It's My Party

It seemed inconceivable to Aggie that her Party would leave the food supplies at all these locations untouched. By the time the women from Green Mall would have reached them, they must have realized something incredible had happened, and the hub areas were just too attractive as home bases to be passed over. Yet none of the food larders had ever been touched.

It was a deep mystery. The women appeared to have vanished. Aggie concluded her report by saying there was one area they still hadn't fully investigated, the extreme corner to the southeast of the Green Mall complex. The area was where the two great interior barrier walls met at an acute angle. These were the walls that separated the six mall surface regions from one another. In the extreme corner, Red Mall territory would be to their south, and Yellow Mall area to their north and east. Aggie's plan was to search this small region tomorrow but she wasn't very optimistic.

Fatima had only met Carla yesterday, but she was very impressed with the woman's practical experience in field operations. Should Fatima have put her in charge of the Black Mall team? It was a very difficult decision, but Amber was also a person who acted very coolly under pressure and she seemed to have an uncanny ability to anticipate how Ricardo would think. Did they ever link by accident and share thoughts without realizing it?

Fatima had once privately asked Amber that question. Amber had shuddered and admitted it might have happened their first night on the planet. Her own boyfriend Neto had abandoned her after a brief lovemaking. He was in search of a fresh female to copulate with. A short time later Muchacho Ricardo came over and petted her, reaching in and stroking Amber inside her unbuttoned blouse, and he was soon panting in his interest. It was the only time Amber thought she had ever seen him in true sexual arousal. And they had stared at each other's eyes that night, something Ricardo was normally loath to do.

"Know your enemy!" That was Carla's response when Frida had talked to her about the formation of the Black Mall team. Carla figured that in a critical situation, Amber would be the best person to be making the decisions, and she agreed with Fatima's instinct to let Amber lead. And Amber appreciated Carla's priceless military experience and asked her to be second in command. Fatima's sleepy mind finally decided she had made the right choice. She drifted off to sleep, and was soon a little girl again, a welcome retreat from her adult burdens. It was her sixth birthday. Young Fatima was laughing and clapping her hands in delight as she rode atop her uncle's giant camel as her mother's brother led it across the Kuwaiti desert.

The next day.

Time: Sunday, April 3, 2019 5:40 AM

Amber's team assembled before sunrise. That was the plan from their meeting the previous night. There was no reason to wait. They would begin the final exploration and lockdown of Black Mall this morning. They were a formidable force, eight people with six Leophones, six bicycles and four side cars for extra capacity. They were armed with five crossbows and two pistols. After a light breakfast, they set off from the Black Mall sky bridge at a leisurely pace.

They stopped halfway to their destination and practiced for an hour advancing on foot, a simple cross and cover pattern that would defend them against sudden attack. Carla thought their greatest danger was somebody letting loose a cross bolt by accident, but the team kept the safeties on and the crossbows pointed in the air.

They mounted their bikes again and continued their journey, completing their 32 km trip approximately three hours after leaving the sky bridge. They stopped about a hundred meters before the last locked store on the outside arc. The dangerous part of their mission was about to begin.

Their goal for today was to extend the locked area of the Mall to Jacob's Bar and Grill, install the advanced sensors in the store on the outside arc opposite Jacob's, and also test the restaurant's kitchen entrance to the surface. The reason for their boldness was their ability to "look around the corner" with Looking Glass. Since the demolition of the chicken-wire barrier, their sensors had revealed absolutely no motion on either side of the mall on their side of Jacob's or a full five hundred meters beyond it. It was Amber's judgment that even Ricardo couldn't resist taking a peek with a mirror or something if he was hiding in one of the stores. Their opponents at Black Mall had no idea of the range of their sensor network, nor its ability to detect small motions.

Still, Carla was taking no chances. They advanced on foot for the last hundred meters and then started locking the stores, using the crossing pattern of advancing and covering and locking, advancing and covering and locking. The work proceeded almost in silence, their phones open to receive any warning from Holly and Toshi who were on monitor duty at the Hilton and adding close support.

At last they were at Jacob's, their objective for the day. As Husna assisted Ashley in installing the new node of their sensor net, Amber, Carla, and Cassidy slowly checked out the first floor of Jacob's. Within a few minutes, Carla was satisfied it was deserted. A minute later they confirmed their expectation that the door in the back of the kitchen freezer was locked from the surface side. Outside the freezer, Cassidy offered to link with Amber and she accepted.

"Sure does bring back memories, huh?" Cassidy thought as she looked around the kitchen with her peripheral vision. "I remember calling Tom Toro at this exact spot."

Amber smiled at the trick Cassidy was demonstrating, taking glimpses of the kitchen while still maintaining the link. And then Amber's thoughts turned somber. She thought in reply. "Somewhat. This place is pristine now. The servos didn't miss a speck of dust. Except for the lack of food in the storage bins, it's as if nothing ever happened." Amber sighed in her thoughts. "It's a sad epitaph to the good people who died here."

Cassidy replied with a mental construct of a nod. "Do you think we should check out the second floor?"

Amber blinked and almost lost the link. "I don't see why. Let me ask Carla her opinion."

Amber shifted her link and a moment later Carla thought back. "Ah, mission creep. Your instincts are correct Amber. There's no benefit for taking the slight risk. The sensors will watch all the stairs. Looking Glass will tell us instantly the moment there's an indication that a locked store is occupied."

Amber agreed and added, "Then we're finished for the day. This was almost too easy."

Carla laughed in her thoughts. "It's an old saying but it's true. Be careful what you wish for!"

A few minutes later the group carefully backed up to their bike location, for practice repeating the cross and cover motions in their retreat. Soon they were by their bikes and ready to return home. With her team around her, Amber talked with Holly and Toshi and confirmed again that the new sensor node was working. Their network could now observe both sides of the mall five hundred meters beyond Jacob's, and by boosting with Looking Glass to the far outside sensor at a store at spiral mark 70938 meters, they could extent their coverage an additional kilometer. In addition, the entrance door to Jacob's was now locked and under their control. Significant milestones had been achieved.

Carla's laughing warning returned to Amber's mind. It had been tempting to press on a bit and lock a few more stores. They had brought extra locks with them if the need for that arose, and her team would do so if she gave the orders. It would be so easy. There was an unlocked store just twenty meters from Jacob's.

But their original plan was the correct one to follow. It was time to let the sensor network and Looking Glass do some observation work. If they revealed nothing, Amber's team would repeat this process tomorrow and extend the sensor network another kilometer. If they detected a presence, they would probably just observe for a day and decide on a course of action based on what and whom they were observing. That was the correct plan, and there was no need to rush it.

After one last look towards Jacob's, the group turned and started biking for home.

Chapter 73.

Time: Sunday, April 3, 2019 10:25 AM

Aggie's away team had left the Green Mall complex at 9 AM, and now after a seven kilometer walk along an optimal route, they were about four kilometers east and two kilometers south of home and less than a hundred meters from the three-way junction that separated Red Mall, Green Mall, and Yellow Mall territories. Aggie's team had spent the last few minutes listening to Amber report on her successful but uneventful mission at Black Mall, and now Amber's team was biking home. Emily and Mark were still online with Aggie from the Red Mall library, ready to offer advice if needed.

Alison looked at the building before them with a very skeptical eye. "This? We hiked all the way here to investigate this one building?"

Aggie shrugged. "I know it doesn't look like much." It was a triangular building, rather small, at least by the standards they had become accustomed to. The building was one story in height with its longest side perhaps fifty meters. It was wedged tight against the high perimeter walls that separated the building from Red and Yellow Mall territories.

Aggie pulled out her laser rangefinder and measured the length of the side facing them at thirty-five meters, which she dutifully reported to Mark and Emily. She also reported there was a transparent door leading to what looked like a small lobby. There were also a few lobby windows, and Aggie voiced the conjecture that they were probably the only windows for the building. Windows on the building's two other sides would look directly into the sand and cobblestone and ivy buffer area of the perimeter barrier, and that was very rare. They had only discovered one example of that so far, at the southern tip of White Mall's diamond complex.

Heather spoke up. "I don't understand. Why did you leave this one small building unexplored?"

Aggie grinned. "It's not as if we didn't try. The last time my team was here, we were already passed our usual time limit. The sun was setting and our safety buffer was cut to the bone. Fatima ordered us home."

"I made the right decision." It was Fatima's voice on the phone.

"Oh, hi Fatima," Aggie replied. "Yes, I agree. Are you with Mark and Emily?"

"No, I'm at the Hilton. But I thought I'd listen in."

"Sure, no problem. Too bad I can't send you some video of what things look like here." There was streaming video capabilities built into the Leophones, but so far nobody had gotten it to work.

"I should tell you," replied Fatima. "In addition to activating the new phones, Akiko is working with Lynn on that right now."

"Ah. Cool." Aggie strapped the open phone to her shoulder harness and walked up to the lobby door with the rest of her team, reporting minor details as they went.

Time: Sunday, April 3, 2019 10:26 AM

It had been two days now since Ricardo had left the Black Mall home complex, and almost two days that he had been alone with Jessica. It had been a strange experience for him. Back at the home complex, he had been alone with her, but there he had much more control in how they interacted. But back then Ricardo carefully allocated interaction and isolation time. It all depended on the progress Jessica was making transforming herself into the person Ricardo wanted her to be. Here…

Here the circumstances were not nearly as favorable or controllable. Ricardo had not left Jessica alone in two days. He didn't dare. Even if she obeyed his order to stay put, there was the danger of Ricardo walking a path that he would later discover to be irreversible. And Jessica herself, it was so strange. Late last night and early this morning, there had been several brief moments when Jessica's behavior was extremely bizarre.

It never lasted more than a second or two. They would be walking normally and then Jessica would suddenly freeze, sometimes shaking, once crying out in panic, a deep haunting wail as if someone were tearing her apart. And then she would recover and be unaware that the moment of panic had even occurred.

Ricardo formed a theory of what was going on. Originally he had hoped to transform Jessica into a completely new person, but it was his suspicion now that he had failed. He had not changed Jessica's personality. He had fractured it.

Jessica's fall from power was a catastrophe for her. Her assumptions of superiority and ability to control her future cracked the day Ricardo killed Uno, and then shattered completely as she was raped in front of her boyfriend. She had been perfectly positioned for the fall. Ricardo had skillfully cranked up the pressure on her, causing her to live in constant fear that her sexual exploits with Alfonso would cause his death and her transformation into Ricardo's hoof pussy.

On the day of her rape, the emotional distress split Jessica's personality. The old Jessica was not destroyed, only suppressed. Ricardo had created a path for her to escape her fear by giving Ricardo absolute and childlike obedience. Jessica's mind had accepted the offer by constructing a new personality as an overlay to her adult self image, smothering her adult years by building a new identify from the memories of her childhood.

Ricardo discovered a key piece of supporting evidence for this very early this morning. Part of Ricardo's training for Jessica in the past week was to disrupt her sleep rhythm, and he had kept this up over the last two days. The schedule he was using on her was roughly twenty hours awake followed by a four-hour sleep period, with occasional one-hour naps when Jessica became too disoriented. Early this morning, at about 3 AM when it was time to wake her from a nap, he had pinched her nose closed to wake her and then asked her as soon as her eyes blinked open how old she was. In absolute honesty, the bewildered Jessica had replied nine.

Nine years old! Ricardo had driven Jessica to a time before her puberty. No wonder she had accepted the pigtails and kid clothing so readily. It was exactly the identity to which Jessica was trying to escape. And unknown to Ricardo, nine years old was a time in her youth when Jessica was actually a very sweet kid with rosy cheeks, a love for running, and with a great curiosity about the world. She would shrug off the occasional teasing about being the shortest girl in her class and instead pride herself in the care of her dog and her younger sister.

It was the last year of peace and normalcy in her life. The following year her mother discovered that Jessica's father was having an affair, and things rapidly got very ugly. Four years of misery followed, culminating with Jessica's divorced mother becoming an alcoholic and losing the family home.

And now it was nearly 10:30 AM, and in a half hour Ricardo would wake Jessica from another of her one-hour naps. Ricardo had picked a schedule that would give Jessica's body enough physical rest but deprive her mind of dreaming sleep. He thought the disorientation would make it easier to mold her personality, and he had succeeded beyond his expectations.

Ricardo's own dreams were strange. They frightened him. In his troubled dreams, he kept confusing Jessica with Amber, and he couldn't figure out why. He had known both women since September. Neto's girlfriend Amber he thought was rather interesting. Alfonso's girlfriend Jessica he thought should be used as a piss mop. What quality did the two women have in common that Ricardo was confusing them in his dreams? The mergence made no sense, and the lack of an explanation was disturbing.

Ricardo took a hard look at Jessica's face as she slept. Her face was very relaxed, the innocence of a child at sleep. Yes, his theory of a split personality was correct, he was sure of it. And as he stared at her closely, Ricardo noticed a flutter in her eyes behind her closed lids. And first the flutter was subtle and fleeting, but then it returned, stronger and more enduring. Jessica's dreamed-deprived mind was striving for REM sleep in the short hour of her nap. Ricardo did not want that. So he positioned his face directly above hers, mouth above mouth and their noses almost touching. And the he pinched her nostrils shut.

In the dream it was late summer, at the end of August. School would be starting in another week. Unknown to Jessica, she was visiting the Bromley Mountain Thrill Zone for the last time in her life. She was speeding down The Big Splash, an amusement ride billed as Vermont's longest water slide. Jessica was sitting behind and holding her sister Trudy who seemed to be screaming and laughing at the same time.

And then unexpectedly, Trudy started to scream in genuine horror as their yellow raft hit a horribly tight and dangerous curve. The raft sailed up the side of the giant green slide and then jumped the track. Jessica and her hysterical sister were impossibly high, sailing in the air far above a parking lot. They were suspended in the air for a moment, and then they began to fall to their deaths. Jessica opened her mouth to scream with her sister but she couldn't draw a breath. She gasped for air but nothing came. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't breathe! Why?! She deserved one last shout against the injustice of her death, but she couldn't breathe!

Jessica's eyes opened in shock while her dream-deprived mind was still clinging to the nightmare. She was suspended above the parking lot, still falling to her death, but the enormous face of Ricardo was superimposed on her dream. In a dreamlike hallucination, his eyes seem to bore into her soul, and to her horror and seemingly against her will her own eyes and mind drilled back into his. Time itself seemed to stop.

Time: Sunday, April 3, 2019 10:29 AM

So it had come to this. Diego was standing in the hexagonal corridor at the southern vertex of his home complex, the very spot where he had been imprisoned just two days ago. But now there were two important differences. The first was that the servos had returned the area to a pristine state. No trace of his supplies or the dead-man switch that had chained him at the vertex location remained.

The second difference was that the door leading inward to the sand park and home was closed and locked. Again, it was no surprise. Except for the interior doors within their home, Diego's group had known for months about the gremlin servos and how they would not tolerate unattended doors being wedged open.

Diego had eaten a hearty breakfast and then showered and left the home complex shortly before dawn, carrying two backpacks loaded with as many supplies as he could manage. He left the vestibule door propped open with the reasoning there was no reason not to, but he was under no illusion of the wedge surviving once the door was out of sight. Numerous tests in the past had demonstrated the diligence and promptness of the servo's response to such attempts.

Diego walked around the perimeter track without incident for 2.4 kilometers, until he came to the southern vertex of the northernmost hexagon. He would occasionally glance out the clear windows as he walked. He thought it was remarkable how well the wall with the moguls on top was camouflaged by the grass. At the closest approach at the most eastern hexagon, Diego guessed the wall was a mere 800 meters away, and yet in was almost invisible. If he didn't know of its presence through the binoculars, Diego thought he wouldn't recognize its presence at all.