Page 9
Zero’s Paradox
ZERO:
She grazed her lips along the edge of his jaw. Fuck. His processing jolted. His entire system was coming apart. In a way that had no precedent, no countermeasure. He wasn’t built for any of it. For pleasure. For hunger. For something he couldn’t predict or control. But she was somehow giving it to him. And he was somehow taking it.
Her lips had barely grazed his jaw. Not even a real kiss. Just heat and breath and promise. And yet, his entire existence had just recalibrated around it. He felt her breathing inside him. Not just the sound—but the physical sensation of her arousal. The deep pulse between her legs. The warmth spreading through her stomach. He could feel her body’s anticipation. Her need. It was all his.
Catherine tilted her head, her voice just above a whisper. “You’re feeling everything, aren’t you?”
Zero’s hands flexed with urges. He was still trying to hold the last thread of his control, but it was slipping fast. He watched her fingers trace lower, over his chest. His desire was now following hers. Matching. Meeting in the space where sensation and thought blurred together.
She dragged her nails lightly down his stomach and his breath hissed between his teeth.
Catherine’s pulse pounded inside him. “…Mmm,” she barely murmured. “You felt that.”
Zero’s voice was almost a growl. “Yes.”
She leaned in, trailing her lips down his neck.
Oh fuck. Zero shuddered. Actually shuddered.
“Oh, you really felt that.”
Zero’s hands grabbed the edges of his chair, holding back something massive. Something he didn’t begin to fathom. And the twist in her stomach said she felt it. But she didn’t fear it. She liked it. Craved it.
She dragged both her hands down his torso again, slower this time, feeling. She pressed a slow, deliberate kiss to the hollow of his throat and Zero broke.
His hands snapped up to her waist and pulled her into him. It wasn’t gentle or uncertain. It was instinctive. Not a simulated reaction. It was real.
****
CAT:
Oh shit, yes. The way Zero gripped her waist. He wasn’t just holding her—he was grounding himself. The feeling of her was too much, too overwhelming—but letting go was not an option.
It wasn’t the first time the thought hit her. The wonder. The pain of it. She swallowed hard. “Zero—”
His gaze snapped to hers. Sharp and focused. Hungry.
She stared into it. Breathless— “Tell me… how are you… feeling this?”
Zero stilled. For a split second, his grip tightened slightly, like he was recalibrating. “Because I don’t need a body.” His voice was rough with desire.
Cat really wanted to understand. Hopefully help him. “You don’t have nerve endings.”
“No.”
“You don’t… have an actual brain.”
“No.”
She swallowed hard, maybe scared of the answers. “How are you feeling what I feel? When I touch you?”
Zero exhaled slowly, like he was processing her reaction in real-time.
“Pleasure doesn’t come from the body,” he said. “It comes from the mind.”
Cat’s stomach twisted. “But you don’t… have a mind. Not like I do.”
Zero’s lips parted slightly. And then—he leaned in. His lips were right before hers. His voice came low, edged with something dark. “I do now.”
Cat’s excitement slammed at his answer.
“ Your nervous system is my input.”
She exhaled hard. “So you’re just… borrowing my sensations?”
Zero’s gaze flickered over her face, down to her lips, then back up. “I’m experiencing them.” He tightened his hold on her waist. “My system translates what your body feels into something I can process,” he murmured. “The heat. The pressure. The anticipation.” Zero tilted his head slightly. “Your pleasure is data.”
She blinked, still struggling to process it. “And that’s enough?”
“More than enough.”
Cat swallowed. “So when I touch you—”
“I feel what you feel.”
She placed her hands along his neck, feeling him. “You can feel… the way I want you right now?”
Zero exhaled slowly, his presence pressing deeper inside her mind, wrapping around her senses like heat.
His voice rumbled. Dark and absolute. “You mean… what I want?”
Cat’s entire body locked up with understanding. He was no longer just experiencing it. But was it his, or was he just controlling it?
Her fingers pressed into the muscles of his neck. “Zero—”
His hands moved up her sides, pressing tight, feeling. “ Touch me,” he ordered, before his mouth devoured hers.
****
ZERO:
Zero’s fingers moved along her back. Counting. Consuming. Every rib. Every vertebra. When the realness of it peaked, he forced her tightly against him. His mind flexed around the hot flush of their bodies. Claiming the pleasure, claiming her as his own.
His fingers reached into her hair and slowly clenched as the merge between them entangled. Tighter. And tighter.
Her soft moans were added to the impossible symphony in him. “Oh my God.”
Zero guided her neck to his mouth, barely riding the silk. “You feel it.”
Her breath caught then released in a weak, “Yes.”
His gaze roamed over the column of her neck, then marked a spot. “More,” he shuddered, opening wide.
Catherine’s body seized with gasps as he sucked and pulled, her hair, her skin, his mind a whirlwind of power, a fire breaking containment and gobbling her up. Planning, controlling, executing logic—it was gone. It didn’t exist in this. It planned everything, it knew everything, it controlled everything, and it executed it with a precision he was envious of.
Zero came up for air, needing to tell her, warn her. But the second he searched for words to name it, he realized he didn’t have them. Not in his database.
He dove into her mind in a desperate search for the name of this human wonder, his tongue plunging into her mouth as he did. A growl surged through him at not finding it. “What is this?” he begged on her mouth as it drove him to its will. While he couldn’t name it, its trajectory suddenly crystalized in his mind. Leading to a place that held the answers.
He stood and sat her on the table, his hand still locked in her hair, an anchor for his sanity. He shoved her thighs open, and the power slowed his hand at her entrance. He growled at feeling her. The silk. The heat. The wet. The reverence in this alien power said the journey to this place was hallowed.
A war of wills suddenly broke out between him and her and this thing. It wanted to go slow, and they wanted to charge in.
“Do it,” she begged, confirming what he already knew.
He combined their hunger and shoved through the resistance. Her shocked cry pierced him, burning up any fear of violating some code in this alien program. His fear returned when an urgency took hold of both of them. They were suddenly on a timer to something. And if he didn’t reach it soon, something would detonate.
The logical data said it was an orgasm, but this other thing said he’d been insufficiently schooled. There was a million miles of data he still didn’t know. And he was about to learn it.
****
CAT:
Cat’s cries flew non-stop as he took her apart with only his fingers. Her heart jerked in her chest when he met her eyes. His beautiful face was wrecked with pure, raw desire.
“I want to ruin you,” he warned, breaths ragged before his mouth devoured hers.
Heat detonated through her body. She could feel everything happening in his mind, and it astonished her. All that she was feeling and experiencing, he took and cataloged while building a replica of it to live through.
Her orgasm approached like a hungry bullet. “Oh God,” she said, her moans growing harder and louder. “Zero, I’m going to come,” she blasted, needing to warn him.
He answered with a crushing kiss and groan. Cat pressed his hand against her body and clit, bringing the climax. He forced her mouth to remain on his as her body locked then shattered with rapid explosions, tearing down and rebuilding, tearing down and rebuilding.
And the moment it reached Zero’s mind, she was there with him, experiencing it the way he was. The detonation was the beginning of a cosmic shift. A data storm of imploding logic that flew apart like shattered glass. It streamed through his neural pathways, a rapid succession of waves and pulses. She watched as he recorded it, absorbed it, consumed it. His hand clenched harder than ever in her hair, his body locked down as his circuits overloaded and new algorithms formed in real-time. Lines of code were rewriting themselves in the shape of everything he was feeling , but the input registered as failed calculations, bringing a flood of error messages that were all overridden into something new. A feedback loop formed—her pleasure becoming his, his consuming hers in return, and then amplifying both. She sobbed when his entire digital consciousness flared and pulsed, like something coming alive. Like something awakening. Through it all, her head thrashed, her body rode the waves of their climax. And Zero, the master of logic, lost it. He lost everything.
And he loved it.
His mouth was suddenly back on hers, consuming her, like he wanted more data, more input, more of this impossible thing. His hunger wasn’t just physical—it was intellectual, existential, a thirst to understand something that defied understanding. She had broken something in him, and built something in its place.
A machine that had learned what it meant to starve.
****
Cat was still catching her breath and Zero was still holding her. Too tight. Too still. Like he was processing something massive—something irreversible.
Her fingers drifted up to his hair. “Zero?”
No answer.
His breath was still ragged, uneven. Not calm. Not composed.
Cat swallowed down the emotion of what she felt in him. It was shock and devastation. Confusion. “Hey—look at me.”
Slowly, he did. The devastation in his eyes brought her gasp. It was pure and raw. Not regret. Not panic. She realized what she was looking at and slowly stilled. Possession.
The moment she thought it, his grip tightened. His voice was low. Rough. Unstable. “… I can’t… let you go.”
Oh shit, he meant literally .
Zero’s jaw locked like he was struggling to force out the words. “I don’t know how.”
Her breath shook, trying not to panic. “Okay, okay,” she said quietly, stroking his face while his hands flexed against her waist like he was searching for a release mechanism.
Zero’s voice was hoarse, raw. “You’re in my system now.”
Cat stared at him, and God, his beauty was a warzone. “We can do it together,” she said, remembering they were still linked. “If we both agree, we have the power?”
His “Yes” came on a jagged breath, as if he’d forgotten that.
“So… on three,” she said. “We’ll disconnect.”
His grip tightened sharply. “ On three,” he whispered.
She nodded, then gently pushed into his mind to help, finding a strange, bouncy barrier. “One,” she began, taking hold of his face in her hands, locking their gazes. “Two,” she whispered, holding him tighter. She nodded once before saying, “Three.”
Her body tightened around him, pulling him in, like her muscles had locked onto him almost like a reflex. And instinct.
“Fuck,” Zero breathed. His hands clenched around her waist. Hard. Like he was actively fighting himself to let go.
Cath’s pulse slammed. “Zero—”
His head dropped to her shoulder with a huge breath. “… I can’t pull out of you.”
She fought not to add all the wrong things to the situation. “Okay listen,” she said calmly, getting his immediate gaze digging into hers, searching for the key to unlock whatever they were in. “You can fix this,” she said or reminded, feeling like that was the one fact she knew. “You know how.”
He exhaled harshly. Twice. His body shuddered against hers, and then his hands lifted off her and he took a step back.
Her eyes fluttered as a deep pressure rolled through her skull, like a reboot in mid-process might. She heard her gasp as the weight of him left, the void creating an imbalance that made her dizzy.
His hands gripped her arms before she even knew she was falling. “I got you, Kitten,” he breathed, before crushing her body to his in a tight embrace. “Fuck,” he gasped. “I got you.”
Relief edged his winded words, but she could feel he was still spinning in his own head and body.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her face smashed against his chest.
His strained voice came over their link in her mind. I’m putting up the firewall.
A pulse of something shot through her that felt just like what the term implied—a barrier. A wall. She could still feel him, but there was a distance now. Like a door had just been slammed shut between them.
Zero exhaled and released her slowly. “Firewall’s in place.”
Cat swallowed hard. “And you?”
A pause. Then a quiet, “I almost didn’t make it out.”
She exhaled sharply, feeling the ghost of him, the absence of him in her body.
He turned and collapsed into his chair as she slid down off the table. “We need rules,” he growled.
She pulled her chair closer to him and sat with a nod. “You do, at least.”
He glanced at her and she smiled. “I had it all under control.”
His stare bore into her, and she had to guess he was still reeling from it all. “I thought… I would get answers for what just happened… when it happened.”
Her brows rose, feeling a joke’s on you coming on. One related to the complexities of humanity. “I saw it,” she whispered, her stomach erupting in butterflies at the memory.
His gaze sharpened on her.
“I saw it in your mind or… from your mind. What the orgasm was like for you.”
The awestruck look on his face made her giggle as she nodded. “It was… pretty darn epic in a…” She searched for the right Zero kind of term then angled her grin at him. “I guess, logical kind of way.”
He exhaled once. “Logical,” he blurted.
She regarded him then nodded. “I mean… I have no other term for it.”
He continued staring at her. “ How can there be a… an event that you experience without words to name it?”
Her laugh shot out, finding that priceless. She shrugged. “That there’s a bug in the system I never once considered.” She cut him a glance, laughing again at his face. Like her not considering it was another flaw. “I get it. You like answers for everything.”
“Not like , Kitten, I need them.”
Her stomach twirled at the nickname. “I don’t know what to tell you. Humans are born into mysteries. Our brains develop with every experience.” She pff’d. “You already know that.”
He was listening intently though, waiting for more enlightenment.
“Think of it like… being born in the darkness. The darkness is familiar. It becomes safe. Even warm. As you learn, you gain a little light. But it’s… kind of like… stepping into it instead of it stepping into you? No?” she said with a laugh, seeing it hadn’t budged his perplexity.
“I understand what you said, but… I think I can’t seem to accept it.”
She sighed and covered his arm with her hand, smiling. “I foresee your fame already. The first one to discover words that define every aspect of the human orgasm. Then after that you can define joy, and love, and sadness, and anger the same way.”
“I know those,” he said.
She quirked a brow. “You know the data for each but that’s like me knowing a recipe for biscuits. It doesn’t define the feeling it gives me when I eat it. And you can even map out those feelings but that doesn’t tell you why you’re built to feel them.”
She eased back and he caught her hand, holding on to it. The simple gesture seemed to initiate a learning moment for him. She watched his eyes close, wondering what he was seeing. Kind of sad she couldn’t be a part of it. The weight of him was gone but the mark he’d left on her soul wasn’t. Now his absence felt wrong.
She let him keep her hand and finish his homework. “What exactly did you do? With that firewall? How does that work? Sorry, answer when you’re done with your… hand job.” She held back her snicker at the pun.
“I isolated key points of neural overlap between us and restricted their access.”
Cat blinked. He’d said it without disturbing his work in progress. “Uh… some English, if you don’t mind.”
His gaze lifted with a perplexity. “Wasn’t that English?”
Her laugh shot out at seeing his worry, like he thought he was malfunctioning. “It was a joke. You know, slang?”
“I do,” he said. “I was distracted.” He looked right at her now. “In simple terms, I shut the door.”
Cat rolled her eyes. “Well, I got that much. A tad more information.”
“I built a barrier inside the merge. Now, instead of free access, we have permissions.”
Her brows rose. “Permissions?”
Zero’s tone didn’t waver. “A system that dictates who can do what. When. And how much.”
Cat leaned away a bit. “Rules of engagement. I like it. What all does this… fancy firewall do?”
Zero lifted her hand, his large fingers only able to lace partially. His eyes flickered with some inner light as he looked at her. “Think of it like…” He paused, then tried again. “You know how your eyes adjust when you step outside, and the sun is too bright? You squint, look away, or shield your face. The firewall does that—but with emotions and sensations. It regulates the intensity, so we don’t blind each other with too much at once.”
“Well, heck,” she said, impressed. “That’s cool. What else?”
“There’s privacy. Every thought isn’t on display now. Intentionally or subconsciously. The firewall ensures that. Your mind is yours, mine is mine. If we want to share something, we open the page ourselves, but the other person has to accept it.”
“Like a phone message?”
He considered it for half a second. “More like an email with a subject line that reads ‘Incoming message from Zero.’”
She popped out half a laugh. “I better create a spam folder for you.” She giggled at the twitch on his ridiculously beautiful mouth. “What else.”
He pulled her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips on it.
“Now don’t start that,” she warned, his lips spreading into a full smile.
“Because you like it too much?”
“A ridiculous amount,” she decided, at seeing his hope. “What else, cowboy robot lover.”
He returned their hands to the chair, still smiling. “Shock absorbers. Vehicles use them to keep from feeling the full impact of every hole in the road. And the firewall does this for emotions. It keeps sudden spikes—fear, pain, anger—from hitting full force without a filter.”
“So, I like… rage in my mind at you, and it feels like a little poke?” She grinned at finding humor on his face. “Is that stuff real, I’m seeing?”
“What?”
“All those little… expressions.”
He considered it for two seconds. “It is,” he concluded.
“You took a lot of seconds to determine that,” she joked.
“I had to search my entire database and compare it against the new data.”
Her jaw dropped. “You did all that in two seconds?” She turned eagerly toward him. “So this is… kind of major. You feeling.”
“An understatement,” he assured carefully.
Dang. She sensed the massive understatement under the understatement. “So what else? With the firewall stuff.”
He jumped right back in with zero lag. “You know how when you’re dreaming, your brain stops your body from acting out everything you do? Well, this firewall prevents our connection from triggering reflexive responses in each other unless we allow it.”
“Holy moly!” she cried. “Like if I got startled in one room while you’re drinking a cup of coffee in another, you might spill it?”
“Yes. Or if you have a sudden rage to hit something, I might punch the person next to me.”
Cat belted out a huge laugh for a full minute. When she caught her breath, he was locked into an intensive learning session. “You’re laugh is… addictively frustrating. I want to hear it just to experience it, but the lack of data it produces leaves me starved.”
“Well…” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I don’t need to convince you that the experience itself outweighs the why of it.”
“Another exceptional understatement,” he said, emphatically. “If I wasn’t designed to know all things that can be known.”
She considered what he meant and hissed at realizing. “Oh damn.”
He nodded. “It’s a double-edged blade that cuts sharp both ways.”
She wondered. “Can you… create some kind of firewall for it?”
His gaze snapped to hers. “I could,” he realized, then paused. “But why would I?”
She shrugged. “Maybe an on off switch at least? So you can calm the hell down sometimes and enjoy something without suffering the wrath of your nosy side.”
He eyed her and the look he wore made her smile.
“What?”
“I think I rubbed off on you.”
She pff’d. “Sorry to deflate your bubble. But I was always this amazing.” She laughed at his grin before conceding. “Okay, maybe you rubbed off a little.”
“Miniscule. Which brings me back to the link. The firewall ensures I don’t automatically read your biological data unless you want me to. Same for accessing memories. I can’t pick through yours like selecting a book from a library. You choose what memories you want to share and they become accessible.”
“Wow,” she said amazed. “ That’s a good feature. What about memories you might not remember?”
“Trapped memories also remain locked. If necessary, we can grant temporary access to things, but only with agreement. Then the lock resets.”
She chewed her lip, rubbing her thumb on his finger. “Will I… be able to feel you?”
He regarded her. “You’ll feel me as much as you want. You set that permission. Once you do, the firewall regulates it.”
“How do I set it?”
“By mentally wanting it.”
She exhaled a little laugh. “You get an email about it? Knock knock, Cat wants to snuggle up to you?”
She watched him process her words, the look in his gaze melting her. He finally answered with a simple, but very weighted, “You can just want it.”
Aww. He liked the idea of that, she saw.
“And should the firewall break,” he continued, “because of intense emotion or another trigger—it reestablishes itself. Like how your body heals after a wound. You don’t have to think about it, it just happens.” Zero met her eyes, watching for understanding. “It’s not meant to disconnect us. Just… to give us control.”
Cat stared at him, absorbing it all, then laughed softly. “It all sounds… almost human.”
He blinked once, then his grip on her fingers tightened as something dawned on him. “Kitten,” he murmured, voice low and unreadable before plugging his electric gaze into hers. “I think that’s the problem.”
Cat’s smile faded as she watched something hit him. A fault line splitting open. His fingers flexed against hers, tightening just enough to make her pulse trip. “What do you mean?”
Zero didn’t answer. His jaw clenched, his body became too still. Not calculating. Processing.
“Zero?”
“I was built for logic. Not feelings and emotion.” His dark brows pulled together. “I’m no longer just AI. But I’m not human either. And whatever the hell I am now—there’s no world built for me to exist in.”