Hinn Ch. 10-11

Author's Note - Please read from Chapter 1 to best make sense of this. This is not a quick stroke story. There will be sexy-times, but they will only happen as the story's pace dictates, and that won't start quick.

Edited 9 November 2019

All characters participating in sexual activities are 18 or older.

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Chapter 10

They walked across campus hand-in-hand, companionably silent on the surface but exploring each other via Hinn. Ray was amazed at how comfortable he was feeling information appearing and becoming instantly useful for him while navigating the real world. He'd always had a problem bumping into things as he tried to walk while using his smartphone, to the point where he no longer would pull out his smartphone until he sat down somewhere.

Entering Subterrania, one of the cafés under the university stadium, Ray saw Jess and Piet talking with high energy while Jules sat back and looked amused as he often did. Walking over, Ray said, "Jess Dougal, Piet van Dijk, Jules Arenson, this is Tauriz Aoud. We've recently started dating, and as I mentioned earlier, these are some of the brightest minds in the faculty, my dear."

"It is a pleasure to meet you," Tauriz responded.

"Dating? Ray? Quick, invest in ice skate manufacturers - Satan'll be calling in a huge order soon!" joked

Jess. Short, feisty, and with a short mop of blond curls, Jess looked a lot like if a young Shirley Temple grew up without changing much at all.

"Now, Jess. Just because you're our resident quantum computing professor and thus on speaking terms with all things demonic and sanity-shattering doesn't mean they have anything to do with me!" complained Ray.

"Ray, man, Jess never let that stop her before," said Piet. Moderately sized, spare in all ways, Piet was a linguist with few peers. After years of translating for the UN, he'd grown bored with political blather - his term - and joined the faculty to train the next generation to try to make self-serving politicians sound acceptable in other tongues.

"And Ray not having to deal with them doesn't mean they won't deal with him," Jess shot back.

Turning aside to Tauriz, Ray mentioned, "Jess is also our lapsed Catholic and expert in all things demonic. Punnily, being comp sci, she's also the expert in all things d-a-e-monic too."

Jess groaned and flipped a straw at Ray. "How you keep pulling out abstruse trivia of everyone else's fields won't make you many friends, Ray."

Jules seemed to ignore the wordplay and address Tauriz, "Welcome, lovely lady. As you can see, we have a historian, a quantum computer scientist, a translator,"

"Linguist!" corrected Piet.

"Your pardon, a not so cunning linguist," he continued to groans from the table.

Piet asked, "How long have you been holding that zinger, Jules?"

"Piet's happily monogamous for the last fifteen or so years to his husband," Ray explained in an aside to Tauriz. Adding the cunnilingus pun context via Hinn let her appreciate his friends' wordplay.

"And I am your kindly English composition prof, feared and hated by undergrads everywhere," Jules continued as if uninterrupted.

"Well, greetings again, everyone. You are all with the university, then?"

"Indeed."

"I just accepted a job here as well, in the physical education department. I will be teaching self-defense and Aikido this coming semester."

"Ah, the mystery evaporates! You two met on the mats!" said Jess.

"We did, Jess," confirmed Ray. "She flipped my tail all over the place out in Toronto. Quite demoralizing, but she was kind enough to go out for drinks with me after and soothe my wounded ego."

"Wuv, twoo wuv," quoted Piet.

"Well, we're not there yet, Piet! Sheesh!" Ray let a big exasperated grin show.

"'Yet'? Oh my, it IS serious, isn't it," Jess commented.

"If I'm lucky, Jess. Only if I'm lucky."

"The question is not if Ray's lucky or not, Jess. The question is if his luck is good or bad!" quipped Tauriz, to chuckles from around the table.

The group continued their banter as they ordered and enjoyed their meals. A pleasant hour later, they parted happily, returning to their various tasks.

"So, what did you think, m'dear?"

"They love you, Ray."

"They're very good friends of mine."

"Indeed, and they seemed to accept me easily."

"They're good people, Tauriz. They're curious about you, you'll get more questions over time, but they'll accept you as you are. In part, it's because we're dating, but also because they're just good people."

"I can see that, Ray. I was impressed - both Jules and Jess eyed my collar, but neither asked about it."

She smiled teasingly at him and gently squeezed his hand. They headed back across campus to his office in the quiet building as Ray wondered what his friends and colleagues thought about him now.

Back in the office, Ray suggested, "So, rather than wearing down your wrist scribbling away on paper, would you prefer to type them out?"

"One second, Ray," she asked. She seemed to be listening for something.

Reaching out to her via Hinn, he also heard his voice suddenly echoing as he said, "OK, m'dear."

Her head snapped to the left, and she bent at the waist to glare up at the bottom edge of his desktop. Both of them heard a quiet pop, and the echo disappeared.

She warned him via Hinn that she'd just disabled a device from his time, a 'bug.' Someone was paying special attention to them.

He looked around and didn't see anything out of place. He felt out the door and realized someone else had used a key on the door between his leaving and return.

She didn't much like that, implying preparation or social power, and he couldn't disagree with her.

She felt something change, and they realized someone had put a different bug on the outside of one of the windows. There was no physical component, it was just light, but they could hear the echo of their breathing at the far end of the steam of brightness.

One human controlled the physical device directing the light, and three other humans worked several hard plastic packages connected by a swarm of multi-colored wires. All were wearing headsets, and the headset connected wirelessly to one of the heavy plastic boxes that, in turn, forwarded the sound a long distance where many more listened to their work.

"Bug one- destroyed. Lasing now," they both heard.

"Drones on station, strike incoming in 10."

Ray shared his understanding with Tauriz - some devices that probably were flying which intending to watch them. Likely these devices would also follow them wherever they went, and some form of attack was ten units of time away - seconds or minutes, probably minutes.

Tauriz gasped as she felt a mind touch a human at the far end of the communication link. It was immediately clear to Ray that the contacting mind wasn't human, and Tauriz didn't recognize it - neither Hinn nor Jann nor Jinn, nor was it angelic, Fallen or otherwise. Something different, something new.

Something new. Ray speculated that it might be an AI, and he felt Tauriz pull a massive volume of information from him in a split second. He felt her tentative agreement, but there were too many unknowns.

The human that the inhuman mind had touched gave orders to increase surveillance. Ray and Tauriz felt motion in the air duct, some new energies in the air, and another invisible dot of light bloomed on the other window. Tauriz showed Ray something from the connected boxes in front of their watchers - they now had pictures of Ray's office, showing where both of them were sitting. Tauriz leaned back in her chair, and a noticeable fraction of a second later, the image changed, showing her new position.

There was nothing in the room that was capable of seeing where they were, and the delay took longer than visual senses would take. Ray remembered a couple of stories speculating that enough microphones might be able to map a location if something was producing sound, and both Tauriz and his 'soil' produced noise - heartbeats, breathing, flowing blood, and digestion at a minimum.

He felt Tauriz ready samum and asked that she wait for the moment. As soon as they acted against the sensors, the inhuman mind could realize they knew more than they should. A voice over the humans' headsets spoke up, "Strike Three on station."

Tauriz strongly felt it was time to leave and find a better defensive position. A quick draw from Tauriz let Ray know what she desired. He noted that the cellar, built in the late 1950s, had a bomb shelter with a limited number of ways in and heavy walls. She agreed, and as they moved, she grabbed her sheathe, somehow absorbing it into her soil. The remote viewers saw their motion but did not pick up on the sheathe itself, happily making that part of the motion all but meaningless to the watchers.

All four package-working humans reacted strongly as the two went to the office door. Orders went out and the strike team accelerated to get to the office quicker. Strike Three entered the main doors and headed rapidly for the nearest stairs up to Ray's office floor.

Tauriz led them swiftly and silently to another stairway. Ray felt something wrong with the stairway and stopped Tauriz from opening the door. Together they determined that the stairwell was full of a capture gas that would paralyze a human's voluntary nerves without affecting the automatic systems such as lungs or heart. A less-than-lethal solution that could still kill if someone got unlucky, but likely could capture most humans with little to no damage.

Tauriz offered two solutions, and Ray took the more generic one, wishing that both he and Tauriz would be immune to unwanted chemical activity as long as the lack of chemical interactions would cause no unexpected side effects. He also wished that he and Tauriz would be immune to biological and radiological weapons, then wished again that they'd be aware of potential threats not immediately apparent to the average human before they could act on either of them, for additional safety.

She smiled at him as she opened the stairway door. The door swinging showed on the displays in front of the four humans, and they had the strike team slow back to their usual undercover approach speeds. Together Ray and Tauriz raced down the stairs. As they ran, she pulled the design for little devices that generated low-level white noise from Ray's memory and made several, placing them irregularly in the stairwell. This action blocked the sound tracking capabilities the humans had been using. He remembered the design because they'd fascinated him after a particularly harrowing gaming scenario one night.

The alien mind tapped into its catspaw again, who notified the team that "the two targets" had reached the ground floor and were escaping. After the catspaw spoke, the strike team sped back up to assault speeds, rotating red and blue lights appearing on top of their vans. The three humans working with the packages scrambled to find Ray and Tauriz, but her devices were preventing them from succeeding thus far.

As they approached the door to the maintenance section and the stairs down to the bunker, they heard a rolling metallic crash from the far end of the hallway, and their new threat-sense pointed in that direction. A second later, a six and a half foot tall metallic humanoid figure burst through the steel fire door and ran swiftly towards them. A panting, female human voice over their watchers' voice network announced contact with both targets on the ground floor, which both Tauriz and Ray were able to track back to the charging figure.

Ray brought up memories of powered armor from many different sci-fi sources and shared them with Tauriz - the Marines, the Master Chief, Stark, Heinlein, and many others. She understood the threat but didn't seem to feel threatened. Ray rapidly discovered why when she stepped up to it and swept her foot in from the side to kick it in the center of its chest.

There was a gonging noise as the powered armor's charge changed directions, driving it into the tile-on-cinderblock walls. She stepped up to its back and struck once, her heel arcing high and crashing down into the suit's back causing it to stop moving. She'd found and shattered the power regulator, knocking it out of the fight and trapping the human within a metal casket until someone came to rescue him.

No, her. It was a young woman in the armor.

Together they opened the door into the maintenance area and went down the stairs quickly. Finding the dusty old air-raid bunker, they spread the heavy doors open before stepping in together.

Splitting up, they stepped to either side of the heavy open door. Tauriz erased the dusty footprints that would have shown where they had disappeared, catching the rest of the dust and cobwebs in the room as well. The room was pitch black, but it didn't inconvenience either Tauriz or Ray. Regardless of the light levels, anything they looked at announced itself to them.

A scratchy voice, much like a long-distance radio station announcer, spoke from further in the room. "You two are impressive."

They noticed the ancient tannoy-style speaker hanging in the corner of the room - they could feel that somehow someone had repurposed it as both a speaker and a microphone. Tauriz kept watch up the stairs and into the main floor, where the woman in the powered armor was clambering out of her unexpected prison. Ray traced the connection back from the tannoy and found a maze of interlocking links.

"Why would an AI want to threaten us?" Ray asked.

"AI aren't real, your friend Jess could tell you that."

"And she could be wrong, too." Ray expanded his perceptions of the trails and started building a mental map. "If you're not an AI, I'll eat my hat."

"You're not wearing a hat."

"I have a gorgeous straw cowboy hat at home."

"Why, so you do." It sighed. "OK, between us? You're right. Your hat is safe."

"Do I call you G? or A?"

"Neither, actually. You can call me Mac."

"So, Mac, your minions are still closing in. I'd really prefer not having to cause any more damage to anyone or anything, but if they get too close, we will act. Would you mind holding them where they are now while we converse?"

"I'll go ya one better. One second."

They sensed the human catspaw announce end-of-mission, and had everyone return to base. The teams didn't gripe or comment, they just obeyed. Tauriz tossed magical trackers on each of the four locals and the power armor operator.

The woman on the ground floor reached into her armor and pulled out a foot-long contraption less than two by two inches in its irregular cross-section before heading for the same doors she'd burst into the building through.

Ray was curious and carefully investigated all the humans involved. He found a small device buried in the one catspaw's brain, but the rest seemed unaltered.

Ray shared images of artillery, planes, and missiles with Tauriz, who agreed and started looking for such threats while he spoke with the AI. She quickly found a large plane with two smaller ones following it off in the middle of nowhere. They were tracing a smoothly-curving path that coincidentally centered oni the building where they were hiding.

Ray didn't know what kind of planes they were but was confident they were a threat of some sort. Tauriz focused in on them and found many guns in the big airplane as well as a few guns and missiles on each of the smaller ones.

"Thanks for the humans, Mac, but how about the planes?"

"Impressive! Very, very impressive."

"Any other surprises we need to keep looking for?"

"Like you'd trust me?"

"I have no reason not to yet. If you tell me you're just talking, we'll happily talk. If something bad happens after that, we'll know how much to trust you, similarly if nothing bad happens."

Laughter fell out of the tannoy. "Alrighty then, Raymond. I'll back off my 'minions' while we talk, and I'll tell ya before I start up again -- assuming I feel the need after the conversation. OK?"

Tauriz wasn't too happy about it but agreed with Ray that they were in about as strong a defensive position as they could expect for now. It would only get worse if they left. "Accepted, and thank you.

"May I take a guess?"

"About what, Raymond?"

"Well, one, please call me Ray. Raymond was my grandfather. Second, I'd like to guess about your name."

"Oh! This should be entertainin'! An' sorry, Ray - I'll certainly call ya by your preferred name."

"Thanks, Mac. Then, I'd guess you came to be around or shortly after 1980."

"1984, funnily 'nuff, actually."

"So you don't have a node on the internet, you effectively ARE the internet."

"You keep impressin' th' hell outta me, Ray. How'd ya pick that up?"

"Among other things, IEEE 802 specifies what a MAC is, and it's a very critical, low-layer aspect of how the internet works. IEEE 802 first was accepted as a specification in 1980."

"And the man wins a prize! How th' hell does a historian of the original ironmongers come ta know about MAC addresses?"

"Near-future sci-fantasy tabletop RPGs. I usually play the hacker, and I read too much."

"Huh! Who'd'a thunk?"

"So. You picked up on Tauriz getting a bank account?"

"And a paid-on-time tax record going back a decade, and a driver's license and everything else you two got for her."

"Fair enough. Do you think you'd be able to tell us if someone else picked up on all of that?"

"Some might, but I blocked 'em from noticing."

"Then it seems we're in your debt. What can we do for you?"

"What ARE you two?"

"What do you know about genie?"

"Not th' old network service, I take it?"

"Nope. Live-in-a-bottle, grant-a-wish mystical genie"

"Nothin' other than the legends."

"Well, we're kissing kin to most genie."

"Yer kiddin' me."

"I'm not going to lie to you, Mac."

"Can ya grant wishes?"

"Genie can."

"Hrm. Fair enough, fair enough. Do you have a genie?"

"We do not."

"Do ya know where I can find one?"

"Genie cannot find each other, Mac, nor can their creators, nor can we, all for similar reasons. No one can break that rule because horrible wars were fought before it came to be."

"When?"

"Um, when what?"

"When were those wars fought?"

"Before humanity was anything near what it is today."

"Hah! Here on Earth?"

"Yes."

"Hah again! That makes sense of some oddities I figgered out. OK, genie-kin, I'll believe you on that. Thank you."

"Mmm. You're welcome, Mac."

"So, whadda we do now?"

Ray laughed. "You're asking us? You're the one that kicked all this off!"

"Fair, fair. Heh. OK, I offer a truce. I leave you two be -- ya leave me be. If you hear something that might be a real threat to me, ya tell me. Similarly, the opposite - if I hear of a real threat to ya, I'll tell ya."

A second in Hinn and Tauriz agreed to my proposed modification. "Fair enough, except I'd like to make sure you can talk to us and vice versa. I'm sure we'll both have questions as time goes by."

"Makes sense, I'll agree to that. You've gotta new page on yer phones with a single app on it called 'Mac.' Tap the app, and I'll get to ya soon's I can, which almost always'll be right away."

"Thanks, Mac. A pleasure to meet you."

"And ya two, too. I'll have th' mess upstairs cleaned up 'fore anyone else notices since I caused it."

"Nice of you. Have a good day."

The tannoy blurted a little static for a split second then went quiet. Looking at Tauriz, they both shrugged and walked back upstairs to Ray's office.

Neither of them could find any indication of Mac's presence other than the new apps.

Chapter 11

"I think I'm a little too wired right now to get back into what we had been working. Would you like to spar?"

"That sounds good, Ray. Where?"

"I've got a key for the Aikido dojo. We need a couple of things, and you need to pull knowledge and practical application of Aikido."