The Wanted Memory

Oliviero sighed. Damn Novak and her iron competence. She would never, ever let herself be denied, not when she was on the scent. So he turned back, staring into her eyes. "Okay. But nobody finds out, Lieutenant Novak. Clear?"

"Yes. Sir." She was openly mocking him to his face, but he deserved it from her. Just not in public, and she never would. "Spill it, Kai."

He was watching her closely as he took a deep breath. "So, you know I was married."

Novak stared at him for a long, painful moment. "You told me." She sat back down, every movement slow now, precise. "You said she left you for another man."

"She did." He waited then, watching her reaction, trying to figure out the exact moment she'd put the pieces together, but Ellie Novak was far from a moron. It happened right away.

"Good God, Kai," she breathed. "This must be hell for you." She looked away, out the viewport, and then opened and closed her mouth in an indecision that was very unlike her. "Do you... do you know what happened? Like, to the original?"

Oliviero laced his hands behind his head, feeling a sense of relief; it was good that he could share all this shit. "No idea. The manifest says it's a lobe and hippo, though, so she must be dead."

"Sort of."

"Sort of." The conventions of what made up "death" in their world were not at all certain. "She's a navigation officer aboard some frigate."

"You don't know which one? We could find out what happened..." She trailed off as her eyes returned to his face. She nodded. "You don't want to know."

"I don't want to know." The vid she'd told him to watch when she'd left him had ended it. She'd had that mocking smirk of hers, but Oliviero remembered the gleam in her eyes as she'd handed him the cassette; she knew how it would hurt him. But she'd wanted the cleanest of clean breaks, and she'd made sure of it from both sides by giving him the vid. He'd added the bottle. And the two had worked; she'd been dead to him since that day.

Only now, she was alive again. Novak sighed and played idly with the seams in the hull. "Well. You've got issues, Kai, I'll tell you that." She got up again and stretched. "But, seriously, if you're capable of doing your job? Take some of the heat off me, bud. The captain doesn't care, but I could use the break." She stared hard at him, as if he was the subordinate. "Comprehend?"

He nodded against the pillow. His mind had greater clarity now, almost a day and a half sober. He cast a wry glance her way. "Comprehend. I can do it. Take the night off."

"Peace out, sir," Novak announced swiftly; she'd never been a woman to let the grass grow underfoot, and she swept out before he could reply. Oliviero was left chuckling, creeping into his latrine for a glass of water.

He was coming back out into the main quarters when there was another knock on his hatch, soft but insistent. He scratched at his head and began to dress, assuming it was yet another delegation from Weapons, bitching about the duty roster. "Enter!"

And of course, the sliding hatch did not reveal Chief Surman or any of those other Weapons pukes.

Oliviero straightened slowly as the uniform crept up his legs, sluggish from its trip through the wash unit. "Umm," he said as she walked calmly in and shut the hatch behind her. "Lina."

"Hello, Kai." She moved to his bed and sat placidly at its foot, gazing up at him with those olive eyes. "I thought I'd continue making you nervous." He just gaped as the uniform did itself up, standing slack-limbed. She breezed on. "I'll be very interested, when I become myself, as to how I'll remember you." She blinked. "Because, see, I think I will remember two of you. I'll remember how you and I were, why things changed. But I'm not certain I'll remember you as you are now; I won't have this hippocampus anymore."

He felt he ought to say something, striking out blindly. "An interesting conundrum." Meaningless twaddle; he sat on his chair.

"To you, perhaps." She sighed. "It's different for me, for a clone. Clones know they're there to provide spare parts, and yet we've got minds as well." She frowned. "It frustrates me, now, so close to my end. I think I like myself this way, and yet I'm not supposed to."

"You should like yourself." He found himself saying it completely unplanned, mostly because he'd stopped believing, himself, that she was worth liking. "You're... you used to be a wonderful woman."

"When did I change?" That same penetrating intellect; he'd never been able to cope with it.

Oliviero made a weak, formless arm gesture, unable to add any words, so after a few tries he just sat back and ran his hands through his short hair. "People change, Lina," was the best he could do. "They just do. You, you were an engineer; I know you want to believe in cause and effect. You always did. But you changed, babe, and I didn't know why." He sighed. "Maybe you know. Your original, I mean; maybe the reasons are in her brain bag, in cold storage aboard a hospital ship."

"Maybe, but it's likely I'll never know." She shrugged. "The process was explained to us: integration of declarative and nondeclarative memory is seldom complete, and may take some time even if it is." She sounded like a textbook; she always had. "This is why I am here, Kai. I fear I won't get my answers any other way." She nodded. "Can you imagine that?"

Oliviero's mouth had gone dry. With great effort, confronting many foul things, he raised his eyes. "I think you changed when you met him." He shuddered. "When you become your original, you'll remember his name; I won't say it. You became cold, distant. You ignored me. You betrayed me." He took a deep, ragged breath. "You destroyed me, Lina."

"Betrayed you." She stared, serene, unmoving. "Sexually?"

His eyes gave her all the answer she needed, but he provided one anyway with a sullen sigh toward the viewport. "I couldn't love you after that. You hadn't loved me in a long time. Since you met him." He forced the words out. "You'll remember a meeting at a restaurant, under a lime tree. You met him there, I think, two years ago. Perhaps a bit longer." He looked back at her at last, shocked to find compassion in her eyes. But then, she'd loved him once. Was it too strange to think her clone would be moved by his pain?

"What was there to betray?" The question was soft, but insistent. "What was it like, with you?"

"It was..." He drew a ragged breath and shook his head. After a long moment, he was able to look into a pair of eyes where the compassion had only deepened. He managed a small smile with a great deal of effort. "I've spent a lot of time forgetting, Lina."

She frowned. "A pity." Her full lips gathered themselves into a thoughtful pucker. "I came here for memories, Kai." She was on her feet, calm and sinuous as ever, and Oliviero hadn't seen that look in years. Since the vid, for the other guy; the thought caused a pang, but somehow this Lina was not that Lina, and when she walked slowly across to him he did not stop her.

Her knees touched his and she said nothing else, staring up with that same old astro-engineer detachment, mixed with the olive glitter in those big, lovely eyes. Oliviero felt the stirrings now, down in his groin, but he was aware he must have been hardening for some time now. He'd ignored it, the sensation unfamiliar nowadays and more than dead for Lina, ever since the vid, but there it was. She laid a steady hand on his shoulder, still staring up at him, and he read the invitation.

Moving, then, as though his hand was the moth to her staytab's flame, he sent his fingers up, slowly along her ribcage, past her breast, to her neck where the 'tab glimmered. She raised her chin, his access unimpeded, but her expression did not change as her clothes began the origami dance that would soon leave her naked. She felt the 'tab come free and stepped back, slack and ready as ever; she'd always been this way, loving the display of it, proud of her body.

That much of her brain was the same, at least.

Slowly her clothes exposed pale flesh, carefully exercised by the clonemasters to match the original Lina's most recent measurements; from the looks of things, she'd kept herself quite well since the vid. She looked strong and clean and healthy, her skin with that same crimson flush it had always had. Oliviero was already savoring her, trying desperately to remember the early times, to forget the vid, and the clone helped; she posed for him.

He spoke through a thick throat.

"Are you doing this because you think you should?" He was wondering, now, whether the clonemasters had known he was on this ship, had been more subtle than anyone said they were. And, true to form, she dashed the idea without a further thought.

"I'm doing this, Kai, because I want to." She stared a moment longer, her smile spreading so slowly, and when she turned away to step toward the bunk she did it proudly, with the self-possession she'd always shown. "Not because she wants to." The comment, over her shoulder was empathy, was compassion, and he responded to it strongly. It was warmth in a dark, starry world. "I want the memory of you, somewhere in my body."

She watched with keen eyes as he undressed, the clothes slithering down. "She had good taste, though," Lina murmured, and she was long and twisty on the bunk, writhing until the mattress gave her comfort. "I suspected she might."

Oliviero walked, a marionette, his eyes taking her in; she was different now, but yet not different. She waited, one arm lazily gesturing, and he fell beside her with no strength left in his body. None to resist, anyway; she'd taken him already, as she always had, with no effort on her placid face.

She'd never had any trouble manipulating him.

Their first kiss was familiar: vibrant and consuming, and Lina still had that way of convincing him she'd never kissed anyone else, and never would. But the vid... no. The vid had no place here. The vid was the original; this was a clone, the Lina that should have been, and Oliviero kissed her at last with the fervency she deserved.

Her touch was familiar. She tasted different, but the exhale as their tongues met was the same, and then Oliviero stopped comparing the old with the new as confident, questing fingers found his cock.

Two groans, loud and close, muffled by lips and pillows, and then her arms were snaking around him and he was lost, as he'd always been with her. Her body was smooth and firm and wonderful for him, her scent intoxicating, her limbs moving with precision and curiosity; she was exploring him as she explored everything else.

As ever, Lina never closed her eyes. They gazed into his face whenever he glanced up, which had always disquieted him. Lina Brightstar had made love feel like a contest, judged and evaluated. But he'd never been able to help himself, either, then or now, and he felt himself come alive alongside her, stoked by her wet rhythmic kisses, his wasted body mashed against her toned one, and then came the gasp; she wanted him.

He'd always been able to tell when she wanted him. It was the one thing that she'd always laughed about, that of all the men she'd ever known, all the men who had come before him, it was he, Kai Oliviero, unimportant Service fleet lieutenant, the only one she'd never been able to fake. "I love you," she'd giggled once afterward. "You keep me honest. I can't lie to you."

She'd been lying to the man on the vid. Oliviero had known that, even if the man hadn't ever figured it out. Even as she'd stared into the camera lens, her eyes finding Oliviero's for the final time, she'd been sharing the joke with him.

Manipulating him.

But now she was digging her foot into the mattress, surging up and over, the sweat beginning to grease her nude flesh. He felt her small teeth digging into his lower lip, pulling, letting him feel her need; her hand gripped his shoulder, and then he was falling onto the side of the bed. The viewport spun in his eyes, though even more in his head; Oliviero was confused as he'd seldom been, his only point of reference in this fucked-up world the woman moving on top of him, the center of his universe again as she had been once before.

She came down for one more kiss just as she got him onto his back. He smelled her strongly in the room's humidified air, the small, even breasts crowned with their light pink nipples hanging above him. As she sat back onto his thighs, the full tableau was there for them both: bodies, hers trim and his merely scrawny, but with that short but brutally thick cock she'd always enjoyed; her own weeping pink slit, winking wide open, her entire body smooth and unmarked, a masterpiece, and somehow his hands had found her hips.

"I can see why I fell in love with you," Lina crooned quietly. "Even in the state you're in, you're exactly what I want." She lifted his penis, her hands deft and warm against his smoldering flesh. "I want a memory, Kai.

He took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts before he trusted himself to speak. "At least you were honest, Lina. Eventually."

She nodded gravely, as if she'd expected the answer, and then she was moving up, every muscle hard and sleek beneath her skin, to take him. She rose high, still eyeing him keenly, then licked her fingers and ran them along her parted lips, lifting his cock to her at the same time. Oliviero braced himself; entry had always been difficult, her pussy small. He at last felt heat from her chilly body as she steered him against her labia, the lips parting lewdly for his head. Her mouth fell open briefly in an eyes-closed betrayal of her composure before the old Lina returned, biting her lower lip in concentration as she began the slow process of working him into her body.

He'd thought he'd never, ever see this again: this woman, this incomparable woman, twisting and swiveling as she descended slowly, her lips stretched around his flesh. Oliviero caught himself leaving white fingermarks on her thighs, forced himself to calm down, but of course that wasn't happening: he struggled to hold back already, her vagina so viciously tight around him.

Fucking her had always been the same, always wonderful, always so painfully intimate; the hard, eager, slapping thrusts most humans got to frolic through were not something that she'd ever found comfortable. Their bodies instead moved slowly, softly against each other, almost dancing, hips in motion; Oliviero was amazed at how quickly the rhythm came back to him. Her hands found his ribcage, comfortable, and when his pubes tickled her clit she closed her eyes and smiled at last.

Back and forth. Left and right. Her body in constant, sinuous motion, muscles flowing with excellent control both outside and in, the tightness of her thighs mirroring the clasping of his cock; Oliviero gasped, his hands on an uncontrolled journey up and down her body. He ended, at last, where he always had: thumbs burrowing beneath her hood, seeking her clitoris. She shuddered above him. It would not be long now. "You're beautiful," he admitted at last, hating himself for doing it, but no; that was the original. She was the wicked one, the hurtful one. This one was... just a clone.

Just a clone, and yet he felt the same old power he'd always felt as, with a pair of shuddering breaths, they both felt the sudden fullness in her body as she drew out his cum, soft and gentle and perfect with the stars singing outside.

* * *

"Mr Oliviero, they're calling from the hospital ship. They say they won't hang up until they get an answer." The voice from the intertube paused again, uncertain as it had been the first five times. "Sir, the captain is saying you have to answer."

Oliviero sighed from where he'd been doing the charts. He'd been enjoying it, now that he'd convinced Novak he was sober enough to take back the duty; the complexities of stellar navigation, with that one right answer, had been a specialty of his, before. He sighed. "Put it on vox, Jennings."

"Aye aye, sir." The vox speaker crackled next; the First Officer was the only one aboard allowed to make vox calls. An unfamiliar voice spat through.

"Is this Lieutenant Kai Oliviero?"

"It is." The voice sounded pissed, but then he'd been trying to get through for half an hour. He was entitled to be pissed. "I'm the First Officer. What do you need?"

"Is your supply officer handy, Lieutenant?" Was that amusement in the voice, mixed with the rage? Could it be? "There's a problem with one of your deliveries."

"Tell me the problem." It rapped out flat and harsh, a real First Officer's command voice once again. "If there's an issue with my supply officer, I'll deal with her. The shekel stops here. So tell me what's wrong."

The voice sighed. It was calling from just the other side of his office viewport, the fat hospital ship swinging neatly in its orbit. That place would be disgusting inside, he knew from experience, stinking of disinfectant and the whispering smell of blood, the smell no scrubbers could ever really erase. "Well, it's about the clone consignment. You know the one: Marcellina Brightstar?" It sounded like the guy was checking a document. "Did you miss it when you picked her up?"

His gut dropped. "Miss what?"

Definite amusement now, in the voice. "It's just that it opens up a whole can of worms over here, a delay before we can do the transplant and reintegration. Why is the clone pregnant?"

Already Oliviero's hand was clawing at his lower desk drawer, where the bottle waited.

* * *

Thanks for reading! I've always enjoyed submitting to the Geek Pride event, and I hope you enjoy all the entries.