growled, unaware of the consequences of not letting me go, while his colleague leaned over his boss to try to understand what was happening.

Both guards were hit within a second, and neither had Yegorov´s self-control. I was sure all the adjoining rooms heard their screams. I ran for the door where the two guards who´d been stationed outside were already scrambling with the lock, and when they saw me I yelled, “Help!”

Distracted by the screams, neither one gave me a second thought as they ran by me. I slipped out, to be faced by the last twosome from the elevator. One of them – the bigger and nastier one, if that was possible – had the presence of mind to order me to stop at gunpoint while his colleague ran into the room to investigate. No one came out of the room, and the guard pointed his gun at the open door.

“I have to go,” I stammered, and tried to walk by him towards the staircase emergency exit, but his gun moved back to my direction and he barked something in a language I didn´t know.

He went down like the others, or that´s what I thought first. I was halfway to the exit when a bullet hit the wall at the height of my shoulder, and I crouched and dived the last few meters, then threw myself at the wide panic handle to slam the door open. Only then I remembered that I´d left the coin in the suite. Someone finding it wasn´t the problem; it would self-destruct, but inside a building like this the range of my neural mesh would be far shorter than hundred meters. Most likely, half of the massive hotel would be out of reach of the coin. I was only wearing underwear and a necktie - with a very bad knot - and my wrists were bound behind my back. To make things worse, the toughest of the bodyguards continued to be either half immune or simply too big and dumb to feel the burn like the others, and I heard him bang the door open above me after I´d only descended a single floor. I would have to make it through six more floors to reach the safe room, and then, with a shock, I realized that the key card was in the pocket of my trousers. I had nowhere to go.

The heavy footsteps of the guard were stomping down the stairs after me, and when I heard another infuriated scream I knew he´d been shot with another dose. With my bound wrists I couldn´t move fast enough and he was gaining on me, and I had no choice but to leave the staircase and return to the public areas of the hotel. There was yet another bear-like growl, a sign of another hit, as I went through an emergency door. The man was tough, but now even he was finally showing signs of being slowed down.

At the other end of the long corridor someone in a tuxedo was searching his pockets for a key card. I myself had only one card left to play: Engineer´s wily tricks. I ran along the corridor, calling for the man while trying to keep my voice down not to alarm the other guests behind their doors. As I got closer and closer I thought the man looked familiar, and to my shock I realized it was none other than Carlo Brambilla, in town for some shady deal with the NATO.

He stared at me, utterly stunned.

“Carlo,” I called at him, running closer. “Open the door. Quick.”

He didn´t move.

“Nice to see you again, um, whatever your name is,” Carlo said when I reached him, his upper lip curled with disgust. “Dressed up for the occasion?”

“Carlo, there´s no time,” I stuttered. “Nazer Yegorov´s bodyguards will crash through that door any second. They´re armed and they´ll shoot at sight.”

“I have no doubt,” he said sarcastically but I could tell I´d managed to shake him, and he pulled out his key card.

“Please,” I begged him, with no need to feign terror. I was probably out of reach of the relay transmitter and therefore, if I died, the next Jonatan would no longer be me. Just like I wasn´t the original. Besides, I was pretty sure that getting shot wasn´t a pleasurable experience.

“Merda,” he muttered under his breath, furious at himself, and opened the door.

I couldn´t believe he had let me in. Another sobering sign of the power Engineer held over human beings. Just as the door was closing behind us, the bodyguard finally made it through the emergency door with a slam, cursing out loud.

“Did he see us come in,” I asked fearfully as the lock clicked shut.

“I don´t know,” Carlo said, unhelpfully.

“We should step back from the door,” I whispered as thumping footsteps drew closer along the corridor. “They are heavily armed.”

We moved into the room and I couldn´t help noticing that the furnishings were just as luxurious as in the Presidential Suite. The footsteps passed by the door, and I couldn´t hold back a sigh of relief.

“I´m so sorry I got you involved,” I said quickly when it seemed that Carlo was contemplating throwing me back into the corridor now that the bodyguard was gone.

“And I can´t believe I let you in,” he said, shaking his head. “What the hell was I thinking?”

I turned my back and, looking over my shoulder, asked him, “Would you please untie my wrists?”

He stepped behind me and undid the belt. “Do you need help with the tie too-” he started, and then noticed the marks around my neck.

While I got rid of the tie, he kept staring at me, his mind working.

“How did you get away from them?” he asked when I sat down, figuring that it would be harder for him to throw me out if I was acting normal.

“Pepper spray,” I said airily, not stopping to dwell on the fact that my hands had been tied behind my back. “I know how to get out of hairy situations.”

“I bet you do.”

Still on his feet, he ran his eyes over me to see if I´d suffered more damage, and I could tell the sight was actually beginning to turn him on. I decided it was time to send an oversized thank you card to Engineer.

“Listen,” I started, hesitantly. “The blackmailing thing... Has it been hard?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Actually, no,” he answered, shaking his head. “They´ve always asked me to vote the way I wanted to vote anyway. That´s not the same as in ´the way I would have voted anyway´,” he added.

I frowned.

“I´m not free to vote any which way I see fit. There are commercial and political prerogatives,” he explained. “And not having taken them into consideration, I will lose my job within the next twelve months.”

“I doubt that.”

He looked at me, surprised. “Say again?”

“As far as I know, you´re too important to be replaced by some rank and file bureaucrat. And you´re ours. I wouldn´t worry about losing your job.”

Carlo studied me closely, and realized that I wasn´t joking.

“Who are you?”

I laughed. “Listen, if any of the people who decide your fate are gay I´ll take care of them myself.”

“I have no doubt.” His eyes didn´t leave me.

“I owe you,” I said simply, and only then realized how it might be interpreted. “I mean – I meant...”

“I know what you meant,” he relented. “So, what next?”

I put on my thinking cap while he poured himself a drink and then sat down in an armchair, to glare at me disapprovingly. The video drone and at least one of the defensive ones would be in the room, so an extraction team would know where to find me. Come to think of it, even if I ended up dead away from the coin they could create a memory construct from the footage. A reassuring thought, considering that most likely there would be no extraction team. I´d have to get out on my own, and worst of all, I´d have to break it to Carlo that I wasn´t disappearing from his life any time soon.

“Um...” I started, but he interrupted me.

“Don´t tell me you have no extraction team picking you up within the next ten minutes.”

“It´s, um, possible,” I faltered. “But not – likely.” I went on before he could say anything too scathing. “I may have to spend the night here. If a team doesn´t show up, I´d really appreciate it if in the morning you picked up some clothes for me from the Printemps store near the hotel. Yegorov will surely check out from the hotel tomorrow, and as soon as he´s gone I can leave myself.”

Raised eyebrow. “Any preferences? Armani, Cavalli?”

“Levi´s, please,” I said imperiously.

His ran his eyes over me. “I just wonder what the clerk will think when I give him your measures.”

“It depends on the ones you give him.”

Judging by the turn of the conversation I figured we´d be in bed within two minutes. Since I badly needed a shower, it took a little longer, but I wasn´t too far off the mark in the end.

Mauro was waiting for me when I returned to the Rive Gauche apartment exceedingly late the next evening, tired but happy, as the saying goes. He was standing up, leaning on a wall by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and watching the Louvre with his arms folded across his chest. The body language didn´t look too promising, and I felt chastised even though he hadn´t said a word yet.

“I´m sorry it took me so long to get back,” I started. “Carlo, you know... And the operation went to hell...”

“What are you talking about?” Mauro said, turning to me, eyes wide. “The operation couldn´t have gone better.” He paused, searching for words. “From our point of view, I mean. But we had no idea Yegorov was that crazy, and I personally owe you an apology for what happened.”

“Come on,” I said. “How could you have known if he never went that far with the boy in the Palace?”

“True. It still wasn´t right.”

“I took this job because I thought it would be fun. And exciting.” I couldn´t help a grin. “And I can´t deny I had fun, at least most of the time.”

“I can see that.” Mauro´s good humor returned as he observed my clothes.

Carlo had taken a quick and easy route while shopping for clothes, having simply given a salesperson my measures for a uniform of the Saint-Denis Catholic School for Boys. It had come complete with shoes, a tie and the school pin for the jacket lapel. Once he´d returned, I´d soon discovered that convenience hadn´t been by far the only reason for the choice.

“Listen,” I said, unable to stop a frown. “Did the coin pick up my signal or did we lose something?”

“We lost some,” Mauro admitted, as if it had been his own personal shortcoming. “It took us about thirty minutes to place another one within range outside Carlo´s hotel room.”

More or less in time to see Carlo force his obscenely big dick up into my lubed ass.

“But the drone feeds can be used for a memory construct?”

Mauro nodded. “Our AIs are pretty good at that.”

“Excellent. There were some moments I´d hate to lose the memory of.”

“I bet,” Mauro said with a smile, but then his expression turned more serious than I would have preferred. “As you know, our relationship with the Axiom is not exactly belligerent despite certain obvious disagreements.”

“No use fighting over some indigenous primitives?” I couldn´t help sniping.

Shrug. “Basically, yes.” He then searched for the right words for a moment. “There are official channels of communication, and then some that could be called ´unofficial´. And we´ve heard that you have become something of a priority.”

I was taken aback. “That doesn´t sound good.”

“Your, let´s say, resilience, isn´t doing much for certain egos.”

“And I need to disappear for a while.”

“That would be a good idea.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe I should go back home, then. Haven´t been there ever since you and I first met.”

Midby, Northern Sweden

2009-06-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Midby village was located about 20 kilometers north of Luleå, a reasonably safe distance from my birthplace given all the time that had passed, and about four kilometers from the seaside. It had just one small grocery shop, and for anything more complicated than that I had to ride my scooter along the coastline to one of the nearby towns, none of them much bigger than Midby itself, in the bitter cold of the Swedish winter. Not that I had to do that very often; I had come in with all the equipment that I needed, and planned to ride out the winter in a small traditional country house painted with red ochre and with the door and window frames highlighted in white. The house had the characteristic enclosed porch in front of the entry hall to keep the winter cold outside, and in addition to them and the bathroom the ground floor had four rooms: the living room, two bedrooms and a traditional kitchen with a fireplace that would keep the house warm during winter storm blackouts. The porch held the staircase to the attic which was mostly a cold dark uninsulated space with a special built-in summer bedroom at the northernmost end where the midnight sun would be least annoying. The rustic atmosphere was somewhat disfigured by a satellite dish, but there was only so much peace and quiet I could take without a few dozen movie and documentary channels on a huge TV set.

I had rented the place in early December when snow had already arrived and the northern lights were blazing bright almost every night. I´d been lucky; the 11-year cycle of the Sun was at its most active, promising spectacles all winter long, and many nights I bundled up and lay in the soft snow on my back, watching the shimmering ribbons of electric storms high above. Some nights, when the world was exceptionally quiet, I could hear the barely audible whisper of the snow just a fraction of a second after some particularly strong ribbon flared across the sky. That´s how I spent my Christmas Eve, in the snow, watching the cold and clear skies, but that night all the fiercely burning stars and the dancing shimmer of electricity failed to move me. It felt kind of weird to know that no one was following my transmission. I still carried the coin and everything was recorded for my benefit, but only a quasi AI program kept an eye on the data flow to raise an alarm if I found myself in trouble. I would have expected it to be a liberating experience, but instead I found myself feeling lonely. Not even Alex was calling me as we had parted ways with a huge fight when I´d told him about my trip to Paris, once again lying about the motive, and we still hadn´t made up. But then, it was only natural that he´d want to distance himself from me and all the weirdness that I couldn´t and wouldn´t shake.

As the winter advanced, wind blew chest-high snow drifts like dunes around the house during snowstorms, and getting to the nearest snow ploughed road sometimes took a real effort. Never having been a big fan of Nordic skiing, I now discovered the practical side of the sport and got all the latest gear in one of my trips to a nearby town, including a one-piece, professional ski suit. After that, I learned the lay of the land quite well even though I did my best to avoid coming in contact with the people of the village. During the short daylight hours I spent a lot of time just watching snowflakes play in the wind outside my warm cozy house, while listening to music or keeping distractedly in touch with the world through the Internet.

One day in early February, with the first signs of the sun creeping a little higher in the sky and the temperature having risen to just below freezing for the first time for days, I decided to go out for some exercise. I put on the nylon ski suit which stretched over my body like a silky blue second skin, with a few strategically placed black stripes that underlined the male V-shape. It was just like a fetish costume, except that as long as you carried a pair of skis it was totally legit in public. The part I always had problems with was the bulge, though; the suit designer´s ideas about the male body were rather different from Engineer´s, and it took a tight pair of underwear to be able to fit everything into the suit without looking like some kind of a maniac. Even then, passers-by couldn´t help a thoughtful double-take when they saw me.

It was early afternoon, and the sun already hung close to the horizon, but on this latitude it would take three more hours for it to set. I had plenty of time before I´d have to get back home. I soon found tracks left by someone else, which always made skiing much easier, and followed them through a small forest and into open farmland. The tracks ran to the direction of a large country house, and for the first time I realized it wasn´t a dairy farm but stables as four horses were outside in their enclosure, enjoying the relatively warm weather. A large green and yellow tractor was inching along the road towards the house, trailing a huge cargo of hay bails on a flat bed. Too lazy to move to deep fresh snow from the easy tracks, I skied closer to the house and watched the driver back the flat bed halfway into a tall barn. He got off the tractor, and as he climbed on top of the bails I had a better look at him. A Nordic blond: tall with a well-proportioned, strong body that had been built by throwing bails instead of gym. I skied onward. It was becoming clear the the tracks originated from the house, and it crossed my mind that whoever had made them had skied directly between my house and the stables. His wife, perhaps, curious of a newcomer to the village.

I was still some distance away when he noticed me and glanced at my direction, and I could tell he had attractive regular features: a square jaw and broad cheekbones, with a wide but unsmiling mouth and a straight nose. All in all, handsome straight-guy-next-door looks. I pegged him around thirty years of age, and the closer I got the more I liked what I was seeing. Warmed up by the exercise he had pulled off his cap and showed a shock of blond curly hair, about a month beyond the point where it should have been cut. I skied next to the flat bed, trying to figure out some neighborly thing to say, when he stopped and looked at me. His eyes lingered a moment on my bulge and I thought he seemed a little surprised when he caught himself doing so.

“Hi,” was the smartest thing I could come up with.

“Hi,” he answered gruffly, and ran his eyes over my suit. “Want to have a real workout instead of just skiing? I´ve got some bails here to take care of.”

“Sure,” I said, hiding my smile while releasing the skis.

He gave me a dubious look. “Can you even walk in those shoes?”

“We´ll find out,” I replied, scampering up the mountain of bails like a happy little monkey knowing that straight or bi, he couldn´t avoid checking out my ass in the tight suit.

“Can you pile them up against the back wall?” he asked once I got to the top and realized that the barn seemed much bigger on the inside and that stumbling down might easily send me to an emergency room with a few broken bones.

“OK,” I said and picked up a bail.

When I got back there was another one waiting for me. I was secretly quite impressed by the distance he could throw them, but said nothing, and we fell into the rhythm of the work.

“What´s your name?” he asked after a while.

“Jonatan.”

Fuck! Without thinking, I´d given him my real name. If he ever saw my passport he´d think I´d lied to him. Now wouldn´t that be ironic.

“I´m Harry,” he said.

Exchanging a few words every now and then I managed to find out that he wasn´t married and lived alone, but in Luleå there was a girlfriend who had been one of the clients who came to ride the horses. His real income didn´t come from horses, though; apparently he owned large swathes of forest towards the town of Älvsbyn and the stables were more like a hobby.

“So, basically, you could live anywhere in the world?” I asked.

“I guess,” was the somewhat surprised answer. “But I like it here.”

The sun was touching the horizon when we finished the job.

“Thanks Jonatan,” he said once I was back on the ground. “Listen, I´m warming up the sauna tonight. We could eat something, have a sauna, and later I could give you a ride home. I owe you.”

“Sounds good.”

I discovered that he didn´t subscribe to the in-house electric sauna philosophy, and had an old-fashioned sauna building which looked like a miniaturized version of my house with the red ochre and white paint. We picked up some small logs from a shed and took them into the sauna, and I sat on a bench and watched him build a fire in the stove. The place smelled wonderful, of wood and smoke and soap, and the single small window cast a pleasantly dim light into the room. I realized the sauna didn´t even have tap water: there was a container attached to the stove where we would get hot water, and a large plastic barrel almost full of cold water standing on the floor.

“You do have a shower in the house?” I quipped.

“I do, don´t worry,” he said and fell quiet, his back turned.

Now why would he think I´d worry about him having a shower or not, I wondered and then reminded myself that I had just asked. Let´s not start imagining things, I scolded myself, but looking around the sauna I was beginning to have second thoughts about staying. What would happen to my self-control once we both got naked and hot and were sitting right next to each other in this small dimly lit place?

The fire took, and we sauntered back to the main building. The house was furnished in a perfectly typical local style, with lots of wood and red bricks and leather with a few incongruous paint jobs thrown in. I bet the curtains had been chosen by his girlfriend. I discreetly looked for a photo, and there it was in the living room bookcase, a fresh-faced slim blonde standing next to one of the horses. He noticed me noticing and said, not without pride, that her name was Britta.

“You make a good-looking couple,” I said, well aware that it would sound a bit weird to him.

The huge TV set in the living room was the same brand and size as mine, and a quick glance at his film collection proved that we had almost similar taste in movies, too. The familiar titles of 2001: Space Odyssey, Solaris and Avatar were stashed in between the Bourne series and, God forbid, Forrest Gump.

We prepared the food in near complete Nordic silence, with me wondering if my earlier remark had something to do with it. We were having a moose and vegetables stew – a friend had brought him some from a hunt – with extra potatoes and excellent dark rye bread. He drank milk but I preferred the diet Pepsi he kept in the fridge “for Britta”. Halfway through the meal I decided I needed to get the conversation going again, and told him my stock lies about my parents being in China for an engineering job.

“What´s your last name?” he asked, and I gave him the name in my passport so that at least half of my identity would be consistent with my stories.

“And yours?” I tallied.

“Sundström.”

I almost choked in my moose stew. It´s a common last name in Sweden, I reminded myself.

“That sounds kind of familiar,” I said faux thoughtfully. “I think one of my uncles had a friend called Sundström somewhere near Luleå... Wait... I think his name was Johan?”

My mother had had an estranged brother I had never met and who was something like twenty years younger than her.

“My father´s name is Johan.”

“Really?”

Focusing on my stew I made some feverish calculations. The result was that whoever this Johan was, he really, really needed to have had Harry when he was young.

“I wonder if it´s the same Johan,” I said, reaching for more bread. “I think he had a kid when he was still in his teens. His parents didn´t approve.”

Harry laughed. “Then it´s not my father. He had me when he was already forty.”

“What´s your mom´s name?”

“Susanna.”

Fuck me... Harry was my first cousin. This was exactly the kind of thing that happened when you lived in the countryside. There just weren´t enough people to go around.

For the rest of the meal, I was in silent panic. Refusing the sauna would be considered rude at this point, but the idea of the calamity that might happen to me in the sauna – and caused by none other than my own cousin for heaven´s sake – was driving me crazy. Once we´d finished, Harry told me that he´d go and add some wood into the stove, and asked me to make myself comfortable in the living room while he was gone. I sat down in the leather couch and fretted over the situation, knowing that my guardian angel program was going through algorithms like crazy trying to decide whether to red flag or not to red flag. After a while I came to the logical conclusions that a) Harry was straight and b) he´d never know I was his cousin anyway. So why worry?

Half an hour later, I got pretty worried pretty quickly as we entered the small changing room of the sauna. While I stalled with my shoes and socks Harry was already stripping off his clothes, unselfconsciously like any straight guy, revealing a strong thick neck and broad shoulders, then biceps that were so big he had trouble pulling his shirt off and a pair of hard, meaty pecs. He didn´t turn his back while pulling down his trousers and the girth of his thighs was nothing short of spectacular. I stole a glance at his underwear when a leg of his trousers got snagged around an ankle, forcing him to hop around awkwardly a couple of times, and knew that I was in real trouble. Apparently, not everyone in the family needed Engineer´s tricks. When it was the turn of the underwear and not only a massive uncut dick but also a pair of heavy, shaved balls tumbled out, I had to turn and pretend that the zipper of my suit was stuck.

“What´s wrong?” he asked, and when I turned to answer him over my shoulder I saw that he was standing behind me totally naked.

“The zipper,” I explained. “It sometimes does that. You just go ahead.”

“No, wait,” he insisted. “Let me have a look. I bet I have stronger fingers than you do.”

Not one to dither uselessly he put a large hand on my shoulder, instantly aggravating my situation, and turned me around. Thanks to the carefully chosen underwear my problem wasn´t immediately too obvious even though Harry seemed a little taken aback just the same.

“Let me see,” he said, focusing tightly on the problem which vanished miraculously as soon as he tried to move the zipper. “There you go.”

Then he was gone, and I had a few seconds to pull myself together. I peeled off the suit and pulled down my underwear, took a deep breath, and entered the sauna. Darkness had fallen outside the small window, and the room was lit only by a dim lantern and a few rays of flickering light that escaped from the ill-fitting stove door. As luck would have it, Harry was pouring water over his head while rinsing himself and didn´t see me enter, but the custom demanded that I do the same before climbing on the benches. The sight of water pouring down his muscular back and the perfect round glutes in the dim warm light of the sauna nearly made me lose the fragile grip I had on my self-control, and as soon as he had finished I grabbed the ladle from his hand and splashed cold water all over my body. To any onlooker, there was no question whether my dick was swollen or not, but I hoped the state remained within explicable margins.

When I turned to climb to the benches Harry let out a friendly chuckle. “For a kid you sure pack some big meat between your legs.”

That did it. I felt blood rush into my dick and I quickly settled down, drawing my legs up to hide my hard-on. To keep it out of Harry´s sight, I had to press it down against my right thigh at just the right angle, and as the shaft kept getting harder and harder it took ever more effort to keep it in the right spot without looking awkward.

“Would you throw some water on the stove?” Harry asked, nodding at the small wooden bucket and stove ladle sitting next to me.

I swallowed as I went through several possible scenarios in my mind. Using my left hand would look totally awkward, and moving my right hand would not only make my hard-on spring up but also probably slap loudly against my abs. Pushing the bucket to Harry would have the same consequences. He was looking at me, puzzled by my not moving.

Then he chuckled gleefully. “I´m fucking with you, kid. I know you have a big ol´ boner there.”

My face flashed red and I didn´t know what to say.

“Oh come on,” Harry continued. “Relax. I was your age once and I know what it´s like.” He frowned. “How old are you, exactly?”

I had to go with my passport. “Fifteen.”

His frown deepened a little but he said nothing. I set my feet down on the lower bench, a further encouragement for my now totally visible hard-on, and his eyes widened.

“Fuck,” he said, amazed. “That´s big.”

Trying to make a joke, I grabbed my dick – my fingers didn´t reach around the shaft – and pointed it around like a garden hose.

“It can get pretty embarrassing at times,” I admitted.

Then it really did. A huge glob of precum squeezed out of the tip, hang there for a second, and started running down the shaft. Dismayed, I let go of my dick, and watched as it swayed heavily up and down and sprung another big glob of precum off the tip.

“Sorry-” I started, but he only laughed and shook his head.

“Don´t you have a girlfriend?”

“No,” I said, deciding not to elaborate.

“You need one,” he laughed and dropped the subject, pulling the wooden bucket to himself and throwing a ladleful of water on the stones.

I stole a glance at his direction and noticed that the heat had had some effect on his dick as well. Fat and swollen, it rested on the bench between his muscular legs. I sat back, trying to relax and enjoy the sauna, but there was nothing to be done. With Harry sitting next to me, naked and handsome, my dick just refused to go down. In the end I gave up, and scampered down to the floor to soap up. Harry soon followed, but kept just enough distance not to have my hard-on slap against his thighs as I maneuvered in the small space with the soap and rinsing water. Apart from another joke, “Don´t expect me to wash your back as long as you have that boner,” he ignored my hard-on, and when we were toweling and cooling off in the changing room my dick finally started to relax. The air outside felt very cold after the sauna. We walked back to the house and had a drink in the kitchen, and then it was time for him to take me back home. He drove a large Japanese pick-up truck, and I threw my skis on the flat bed before climbing inside. The ride didn´t take long, and when we got to my house – or as close as we could, as the snow was blocking the last part of the road – he said he wanted to ask me something.

“You said you won´t be going back to school until next fall, right?” he started. “I need a hand in the stables, and I was wondering if you´d be interested in working for me, say, three afternoons every week?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised at the question and how enthusiastic I was about the idea. “I´d like that.”

“Great,” Harry said. “Britta is coming for the weekend, so I´ll pick you up at 2p.m. on Monday?”

“OK.”

The weekend dragged by ever so slowly, and for the first time I was bored in my red and white house. There didn´t seem to be anything interesting on the satellite channels, I didn´t have the patience for surfing the web, and the weather turned cold and nasty so I couldn´t even go out. Finally, on Monday afternoon, Harry´s pick-up truck showed up at 2p.m. sharp and I scurried through the snow banks to the car. He greeted me with a brief and gruffy smile as if he was regretting his offer and my mood deflated. We barely exchanged a word during the trip, but once we reached the stables and he showed me what to do his mood seemed to lighten. At the end of the day his regrets seemed to have disappeared and we talked about the chores on the way back to my house, and he told me he´d need me again on Wednesday. Just before I left the car he made a joke about Wednesday, a traditional mid-week sauna day, telling me to “take care of things” so that I wouldn´t have to worry about embarrassing myself.

“Do you want me to work for you, or do you want me to go blind?”

He chuckled and waved as the car pulled away. In the following days we formed our routine: he picked me up three afternoons every week, and most days we had an early dinner and a sauna once we had finished with work. My hard-ons persisted and provided ammunition for his jokes. Whenever Britta was around, I wasn´t invited.

At the beginning of March, when there still was no sign whatsoever that the winter might one day end, Harry asked me out of the blue if was free on the next Saturday night.

“Britta is in Stockholm for the weekend,” he explained, “and I´d like to go to the movies in Luleå. What do you think? Are you free?”

“Yes, I´d like that,” I said.

He shot me a sideways glance. “You don´t have too many friends here, do you?”

I shrugged. “Haven´t really looked for them.”

“You shouldn´t have stayed out of school this year,” he said, genuinely concerned. “All alone in that house. It´s not good for you.”

“I like it here,” I countered. “It´s not that bad at all.”

“Still.”

He picked me up at seven on Saturday night so that we´d have time to grab something quick to eat first. When it came to the movie there wasn´t much of a choice available, and we went to see a rather maligned fourth installment of a science-fiction franchise. All night long, we were both quiet and subdued and the movie, not the best in the series, didn´t provide much to talk about on the drive back home. The night was clear, and we watched the icy road slip by in silence, the low rumble of his powerful truck in the background.

Back at my house, I discovered that the driveway had been cleared of snow.

“I asked one of the neighbors to plough it when he happened to drive by,” Harry explained.

“Thanks,” I said, touched by his consideration. “One more storm and I would have been cut off from the world until May.”

“I think I´d have needed you before that,” he grumbled and drove the car all the way the house.

As I was getting off, he asked me if I´d seen the third movie of the series, reputed as the best one. Of course I had.

“No,” I answered. “Why?”

“I have it on Blu-Ray. Do you want to see it one of these nights?”

“Sure. Any time you want. I´m curious about it.”

“Tomorrow?” he said, and then suddenly looked as if he wanted to bite his tongue.

I hesitated, trying to figure out if he wanted to see me on Sunday or not. Well, he had asked, I told myself.

“If that´s OK with you, yes. I have nothing better to do.”

“Pick you up at seven, then?”

He drove away, and I watched the receding car until it turned to the main road, confused whether I should have said yes or no given how weird the evening had been. In any case, the next day he was as punctual as ever. He´d had his hair cut earlier in the week, and every time I happened to glance at his direction I still couldn´t help noticing how good he looked with a shorter style. I wanted to ask what Britta thought of it but kept my mouth shut. When we got to his place he pointed out a bowl of peanuts on the living room coffee table, and told me that popcorn was coming up soon. To complete the movie snacks array, he also brought a large glass pitcher filled with juice on ice to the table before turning off the lights. A suspicious scent drifted in the air around the pitcher.

“What´s in that?” I asked as we settled down on the couch and he fiddled with the remote control.

“Tropical fruit juice,” he replied, and then added with a crooked smile, “and some rum.”

“I´m going to fall asleep halfway through the movie then,” I warned him, pouring myself a glass.

“The sound effects should keep you awake,” he said, unable not to brag about his ridiculously overpowered sound system which I secretly envied.

The movie started, and every now and then we commented on the action in between mouthfuls of popcorn and an occasional swig of the rum-spiked juice. I was soon feeling pretty good and relaxed, and when Harry said something about an impressive sequence, I added, “The underground power station scene is pretty good, too-” before realizing that we hadn´t gotten to that part yet. I threw a sideways glance at him, but apparently he hadn´t caught my slip of tongue. And besides, if he had, he´d be making fun of me already. After that I paid more attention to what I said but, just as I had warned him, about halfway through the film the rum got to me and my eyelids inexorably began to grow heavier and heavier.

“You weren´t joking about the rum,” Harry said when I nodded off and then came to with a jolt. “Lie down.”

“I´ll crowd you,” I mumbled, focusing back on the movie.

“Don´t worry about it. Lean on me.”

He was being serious. After a moment of hesitation, I sort of snuggled up to him, laid my head on his arm, and found a comfortable position. He was warm, and the plump, relaxed muscles of his strong arm were the best pillow I could imagine.

“I´d be the worst alcoholic ever,” I told him. “I´d always fall asleep long before getting drunk.”

Being so close to him woke me up for a moment, but after another few minutes the rum did its job and I couldn´t help falling asleep. It just felt too good to be so close to him, warm and safe. Maybe twenty minutes later, I gradually woke up to fingers caressing the back of my neck, and every now and then moving up to play with some unruly lock of hair. Suddenly my heart was racing even though I pretended I was still asleep. Of course he knew I wasn´t; but there was no way I´d do anything that might make him stop. Things were quickly getting uncomfortably crowded in my trousers, but I had a baggy pair of cargo pants on and unless he paid close attention there was some hope he might not notice. Not that I really cared; he already knew quite well how trigger-happy I was.

“Jonatan...”

His voice was so hoarse it was almost unrecognizable. I said nothing but nuzzled up to him, and he wrapped one of his big arms around me, pulling me even closer. The side of my face came to rest against his chest, and I could feel his heartbeat, pounding as strong and fast as mine. The only other person who had ever had such an overpowering effect on me was Alex, and this was just the first time Harry was actually touching me. It was kind of scary to think where this might lead.

“So you´d never seen this movie before,” his amused voice rumbled against my ear.

“Maybe I stretched the truth a little.”

“I´m glad you did.”

The need for words fell away. After a while, there were some window-rattling explosions and crashes, but neither of us was paying any attention. We both knew that the first kiss was approaching, and neither he nor I felt a need to hurry. We had all the time in the world.

The next weekend, Britta was back. I´d spent every night at Harry´s during the week, and when he told me on Friday morning that Britta would arrive late in the evening I was stunned.

“I didn´t know how to tell you,” Harry spread his arms, defending himself. “It´s just... I can´t change so much, so fast. You have no idea what it´s like.”

After my initial dismay, I couldn´t say I didn´t understand. After all, I was anything but an idealistic fifteen-year-old who believed that Walt Disney himself had created the world four thousand years ago. I bit my tongue not to say that considering all the things we´d been doing in bed the last four nights – from dusk to dawn, and I was talking about Nordic winter nights here – he´d changed quite a lot, and quite fast, too, but that wouldn´t have been fair. Especially taking into account that they´d easily been among the best nights of my life. The man needed to take his time to come around, and if in the end he didn´t, there was nothing I could do about it. The weekend was going to be hell.

“You do what feels right,” I told him, and then specified, “And I don´t mean what you think is right. I mean what feels right.”

Somehow he managed to look like a big shaggy dog caught under a thunder shower. “I´ll pick you up on Monday then, at the usual hour?”

We both knew I was helpless to say no. “Sure.”

And that was how the rollercoaster ride began. On Mondays, when he picked me up, he´d be sullen and angry at me for upending his life, but usually his mood changed towards the evening. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were great. He´d fuck me over and over again with what I thought of as, in amused quotation marks, “deep romantic passion”, but when he held me tight in his arms and whispered things to me with his soft lips brushing against my ear and his huge lubed cock sliding up deeper and deeper into my ass until I thought I was going to die the quotation marks just vanished and I couldn´t deny that that´s what it was, and it was mutual. Then, Thursday nights, our last night together before the weekend, he´d become so anguished that all he wanted to do was to lie together in the bed, all night long, his arms around me, unable to sleep. In our third week together, late into the dreaded Thursday night, he revealed that our meeting hadn´t been a total coincidence. He´d seen me outside the grocery story one afternoon, and out of curiosity had asked the shopkeeper if a new family had moved into the village. She´d disapprovingly told Harry about me living in the house alone while my parents were in China. The same night, not having anything better to do, he´d skied over to my house to have a look what I was up to.

“I could see right into the house and there you were, wearing only a pair of workout shorts and nothing else, and vacuuming the living room, and it was 10p.m.! Only someone a bit crazy would do that so late at night. I guess you had music on, real loud to drown out the noise, because every now and then you did some silly dance move with the vacuum, and then you laughed, not knowing that somebody was watching... That´s when I first realized that something weird was happening. I kept watching you and thinking about knocking on the door and carrying you, kicking and screaming, into the bedroom and pulling down the gym kit to get at your ass... I just couldn´t believe that I was standing out there in the dark, with a total hard-on, fantasizing about raping a boy. I mean, I´d always sort of known that guys looked good to me too, but since I love to fuck girls, why bother with the complications? And then, the very next day, you were following my ski tracks back to my house and my first thought was that you´d demand to know why I´d been spying on you. Instead, you looked so happy when I came up with the idea of the bails that I invented the whole thing about needing help... I figured you were from the city and didn´t know that farms really don´t need any extra help during the winter.”

“Later, in the sauna, I kept repeating Britta´s name in my head like some kind of a mantra to keep myself from doing something really bad to you... Well, now I know you like that kind of thing. But then, I was in big trouble, and so were you, literally.”

“And I can´t keep this up any longer. Something has to change, I have to make a decision. All things equal, I´d know what to do. But, you see, I´m not a kid any more, like you... I have to think further than that. Britta is talking about getting married. And your parents will be back in the fall and you´ll start school in Stockholm, or in some other country altogether... So you see it´s not that easy.”

The words Britta and marriage took my breath away. This couldn´t be happening. He was breaking up with me.

Harry felt me tense up. “Jonatan... every time I think about you going away it´s like I can´t breathe. But that´s what you´re going to do: you´re going away in any case. To you, us is no big deal. To me, it would completely change everything.”

“Are you telling me you´re not picking me up on Monday?”

Pause. “I don´t know. It would kill me... that´s all I know.”

I tried to stay calm, but I soon realized I couldn´t stay in his place after what he´d just told me. I was about to break down and I wasn´t going to do it in front of him.

He read my mind. “Do you want me to take you back to your place, now?”

We dressed up and climbed into his car, at half past two, and he drove me home. Tonight, I hated the sight of the house I´d liked so much until now. It looked like some kind of a grotesque Brothers Grimm prison. I realized that all the time I´d lived there, not a single person apart from me had entered the place. When he stopped the car, we sort of just looked at each other for a while, and then I got out, without a word, and he drove away.

Before, I had thought that weekends away from him were hell, but now I found out what a fool I´d been. All Friday, I stumbled around like a zombie, unable to form a coherent thought. Saturday was worse. I forced myself to get up from bed in the afternoon and eat something, and then I stood under a hot shower for the longest time, trying to decide whether I should leave Midby on Monday if Harry didn´t show up. But then, Monday would be too soon for him to make his mind up. I couldn´t leave only to have him come and knock on the door of an empty house. But if I stayed, I´d go crazy, I knew that. Around and around, these thoughts repeated themselves in my mind, without making any sense or reaching any conclusions. I found myself sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark, not eating, with no music or TV on, lamps unlit, when my cell phone rang. No one ever called me, not even Harry because we spent all our free time together, and when I saw that the caller ID was an unknown number I found that my hands were shaking a little as I picked up the phone.

“Jonatan?” It was Mauro. “You have to get out of the house.”

“Fuck,” I said, already knowing why, a shock of adrenaline waking me up. I stood up and went to get my coat and shoes. “What happened?”

“We just got some unofficial intelligence. There´s an Axiom operation in progress. We don´t know the timeline and not even who the target is, but it might be you. Call me back as soon as you´re out and in a safe place with people. We´re on our way.”

“OK.”

The problem was, there was no place with people that I could go. Midby didn´t have a bar or a restaurant, and the shop had closed hours ago. Harry was out of question, with Britta spending the weekend at his place. I decided I´d put on long johns and an extra sweater, and ski into the forest to huddle there under a tree until Mauro´s team arrived. Darkness wouldn´t be a problem with the clear sky and an almost full moon reflecting from the snow, and with the extra clothes I could easily handle the cold for an hour and a half. The transmission from the coin couldn´t be triangulated, which obviously meant that it used some weird unknown technology, but my own mesh transmitter would be detected if the Axiom got closer to me than one hundred meters. All I had to do was to get farther than that from the house and I would be OK. I had finished bundling up and was on my way outside to put on the skis when a car turned into the driveway from the main road. I was caught in the headlights, and instantly a powerful motor roared as someone revved it up. I had barely enough time to secure the ski bindings and get moving when the black Jeep was already skidding to a halt in front of the house.

Catch me if you can, fuckers, I thought as I speeded up towards the nearest forest, moving as fast as I could in the virgin snow. I glanced back and saw three hateful, familiar figures jump out of the car, the three mousy accountants who had cut Jonatan open and killed him. They seemed human enough, conferring among themselves, but Mauro had told me that behind the facade they were actually hybrids with an Axiom mind overlaid on human behavioral patterns. They quickly reached a decision that I didn´t like one bit. Three rifles were pulled out from the back of the car, and the group started after me. If it hadn´t been for the rifles I would have laughed at them, imagining the threesome trying to get through the deep snow without skis fast enough to catch me. But when I threw the next glance over my shoulder I saw something that almost froze my blood. They were running through the snow almost as if it wasn´t thicker than a fog; with each step, they threw off a spray of white flakes under the cold moonlight, and they were moving faster than I was. It was the most frightening thing I´d ever seen. I could only imagine the kind of military enhancements they were embedded with: infrared vision, combat routines, hidden arms. And something that allowed them to move through icy snow at a high velocity without ripping their flesh into shreds.

I was just about to reach the forest, where I´d be more sheltered from their rifles, when a young birch tree right ahead of me shuddered and dropped little chunks of snow from its branches. A fraction of a second later the sharp crack of a gunshot reached me. I propelled myself in between the trees, and under the clear moonlight I had just enough time to notice a quivering tranquillizer dart stuck on the white tree trunk. They weren´t using bullets; I would have to be alive for the vivisection.

It was darker inside the forest, and I was sure that the frozen underbrush, hidden by the snow, would slow them down. However, I didn´t have time to congratulate myself before I suddenly felt a sharp gnash at my right calf. Looking down, I saw that a dart had torn a rent in my trousers, and the edges were already turning dark with blood. I quickly checked out the wound and saw that the dart had just grazed my leg and was nowhere to be found, allowing me to move on, but as I kicked with my ski there was already a numb patch on my calf where the sharp pain should have been. The discovery chilled me to the bone. I didn´t know how strong their tranquillizers were, and just one grazing dart might be enough to do the job.

I´d been right about the underbrush slowing them down, but numbness was quickly spreading deeper into my calf muscle and making it very difficult to control the ski. I kept jabbing it between saplings and against trees, and to keep myself from falling I had to reduce my own speed. Then another dart grazed my thigh, and I instinctively swatted it off before much of the venom had had time to enter my bloodstream. However, another numb patch had immediately formed around the wound, and I knew I was losing the fight. I had to come up with something right now or I´d be tied down on their operating table before the night was over.

Still struggling onward, I mentally mapped out my surroundings and a horrible idea came to my mind. There wasn´t any spare time to think the plan over, I just had to do it. I could hear the snapping and crunching of the frozen forest behind me, ever closer as they gained on me, and as I took a sharp turn to the right I inevitably squandered some of my lead as they took a shortcut instead of following my tracks. My leg was growing heavier and heavier, and they could see I was slowing down. They´d be already planning their next step, knowing they had won, but then I finally reached the edge of the forest and a strangely bumpy snowfield opened in front of me. It was one of the ubiquitous northern swamps, a lake left over by receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age and now a mixture of bog and half-hidden springs. At the end of March it was mostly frozen over, but the depressions told me where there might be open water hidden under the snow. If I went over a too large of a depression I might fall into the water myself despite the skis, but if I chose my path well one of the Axiom could find himself in deep, cold trouble. Out there, I would be an easy target to their tranquillizer guns, but I had no choice.

I moved on, plotting my course as well as I could to avoid making them realize something was not quite right. My slightly erratic skiing could easily be accounted for the worsening condition of my leg, and I was starting to wonder if my plan would make any difference in the end. If I fell and couldn´t get up, I´d slowly freeze to death in the snow even if I managed to escape the bastards. A tiny geyser of snow blew up next to me, and I knew they´d reached the edge of the forest and were shooting at me again. Another one struck the left ski with a rapping sound and I knew my time was up. I threw myself down in the snow, and crawled to the nearest depression to minimize the target area. They´d reach me within a minute, at most.

I counted the seconds, and upon reaching thirty I thought I should be hearing their crunching of the snow by now. When nothing had happened at sixty, I lifted my head, very carefully, and looked back at the edge of the forest. Only about thirty meters from the trees, a sole figure was visible, on his knees. Two of them had fallen deep into a spring, and in their struggle to get out their strength was only working against them, driving their feet and legs deeper into the bottom mud and tangled, half rotten vegetation. The immediate danger wasn´t drowning, though, but hypothermia in the near-freezing water. Trying to help his friends, the only survivor had no time to shoot at me, and I struggled back to my feet and resumed skiing. I was almost across the swamp and closing in on the forest on the other side when an inhuman howling rose into the night behind me. My body instantly recognized the sound as something that didn´t belong to this world, and I shuddered like an animal trying to shake a nightmare.

The numb area had spread to the entire leg now, and the only way I could keep going was to watch my leg the entire time to make sure it was following my orders. I was starting to think that they´d shot me with an anesthetic instead of tranquillizer, as my mind was as clear as ever. That made sense, considering what they´d been planning to do to me. The numb area was still spreading, though, and I had no other choice left but to try to reach Harry´s place before I´d freeze to death, or the one surviving Axiom came after me with vengeance. I could only hope that Harry and Britta would be home and not somewhere else having fun on Saturday night. Fifteen minutes later, about halfway through to Harry´s house, I fell for the first time and after that every meter was a struggle, but once I´d passed through another small patch of forest I could already see the house across the fields. There was a dim flickering light in the living room, of someone watching TV. They were home. Skiing across the last fields I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see the horrible sight of the Axiom moving through the snow, but perhaps my plan had worked even better than I´d expected. To move the way they did, the freaks had to have enhanced metabolisms and energy reserves which probably kept them alive longer in the cold water, holding back the survivor. In any case, I knew that sooner or later at least one of them would show up.

For the last hundred yards, the leg was completely useless. I had to keep myself upright with the help of the ski poles, and in the end, unable to align the ski, I had lie down in the snow to undo the bindings and leave the skis behind, to half stumble, half crawl the last meters to his snowploughed yard. I couldn´t walk or jump on the icy surface, and I just lay there, calling Harry´s name. At first, nobody heard me, but then there were steps in the enclosed porch and the front door opened. When I saw him standing there, tall and handsome in a rumpled t-shirt and jeans, I started crying. I just couldn´t help it.

He saw the red streak of blood I´d left on the snow, and strode the distance between us with three huge lunges.

“Harry...”

“What happened?” he asked, horrified, scooping me up from the ground in his big arms.

“I was shot – twice,” I tearfully explained as he carried me into the house. “My leg isn´s working-”

Britta appeared, and alarm spread to her face when she saw us. She was much prettier in person than in the photo, and I was so exhausted and scared that this little detail was almost enough to make me burst into tears again. Without a word, she ran to lock the door behind us.

“Who did this?” Harry demanded as he set me down in the living room couch and ran his hands all over me to assess the damage.

When he saw the second red patch on my thigh, without an obvious exit wound, his face went so dark that he was almost unrecognizable.

“They weren´t bullets,” I reassured him. “Tranquillizer darts.”

He stared at me, speechless. “Who would shoot at you with tranquillizer darts?” he asked then, and as he thought it over the dark look returned.

He didn´t have time to ask more questions before my cell phone rang, and I dug it out from the breast pocket of my jacket. It was Mauro, as expected.

“Are you following the live feed?” I asked.

“I was patched into it. We´re on our way.”

“I killed two of them in the swamp” - I heard Britta gasp somewhere in the background - “but one is still after me. What do you want us to do?”

Harry was staring at me, shocked.

“You have to get out of there. They won´t harm Harry and Britta, but after what´s happened I don´t know what they´d do to you.”

“Harry -” I heard Britta say. “I´m calling the police.”

“No!” I raised my voice, and saw that she already had her cell phone out. “Don´t do that.”

Harry shook his head. “Britta, wait. We don´t know what´s going on.”

“Two people are dead, and I don´t know who´s out there. I´m calling,” she repeated and turned her back, punching in the numbers.

Harry´s eyes searched my face in desperation as he tried to decide whether to trust me or to let his fiancée do the rational thing.

“Mauro, she´s calling the emergency number,” I yelled into my phone.

“I heard. Working on it.”

There was a tiny beeping sound, and someone answered Britta´s call.

“Hello, this is-” Britta frowned. “Hello? Hello?”

Frustrated, she started to punch in the numbers again, then noticed the text on the screen. “No service.” She quickly stepped to the regular landline phone sitting in the bookcase, afraid that Harry would stop her, and lifted the receiver. The line was busy.

She turned to look at me, taken aback, and then asked me, her voice low and careful, “Did you just do that?”

I didn´t know what to say. Eyes wide, Harry pulled his hand away, only now realizing that he´d been caressing my hair the way one does to a sick child.

“The people after me are under strict orders not to harm bystanders,” I told her. “You´re safe. But we should all get out of here, now, just in case.” I turned back to Harry. “You have a gun, right?”

He nodded, and got on his feet. As he disappeared into the dark part of the house, Britta stayed in the living room, staring at me. Gradually I realized that her pinched expression and white lips had nothing to do fear. She knew. She´d seen Harry´s face when he saw me out there, and the utterly familiar way he had frisked my body for damage once back inside, and the way he hadn´t been able to stop touching me and caressing my hair to calm me down. We stared at each other without a word, and she took it as a silent confirmation.

“How old are you?” she asked then, quietly.

“Sixteen,” I replied. She didn´t need to know that I was officially under the age of consent.

Harry walked back into the room, a rifle hanging from one hand and a package of ammo in the other, oblivious to our discussion, and told Britta to go and get their coats.

A warbling sound came from my phone, and I lifted it up to my ear.

“Get moving,” Mauro ordered. “Take the road to Älvsbyn.”

Britta came back with their coats and boots, and once they were ready Harry handed the loaded gun over to her.

“I´ll carry him into the car. You shoot anything that moves.”

Going back into the cold moonlight and snow almost freaked me out. I had one arm around Harry´s shoulders, and when he saw my expression he murmured in a low voice, “It´ll be all right. I won´t let anything happen to you.”

Britta kept sweeping the snow-covered fields with the rifle, ready for anything, and I had to admit that she looked kind of formidable. I could see why Harry, or anyone else, might fall hard for her. We packed into the single wide seat of the pick-up truck, me in the middle, and Harry started the motor.

“Take the road to Älvsbyn,” I told him, and he nodded silently.

“Why Älvsbyn,” Britta asked worried. “There´s nothing there but forest.”

Harry revved up the engine and I didn´t have to answer. He swerved the car into the driveway and took the curves so fast that I flopped around with my bad leg. Between two curves, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me closer so that I could lean on him. We reached the main road, and he pushed the pick-up truck to full speed. I heard Britta breathe in sharply when suddenly the wheels skidded on ice for a second before gaining traction again, but she said nothing. For a few minutes, nobody spoke a word.

Then, carefully, Britta said, “What´s going on?”

Words stuck in my throat. These two didn´t deserve another barrage of lies.

“Your parent´s aren´t in China, are they?” Harry said, glancing at me, but not angrily.

“No, they aren´t. They´re dead.”

Britta gasped, and I tranquillized her, “It happened a long time ago.”

From the corner of my eye, I could tell she was looking at me. “Who are you?”

“Jonatan is living in the old Finfors house, you know that red and white on the other side of the forest?” Harry explained, a little too quickly. “He´s been helping me with the horses this winter.”

“Living alone, at sixteen?” Britta said, and I felt Harry tense up by my side. She added, flatly, “And you know that´s not what I meant with the question about who you are.”

I said nothing, and neither did Harry. There was another protracted silence.

“What happened with the phones?” Harry finally asked me, and there was a harder edge to his voice this time. “And why is yours the only one working?”

Again, I said nothing. I nudged at his arm, out of Britta´s sight, begging him to stop the questions. Inconspicuously, he shifted just a little further from me.

“I think we deserve to know,” Britta said, quietly.

I was still clutching at my phone, and I lifted it to my ear. “Mauro?”

He was there, his voice firm. “You can´t tell them anything. You shouldn´t even have used my name.”

I set down the phone. “I´m sorry.”

Harry took a deep breath. “Britta´s cell phone and my landline have different carriers. Who can shut them both down in three seconds, but leave your phone working? You gave me your number and you have the same carrier prefix as Britta.”

“Harry-” I tried, and then turned silent. There was nothing either truthful or dishonest I could say that didn´t demand more questions.

“Listen...” I tried again. “If it weren´t for you, I´d be dead by now. You know I´m not kidding.” A long pause. “Two people died in the swamp, and either one of them could have been me. I had no choice.”

“What did you do?” Harry asked.

“I tricked them into falling into open water.”

Britta turned his face away, to look outside the door window.

“They deserved it, “ I said.

“Nobody deserves to die,” she said softly.

Harry groaned in frustration. “Are you in some kind of a witness protection program?”

What a perfect occasion to calm them down with a few lies. “No.”

I heard Mauro´s voice from the phone. “Don´t say anything more,” he ordered when I lifted the phone up. “I´ll visit them and tell them personally what happened once we´ve extracted you.”

“Fine.” I turned to Harry. “Someone who knows exactly what´s classified and what´s not will visit and explain you everything.”

“Lie, you mean?” he said, exasperated.

He still couldn´t bring himself to be angry with me, but even so every word I said or didn´t say was pushing him away from me, and back to Britta, and she knew it.

“Where are we going?” she asked after a while.

“I don´t know,” I mumbled.

I kept my eyes on the road, trying to keep my mind blank. Like hell was I going to start crying again, here, between the two of them, but suddenly it crossed my mind that this was probably the very last time ever I´d see Harry and I couldn´t hold back. I didn´t make a sound, but the evidence was there just the same. Harry sensed that something was wrong and glanced at me.

“The tranquillizer is fucking with me,” I said. “They had some strong shit in those darts.”

Harry knew I was lying, and shifted his leg just enough for it to brush against mine.

“Jonatan,” I heard Mauro warble from the phone. “Tell Harry to flicker the headlights.”

He did, and Mauro said, “We´ve got you. Ask Harry to stop the car, leave you there and drive back.”

When Harry heard the plan, he grabbed the phone from my hand.

“Listen, Mauro,” he snapped. “Whoever you are, I don´t like you. And if you think I´m going to leave Jonatan here alone in the cold, in the middle of nowhere, think again. It´s not going to happen.”

There was a long silence, and then I heard Mauro give him new directions. Harry gave the phone back to me, and told us that we´d stop at the nearest straight patch of the road. After a couple of long shallow curves we reached a reasonably long stretch of the road with good visibility and Harry came to a halt. About thirty seconds later, a shuddering bright light appeared from behind the trees lining the road, and a rather large military-style helicopter slowly came down, sending plumes of snow to every direction. Britta turned to look at me, to gauge my reaction, and then shook her head in disbelief. The helicopter settled down on the road, and Mauro, not properly dressed for cold weather, jumped down from the back. Harry and Britta got out of the car, and Harry pulled me out, a little too unceremoniously, and lifted me in his arms to carry me to the chopper. He barely deigned a nod at Mauro, who consequently chose to talk to Britta while Harry set me down in the back of the chopper where a stretcher took up most of the room on the floor. He was kneeling by my side, holding my arm, and I thought I´d have to warn him.

“Britta knows. I didn´t say anything,” I added quickly. “She just saw us together and she figured it out.”

“Fucking hell,” Harry said, anguish creeping into his voice.

Then he shook his head, postponing the problem until the two of them would be alone, and gave me searching look.

“Who are you, Jonatan? Can you tell me?”

“I wish I could.” I was choking up. “But I just can´t. I can´t.”

“It´s killing me to see you go.”

He stepped back and down from the helicopter, gave me a last look and walked away, passing by Mauro without a word. The pilot started accelerating the engine and after saying goodbye to Britta Mauro climbed to the back of the chopper. The pick-up truck had already turned around and was driving away into the night when the helicopter took to the air, and there was nothing left to see but an occasional glimpse of the moon through the small portholes.

“We need to run some tests,” Mauro said without a preamble. “I want to make sure that they used only tranquillizer and didn´t shoot you up with behavior-changing DNA or some other nanoshit.”

That was the first time I´d ever heard Mauro swear, and I blinked in surprise. The night had really riled him up. While he was drawing a blood sample from my arm, I apologized for Harry´s behavior. For a moment he said nothing, but then relented, sort of.

“He´s really protective, I know. The AI summary from your feed gave him high marks,” he huffed in response. “The AI also found him reasonably interesting as a potential Rep.”

That shut me up. Mauro wouldn´t have said something like that without a reason. He pulled out a flat wand-like thing, and started carefully going over every inch of my body. I felt a strange tingling sensation reach deep into the tissues, even bone.

“What happens if that thing beeps,” I asked warily.

“I´ll have to kill you, instantly. You won´t even know it happened,” Mauro added, a rather feeble consolation. “If they´ve used something that messes with your brain we have to stop it before it can influence your next life.”

Instantly the wand took on a far more sinister air. I gulped, and watched it move over my good leg. “How did they find me,” I asked to distract myself.

“Not by coincidence,” Mauro sighed. “They must have drugged you in Italy to find out your real name, and now it seems that in the last couple of weeks a Sundström has been googling ´Jonatan´ in every possible combination until it got red flagged by a scout program.”

There was a rather large amount of satisfaction in hearing that Harry had been so obsessive about me.

“What were you getting at with the AI´s comment about Harry?”

Mauro looked at me, his lips drawn into a thin line. “You know we take very good care of our own,” he said. “But we haven´t been able to do that with you.”

“But-”

“Please let me finish,” Mauro interrupted. “I shouldn´t be telling you this, but as a compensation you may be granted the right to recruit one person. That has never happened before, and it´s still being discussed. But if the final decision is affirmative, and as long as the person passes the AIs´ scrutiny...”

A small blue light lit up at the tip of the wand.

“Fuck

The White Room

2009-06-19T17:18:00.000-07:00

I was feeling really good today. Clearheaded. Light. No discomfort anywhere. I was in the white room.

And the beautiful view was back. As I watched, the huge black sphere, sprinkled with glittering lights in patterns that somehow seemed familiar, was changing again with a curve of light slowly appearing at its side and gradually turning blue as it widened. A great sense of tranquility washed over me as I watched the light advance. I knew what was happening.

I was in orbit.

It was a wonderful, rare thing. I was privileged to see what I was seeing. I would remember this for the rest of my life.

There was just this one little thing nattering at the back of my mind, very quietly and discreetly, but it didn´t give up.

What did it mean, to be in orbit?

A room

2009-06-19T17:16:00.000-07:00

Now I was sure psychologists had determined that a rustic bedroom was the most soothing ambiance for waking up from dead. This room was a little different from the previous one, less frillsome and more to my taste, but all the same basic elements were there. I couldn´t be bothered with the details, though, and threw away the soft duvet and stepped to the window to see the view outside. A wide expanse of windblown sand, with occasional copses of reeds, and a sea of white-tipped waves. At least I wasn´t in Ireland. And, apparently, the world hadn´t been blown to smithereens in a nuclear war during my two-year absence as I could see a few seagulls hovering over the waves. But then, this could plausibly be Australia and the last beach.

I let out a sigh. It seemed that dying put me in a morbid mood. There was an oval mirror on the cupboard door, and to distract myself I decided to see if there had been any changes or if I was the old engineered myself. Everything seemed in order; Engineer wouldn´t have allowed anyone to tinker with perfection. I let out another sigh. Perfection wasn´t enough to tip the scales when it came to bumbling bisexuals. In my subjective sense of time, Harry had broken up with me just three days ago. Impending depression.

There was a knock on the door, and Mauro entered with a lopsided smile.

“It´s OK,” I said. “Thanks for killing me.”

“You´re welcome,” he said, recovering some of his regular good mood. “And welcome to Denmark.”

I frowned. That seemed ominously close to Sweden, under the circumstances. Something was up.

“He and Britta divorced five months ago,” Mauro explained, resigned to the role of a reluctant matchmaker.

Perhaps being dead didn´t deserve all the bad rep it usually got.

A thought crossed my mind. “How did that pow-wow go, about letting me recruit someone?”

Looking more resigned than ever, Mauro said, “They could hardly say no after I killed you.”

“You don´t think it´s a good idea.”

“I think it´s a great idea,” Mauro said forcefully. “But you haven´t had time to think it all through. It´s going to be far more trickier than you´d believe.”

“I know. He might not be crazy about the idea of having a bunch of anthropologists in his head, watching while he´s doing kinky homo things.”

“You can´t even be sure if it should be him. Two years have passed,” Mauro reminded me. “I don´t want you to get your hopes up.”

“Is he seeing someone?”

“That´s something you need to find out for yourself.” He stood up. “How about if we go out and do something Danish?”

“What´s that?”

Mauro cocked his head. “Words beer, smörgåsbord, and welfare come to mind. I guess that means going to a bar to get drunk and fat on government´s money.”

“The next time, please wake me up in Ireland.”

The Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden

2009-06-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

The Stockholm archipelago was one of the most beautiful places in Sweden. It wasn´t spectacular like Switzerland, or exciting like a photo safari in Africa, but just like Tuscany, even though entirely different as a landscape, it had a similar special and unique atmosphere of its own. Spreading as far as 60 kilometers away from Stockholm, the archipelago had some 24 000 islands and islets, all of them bedrock that had been scoured smooth by the retreating ice age, then risen from the sea during the last five thousand years as the land itself rose a few millimeters a year after shaking off the weight of mammoth glaciers. Trees and meadows had formed over the rock, turning the islands into lush havens for wildlife, and now the beautiful summer houses and cottages of the people of Stockholm had given the finishing touch to the landscape. This was my first ever visit to the place and the warm summer evening, the sun low in the sky but still hours away from sunset, was the perfect time of the day to sit on the top deck of a small ferryboat and enjoy the beauty of the islands. A huge red and white Viking Line ferry with thousands of holidaymakers en route from Finland or Estonia majestically passed us by in the narrow strait, and the wake rocked my boat, making me smile despite the tension in the pit of my stomach.

Four attack drones were flying in a formation around the boat, unbeknownst to my fellow passengers who were on their way to their island summer houses for the weekend and happily chatting amongst themselves. There would be one more boat returning to town tonight, and I had an hour to spare before I´d have to be back on board once I reached the island where I was going. In my destination, in addition to protecting me, the attack drones would search and destroy any Axiom contraptions that they might find, and even though the mere cessation of transmissions would indicate my presence I should have enough time to retreat and disappear before a deliverance team could catch me. The Axiom had discreetly been informed that after their latest botched operation I was no longer fair game and further attempts to deliver me would lead to a confrontation; however, it was unclear what exactly would happen if my drones and an Axiom team faced each other off. This was uncharted diplomatic territory that everyone wanted to avoid at all costs, and I suspected that the live feed observation team contained some very high-ranking individuals indeed in addition to Mauro who would contact me through my cell phone as usual if anything went wrong. There had been some talk of adding communications hardware into my body, but in the end the risk of being found out after a freak accident had been considered too high. Not even Mauro had anything more than the usual neural mesh which would go unnoticed in a regular unsuspecting autopsy.

It was time to get off the boat. The island was fairly large, with a loose congregation of traditional wooden houses that might be called a village clustered near the jetty, but my destination was beyond them, on the other side of a small forest. I walked along the narrow dirt road past the houses, knowing that two of the drones were systematically checking them out, while the front runner was scanning the area directly ahead and the fourth buzzed around the island looking for less obvious threats and observation gear. So far, so good; my cell phone hadn´t rung yet. I left the village behind, and after walking about one hundred and fifty meters I caught my first glimpse of the house, a portion of the windowless back wall that camouflaged surprisingly well among the trees. The drones would have congregated around the house by now, two of them creeping inside through any cracks, windows left ajar, or air ducts. I turned the corner and entered the front yard, and couldn´t help stopping for a moment to admire the view. The facade of the ultramodern one-storey house was an expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing unobstructed view to a rather ascetic yet perfectly balanced front garden that gradually descended towards the sea and turned into bare rock for the last few meters where winter storms hit the hardest. The sea was dotted with islands big and small, most of them with a traditional summer house half-hidden by trees, and the amount of motor yachts and sailboats in sight made it clear that this was not the kind of place that economic downturns could touch.

I followed a stone-paved walkway to the front door and hesitantly stood there for a moment. The evening sun reflected from the glass facade, making it impossible to see inside and discern if you were being observed. For all I knew, he was watching me right now as I stood in front of the entrance, rousing courage to ring the doorbell. I took a deep breath, but just as I started moving my hand towards the fateful button my phone rang.

“Stay where you are,” Mauro ordered me. “Two hostile drones have been detected and are being dealt with right now. Neither can get through to you.”

A few seconds passed, and then, without a warning, a huge window pane at the corner of the house let out a loud cracking sound and crashed down in a cascade of sharp-edged pieces. Startled by the ear-shattering noise, I almost dropped my cell phone and took a step back even though I was at safe distance. A second later the front door swung open and there he was, right in front of me, wearing just a pair of comfortable-looking baggy shorts and nothing else, his blond hair tousled and a little too long as always.

“I see you´re back,” he said wryly. “I suppose that wasn´t a bullet because you´re not ducking.”

“Right, it wasn´t,” I replied. “But let´s not move just for a moment.”

He shook his head. “Why does the world always turn into a weird place when you´re around?” Then he frowned, running his eyes over me. “And you´re kind of creeping me out, kid. You don´t look a month older that you used to.”

“I´ll come to that in a moment... OK, what happened over there was that two attack drones – they look like insects but they´re not – have been hiding in your house to see if I show up. My own drones are taking care of them right now.”

Deadpan. “They seem to be taking care of my house, too.”

All things considered, he was showing impressive sangue froid, and sarcasm, while his house was being devastated by some presumed invisible insect things he surely couldn´t be taking seriously.

Not a moment too late, Mauro informed me that the attack drones had been disposed of and while we´d lost one of mine in the process the remaining three would make sure that we were safe, for the time being.

“Your cell phone is back, too.”

“Please lay off the sarcasm and invite me in,” I said, exasperated. “The attack drones are dead.”

Their presence had been something of a surprise, as we´d only expected to run into observation drones. Hopefully, the Axiom were only scoring diplomatic points by sacrificing attack drones but there was no way to be sure, and to avoid a confrontation that didn´t involve mere proxies, once again there was no back-up extraction team for me. It would be another two years in the White Room if something went wrong.

Harry stepped aside and gestured me to enter the house. The first thing we did was to check the damage to the kitchen, and along the way I had a closer look at his home. It was a dream, I grudgingly admitted, Scandinavian design at its purest and most minimal. White surfaces, bent wood, everything light and simple, glorified by the floor-to-ceiling windows. Come to think of it, the house in Midby had been perfect in its own way even though I hadn´t been so crazy about the country style. Britta should have been warned. In the kitchen, we discovered that the window had been the only casualty.

“It´ll be taken care of,” I promised, but Harry didn´t seem very interested.

Instead, his eyes never left me, and he seemed more preoccupied by the second. “You´re pulling me into some really weird shit once again.”

I could only shrug, a little shamefaced.

“I bet you already know that I married Britta and she divorced me.”

“I was told, yes.”

“And it took you five months to show up?” he asked with a smile, trying to shift the mood to something more normal.

“Sorry it took me so long. I was dead.”

He saw that I wasn´t joking, and his smile faded. I could tell he was becoming seriously disturbed, probably thinking that I´d gone crazy, but then, what had happened with the window and why did I still look fifteen even though two years had passed?

“Listen, kid, this is really starting to freak me out.”

I asked him to follow me to the living room, where we sat down on the couch and I told him everything. Or almost. I didn´t tell him that we were cousins, what my job had been before moving to Midby, and who Alex was, among other things. I didn´t tell him the reason for my visit, either. But I didn´t tell a single lie. For the entire time, neither did he stop me nor did he ask one question, and once I was finished he still remained silent.

“You died that night,” he finally said, his voice shaken. “And this body... it´s a different one? I mean, completely?”

I nodded.

“Fucking hell.”

“Listen, Harry,” I said, feeling like a jerk. “It doesn´t look like it´s going to rain tonight, so the kitchen should be all right until some people will come and take care of it in the morning. You and I, we should go. Just for tonight. We have fifteen minutes to catch the last ferry to town.”

“Is someone going to be shooting at us if we don´t catch the boat?”

The evening really hadn´t gone the way I´d planned. “Probably not.”

“Probably?” He stood up.

“Are you angry at me?” What a stupid question. I could have kicked myself for letting it slip out.

“About your Peeping Toms watching me fuck you?” he said, not looking particularly un-angry. I wasn´t very happy about his unsentimental choice of a word for our sex life either. “I haven´t figured that one out yet. I´ll let you know.”

He was back in two minutes, in a pair of jeans and an unzipped hooded sweatjacket over a t-shirt. Even close to midsummer, the night air would be cool. My heart started beating faster as soon as he reappeared, and I realized I hadn´t expressly told him that for me only few days had passed. He gave me an inscrutable glance and nodded at the direction of the door. We still hadn´t as much as shaken hands, and now we were already leaving the house. I walked into the hall, knowing what I´d find there.

“Just a second,” I said and pointed at the two dead dragonflies on the floor.

With a shudder, I brought the heel of my shoe down on each one, and Harry´s eyes went wide as he heard the unnatural crunch and saw the way the remains turned into two tiny piles of greasy ash, leaving an acrid tang in the air.

“Those were the-”

“Yes.”

Harry looked around with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity, but of course there was nothing to be seen. The ferry was already approaching the jetty when we reached the village, and as the few people going towards Stockholm were all sitting on the top deck he lead me to the deserted lower one where we could talk freely. I sat down next to him, aghast at how unaltered the need to touch him had remained during the two years of regeneration.

He glanced at me, puzzled.

“You know,” I said, keeping my eyes on the retreating island, “it´s been just a few days for me.”

It took him a couple of seconds to understand my meaning. He let out something like a sigh, but didn´t reach out to touch me. This was definitely not going the way I´d planned. And as if on cue, my cell phone rang. Harry rolled his eyes.

“Bad news,” Mauro said, his voice unexpectedly low. “Our contacts know nothing about the attack drones. That means they weren´t there for you.”

I knew I wasn´t the center of the world, but this was weird, to use Harry´s favorite new expression, and not just a little scary.

Having given me a few seconds to think about it, Mauro added, “The logical conclusion is that they were there for Harry. To protect him.” I heard Mauro draw a deep breath. “He could be an Axiom hybrid.”

I must have tensed up or let out a small sound as Harry turned to me, with a deep frown. “Is everything OK?”

Keep the drones away. Do not touch him.

After just a second of delay Mauro responded, “We´re on standby.”

I turned to Harry and struggled to form a smile. “Just some diplomatic squabble, nothing to do with us.” I focused back on the phone. If this is a hybrid, where´s Harry? “Keep me updated, though,” I said aloud.

“I will.” There was a pause. “I´m sorry. If that´s not him, Harry is probably dead. Get to the upper deck, now.”

I ended the call and stared out of the window, not ready to face Harry, or the thing pretending to be him. I felt his eyes on me and felt a wave of panic rise inside, not because of the personal danger I was in but for Harry.

I couldn´t stop myself. If this one here killed Harry, I want you to rip him to shreds.

“What´s wrong?” Harry asked, and this time his large hand came down on my shoulder. “That wasn´t about just some diplomatic squabble. Talk to me.”

“I´ll let you know as soon as they tell me. I promise.”

He didn´t pull back his hand. All kinds of nasty things could be passing through to my skin from his fingertips touching the base of my neck. I racked my brain, trying to come up with at least one smart question to figure out who the man sitting next to me was, but my efforts were hindered by my dick which was instantly reacting to Harry´s touch. It was reassuring, in a way; it seemed that my subconscious was receiving just the right subliminal messages and considered him the real thing. Or he could be injecting my skin with pheromones with the exact same effect.

“You look like you´re going to start hyperventilating any second now,” Harry said. “Something´s seriously wrong.”

I shifted my position a little, just enough for him to see the massive erection bulging in my pants, and he pulled his hand back.

“Um... I see.” His eyes lingered on my bulge, and his face grew flustered.

“Why did Britta divorce you?” I asked, head on.

“She said there was a ghost in our house.” Harry leaned his head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. “And the ghost wasn´t leaving, so she had to.”

“Why are you shunning me, then?”

“You´re drawing me into things I want nothing to do with,” he answered, looking me in the eyes. “And you´re lying to me.”

“Fuck...” I closed my eyes for a second. I might be seconds away from the White Room. “Mauro thinks you´re an Axiom hybrid.”

Harry looked at me, incredulous at first, then disgusted. “I knew there was a good reason why I hated the guy.”

Predictably, my phone rang, somehow sounding louder than usual.

“Are you out of your mind,” Mauro yelled at me. “We can´t protect you if pull stunts like that.” He cursed. “Stay on hold, we should be getting new information any moment now.”

Harry interrupted, more puzzled than angry. “Why would he think I´m a hybrid?”

“The attack drones weren´t there for me. Something weird is going on.”

“You can say that again.”

We stared at each other, and my heartbeat began to slow down. Either this was Harry, or the hybrid was trying to learn as much as possible before doing whatever it was planning to do. He ran his fingers into my hair, gripping a fistful, and pulled me closer.

“Can you tell your team to shut down the connection?” he murmured into my ear.

“They won´t until they´re sure you´re not a hybrid.”

“Bastards.”

His soft, full lips came down on mine, and at first I half expected something awful to happen. Nothing did, however, and I very soon I was thinking, for a weird scary mutant he sure kisses well.

Mauro´s voice was back on the phone, interrupting us. “Stop bragging... and ask him about his job.”

“My job?” Harry said with a frown when I relayed the question. “I have a degree in agronomy, and a few months after you left a head hunter contacted me about a job. I said no as I had no intention of leaving Midby, but once the divorce came through and I moved down here, after selling everything, I thought what the hell and called him. It turned out they had another vacancy and I took the job.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“It´s a company that´s trying to engineer a bacteria that will feed on useless minerals in the soil, turning it more productive without the help of chemical fertilizers that eutrophicate rivers and lakes. My job is to design field trials.”

It sounded great, but after I thought about it for a moment I grew somewhat alarmed. “What if it runs amok? Won´t it turn planetary crust into mush in a couple of centuries? What if it gobbles up my teeth after I´ve eaten the produce?”

“The bacteria can be tailored for specific minerals,” Harry said, imperturbed. “And several sets of suicide genes are built in. A thing like that could work wonders in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of transporting truckloads of prohibitively expensive fertilizer, you just sprinkle a spoonful of the stuff on your fields and that´s that until the next year.”

I was impressed, but I couldn´t figure out how this could be relevant to the attack drones. Mauro was hard at work digging up details, though, and my phone rang after just a few more minutes.

“Our financial search programs haven´t been able to trace back to the owner of the company, which can mean only one thing. It´s them.”

I was flabbergasted. “Why? Is the bacteria some kind of a Trojan horse?”

“No, actually it´s not,” Mauro replied. “Listen, you know we can only tell you things you need to know. What we haven´t told you until now is that the Axiom like to nudge things along just as much as we do, and just as inconspicuously. The bacteria in question was actually created rather a long time ago, but only now biotechnologies have gotten advanced enough to make it a plausible invention.”

“I see... so that´s why you tiptoe around them, no matter what some of them get hung up about.”

“Exactly.”

So the Axiom were philanthropists. That is, when they weren´t liberating people like me. It made some kind of twisted sense.

“They can´t let anyone realize what´s really going on, so they keep close tabs on the workers,” Mauro added. “And I´d guess it´s no coincidence that he´s your ex. Two pigeons with one stone.”

Harry was watching me attentively, waiting for an explanation. I ended the conversation with Mauro and turned to him.

“Bad news,” I said. “You´re working for the Axiom.”

He stared at me, and then shook his head. “So, wrecking my house and marriage wasn´t enough. Now you have to wreck my career, too.”

Put like that, it sounded quite bad, and try as I might I couldn´t fault his reasoning. I hadn´t been prepared to tell him the real reason for my visit, but this was the moment to do it. He watched me incredulously as I explained everything to him.

“So you want to put those Peeping Toms into my head, too?” he said crossly when I had finished.

“But the benefits...”

He checked his temper. “Are very good indeed. But I can´t have people in my head, watching and listening to everything I do. I just can´t.”

“Please think about it,” I begged. “I have this one chance to recruit someone-”

“Why are you telling me this now?” he interrupted. “Why not back at the house?”

“Because you don´t care for me any more,” I said heatedly. “I don´t think you even like me any more.”

He looked at me, taken aback. “That´s not true.” After having looked for words for a moment, he continued, “it´s just that every time I see you it´s like this huge wrecking ball smashes right through my life-”

“That´s because you keep fighting it! Just be who you are,” I said.

He looked at me, eyes narrowed. “And you think you know who I am?” He stood up. “You´re the most fucking arrogant person I´ve ever met.”

I watched after him as he walked out of the room and climbed to the upper deck. Mauro if you call me now with some smart piece of advice I swear I´ll string you up by the balls tomorrow.

While I was trying to decide whether to follow Harry to the upper deck or wallow in my misery below, a little old lady peeked into the lower deck. She was wearing a cheap jacket and skirt, but her gray hair was perfect as if she´d just pulled out the rollers and her silver glasses were matched by a rather conspicuous brooch and several rings in her fingers.

“Hello,” she said, stepping down the steep stairs into the room. “I´m sorry but couldn´t help overhearing that you were having a quarrel with that handsome boyfriend of yours. Now don´t you worry, it´ll be all right.”

I was a little surprised by her words. Not that an old lady was supportive of two boyfriends, there was nothing strange about that in Sweden, but it was unusual for a stranger to meddle even benignly into private affairs. She was sweet, though. And she looked quite agile for an old lady, with no sign whatsoever of artirithis or any other age-related ailment as she took the stairs and moved across the room towards me. Her head was cocked and she had the most sincere smile, and suddenly the hair on my neck was standing up. I discovered that I´d gotten on my feet even though I was still smiling back at her.

“Yes, I think I should go and talk to him,” I said, taking a step towards an aisle away from her.

“Oh, don´t be in such a hurry,” she pleaded, with a little wave of her ringed hand.

Then we both stood very still. Between us, there was a thin transparent sheet of something, shimmering like air above a black patch of asphalt in the summer. The old lady´s smile had turned into a near grimace and was quickly fading as her eyes searched for the source of the field and found two of my drones, looking like coal-black horseflies that had attached themselves to the ceiling. Her posture stiffened as she stared at me.

Keep Harry out of this. Don´t call him.

I knew my phone wasn´t going to ring and distract me until the situation had been resolved one way or another. The old lady was about to say something when Harry walked down the stairs – he had been watching over me, after all – and came to a halt when he saw the shimmering wall between us. For a moment, none of us moved or spoke.

“Harry, would you please step aside,” I said then, with as much calm as I could muster. “I think she was about to leave.”

Reluctantly he obeyed, acknowledging my presumably superior experience on this type of matters. The road clear, the old lady retreated with alarming speed, and for a second Harry was left staring after her with his eyes wide before he turned and strode over to me to see if I was all right.

“I´m OK,” I said, a little shakily, but Harry ran his hands all over me just the same to make sure I was unharmed.

He had barely finished when a dark shadow flitted in front of the windows and almost immediately there was a loud scream on the upper deck.

“She jumped,” a female voice was screaming. “That... that old woman... she just climbed the railing! She jumped!”

Instantly the captain went to work to reverse the engines, and we were almost thrown off our feet as the boat forcefully slowed down and started turning around. As soon as we´d regained our footing there was another unexpected sideways move, accompanied by the deepening roar of the engines, and Harry had to slam his arm around my chest and pull me back before I crashed on a table.

“What a bitch...” I said as soon as Harry had lifted me up. “I don´t think these drones can follow her underwater, and she can probably dive for two or maybe three hundred meters before she has to come up for air. If she has to come up at all.”

“Will they even try to follow her?” Harry asked. “I mean, if their job is to watch over you and try to avoid trouble.”

I nodded. “Right.”

Harry had his arm around me and didn´t let go even when Mauro called and told me that they were sending more drones to the boat, ETA fifteen minutes. With such a short time of arrival the new ones either had to be real fiends or the base happened to be orbiting nearly overhead.

“These look like blackbirds, and they´re pretty heavily armed,” Mauro reassured me. “Just so that you know, one of them could easily take out not only Stockholm but the entire archipelago.”

“Is that supposed to cheer me up?” I asked.

“It´s a bit of an overkill when it comes to firepower, but they´ve got much better sensors,” Mauro told me. “I think we´ll have to permanently upgrade your drones to these unless we lock you into some bunker.”

The boat came to a standstill. We sat down, and with Harry´s big protective arm around my shoulders I couldn´t deny that the hybrid had done me an unexpected favor. Luckily, no one came down to ask us what had happened. Old ladies like her were invisible to other people, and nobody had paid her any attention until she jumped. An hour passed before the captain and the emergency personnel decided that the boat could continue to the harbor, while divers remained on the site looking for her. We were five minutes from the harbor when Mauro called and told us to take a taxi to the main railway station. Tickets to a private cabin in a sleeping car would be waiting for us, destination Copenhagen.

“Are you crazy?” Harry said. “My house is-”

“It will be taken care of,” I said firmly. “As long as you´re with me you don´t have to worry about a single practical thing. Your house will be fixed and looked after until you´ve decided what to do about it. Money is no problem. A security sweep is under way in the railway station and my new drones will take down anything hostile.”

Similar sweep was taking place in every transport hub of the city to throw any followers off the track, but this was not the time to get boggled down by details. Harry regarded me with suspicion, trying to come up with a reason not to go to Copenhagen but couldn´t. It was Friday night, and he couldn´t go back to work on Monday anyway.

“You have no idea how much I want to spank you right now,” he finally said, relenting.

We reached the station and collected our tickets with fifteen minutes to spare. There was a restaurant car in the train, so we didn´t have to rush to a kiosk to get provisions for the night and we could proceed directly to the train. Ours was a two-person cabin, and once we had entered and shut the door we just stood there looking at each other, in the narrow room with its two bunk beds opened and ready.

“You said something about spanking...” I quipped, trying to lighten the mood.

“Just wait until they´ve checked our tickets and the door is locked,” he said darkly.

Galveston, Texas

2009-06-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

It started as an unremarkable weather front in Nigeria, and in the following days it slowly moved across western Africa towards the Atlantic Ocean. Once it reached the warm oceanic waters the front intensified into a storm, then vacillated as if unsure what to do, but by the time it reached Cape Verde islands the storm was rapidly growing stronger and it was officially designated as a Tropical Depression Five on June 20. It was unheard of to have had so many tropical depressions that early in the season, but after a lull of a few rather placid hurricane seasons a record-breaking streak had been back for two years now, and seemingly growing worse. The first depression had formed the second week of May, almost a month before the official start of the season, and after that a new one had appeared nearly every week, two of them growing into level 2 and 3 hurricanes which had both made landfall in Northern America, in Florida and South Carolina respectively. One of the storms had stayed over the Atlantic and curved back in on the UK and France, hitting them with wind speeds of a tropical storm. Worse was expected; the year had been extraordinarily warm so far, with a deadly heat wave engulfing the whole of Europe as early as in the first days of June, and the continent´s power plants were churning out electricity for air conditioning at their peak capacity. A year earlier, almost fifteen thousand people had died in August in Italy alone as the country´s electric grid collapsed under massive demand, and in September the government had given emergency licenses for four new nuclear power plants despite an earlier Chernobyl-induced referendum which had banned nuclear energy forever from the country. Another storm had permanently wiped out two thirds of the inhabitable islands of the Maldives and destroyed their tourist industry, and people were abandoning their island nation in droves. It had been a bad year indeed. Not that there weren´t some bright spots; sub-Saharan countries were growing greener at accelerated pace, extending savanna into the former desert, and Siberia had become positively balmy. But obviously no one knew what was going to happen in the long run, and so far this year had been a good example of the meteorological chaos.

The Tropical Depression Five was upgraded to a tropical storm 24 hours later on June 21, and earned the name Evelyn. Two days later, the storm reached hurricane level, and by the time it made it´s first landfall in Cuba on June 27 it was rated a category 3 storm. Having flown over Cuba, losing strength over the land, the hurricane reached the warm waters of the Mexican Gulf and its winds started intensifying once again along a steady course towards Texas. In the early hours of July 2, computer models predicted a landfall between Freeport and Galveston within two days, and the City Manager issued a mandatory evacuation order for the entire island of Galveston.

“This is not the type of July 4 celebration I was looking forward to,” Harry grumbled as we lifted the heavy plywood panel against a window and he brought up the hammer. “I wanted to see the fireworks on my first Independence Day in America. Tell me again why we didn´t rent the house with the hurricane shutters?”

“Because you said it was butt ugly,” I repeated for the third time as he started to hammer in the first nail. “And the palm trees in the patio had fungus all over them.”

“Damn,” he cursed. “I bet the Causeway will already be totally jammed by the time we´re finished with these.”

“We still have a day and a half to get out. We´ll make it.”

“Isn´t there another bridge in the western end of the island?”

I hesitated. “I think so... but as far as I know the Causeway is faster no matter what.”

Muttering to himself, Harry finished hammering and we moved on to the next window. The Victorian style house didn´t exactly stand on stilts, but it was raised to minimize potential storm surge damage as the real estate agent had repeatedly mentioned while we were trying to make up our minds. It was a narrow two-storey building with a reinforced ceiling – hurricane-proof, she had claimed – and the previous owner had even built a comfortable crawlspace in the attic to escape an unusually high storm surge. After the onslaught of Ike and a couple of minor storms after that, Galveston seemed to be a particularly hurricane-conscious place even though very few people still intended to ride out storms. We weren´t in a particularly low-lying area of the city, but a 17-foot storm surge would still top the Seawall and swamp the city and even a lower surge could go around and enter from the unprotected bay side. Evelyn, presently a grade 3 hurricane, had the potential of wrecking the town even worse than Ike which had been only a grade 2 storm at the moment of landfall. For the time being, Galveston wasn´t projected to take a direct hit but in a day and a half the storm could still theoretically divert to almost anywhere and a large slice of the coast was under hurricane watch.

Harry looked up to the perfectly blue sky and shook his head. “I must say that right now I´m missing Midby.”

For a year, I´d been trying to change his mind about joining us, but he kept saying no as firmly as ever. I´d tried to be subtle, and when that didn´t work I made him feel guilty, and then I resorted to reason and logic after a bout of plain unadulterated nagging which I had prolonged only because he was exceptionally hot in bed when angry with me. All in vain. Almost every other male would have succumbed just because of the enlarged dick, but the bastard was already so well hung that I had no leverage there, and the way women went after him he hardly needed any of Engineer´s other tricks to boost his ego.

Note to myself: the next time, find a less attractive boyfriend. However, for the time being, I was quite glad to watch him at work with only a pair of baggy shorts on in the hot afternoon sun and a sheen of sweat covering his muscular torso. After he had taken off his shirt, a couple of cars had already slowed down suspiciously while driving by despite all the hectic craziness of the mandatory evacuation. Our plan was to finish with the hurricane protection, have a leisurely dinner to wind down, and take to the road once the sun had set and the worst heat of the day was gone. Undoubtedly half of the city residents had the same plan, resulting in an interminable gridlock on the way to the Causeway, but we didn´t want to leave the evacuation to the last minute. I had fled from a hurricane once before but then I hadn´t been in a low-lying island almost straight in the path of the storm, and considering that even normal Texan meteorological phenomena was sufficient to astound Harry after the placid Swedish weather he wasn´t looking forward to seeing even a far edge of a hurricane. The surge from Ike had flooded Galveston before a single drop of rain from the storm proper had reached the city.

Once we had all the windows covered, we dragged everything we possibly could from the first to the second floor, and when that was done we collapsed into the bed to catch our breaths. It would be a long night as we´d have to drive all the way to Conroe, past Houston, because we hadn´t found a single free motel room anywhere closer. Even so we consider ourselves lucky since a lot of people would be driving as far as San Antonio and even Dallas.

“If the town takes a direct hit, things will get so bad that we´ll have to move somewhere else,” I said, cuddling up to Harry in the darkened room. “Where would you like to go?”

“The Alps?”

“Ha ha.” I thought about it for a second. “They have avalanches.”

“Tough choice.” He pulled me on top of him and nibbled at my neck. His big hands slowly slid down along my back and cupped my asscheeks. “What do you say if we postpone dinner? We have all the night to get out here.”

“It´s a deal.”

Later, while he was preparing steaks and salads for the dinner, I packed the car with bottled water, sandwiches and all kinds of road food, in addition to our suitcases and laptops. We´d be all right for a 24-hour drive, only having to stop for restroom breaks. The kitchen TV kept us updated on the latest news about Evelyn, and it didn´t look good. The hurricane was speeding up, shortening the time for evacuation, and as if that wasn´t enough projections kept inching the landfall towards north and Galveston. We were halfway through our steaks when there was a deep, low-frequency boom that rattled the windows even behind their plywood shields.

“That wasn´t fireworks,” Harry said, standing up.

My phone rang, but instead of Mauro it was One. I turned the loudspeaker on for Harry´s benefit, and set the phone on the table.

“There has been an explosion in the direction of Tiki Island,” the drone said. “Two is already on its way. I´m staying here to watch over the house.”

We had named the drones One and Two, as it was hard enough to remember that they weren´t sentient even without proper names. Two came on the line just before another explosion rattled the windows.

“It´s the Causeway,” it said. “Two explosions have taken out a sections-”

We heard the third explosion on the phone seconds before the sound wave reached the house.

“A section of the Causeway has collapsed, both directions,” Two came back on line. “I´m playing back my video feed and it seems that at least the last two explosions were caused by boats that ran into abutments and exploded.”

“I ran a simulation of how fast you can get to the West End bridge if you leave now,” One interrupted. “Not fast enough. You´d get stuck in the traffic long before you´d get there.”

Two was back on. “Irrelevant. My sensors just recorded a flash from that direction so that bridge is probably gone, too.”

The drones went quiet as they had nothing new to say.

“I guess we can forget about the Bolivar Ferry as well,” Harry said, eyes bugged out. “Did a lot of cars fall into the bay?”

“Reviewing video,” Two said, and then added, “I have twenty-one on record. Several must have fallen before I gained sufficient altitude.”

”Fucking hell,” Harry growled. ”Who would do something like that?”

Mauro joined the conversation. ”I just heard. You guys OK? I´m in New Zealand so there´s a bit of a delay in the conversation.”

”New Zealand?” I said, suddenly very envious of him.

”We´re already running scenarios,” he reassured us. ”You´ll be all right.”

”Saying that we´ll be all right is different from saying you´ll get us out,” I noted.

I didn´t like one bit what he said next. ”One, start evaluating the building. I want a complete assessment of what it can take. Two, get back to the house.”

”Can´t you come and pick us up?” Harry asked, frowning.

”I miss the old days,” Mauro said. ”When that bumbling fool used to be the president. Now the Air Force will have the airspace locked down in fifteen minutes, long before we can get to you.”

Two announced, ”Less than that. I´m already picking up electronics from two approaching jet fighters.”

“There will be chaos,” I said. “Can you slip a helicopter through?”

“That´s one of the scenarios. We still have almost sixteen hours, we´ll figure this out.”

“Sixteen? But the projections-”

“Are lagging behind. Ours say that you have time until tomorrow afternoon.”

Everyone signed out, and the only sound that remained in the kitchen was the weather update on TV, soon replaced by the breaking news logo. I realized I was gripping the edge of the kitchen counter, knuckles white, and forced myself to let go and turned to Harry.

“If we´re stuck in here and something goes wrong it´s no big deal for me,” I said, my voice shaking. “But you – they can´t bring you back.”

For once, Harry didn´t have a ready answer.

“Do you – do you think there are still people alive in those cars? In air bubbles?” I asked.

“Don´t think about it,” he said, and wrapped his big arms around me. “Don´t think about it.”

There was a faint, fast ticking sound somewhere upstairs as One started recording the structures for analysis using ultrasonography, X-rays and what not. Neither of us spoke, and as there was nothing else we could do we continued our dinner while listening quietly to the shaken voice of the newscaster as the news came in about the collapse of the West End toll bridge as well. There were still approximately fifty thousand people on the island, and improvising an airlift and ferry evacuation was becoming more of a challenge with every hurricane update. Evelyn was still picking up its pace and Galveston would be hit hard, and the cutoff time for the evacuation had been moving earlier and earlier by the hour. The current estimate demanded that everyone leave the island before 3p.m. the following day, just as Mauro had told us.

“Good luck with that,” Harry said, shaking his head.

At first, the newscasts didn´t have images, but they soon started pouring in. Mostly amateur video from cell phones. The gaps in the Causeway bridges looked horrible, with a couple of cars perched right on the edge of broken trusses.

“That could have been us, if we hadn´t -” Harry said quietly.

People were still running along the almost 3-kilometer-long bridges to get out in case there was another explosion. I picked up the phone.

“Two, can you go and make sure that there aren´t any more boats coming at the Causeway? And if so, can you blow them up without revealing yourself?”

“Of course. But I have orders to stay close to the house.”

“One is here. Please.”

“All right.”

Harry pushed his plate away. “Can´t eat this.” He sat back in the chair, looking at me. “What should we do? Should we go to to the harbor to catch a boat when they start coming in?”

I thought about it for a moment. “We have back-ups that others don´t... How about if we wait till tomorrow to see if they can evacuate everyone? Then we can catch the last ferry without stealing a seat from someone who might need it more than us.”

Harry clearly didn´t like the idea, but nodded nevertheless. “Sounds reasonable.”

We finished dinner, and took all the garbage out to make sure it wouldn´t end up floating in the living-room, and only then realized we hadn´t emptied the kitchen cupboards. “I hate hurricanes,” Harry muttered as we carried all the foodstuffs to the second floor. Once everything was ready, we went out to the front yard to see what was going on. The night was hot and the sky was clear, but looking closely there was a dark streak in the eastern horizon. The first clouds of the storm. The streets were an unsettling sight, as if we´d just landed in a war zone in some third world country. Most people had abandoned their cars at home, and were walking towards the harbor dragging huge suitcases and carrying bags and boxes stuffed with their belongings. Among others there was a woman with three cat travel boxes in a shopping cart, followed by a man carrying a koala in his arms, and then an elderly lady who was doing her best to hold up a chandelier to keep it from dragging on the ground. A police car with flashing lights drove slowly by, zigzagging people, with a loudspeaker repeating the mandatory evacuation order.

“That koala is going to bite someone,” Harry said. “I hear they are grumpy beings.”

To our relief, a passing car gave a ride to the old lady with the chandelier. We talked about ferrying people with our car, but came to the conclusion that on our way back after each trip we´d slow more people down than we could help on their way to the harbor. A neighbor walked by, dragging two suitcases, his shirt wet with perspiration in the hot night and revealing a bump at the waist that might have been a gun.

“Aren´t you taking your son off the island?” he asked Harry. “That storm is speeding up.”

“I will,” Harry reassured the man. “Do they have any idea who did it?”

“Some freaking ecoterrorists,” the man huffed. “They just said it on the TV before I left.”

We returned to the house to check on the news, and found out that a group called GreenWar – how original – had claimed responsibility for the attack. They´d crammed motorboats with explosives and driven them to the Causeway bridges by remote control. The motivation: Gaia was angry with humans for wrecking the climate with carbon emissions and, even worse, for trying to counter this malfeasance by expanding nuclear power. The drama in Galveston, seen on live television around the world, would make people rise up against the military-industrial complex which had enslaved both people and the planet. I could sympathize with them about the part with the military-industrial complex but when it came to the rest I would have liked to kick their dumb asses. A more paranoid part of me even wondered if the complex itself had orchestrated the attack to discredit Greens who had gained enormous support during the last two years´ disasters and were poised to become the largest political parties in almost every Western nation.

Mauro called.

“OK, we have a plan,” he started. “You stay put, and the first chance we get we´ll come and pick you up, so be ready. If we can´t, you can ride out the storm in the house, it´s sturdy and tall enough. And if it starts to look like the house can´t take it during the storm we´ll come down with a ground-to-orbit vehicle and fuck the consequences.”

Harry and I looked at each other.

“Basically, that sounds an awful lot like ´the plan is you ride out the storm´,” I said. “Should we try to evacuate?”

“Our projections put the landfall shortly before noon,” Mauro said. “The storm is still speeding up. So I´d stay away from the chaos.”

As if to underline his words, a gust of wind let out a soft wailing sound as it curled around the house.

“Fucking hell,” Harry said, creeped out.

“Don´t worry,” Mauro told him, “our comms won´t go down. We´ll stay in touch through the whole thing.”

“Won´t the storm disrupt cell phone service?” Harry asked.

“If you open the handset it´ll look perfectly normal, to the last detail,” Mauro said. ”But it´s not a cell phone. Then there´s Jonatan´s coin, and One and Two.”

“I see.”

I tried to figure out a way to talk to Mauro alone, but couldn´t. I´d have to come out and ask the question even if Harry was already worried enough.

“Listen... a lot of things can happen during a hurricane,” I said. “You don´t think someone might try to take advantage of the situation to... well, to do something that would look like the hurricane did it?”

Mauro remained silent for a while. “One and Two should be able to take care of anything of that kind.”

“They´re not sentient,” I pointed out. “Losing them would not create a big problem, diplomatically. The Axiom certainly know that.”

Another silence.

“It would take a lot to take them out, believe me,” he said then.

“But it could be done.”

“I´ll talk to some people about it,” Mauro promised thoughtfully, and then added more brightly, “Almost forgot. I have some good news, too. Guess who´s going to be the new President of the European Union, to be announced tomorrow?”

“I have no idea,” I confessed. I hadn´t been very keen on internal EU politics for quite some time.

“Carlo Brambilla. For the last two years his environmental initiatives have made quite a splash in the Science Committee and the media. Isn´t that cool?”

I grinned. “I don´t think he´ll give me the evil eye the next time we run into each other.”

“Neither do I. Talk to you soon.”

Harry was looking at me questioningly. “You know Carlo Brambilla? Where did you meet him?”

“Uh... I...” Why not come out and say it? I wasn´t in the habit of lying to Harry, just keeping certain things from him. “I think I blackmailed him into the Presidency. In a way.”

“I can´t wait to hear that story,” Harry said, shaking his head. “You get around.”

“I´ll tell you all about it when we´re hunkered down in the crawlspace, to make you forget the storm.”

He made a face. “Christ I hate the idea of riding out the storm.” A deep breath. “Listen, I´m really sorry about getting you into trouble.”

Not the kind of person who could just drop everyone in his life and disappear, he´d been keeping in touch with his friends and relatives, and tracing the calls and emails wouldn´t have posed a problem even to a teenage hacker let alone the Axiom. Our safety had depended on the diplomatic pressure Mauro´s superiors could exert, and so far it had worked fine.

“Don´t worry about it. I´m just being paranoid.”

A local TV station had a crew in the harbor, showing the beginnings of the evacuation process. A huge mass of people had gathered under the harsh glaring lights of the waterfront, but the local and federal authorities hadn´t gotten their machinery going yet. Instead, something quite remarkable was happening: it seemed that every single motorboat owner in the area had delayed their own evacuation and was ferrying people across the bay to Interstate 45 where something equally unexpected was taking place. A steady stream of cars was coming in from Houston to pick up refugees walking along the road and then turning back to take them to safety from the open road. A large number of people seemed to be getting across, and the incredulous reporter told us that it wasn´t impossible that the evacuation could be completed if the official evacuation process could also be kicked in high gear in time. As she spoke, a large American Airlines passenger plane roared over the harbor at low altitude, circling the town and getting ready for the final approach to the Scholes Airport. Practically all commercial airlines operated from Houston where they had longer runways, so this had to be a special evacuation flight. Airplanes wouldn´t be able to fly for much longer; gales had already been picking up and the last planes and helicopters would probably be taking off in three or four hours´ time. The evacuation flight was approaching so low and fast that all the china started rattling in the kitchen cupboards. Just a few minutes later a Continental jet followed the same flight path, and then a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737.

Another call from Mauro. “The bureaucrats have closed the airspace from private jets and helicopters. Only airlines and military allowed.”

“Well... it would be kind of embarrassing to find ourselves in the flight path of an Airbus, now wouldn´t it?” I said, with a wary glance at Harry´s direction. He looked like he´d be glad to take the chance.

“There´s that.” He said something to someone else, then returned to the phone. “We can´t even charter a boat, they are all busy already.”

“I guess we´ll just have to ride it out then,” I said, resigned.

“Not so fast,” Mauro answered. “What we could do is come in low with a helicopter to the West End of the island. It´s very risky, though. Even if we have excellent cover up stories something might go wrong if we were caught and there was an investigation.” There was a pause. “You decide.”

I knew I had no real choice. Stealth was always the priority. Except this time it would be Harry who´d pay the price if something went wrong. I looked at him to let him know it hadn´t been much more than a rhetorical question.

“How about this,” I proposed. “You keep a ground-to-orbit flier ready and if the drones think the house can´t take it you come and pick us up.”

“It´s going to be risky to suck you up from the attic with hurricane winds buffeting the craft,” Mauro said. “But we can do it if there´s no other choice.”

“OK. We´ll do that.”

Mauro signed off, with Harry still staring at me. “´Suck us up´?”

I gave him a lopsided smile. “I think they can manipulate those drone force fields pretty well and I´m sure it beats climbing a rope ladder in 200-mile-per-hour wind.”

“Nothing weird had happened for a year and I was already thinking that the worst was over... apparently not.”

“You pick the next town where we move and I´ll keep my mouth shut even if it´s Ulan Bator,” I promised. “Deal?”

“It´s a deal. Now let´s go and get the damn crawlspace ready.”

The owner of the house must have had a close call with a hurricane, as the crawlspace was quite comfortable with a queen sized foam mattress on the floor, battery operated lights and a tool kit with a baby sledgehammer to break through the reinforced ceiling if need arose. It would probably take a category 5 hurricane to fill the attic with water, but the idea still made me jittery. An emergency medical kit and gallons of drinking water finished the picture with the food we had hauled up. It all looked very cozy, and I already had a half an idea of what we´d be doing while the hurricane winds howled outside.

The job finished, we returned downstairs to check the TV news and the live feed from the harbor. The first ragged clouds had appeared, their bellies ominously lit by the city lights as they raced over the island, and the waiting people kept glancing up at them with apprehension in their faces. Every ten minutes or so, the house was shaken by the approach of yet another passenger jet. The number of people waiting for their turn hadn´t discernibly decreased, and I was starting to wonder about the reporter´s optimistic outlook until a large Navy ship appeared from the bay. It could probably take several hundred passengers alone, but how many large ships were out there? Fifty thousand people were a lot to evacuate within the few hours available.

The night dragged on. Around 3a.m. the planes stopped arriving as there was a sharp increase in the wind speed. People in the harbor had been told that the evacuation would stop at 6a.m. when the storm surge was predicted to begin and that they needed to start making alternative plans and to find people whose houses would give them some shelter if they couldn´t get out in time. There were still thousands of people waiting their turn, and there was no chance that we´d find room in the last boat to mainland. The Interstate 45 was another crisis area: despite all the private cars and now school buses from Houston people just couldn´t be evacuated fast enough and out on the road they´d have no protection against the hurricane.

We slept fitfully, getting up once or twice every hour to check on the TV after a particularly strong howl of the wind woke us up. At 6a.m. when the evacuation officially wound down there were approximately three hundred people left on the waterfront, and they slowly made their way back to the city in small apprehensive groups. The reporter walked with them to find out if everyone had a place to go, and it seemed there was no one left to fend for themselves alone. It had been a close call. Only fifteen minutes later, rising water started flooding the Harborside Drive.

At 8a.m. power went down, shortly after our yard was flooded, but it was a tree felled by the wind two blocks away that cut us out. Debris was flying fast enough to make it dangerous to go outside, and we retreated into the house and locked the doors. Without electricity, and the windows shielded, it was dark inside and the sound of the wind was now even more ominous. Harry couldn´t help blanching when water started flowing into the house from under the back door.

“It´s decided. We´re moving,” he said.

I chuckled. “I´m afraid only to the second floor, for the time being.”

Within half an hour the water followed us there, and neither one was any longer in the mood for jokes. I knew my coin was transmitting, but I still asked confirmation from One and Two about them being in contact with Mauro.

“Of course,” they said, rather smugly for non-sentient beings.

We scampered up the ladder to the crawlspace which now felt far less cozy and far more a death trap. The wind was quite loud, howling under the eaves and forcing us to raise our voices to be heard, but at least so far everything had gone according to the plan apart from the entire house trembling slightly during the stronger onslaughts of the wind. The rising water, however, seemed to be literally dampening the effect, as it was leaving less and less of the house exposed to the storm.

One, who had stayed outside, announced, “I think it´s time for some magic.”

Instantly the strength of the wind seemed to diminish, even though not as much as I would have expected. One had to keep the force field attached to the house to prevent it from becoming blatantly visible, but inside there was no such problem. Two expanded a shimmering bubble of air around us which, contrary to my expectations, didn´t look at all reassuring.

“The wind can´t blow the roof away now,” I said to Harry, unnecessarily as One had already told him about the plan, “and no fast-flying debris can get through.”

We were lying on the mattress in each others´ arms, and from the evil eye Harry gave to Two I could tell that he would have been feeling safe enough for some fun if it hadn´t been for Two´s beady eyes following us to make sure no harm came our way. However, now the wind was so loud that I found it distracting, or to tell the truth, downright scary. I suspected that I would have been reduced into quivering jelly without One´s force field. If the storm had blown the roof away, our life expectancy would have been about fifteen seconds.

“The water level seems to have stabilized,” Two told us, turning up its volume. “It´s more or less where we predicted.”

“That prediction came only an hour ago,” I said dryly to the drone. “Not much use when we were deciding whether to stay or not.”

“I´m not a psychic,” Two chirped, clearly annoyed by my lack of faith in his computational powers. “Hurricanes aren´t as predictable as, to give you an example, you.”

“The wretch is irking me,” I turned to Harry. “Do something!”

“I rest my case,” Two announced.

“Stop it, you two,” Harry said half amused, half exasperated.

As impossible as it seemed, the strength of the wind just kept growing. I thought that there was no way the roof could have stayed in its place without One´s force field. Hearing what others were saying become nearly impossible, so there was nothing left to do but to stay as comfortable as possible and wait for the storm to pass.

After what seemed like an eternity, Two jumped closer and said with its audio turned at full volume, “The eye won´t pass over Galveston. It´s fifteen miles south of the West End.”

“Damn,” Harry yelled. “I could have taken a break from this noise.”

“You should know that there is an aircraft hiding in the storm,” Two added.

I felt a chill run down my spine. “Are you saying its not ours?”

“Ours is still on standby, waiting for the call.”

“It´s not one of the NOAA storm chasers, is it?” Harry asked.

“This one has zero ground speed. And it´s very well stealthed, we can barely pick it out.”

“Fuck.” I couldn´t think of anything more eloquent and to the point.

About thirty seconds later, Two looked up. “I just lost contact to One.” A heartbeat later it added, “The base, too.”

“My coin´s not getting through, either?”

“I´m sorry,” Two said.

Harry wrapped his arms around me, real tight.

“They´re always under strict orders not to hurt bystanders,” I said to him. “You´ll be all right. And I´ll be back in two years.”

He didn´t have time to answer before a bright spot of light appeared on the ceiling – it was actually dim daylight, I realized – and, like an ice cream scoop having sauce being poured over it, Two´s spherical force field began to glow in deep but intense blue, right at the edge of the perception of human eyes.

“Their power generator is overwhelming mine,” Two told us. “I can hold on for about fifteen more seconds.”

Harry took my head in his hands and turned me away from the struggle and towards him, to look me deep in the eyes. Without a word, we stared at each other as the blue glow around us intensified and then vanished. Two had ceased to function; it´s force field had been superceded. A strange, choking smell invaded the sphere, making us cough, and lights dimmed and went out.

The main administrative offices

2009-06-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

“Wake up.”

It was Harry´s voice. I forced my eyes open and, to my surprise, realized I wasn´t in the White Room. I had no idea if that was good or bad news. Harry was leaning over me and caressing the side of my face, looking serious but not particularly upset, and most importantly, he was unhurt. I struggled to sit up, and looked around. Now, this was weird.

The room was shaped like a hemisphere, with the dome curving above us. I couldn´t figure out what it was made of: the dome and the floor looked like smooth glass or transparent plastic, yet at the same time they were opaque in a way that made me believe I could see into them. The room was bathed in uniform, muted light, dim enough to allow me to discern a very faint blue glow from the walls or, more disconcertingly, deep within them. I blinked a few times, and then my brain suddenly made sense out of the phenomena. We were under ice, and the glow was Cherenkov radiation. The room had two simple beds with white sheets, and nothing else.

“What´s going on?” I asked.

“No idea. I just woke up myself,” Harry answered. “Do you know what this ice palace is?”

“Never heard of it,” I said, puzzled. “This is weird.”

Harry looked around, frowning. “The glacier must be very large to be stable enough to house a building, and if it´s still July 3, the sun is shining around the clock in Greenland. We´re either very deep, or somewhere in the south. My bets are on Antarctica.”

“We could be in Europa. The moon.”

Harry´s jaw dropped.

“Not very likely, though,” I added.

I looked around, taking my time. I thought I could see vague outlines of other domes in the ice behind the only door, which was white and instead of a handle had a small projected holotank showing an unknown symbol.

“It´s an interesting prison, I give them that,” I said. “I wonder how long we´ve been here.”

“Not very long, or I´d be hungry,” Harry replied. “Though it doesn´t look like they´re very big on bodily functions. No bathroom.”

“Should we try to attract their attention? Shout? Bang at the door?”

“That wouldn´t be very dignified,” Harry said, and then cocked his head. “What if the door isn´t locked?”

“Ha ha.”

He walked up to the projection and was about to touch it when he quickly drew his hand back.

“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.

“Well... this may sound stupid...” he hesitated. “But, you know, there could be anything out there. Anything.”

I thought about it for a second. “I see your point.”

“I mean, what if they are like giant insects, or maybe man-sized glistening hairy worms wriggling about?” Harry made a face. “Why did I even think about that.”

“Um... yes... there could be ice worms outside the door, just waiting to inject our bodies with their cold eggs that will eat us alive from the inside when they hatch and grow up.”

“Sometimes I hate you so.”

“I guess there´s only one way to find out if the door is open,” I said and stepped next to him. “Go for it.”

Harry touched the projection, and with a muted click the door slid open. A corridor lined with doors on both sides stretched in front of us, leading to a larger open space about fifty yards away. We could tell there was some movement in the large room, but the corridor itself was empty. Not unlike Hansel and Gretel, we hesitantly advanced along the corridor until two beings entered from the room ahead and walked straight towards us. Alarmed, we stopped, and observed the approaching figures.

They were two women of a certain age, one of them overweight but not actively obese while the other one looked more like a stick figure. Both of them were wearing remarkably drab clothing, the hefty one a cheap-looking sweater and a gray skirt and the skinny one a pantsuit of rather horrid pea green polyester. Sensible, squeaky shoes finished off their fashion statements, and as they drew closer we had to admit that their faces matched perfectly the attention-repelling clothes. Neither one paid us any attention whatsoever; they just walked straight by as if we didn´t exist.

“Frankly, this is not what I expected at all,” Harry said, taken aback.

“Yes, the way these women ignored you is shocking,” I quipped.

“It´s not funny,” he replied. “Just try to be serious for a moment.”

Emboldened, we walked to the end of the corridor, and stopped to study the opening. A large number of interconnected domes formed a spacious room, loosely fitted with circular areas that contained a three-dimensional display and a seat. About half of the seats were taken; most of the occupants had their eyes half-closed as if they were drugged, with only a scattered few interacting with their display. The flickering symbols were unrecognizable, but for a moment a thought I saw the image of Capitol Hill in one of the displays. I looked around to see what the people were like, and even though each individual had approached the task from a different angle I couldn´t see anyone who didn´t look like the least personable accountant one could imagine.

“Fucking hell,” Harry said. “It´s an freaking office. What the hell are we doing in an office?”

I shrugged. “Let´s ask.”

I walked to the closest cubicle whose occupant seemed to be aware of his surroundings, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you please tell us why we´re here, and what´s going on?”

The man looked up to me, without bothering to turn off his display, and gave me a somewhat embarrassed smile.

“Oh, it´s you,” he said, clearly wishing I had chosen someone else instead. “Please find a couple of vacant chairs and sit down.”

Rolling his eyes, Harry brought us two chairs, and we sat down right outside the door opening of the circle as there wasn´t enough room for the three of us inside.

“Ah, where to start...” the man contemplated.

“Where are we?” Harry interrupted.

“About one hundred meters under the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, halfway between the South Pole and Princess Elizabeth Land. Very remote. Very discreet.”

“How far from the South Pole station?” I asked.

“About 1100 kilometers,” he answered.

“And what are we doing here?” Harry pressed.

An expression of distaste. “A certain faction of our people have taken an active dislike of Jonatan, and personally I can´t blame them after what happened in Sweden. And in Italy. Our official policy, however, doesn´t allow for personal opinions and as soon as we discovered what they were doing we stepped in. You were brought here to forestall a diplomatic incident with the Anthropology Guild.”

“How nice of you,” I said, earning an annoyed glance. “And please tell me what did I do in Italy that was so aggravating?”

For the first time, there was a flicker of interest in his eyes. “You don´t know?”

“No, I don´t. You people made sure that I have no memories from that, incident.”

“No memories? I don´t understand.” His eyes narrowed. “You were re-lifed after Italy?”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. “Yes. You didn´t know that?”

An absent look took over his eyes. When he came back a few seconds later, his normal impassive expression returned as well.

“What happened there?” I asked, with a hard anxious edge to my voice.

“I think you need to ask the Guild that question.”

I knew he wasn´t going to say another word. So something weird had happened in Italy, too, something that had further annoyed the Axiom, and if they didn´t know I´d been re-lifed that could only mean that something or someone had intervened when I´d still been alive. Had it been the Guild? After knowing Mauro for so long, I knew I could trust him, and since he hadn´t told me that meant he didn´t know anything about it himself. Either the Guild had kept him in the dark or, a more unsettling thought, there was something that the Guild itself didn´t know. And the question was, where was Jonatan? Was he dead or alive, after all?

With an effort, I focused on the question in hand. “So, when is the next flight back home?”

He let out a sigh. “There is considerable political controversy regarding your future, as our most solemn principles demand that you be liberated.”

“So?” I had an increasing urge to push the man, or kick the chair from under him.

“For the time being, the situation is deadlocked.”

“What does that mean?” Harry asked, clearly sharing my inclination.

The man – who had never presented himself – shifted in his chair uncomfortably. “Some of us are hoping that the situation will take care of itself.”

We both just stared at him until he had to continue.

“You are not being held against your will,” he explained reluctantly. “If Jonatan was to, say, take one of the environmental suits and try to walk to the South Pole Station or the Australian Davis Base on the coast of Princess Elizabeth Land...”

We stared at him but this time he didn´t budge.

“What do you mean with ´try to walk´?” Harry asked, his voice cold.

“The suits are similar to space suits, only much lighter and more comfortable,” the man continued, looking away from us. “They recycle liquids and keep you all nice and cozy. But the food reserves... well...”

“I get the picture,” I said, standing up. “We´ll get back to you on that.”

Before leaving the circle, I turned back and asked him, “What about Harry?”

“He was brought along to keep you company, and to keep him quiet until the Guild has had a chance to talk to him. As soon as you leave the base, he´ll be transported back to his house in the Stockholm Archipelago.”

“You fucker...” Harry took a step towards the man, but I stepped in between them and managed to push him out of the circle before he got his hands on the weaselly bureaucrat.

“Let´s find out where they eat,” I said, to distract him from violence. “I´m hungry.”

With the help of the pretense I managed to drag Harry away, and we set out to explore the base once he had calmed down enough not to attack random people in the corridors. The hybrids all sported the forget-me look, and collectively ignored us unless we went up to them and asked a straight question. However, all our questions were promptly answered, with honesty as far as I could tell, and what the bureaucrat had told was pretty much the whole story. The only thing he hadn´t had time to underline was that me being exonerated from liberation was by no means a done deal. The longer I stayed, the more likely the hive would decide to deliver me to end the worsening diplomatic strife with the Guild. Whichever the outcome, Harry would then be returned to Stockholm. The Axiom weren´t worried that he might talk; the Guild had a lot of ways to buy his silence, and the fact that only they could bring me back – this time surely without the mesh, I was told – was just one.

We wandered into a cafeteria, and filled our trays with odd-looking pieces of food to study them in a corner table. Obviously, everything had to be nutrient to a human-hybrid body, so the only problem that remained was the taste. I could have sworn that one of the blobs was a mixture of strawberry cake and tuna, and another contained both peppermint and mozzarella in addition to mud, but when we asked we were assured that everything was healthy no matter how odd the taste. I covertly watched Harry pick on the disgusting food, his face belonging to someone who was plotting murder. If we´d been told the truth, there really was only one thing I could do, but I needed a few more days to build up the courage and to make sure Harry didn´t do anything crazy when he realized I was gone.

Suddenly he lifted his eyes from the food and looked me in the eyes. “Don´t even think about leaving.”

“We have to study this place before we start making any decisions,” I said soothingly.

“That´s already been decided. You´re not leaving alone.”

I knew better than to contradict him. Luckily, I´d have no shortage of allies when the time came.

It only took us couple of hours to finish exploring the base. It was nearly as boring as its occupants, as there was absolutely nothing but offices, dorms and cafeterias, in addition to the common bathrooms which had all the necessities for personal hygiene. No bars, movie theaters, or gyms, or anything. Recreation seemed to be an utterly meaningless concept to them. The only interesting part was the exit.

Only one small room next to the elevators was dedicated to the environmental suits, which meant that wandering up to the dangerously cold polar night wasn´t a favorite pastime. We were told that the urethral and anal catheters inserted themselves automatically and we wouldn´t have to worry about them – easier said than done – and that even though the suits communicated with the hive, a few basic orders could be programmed to be accessible through icons reflected on the faceplate. Fortunately, we didn´t need the suits during our brief visit to the upside. The elevators were interesting: they were made of the same transparent material as the rest of the base, and moved up and down in their shafts with no visible sign of technology. A one-hundred-meter shaft opening right below your feet was a disconcerting sight. The upside, however, was another disappointment. The elevators opened into a rather low-ceilinged space which served to camouflage the entry. The spaceport was nothing but a flat extension of ice, with no sign of hangars, fuel pumps or terminals. The entire complex would be totally invisible for an airplane flying at even very low altitude, and considering that this was probably the most desolate spot on the planet there wasn´t much of a risk of that happening. Any I-skied-alone-across-Antarctica madmen or women could pass the entrance by ten meters and never realize it was there.

I looked around in the dark polar night, and couldn´t help a shudder. There was no moon, and the only light came from stars and green-tinted auroras, strong enough to color the endless plateau of snow and ice with a sick, green hue. The person who had conveniently been waiting at the downside exit to tell us about the suits, but wisely hadn´t taken the elevator up, had told us that the current temperature was -59 degrees Celsius, or -74 Fahrenheit. Sunrise was a month and a half away.

Harry hated the place even more than I did, and after just a couple of minutes he forcefully dragged me back into an elevator.

As soon as the doors closed, he said, “Did you see what it´s like out there? You´re not going into that place. And if you ever try, I´ll stop you.”

There was no one else around, so I could speak without risking him violently attack the first person he saw. “I´d rather be free out on the ice than go through vivisection here.” I laid my hand on his chest. “You have to let me go.”

“If anyone tries to take you away from me I´ll kill them with my bare hands,” Harry said. “And I won´t let you go out there, to die of cold and hunger. If you think I´ll let you do that you´re crazy.”

“You´ll be back in Stockholm just hours after I´m gone. And I´ll be there too, just two years later.”

“Two fucking years! You don´t know what you´re talking about,” he burst out. “Anything could happen in two years.”

“Like what?”

“What if-” at first he couldn´t bring himself to say the words. “What if after a year I meet some girl in a new job? What if something happens with her? I could never betray you for a man, but for a woman?” He slammed his fist into the elevator wall. “I don´t know! And what if I do that after you walk out of here to die in the cold just so that I can go back home and cheat on you?”

“If that happens, then it happens,” I said. “That´s how life goes. And don´t you forget, I won´t die. I´ll be back in two years.”

“You lost your coin in Galveston. Everything that has happened after that will be gone. It won´t be you, the person I´m talking to right now.”

“It´ll be close enough.”

He shook his head. The elevator came to a halt, and we walked back to our room without a word. As soon as the door closed behind us, he lifted me up in his arms and carried me to the bed.

“I won´t let you go,” he kept murmuring into my ear. “I won´t. Ever.”

Three days later I had everything ready. I´d been sneaking out of our room to talk to people while he was asleep, and so everyone in the base knew what I was planning. Now all I had to do was to wait until he fell asleep, walk across the base to the elevators and don a suit. I´d also learned something reassuring: the suits had tranquillizers and anesthetics, and even though the suit would refuse to give me a lethal overdose all I needed to do was to administer enough to make me fall asleep and then quickly undo the suit before I lost consciousness. Cold would do the trick; and it would be totally painless and quick. I warned people that they had to make sure Harry learned about it, to keep him from physically harming and perhaps even killing some of them once he found out that they´d helped me to leave.

We had already created a kind of a daily routine of ours, despite the 31-hour day and night cycle of the station. We slept, had sex, visited the cafeterias whenever we got hungry, walked around the base to get some exercise, and slept again. Falling asleep whenever we felt like it meant that we never remained fast asleep for long: it was as if we kept merely napping around the clock. The tricky part would be to get out of the room without waking Harry up. He was lying next to me, on his stomach, his breath slow and deep. His left arm was thrown over my chest, and as he instinctively searched for me even in his sleep, slipping away wasn´t going to be easy. I tried not to get sentimental; if I allowed myself to get all weepy and unfocused I wouldn´t be able to go through with this. I told myself I´d see him again in just a few days, but what he´d said about falling for someone else during my absence had been the honest truth and there was the distinct possibility that this was the last time we shared a bed together. It was just that he looked so strong yet vulnerable in his sleep, full lips slightly parted, eyelashes fluttering as he dreamed, and finding out that I was gone would be so hard on him. He let out a sigh and turned to his side, moving his arm, and I wriggled down from the bed. Twice his arm moved across the empty bed, searching for me, and I held my breath. Then his hand hit my pillow and came to rest. He hadn´t woken up.

I looked back at him just once, from the door, and then I had to go. Once I reached the office all I had to do was to nod at the first person I saw, and a few of them would gather at the elevators to make sure Harry wouldn´t follow me once he woke up. I hurried across the base, and when I reached the storage room for the suits three of the guardians were already in place. One of them showed me the suit that had been programmed for me, and I started pulling it on. It was white and quite similar to a ski suit, except that all the insulation and machinery that was packed into it made the material about half a centimeter thick and gave it a rubbery feeling. The helmet was very similar to that of a space suit, except for the connection at the neck which was odd-looking but very clever, designed to allow for comfortable sleep without having to take the helmet off. The catheters were nowhere near as comfortable, at least in the beginning, and I took a sharp intake of breath when one of the tubes slithered into my urethra and reached my bladder. It was a strange feeling, but once it was over I could imagine why there were people who liked sounding. To my surprise, I started getting an involuntary erection because of the peculiar new pressure inside of my dick, and had to focus back on the external world.

We almost pulled it off. I was already getting into an elevator when I heard an angry shout, and turned to see Harry charging down the corridor towards us. His eyes were wild and his hands were balled into fists; the poor sods who would have to stop him would need to see a doctor once everything was finished. The first one went down like a bowling pin; I heard the nose of the second one crunch and break as he tried to grab Harry´s arm. But there were too many of them, he couldn´t get through. His progress ground to a halt, and as much as he struggled he couldn´t take another step.

“Jonatan!” He roared. “Don´t you fucking get into that elevator! Jonatan!”

He managed to down two more before they caught him firmly in their grip again.

Anything I could do or say would only make things worse for him. I stepped into the elevator, looking back at him, and the transparent door slid between us. Then I was moving up, and all I could see was the veined, dark ice, and the faintest blue glow emanating from it.

When I reached upside, a gibbous moon had risen over the horizon, and the desolate extension of ice looked almost beautiful in the cold light. A few blue-turquoise ribbons of aurora turned visible in the horizon when I walked to the transparent wall of the chamber. Once I passed through the door there would be no turning back, but I didn´t feel like lingering. The thought of Harry made me want to get out and get it over with as soon as possible, and when I passed my hand through the holo projection the interior lights dimmed to keep any visible light spilling over to the outside world. The door slid open and I could feel a strong gust of wind buffet the suit even though there was no sensation of dropping temperature. Despite their hatefulness, these guys really knew their industrial design.

I passed through the door, and watched it close behind me. I backed away, and nothing but a flat wide boulder of ice that had seemingly been squeezed up from the glacier by internal pressure remained in front of me. There was no sign whatsoever that the slab of ice could be anything but one of the million scattered across the continent. The faceplate navigator projection pointed me to the direction of the South Pole Station, and as useless as taking the route was I still chose to follow it. At least it would keep me from walking in circles and stumbling back to the Axiom base, never realizing that I´d returned there. I started walking.

The back of the suit was thicker than the rest as the water and food reserves were held there to form a mattress to sleep on. I touched the respective icons on the faceplate, and one after another the nozzles extended themselves into my mouth. Water was recycled and wouldn´t run out – the suit hadn´t been specifically designed for polar environment with plenty of snow around for melt water – but the reserves held only 8000 calories worth of the awful-tasting food paste. If I really tried, I could probably get more than halfway to the South Pole Station before dying from hunger. Not an attractive thought.

After having walked about a kilometer, I found an ice boulder that seconded as a rudimentary armchair and sat down to observe the direction of the base. I was in no hurry, but it didn´t turn out to be a long wait in any case. If I hadn´t suspected that there was something to see I would have never noticed the sudden visual distortion of a green aurora near the horizon. A stealthed ground-to-orbit flier was landing at the base. Two minutes later the same phenomena repeated itself, to the opposite direction. Harry was on his way home.

I got back on my feet, turned and walked away.

Unable to access the suit´s chronometer, I had no idea how long I´d been on the ice when the moon dipped below the horizon. The stars, and auroras that came and went, kept me from total darkness. I had already decided that if a storm came along that would be it; I´d pull the plug. But the weather continued beautiful, and after having found a nice soft snow drift to sleep in I woke up to the moonlight again. I wiggled into a half sitting position and had breakfast, and then – why not? – resumed walking. The glacier had a strange beauty to it, utterly barren, yet subtle. As I walked, I couldn´t decide whether I considered the Jonatan who would wake up two years from now myself. He wouldn´t be me, just like Harry had said, but neither would he be someone else. And perhaps it was a blessing that he´d wake up without memories from the base and the pain I´d put Harry through. It was a weird idea, to be walking here on endless glittering ice under the big sky, in utter solitude, free of my own future.

The feeling didn´t last, though. After a few more hours of ice and auroras I was getting bored. Lethally so. I was starting to wonder if I´d be bored enough to open the suit before the next sleep cycle when something caught my attention. Right on my path, maybe half a kilometer ahead, was something that didn´t belong in this place. A shape that wasn´t natural. As I walked closer, squinting my eyes in the moonlight, I began to distinguish more details. It was a chaise longue and a wide, round sunshade. Two chaise longues, I realized after another hundred meters. And there was someone lying on one of them, sipping from a large glass. Someone wearing only a pair of speedos.

At first, I felt like laughing. The suit must have been programmed to mix the atmosphere with some kind of a drug, or maybe to give me a wrong mix of gases. I wouldn´t have to worry about administering the cocktail myself. I kept walking, however, and soon I had to admit that I wasn´t hallucinating. In addition, there was a small table set between the chaise longues, with a pitcher of full of some tropical concoction that came complete with colorful pieces of fruit and paper sunshades. I came to a halt, and stared at the man lying in one of the chaise longues. My faceplate display told me that the temperature had suddenly risen to balmy 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

He gave me a bright smile, obviously quite pleased with himself. “I was going to ride a snowmobile, but then I thought, what the heck, why not be a little more original, just like that last time we met.”

I was absolutely certain I had never seen the man before. No one could have forgotten him. He was black, not just dark-skinned, but deep perfect black, and if he wasn´t Engineer´s handiwork there was someone else who knew every trick of the trade as well as he did. The bodybuilder physique was an utter perfection with deeply etched muscles, and the African face could only be described as exquisite despite being thoroughly masculine. However, the most distracting thing about him ended up being the black speedo, so sheer and tight that only the color was keeping the impressive details of his anatomy from being completely visible.

My dick was helplessly reacting to his presence even though I had no intention whatsoever to engage in sex with this man, having just left Harry behind.

“I don´t believe we´ve been formally introduced,” I said, taken aback by my body´s visceral reaction to him. I supposed I was just having a taste of my own medicine.

He let out an instantly likable belly laughter. “My name is Malik. Let´s get you out of that suit.”

My faceplate display had time to show some kind of general alarm before it blinked out. The seals of the suit started undoing themselves, and within a few seconds the suit crumpled down around my ankles. I lifted the helmet off, enjoying the freedom and the perfectly warm air, but I couldn´t help noticing that I´d passed something like two days in the suit and badly needed a shower.

The man laughed again, shaking his head. “I think you need some of this. See you in twenty seconds.”

Before I had time to ask what he meant, a swirl of white snow crystals rose from the ground and surrounded me like a small tornado. It felt as if I was being tickled by hundreds of soft feathers, covering every inch of my body, and when the feeling invaded my foreskin I couldn´t help a gasp and the crystals entered my mouth as well. Just as he had promised, and a little disappointingly, the crystals scattered away after twenty seconds leaving me with a clean and refreshed feeling.

“Something to drink?” He poured me a drink and gestured me to sit down on the free chaise longue.

After the Axiom food, the tropical juice with pieces of fruit couldn´t have tasted better. He watched me down the drink in one big gulp, happy with the effect the set-up was having on me.

“Was our last meeting in Italy, by any chance?” I asked him while he was pouring me the second glass, and he nodded.

“In the leaning tower of Pisa, at night. The view was magnificent, but at first you had some trouble believing that the tower wasn´t going to topple over at any second.”

“How did we get there?”

“The Axiom driver lost control of the ambulance, hit a road sign, and strangely enough, when they came to all bruised and battered, you were gone.”

“I see.” I took another gulp. “But why?”

“It was a warning. One that the Axiom clearly didn´t heed.”

“Who are you, Malik?”

“I´m The Supervisor. The Big Boss. Man with technology of godlike powers.” He took a sip. “Well, I can´t go back in time. With our present knowledge of physics that would cascade into a new Big Bang, and it doesn´t seem like a smart thing to do. But we´re working on that.”

“And what are you working on down here?”

“I´m sending the Axiom and a bunch of your Guild members right back where they started from.”

That didn´t sound good.

He saw my expression, and added, “Don´t worry, the Guild work will continue. You won´t notice any difference, except that there will be no more hustling and blackmailing.”

“That´s a pity,” I said. “I thought I was cut out for that type of thing. Before I met Harry, obviously.”

“Sorry about that,” he apologized. “But the situation has reached a point where we have to pull back. The Guild and the Axiom have simply overstepped their mandate and their interference has become reckless. Carlo Brambilla, genetically engineered bacteria...”

“What´s so terrible about them? I thought they were fine ideas.”

“They are putting your species in danger. I´m sorry to say, but you are a self-destructive race and unless we move forward very carefully you´ll end up wiped out by your own stupidity.”

I shrugged. “Can´t argue with that.”

Malik smiled. “I see you haven´t changed your mind. I already know what you´re going to ask next.”

“When will we grow up?”

Another belly laugh with gusto. “Bingo,” he said. “OK, there are thousands of indicators, but the most constant over a large variety of species has been global health care. When every individual on the entire planet has free access to the same health care as everyone else, the race is usually ready. Unfortunately, you guys don´t even have the concept of global health care in your minds yet.”

I had rarely felt as deflated. “It´s an alien concept to us all right.”

“Well, there´s some hope for you yet.”

I looked around. “And now what?”

“For you, nothing changes. When you return in two years´ time business will be as usual. The Guild will still be working, perhaps someone else has taken the place of the Axiom, perhaps not.”

I looked at him, trying not to get distracted. “Did you come all the way down here just to tell me that?”

“I thought I owed you,” Malik said. “After all, I´ve used you as a messenger boy and a lightning rod.”

“Well, if you ever need an assistant, I have a pretty banging resume.”

He laughed. “I´ll keep that in mind. Talking of which, I have your memories from Italy and here, and if you get the job I´ll hand them over. For the time being, I´m not sure how much exactly the Guild should know about you and me.”

I was surprised what a big difference it made to know that the memories were still somewhere, intact, and waiting to be reinstalled.

“Sounds good to me,” I said and yawned, looking up to the sky. “I think all this sun is making me sleepy. Make sure I won´t get burned if I fall asleep.”

Malik laughed. “I will. Sweet dreams.”

I yawned again, and closed my eyes. These chaise longues were really comfortable. After all that trudging on ice, a quick nap would be just the thing.

A room

2009-06-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

I was greeted by a pleasant surprise when I opened my eyes. This was no rustic farmhouse bedroom. I was lying in a king sized bed, facing a floor-to-ceiling window with a view over a simple but beautiful garden that gradually descended to a body of water dotted with small islands. It was a gray summer´s day, and I could hear the light pitter-patter of rain on the roof. It was so warm and comfortable under the covers, with the relaxing sound of the rain in the background, that I almost decided to lie there for another minute or two. Had I been anywhere else in the world, I would have stayed in bed. But not here.

Quietly, I threw the covers away and like a midwife counted the number of fingers and toes, and found that I had ten of them and everything was just like it was supposed to be, including my morning erection. I suspected someone would be taking care of it very soon.

I slipped out of the bed and stretched my body, happy to be back, and avoided thinking about my last memory, of the closing elevator doors in the Antarctic base. It was a construct, anyway; my last real memory was from Galveston. And since I was here, now, everything was fine.

The door to the living room had been left ajar. I opened it quietly, and looked around. The room was as beautiful as it had ever been, and there was a live fire in the black, upside down mushroom-shaped fireplace that hung suspended from the ceiling. A tall broad-shouldered blond was sitting in the leather couch in front of the fireplace, his back turned. A sudden warm electric feeling swelled in my chest. There he was, my man. And he had finally gotten a haircut. He realized someone was standing behind him, and turned to look over his shoulder. I couldn´t stop a gasp.

It was still him, but... intensified. It really was the only suitable word. His cheekbones were just a little higher, the eyes deeper yet brighter blue, the nose utterly flawless, and his full lips had just a little more curve to them. The jawline was identical to before, though. The original couldn´t be improved on. I thought my heart was going to stop. This man was the most beautiful thing I´d ever seen in my entire life. He flashed me the happiest smile and stood up, and I instinctively took a step back. Engineer hadn´t stopped with the face.

He stood good five inches taller than before, and his shoulders were broad and packed with muscle. In fact, the whole body was now so muscular that it came just a little shy from being a professional bodybuilder´s physique and one glance at his jeans told me that as perfect his anatomy had been before, certain enhancements must have taken place between his legs as well.

He spread his arms. “What do you think?”

I felt a huge grin spread on my face. “I think you´re going to kill me tonight.”

“Why wait?”

Effortlessly he picked me up like a doll, and carried me back to the bedroom. “Welcome back, kid.”

THE END