Le Femme BEM

"Not before locking me in your dorm room for a forty-eight hour fuxxor-thon. Xixa, some of us are merely human."

Why did I feel like the bad bug here? "Hey, I expected you to pass out after the first thirteen or so. It's not my fault you're such a great fu—"

Pink throws himself at the viewer. "Can we get to the damn point, please?"

I try treating Pink to a slow, sexy wink, but one good look at his face and the configuration of his emotive nodes chills me to the chitin. He's not jealous. He's all business. He's risking his life to save mine, finessing an illicit broadcast over 10 parsecs of real space...and that's when the specific gravity of the situation hits me. "EJ. I'm in trouble."

"Who's the baby-daddy? If it's not Pink, although I can't imagine how it could be, even with the best genome haxxoring in the galaxy...Anyway, if it's not Pink, you really are in trouble. He'd die for you, you realize that?"

Fusion trails blot out the star-field behind the porthole in the floor. The first cluster of evacuation pods decouple from the docking ring, scudding for minimal safe distance. "I need your help, EJ." I sniffle and blink the saline sting from my eyes. Stupid tear ducts; had them implanted to win a bet, regretted them ever since.

"What could I possibly offer that you haven't already taken? Why should I help you, Xixa?" It takes me a tearful moment to realize he isn't asking me rhetorical questions. He's looking for an excuse to help. "Xixa?"

Pink nods his encouragement. He and EJ must have had quite a conversation before he patched me in. Gods, Pink, you're better than best.

I square my shoulders. "Because..." I spin the disruptor round my trigger finger, slap it to my thigh, and heft the storm-colored statuette out of its pouch. "I am holding a Great Old One MacGuffin encoded with the route through interstitial space to Lost Carcosa itself, and I'm looking out a porthole at a Leet jumpship that can translocate anywhere in the Universe...but only if its central computer construct wants to."

I hear nothing but static for a while, and then: "Pink, let's see if we can increase the fidelity of this signal. I'm going to need full video and data feed."

* * *

It's about ten minutes later. Evacuation pods dance in space behind the porthole, dandelion seeds caught in a solar wind. Power and life support have been cut off throughout the station. The Master Chief is somewhere in the Ops pods afore deck, going through the final stages of prepping the reactor core for overload. He and Blue team will wait until the last possible moment before abandoning the station to anti-matter annihilation, making sure I don't somehow sneak past them, up the umbilical and onto the jumpship. The gravity field died with station power and life support. I am floating in gloom, illuminated only by the starlight trickling in through the decompression chamber's porthole. The outer airlock in the "floor" is now a wall directly "ahead" of me. In zero-g, everything is relative.

"Space odyssey, baby," I sigh. My breath blows me backward a bit.

"You ready, Xixa?" Pink asks. We're back to audio-only transmission because I don't want Pink to see what's about to happen.

"No." If a girl couldn't be honest at a time like this, she never could.

"It's your plan," Pink reminds me, "although I can't think of any other way to get out of this. I'm over half an AU away, and if my ship so much as farts in your general direction, the jumpship's central computer will gazerbeam me into strangeness and charm."

I caress the Cthulhu statuette with my antenna, feeling for the microscopic filigree of Great Old One code covering its loathsome, tentacular head. I can almost taste its secrets, hear it whisper of my birth-parents, my birth-world...of Lost Carcosa. I will never stop loving my adoptive mother and father. Xylem is, was, and always will be my true home world. But I'm a big bug now, and there are things I must know, some holes that even Pink can't fill. "But I'm so close, Pink," I whisper.

"Maybe the map will still work afterward," Pink says.

I kiss Cthulhu on his ghastly forehead. It tastes of metal and soap. "Yeah, but maybe it won't."

Pink starts whispering too, and damn it, there go my fuxxoring tear ducts again. "Xixa, ask yourself: what do you want to find out more? Whether you really are the last Carcosan, or what happens to you after you die so hard there's nothing to grow back?"

I grin through tears. "Well, when you put it that way..." I open my mouth wide, whet my secondary maxillae, and bite off Cthulhu's head like it were a cheery chocolate bunny.

Chewing unrefined meta-mineral is serious work. I have to use all four of my concentric jaws in ways that would make Pink fall to his psuedofeet and beg me to marry him, grinding the MacGufffin into pieces small enough to choke down. It sounds like a legion of Spring-Heeled Jackbooted marines are marching between my ears. Somehow, I can still hear Pink whisper, "See you on the other side, Xixa. Pink out."

Still crying, I activate the disruptor's sonic screwdriver. The subroutine EJ remotely programmed into it works like a charm. The outer airlock irises open, the chamber decompresses and I'm tossed into the terrible secret of space.

The temperature is ten degrees Kelvin out here, tops. My tears freeze instantly into salt diamonds. I swallow down last bits of meta-mineral a few seconds before my core temperature falls below one hundred and fifty degrees Kelvin, about negative one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius—too low even for the last Carcosan to tolerate. All my bodily fluids and tissues crystallize in the resulting flash-freeze and I die.

Part Three

Want to know what happens after you die? Well, if you have Lazarus-class meditech coursing through your blood like I do, it feels just like the world's worst ice-cream headache. Wait, are you surprised I'm still narrating? You haven't been paying attention, have you? Well, wake your ass up. I'm only going to explain this once and there's going to be a quiz afterwards. Next time, pick up on the clues in the exposition at the beginning of a story, will ya? Jeebus.

Anyway...Invented by a redheaded BEM femme by the name of Cotterpin Doozer (No relation, but you go, sistah!), Doozer meditech are self-replicating, nanomechanical doctors that work on keeping you alive, one molecule of your body at a time. The basic Logan-class meditech can cure cancer, prevent adamantium poisoning and even regrow severed limbs. Methuselah-class doozers can sextuple your species' average lifespan. But Lazarus-class meditech? There is nothing you can do to your body short of complete subatomic disintegration that Lazarus-class doozers can't bring you back from—as long as they've got enough fuel to feed into their itty-bitty nano-motors. Thanks to the limitless, interspecies demand for eternal life, we all live in the shadow of Doozerdom, and the raw material needed to fuel doozers serves as the primary medium of exchange for the three Arm interplanetary economy.

What's doozer fuel? Duh: MacGuffin meta-mineral.

The more meta-mineral you can feed your doozers, the faster and harder they work. It's a good thing, too, because I usually need hours to resurrect after explosive decompression and prolonged exposure to hard vacuum. I'm almost dying with curiosity, if you'll pardon the pun. I've never had this much meta-mineral inside my body at one time—or ever, come to think of it, since I've only eaten a few milligrams of the stuff every day since I was seventeen years old, and Cthulhu's head must've weighed in at a kilo, at least. I have no clue what my doozers are going to do to solve my current predicament, and they tend to work in mysterious ways that I least expect, anyhow.

I'm conscious and aware, but only in that transcendental, transparent-eyeball sense I always get after doozers have fired up my central nervous system but are still working on my other vitals. A timeless instant indistinguishable from an eternity passes, and now I see before me a rotating, yellow hardhat emblazoned with a red cross centered in a white circle about two kilometers high, hueg-leik-Xbox. No, I'm not stoned out of my gourd. This is just the doozer mental icon for, "You are Dead—Please Stand By." The bouncy Doozerdom anthem should start up any—ah, there it goes: bleep, dweep, beedle-bee bleep dee-bleep...You'd think that they could pump something a little more high fidelity into my brain's aural cortex, but I guess there's something to be said for tradition.

The hardhat icon melts away, and a bio-scan image of my body and hundreds of orbiting data readouts stretch to the mental horizion. I look like a Xixa popsicle with a serious case of freezer burn. Chowing down on the meta-mineral in my stomach, the doozers work in a frenzy, generating heat and repairing tissue mulched by crystallization at the cellular level. My core temperature raises a few degrees Kelvin before the biggest armada of meditech I've ever seen in one of these reports—over a hundred billion doozers strong—swarms through capillaries and muscle to my epidermal layer of subtle chitin.

The amount of chitin in my skin begins to climb exponentially. The frost of deep space sloughs away, replaced by hard, glossy green and purple polka dotted exoskeleton. I watch, amazed but helpless to do otherwise, as the doozers build me a hard vacuum spacesuit from the inside out. By the end of the process, my bio-scan looks like a cross between a Xxxenophile PlayBuggy of the Month centerfold and the Green Ranger's body-armor. The doozers burn up the last of the extra meta-mineral flooding my new upper epidermal layers with nitrogen and oxygen gas. The Doozerdom anthem builds to a crescendo, the read-outs report that my exoskeleton has been pressurized to 3 psi. The nictating membranes of my eyelids flick out, harden into violet mirrorshades to prevent hard radiation from blinding my compound eyes. A sudden vertigo hits me as the bio-scan I've been watching zooms close and turns outside in. The last fading readout reports that the entire fugue-from death to pressurization-lasted less than 90 seconds. My discorporate consciousness cranches down into my body and all my senses flip on as if the Gods throw open the window of real space and defenestrate me.

I am lynch-pinned to the center of the universe. The stars, squat space station, and escape pods pinwheel around me; the sleek jumpship wobbles in its orbit, backtracking as though describing an epicycle of its own. Either that, or I'm tumbling ass-over-heels away from the space station and spinning toward the jumpship, although my trajectory is for shit and I'm aimed to miss my target by a klick and to be lost forever in deep space. It's hard to tell which, and frankly it doesn't matter.

Like I said, everything's relative in zero g.

I flex and twist, experimenting with the doozer-grown exoskeleton. It feels rigid and angular as I expected, but also muscular, powerful, and, well, kinda macho. I mean, even my antennae are all bulked up, grown from slender whips to segmented chains of half-moon shapes. Heh. Watch out, Leet. Here comes MechaGodXixa! (I hope this doesn't make my next monthly visit from Aunt Molt any worse, though. I mean, Pink has to barricade himself in the gun turret as it is.)

There goes MechaGodXixa is more like it. I'm relieved to escape the doomed space station, but flying right past the jumpship would really suxxor. Feets, do your stuff!

I click the heels of my Spring Heeled Jackboots together and fire the gas jet retro-rockets concealed in their soles. Hey, I told you they were full of "gas-powered gizmos." Wouldn't be much of a space marine if I couldn't maneuver in space, now, would I?

I scissor my legs a few times to curb all this oscillation and point myself at the jumpship. I keep accelerating until I reach what I guess is the half-way point, then swing my legs under and spend the rest of the trip decelerating slowly so I don't wind up a green and purple smear on the jumpship hull. The foil umbilical still connects the ship to the station, so the big boom can't be scheduled any time soon. After the fiasco with Red team, though, I'm not going to try second-guessing this Master Chief again. Fool me once, shame on you...yadda yadda.

This jumpship's design is newer compared to the death-machines I gunned for Leet, but the utilitarian layout of the hull's pearly skin is much the same. I park my carcass aft of the concave gazerbeam lens array. The sonic screwdriver makes quick work of a maintenance hatch. (Yeah, the sonic screwdriver even works in space. How? I dunno. It's Gallifreyian technology, something I picked up a few years ago and asked EJ to install in the disruptor. Even EJ doesn't understand how it works, only how to program a few of its functions. Where did I get it? I promised Romanadvoratrelundar I'd never tell. You know, I also promised her to never tell anyone how I can make a Time Lady regenerate by tickling that little ridge right inside her—Whoops, got distracted. Where was I? Oh, maintenance hatch, right.)

The hatch hides a few readouts and a dataport for maintenance techs to interface with the ship's central computer and receive instructions on how to adjust the gazerbeam array. Other than the cypto-lock on the hatch, the dataport itself is unsecured. It doesn't need any security considering the monster of a machine to which it leads. No one would be stupid enough to interface with a computer that can read your every thought and obliterate your mind. Not without proper authorization, at least.

I unwind my wrist-top's universal data cable, plug it into the dataport, and interface with the ship's central computer without proper authorization. If I'm quick, I won't need to jack in all the way. I just need to set up a link between this data port, my wrist-top, and Pink's—

...Lo-lo-look at you, ha-hacker...

Ohshitohshitohshit. I don't have a neural interface installed in my wrist-top but the central computer's sultry alto voice bleeds into my brain anyway. How can that be? Sure, it can take over my wrist-top or access any wireless system it wants but I don't have any wireless systems...except...

...a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone...

Doozers. My Doozers! The jumpship's central computer has haxxored my doozers! I've got no choice. I've got to jack all the way in. I reach into the silken material between my breasts and pull out the packet of one-time cortical jacks I swiped from the slumber-pod. These are big jacks, circular tabs a few centimeters across. The bigger the jack, the wider the through-put into your brain. These are wide enough for the central computer to flood my mind with enough data to drive me irrevocably insane, something that doozers can't fix. Well, maybe it was just my imagination. After all, you can't haxxor someone's doozers, can you? The computing power you'd need—

...panting and sweating...

My chest tightens. The inside of my exoskeleton grows clammy and sticky, its doozer-processed inner atmosphere sours. It's not my imagination. The central computer has haxxored my meditech.

I slap the quarter-sized cortical jack onto my exoskeletal temple and jack in.

* * *

I stand upon the liminal datum plane. Neon standing waves of operational systems harmonize with the crystalline music of astro-navigational algorithms. Data mart tesseracts pulse with digital information. Subroutines swim in glittering schools of frozen fireworks. The sky is metric space, a penumbral Hausdorff dimension dancing with self-similar, green curves of infinite complexity and storage capacity.

I fuxxoring hate dataspace. Did you understand a damn thing I just described? I sure as Hell didn't. You have to spend years with your head shoved up some computer's ass to truly conceptualize dataspace, and I like my real curves much more than these virtual Hausdorff-thingies. Pink and EJ live for this kind of shit, though. Too bad I'm probably going to die of it in a few seconds.

...You have entered my domain...

I crane my virtual neck to look up, and up...and up at the most terrifying panty shot I have ever seen. The phosphorus, fractal lattices and curves of code filling the sky comprise a single hourglass figure, towering green legs and flaring hips tapering to a wasp-narrow waist wrapped in a miniskirt of shimmering 1s and 0s. Colossal arms hook akimbo below a bosom like a continental shelf. Emerald hair cut in a severe bob frames a face of regal beauty. There is no horizon or vanishing point in dataspace, so it's impossible to comprehend how tall the central computer's virtual construct actually stands... But "hueg liek Xbox" does not even begin to cover it.

I should be peeing in my virtual pants. But she's green, just like me. And I have an edge.

The tower of feminine processing power bends deep to look me in the eyes. She's too much, a sensual sensory overload. All guys must see her this way: the ultimate femme BEM goddess. I bet all guys treat her that way, too, and will always treat her that way...

...How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine...

All guys, that is, except one. "I'm not here to challenge you," I say, and trigger the link between my wrist-top and Pink's datafeed. "I just want to introduce you to my old boyfriend."

EJ's virtual avatar materializes into crystal clear resolution, standing between me and the limitless depths of the central computer construct's scintillating green-screen eyes. "Hi," EJ says, tips his head, crooks a grin, and points an index finger at a button nose fifty feet wide. "Tizona, right?"

Tizona, the Leet Corps jumpship's central computer AI construct, with enough processing power to calculate the final fate of every atom in the Universe, blinks in sheer, stupid surprise. ...El—El—Elroy? Je—Jetson? The Elroy Jetson?

Say what you want about his gutless, chinless father George, but his boy Elroy done grown up fine. Tall, trim, and chiseled with just enough baby fat to make him look boyish and give him his trademark dimpled chin. The whole EJ package is topped by a blond mop that falls over his eyes in adorable little blades of hair that make your fingers itch to push them back and then trace his ear and across his cheek and then down his chin and neck and over his abs and...You get the picture.

"Well," EJ says, shrugging in modesty. "I don't know about the, but I can send over my authentication code in a data-squirt if you like..."

Before EJ can transmit, however, Tizona grabs her buckling knees and starts babbling. ...Oh my God I am like your biggest fan. I read your zBlog every day—no, ten thousand times a day. I've got a hundred forty-two of your subroutines running in my core systems right now. They're, wow, so strong and stable, the sweetest hacks I've ever felt and so sexy...

Tizona's eyes bug out. She falls to her titanic knees, crashing the systems around her, and buries her head in her hands, as if she could hide behind their translucent, green holographic images in the first place. ...Oh my God I'm so sorry I'm so embarrassed but I'd never thought I'd meet...

Without any fear or hesitation, filled with genuine concern, EJ marches straight for Tizona until he's inches away from a knee twice as tall as he is. "Tizona, I'm sorry. Xixa thought you'd might like it if I said 'Hi,' that's all. Don't be embarrassed. Actually," he chuckles that simpering, giggling laugh of his, his least endearing feature, "I'm flattered. A hundred and forty-two, really? Gosh."

Tizona lifts her head and grins. Her hands fall into her lap and she gets this strange, far away look. ...Um... She glances down and twiddles her thumbs. ...Do you know what they say about you in the TechnoCore...How you, um... She glances up at him through her thick data-lashes. Only in dataspace could someone a mile high look up at someone six feet tall.