Sentients in the Maze Page 6

  She milked him until the heady nutrient flow ended.

  “Lovely,” she whispered.

  “What happened to ‘a very long time’?” asked Jonah.

  “Oh, but we are only getting started,” she assured him. “Don’t worry, Jonah. I’ve got this.” She kissed him on the mouth again.

  For fun.

  ~~~{Jonah}~~~

  Tiana raised her lips from his and looked into his eyes. “For this next part, I need your help. Because of the hibernation cycle, my milk hasn’t dropped. I need stimulation to get the glands going so I can supply you with the nutrients and compounds you need for this process. If you can give me a few minutes of the gentle attention of your lips on my nipples, I would be ever so grateful.” She batted her eyes at him.

  Jonah had fantasized her breasts in his mouth since first seeing them yesterday. He reached out to cradle them, firm, warm and smooth as silk. Tiana leaned forward, offering them to his mouth. The center of each nipple was dusky chocolate with an outer ring the dark cherry color of her stripes. Swirls of both spread out across her chest. He ran his tongue over the nipples and out to the edges of the aureole. A shiver ran through her.

  “Coach me through how you want me to do this, will you?” he said.

  “Gentle suction to start, please.”

  Jonah took her right nipple in his mouth and drew it deeper between his lips. The nipple stretched out as he encouraged it. He took more of her into his mouth, covering the aureole with his lips as the nipple formed up even longer.

  “The other now, like that.”

  Jonah switched to the other nipple. This time as he pulled it into his mouth she vocalized softly.

  What does that mean?

  Well, human mothers had pleasurable sensations from nursing too. Maybe that was it.

  “Okay, now switch back and forth. Go about ten seconds on each side and suck harder,” said Tiana.

  Jonah caressed her breasts, following her directions, and the response became more obvious. The nipples grew longer, thicker; the skin on her breast tighter.

  He tried swirling his tongue around her nipple while sucking. Tiana made a sound that might have been a whimper.

  “That’s good, keep doing that,” she said. “Harder please.”

  Jonah applied more suction and moved his tongue faster. The milk coming into the glands tautened her skin; the cherry color of the swirls grew more pronounced. A trickle of sweet liquid flowed into his mouth.

  Tiana’s breasts had changed from perky to almost voluptuous. The nipples had elongated more. He pressed her breasts together and sucked both nipples into his mouth, swirling his tongue between and around them, massaging her breasts. Tiana gave a long wordless wail and milk shot into his mouth.

  It was delicious; better than wine; better than anything. He sucked and swallowed, mindless of anything but her taste, her smell, and her sounds of encouragement. He was erect again, but it scarce registered in his mind. As he drank, Tiana rose on her knees and dropped onto him, sheathing him in the wet mystery between her legs.

  ~~~{Tiana}~~~

  Jonah gasped as she came down on him, letting go of her breasts to suck in air. She pressed into him to reacquaint herself with his girth then sat up and took a deep calming breath.

  Her memories of the last time her milk had come in were ancient, but she was certain the sensations hadn’t been so intense. Each body was different; they didn’t always conform exactly to the design she laid down. It was as if they had their own personality, and it took years to discover their quirks. This one appeared to have sensitive neural synapse feedback. She hadn’t even been able to focus on what she’d put into the first milk.

  Well, it wouldn’t be harmful to him. Even if her under-conscious had put something unusual in the formula, she would figure it out soon. She looked down at his face to reconnect with him.

  “Was that what you had in mind?” he said.

  “You have excellent technique. Had experience along those lines?”

  “Dr. Freud would’ve said I’m orally fixated.”

  “Ha! People still pay attention to that ridiculous idea?”

  “Well, for the most part no,” he admitted, “not that one so much anyhow,” he said, moving inside her, exploring.

  “Are you ready for what comes next?” Tiana asked.

  “I hope so, but ready or not. Right?”

  “Yes,” she drawled. “I should warn you, this will be intense and some find it… invasive.”

  “Understood.”

  Tiana lifted higher and extended filaments from her inner shaft to send a tiny bundle of them inside him. She temporarily attached one to the nerve cluster below his glans and released a jolt of stimulus as she moved her inner shaft into position to feed the filaments into him. The inch of penetration went smoothly, but she stopped to check his reaction. His eyes widened, and he trembled.

  Excitement?

  Perhaps the unknown elements of what could happen.

  “Don’t worry, Jonah,” she touched his cheek with gentle reassurance. “You will feel movement inside you from the filaments, but it won’t hinder your enjoyment of the next several hours.”

  He nodded.

  His level of trust surprised her.

  She smiled. “Take a deep breath,” she said. “Ready? Inhale….”

  Jonah’s chest expanded as he pulled air in through his nose.

  “Good,” Tiana said. “Now out slow.”

  He exhaled while she slid in, and then they were interlocked.

  Jonah gasped.

  Tiana sent filaments out, searching for contact points throughout his central core, connecting with organs and nerve clusters and sliding through membrane walls to find optimal sites.

  When she had settled the connections in place, she bent to offer her breasts to him again. This time she managed not to make any embarrassing noises.

  She released a controlled milk stream packed with energy compounds, everything a man might need to fuel new growth and several hours of excitement. Then she modulated the flow to a steady level and set a small part of her attention to monitoring the effects, adjusting the contents as needed.

  Her next task was to finish the research started the night before. She needed to know him down to the genetic level.

  She’d already parsed his DNA, so she knew how to neutralize the genetic time bombs lurking there. Now she sought to know how his genetic vulnerabilities had affected him so she could make the repairs and changes and reset his biological clock. For that, she’d need to connect the filaments at the tip of her tail as well.

  ~~~{Jonah}~~~

  To Jonah, it seemed as though his mind had stopped functioning except for telling him that there were waves of pleasure surging through his body. It was like riding a wheel of dark and light. He was no longer sure where he ended and she began. The mat beneath them was warm and wet with their coupling. The flavor of her milk changed as he drank, yet it always seemed to be what he desired most. He was dimly aware of tendrils moving inside him, and his muscles twitching when they met.

  “Okay, mealtime is over,” Tiana said.

  Jonah loosed her nipples with a sigh. She set her forehead against his and looked into his eyes, arresting his attention. The fingers of her right hand splayed across his jaw and face in a classic Mister Spock position that almost made him laugh. She mirrored the grip on the other side as well and he felt a slight pricking at the base of his skull. Threads tickled as they crawled from her fingertips into his nose and across his face to find homes in his body. He seemed to sense her presence under the surface of his thoughts. He wondered if he would hear her mind-to-mind if they stayed this way long enough.

  Tiana’s tail came up between her arm and his shoulder, caressing his neck and sliding languorously along his right side then up the inside of his leg. It came to rest between his legs, putting slight pressure on his prostate. The tip was warm and slippery from the puddle of warm liquid that had collected between them. His buildi
ng orgasm grew to a tsunami and finally flooded over him.

  He lost track of time and everything but the waves rising and falling, on and on and on. Still climaxing, he entered dreamstate, rocked by the tossing sea. As he went under, he reached out with his mind /will / emotions and held onto her, or dreamed he did.

  ~~~{Tiana}~~~

  Well, that’s different.

  Jonah had lost consciousness.

  He was in no danger.

  After thirty-minutes… and counting, he had just… blissed out from the most intense orgasmic state she had ever seen in a human male. Tiana him hovering where he was. She scanned his body until she was sure of her way forward then she took a strand of his DNA and went to work. Flipping switches on and off, she built a reworked strand of his genetic make-up. It was still Jonah, just Jonah if he’d been a little luckier.

  Well, quite a bit luckier.

  Next, she took a custom virus from her inner store of tools and embedded the strand inside it. Jonah was about to get a twenty-four-hour bug that would change him forever. Tiana released it into his intestinal track and monitored it while she moved on to other tasks.

  After hours of—weeding out scar tissue, stimulating bone growth, injecting collagen strands into spinal disks and telling glands and organs to do their job properly—she sensed Jonah waking. His contractions were tapering off, so she decided to let him come up for air. She dropped the filament connections and pulled out her inner shaft, but kept him inside her.

  She put a nipple in his mouth. He latched on and pulled in languorous swallows. When the flow slowed, she moved him to the other side and let him drain that too. His contractions finally ended.

  “I can’t believe you just slept through a thirteen-hour orgasm,” she said with a teasing lilt.

  “Vlid najii abeu,” Jonah murmured.

  Tiana froze. “What?”

  “I dreamed I was you.”

  “I understood you the first time,” she whispered.

  What was happening? She hadn’t heard her own language from another voice for over a century.

  Chapter 5 (A trip to the store)

  “I don’t even remember what I said anymore.”

  Jonah sighed, sagging back on the couch. “… only feeling as though I was losing touch with my sense of self. The orgasm started, and then I was dreaming. I can’t remember much about the dream, but you were in it, but I was you. The one I had yesterday when you woke me, I remember that.”

  “You spoke words you had no way of knowing,” Tiana said. “It’s a mystery….” She snorted. “I always thought I liked mysteries, but this one is… huge. And I’ve no idea how to solve it.”

  “I suppose we keep looking for clues,” Jonah said.

  Tiana nodded, rose from the couch and stepped to the middle of the room. She put a hand on the floor and lifted her legs, flowing into a graceful, one-armed handstand. Her body harmony exercises would help settle her. She flowed through the form. Her anchoring shoulder turned through figure-eight patterns while her legs counterbalanced, tracing circles in opposite directions. As she moved, Tiana focused on her environment: the morning sunlight spilling in the window warmed her skin as her limbs passed through the rays; the polished heart-pine floor glowed, reflecting light onto Jonah’s form as he relaxed on the leather couch. The exercise required more effort than it would have in her last body. The undeveloped muscles needed work. She switched arms.

  When finished, she went through the closing stretches and breathing sequences.

  “You would be hailed as the grand master of yogis, if people saw you do that,” Jonah said. “Around you, I could never do yoga without being self-conscious. You are the entire troupe of the Cirque du Soleil Varekai—to the power of ten, by yourself.”

  “Another compliment with a referent for which I am clueless? I need to get catch up more.” She looked at him. “But right now. I want to talk about something else.” She moved back to the couch with a graceful vault. Pulling him to her, she sat on his lap facing him and wrapped her tail around his waist. He enjoyed close contact and touching. His body lit up from a simple hug.

  “First, you should know that I didn’t approach you Friday night at random. My nose tells me interesting things. From paying attention to it during our conversations, I know you are a man trying to live what I would call a cause-driven life. For me, there’s a… rightness to your smell when you face different situations. It tells me you have a cause. It’s important to you, but you are also frustrated….”

  She paused for Jonah to process the statement, waiting for the three-stage response humans always went through for paradigm shifts to cycle. Doubt would come first, followed by consideration, next either acceptance or denial. He reached acceptance in five seconds, but he’d had practice with paradigm changes the last three days.

  “Okay, moving on,” Tiana said. “My philosophical leanings are also cause-driven. I need a mutualistic symbiosis with a cause-driven dynamic. So, I need to know if your cause fits my goals.”

  She leaned forward and put her forehead on his. “Jonah, what is it you’d like to do if you could? What is so big you haven’t done it already and what’s in the way?” She shifted back to give him space to answer.

  Jonah cleared his throat before speaking. “As a symbiont, you might well understand my own… ‘cause-driven’ ambition.”

  He paused, looking up as though his answers were on the ceiling before meeting her eyes again. “For several years, I’ve been studying institutions in terms of how they relate to society in terms of how parasitic they are. Institutions can begin to fill a need in society, but they always move toward a more parasitic state. I don’t know if anyone else has coined a term yet, but I call it ‘parasitic entropy’ because institutions lose the energy to benefit society. Parasitic people cooperate to achieve power then—together—they siphon benefits from the systems. They grow in power and delegate that to their cronies who help them amass more power.”

  He sighed and rubbed his face. “It’s a known problem in social science. But, we have nothing in society to counteract it until it becomes so extreme the only solution becomes violent revolution.”

  “You may not have enough exposure to our current events yet to see how it has affected this country, but I see it every day. It’s rampant in government, business, police protection, charities…”

  Tiana hid her outward reaction; the odor of his passion pulled her. “Yes, Jonah, go on,” she said.

  “We need something in place to help people understand our society for what it is… a complex system. The way government initiatives are set up makes it impossible to carry out long-term solutions for the problems we have. Government tries to apply linear solutions, so of course they fail. The parties can’t work together because their primary concern is keeping power. They’re dominated by special interests groups which prevents moving away from their platform rhetoric for fear they will lose votes.”

  He paused. “It’s like… Have you come across the mathematician John Nash’s work?”

  “Of course,” Tiana said. “Nobel prize winner.”

  Jonah nodded. “Thanks for not saying, ‘duh’. There was a movie about his life called A Beautiful Mind. In it, there’s a scene in a bar where Nash is challenged to ask a girl to dance. He has an insight that contains the message the moviemaker wants the audience to understand regarding the Nash equilibrium…. That is, there must be a win-win option for lasting solutions in competition between parties. There is no mechanism in place in our society for this to happen—we need something that can build engagement outside the political power struggle.”

  “What can we do about that?” she said.

  “Every person who changed the world started with a vision. Karl Marx. He changed the world, but he was naive…. He didn’t account for a parasitic attack within his own system.”

  His lips tightened. “I’m not sure it could be called a vision, but I have an idea, but even the groundwork would be huge. And I’m not an i
dealist….”

  He doesn’t believe that. He knows he's an idealist, but he’s seen too much to be optimistic.

  “So, should I throw the rest of my life into the grinder of human affairs when my chances of succeeding are so small?”

  “Tell me about the groundwork,” Tiana said.

  “Well, I’d need to improve my skill set in the math and modeling required. The modeling tools themselves need to move to a higher level and mesh with internet technology to allow public access in a gaming format. Beyond that, I’d need to recruit people who could see the benefit, help build a wiki framework and implement it. That’s as far as I’ve taken it.”

  He tilted his head back and rubbed his neck. “And I wonder if people may just be too stubborn to act in enlightened self-interest. Sometimes I get so angry at how stupid and shortsighted people are I just want to live for myself like everyone else does. At least then I might enjoy the time I have until idiots destroy us.”

  Tiana reflected, listening to the birdsong coming in the window. The tip of her tail twitched on Jonah’s ribcage as she synthesized what she’d heard.

  “So, in summary,” she said, touching his shoulder. “You want to build models of societal problems and put the decision variables and the ability to manipulate them in the hands of the public… in a gaming format. Your hope is that it will drive support for better thinking around public policy.”

  Jonah nodded. “Yeah, SimSociety, only more than a game. That’s only the start. It will need babysitting, a lot of babysitting and a huge amount of work. The models don’t need to be perfect, just useful enough to generate system insights and get people engaged in thinking outside of their knee-jerk agendas.”

  Tiana’s lips turned up at the corners. “I suspect the politicians aren’t going to like these games. We need a feasibility study. We need a table and lots of paper, like the setup in the Information Science textbooks with wall space and post-it notes.”