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The boys had limited internet access for the first time in their life. They could only look things up, and couldn’t fill out any forms, which meant they couldn’t communicate with anyone online, but just being able to look things up had expanded Ezra’s view on nearly everything.

He was happy Elijah was using the internet appropriately, and not just for porn.

Speaking of porn, he still needed to convince Elijah they should want to be more than sex slaves. “When Claire taught you the wordrentboy, it was because she was telling us that even if we chose to be pleasure slaves, we were more than mere rentboys.”

Elijah ran his hand under the covers to give Ferocious something to chase. “I’m not so sure we are, Eazie. Sure, we’ve been trained in how to take pain and keep a hard-on, how to submit gracefully, how to take a cock down our throat without gagging, how to walk on a leash in whichever form they want us in, butit’s still just about them getting their jollies off by using our bodies. Does it matter that the skilled fuckboy knows history and rhetoric?”

“Genie doesn’t see us that way. Even when we pulled out all of our tricks with her, she saw it as real. We weren’t justbought and paid for.” It’d been a new experience for Ezra, and he wanted more of it.

“So is that the goal, then? To be the men Genie needs us to be, so she’ll want us in her life?”

“It isn’t such a bad goal,” Ezra said. “It might be if she weren’t a good person, but she is. I don’t think I need a goal, but you do, so that will work, I think.”

“Brooke gave us goals. Dev tries to get us to come up with our own goals. Something tells me he won’t approve of that one.” Elijah crossed his arms and watched Ferocious bat a ping pong ball around. “Brooke’s goals are to figure out how much freedom we can live with. I don’t even know how tostartdoing that.”

“Watching the television shows and movies is part of the first step. Our Concilio masters kept us ignorant of how most people are allowed to live. We didn’t know what we were missing, so we didn’t know to be sad about not having it.”

“Right, and I was happier, before I knew,” Elijah said.

Ah, so that was what was bothering him. “Give it some time. Dev says this isn’t going to be instant gratification.”

“What, like learning orgasm control by not getting one for a year? That royally sucked.”

“It did,” Ezra agreed. “I don’t think this is going to be quite so uncomfortable.”

At least, he hoped it wasn’t.

* * * *

“No, that isn’t whatThe Matrixis saying at all!” Genie realized she was coming close to shouting, and she took a breath and tried again. “Let me give it to you on a timeline, because it jumps around in the show, and I agree it can be confusing. The Matrix is the only movie I’ve ever watched until the end and then immediately started over again from the beginning. Even now,when I’ve seen it a half-dozen times, I could probably watch it again and pick stuff up I missed the first six times.”

“Mikael brought a device he hooked to our television.” Ezra said, looking thoughtful. “It’s supposed to teach us to drive, but there are other games. He had us playing one where the world is squares, and you have to know how to create civilization. Did you know you make glass from sand?” He shook his head to let her know he didn’t expect an answer, and continued. “We played another, with guns and fighting and zombies. It was very lifelike. It occurred to me our life could be a virtual existence, and our real selves are somewhere else, playing the game.”

“Yes,” Genie said, relieved at least one of them had the edges of understanding. “The Matrix is saying the world we live in is a digital construct, and not real, but in the later movies I began to ask the question of whether it matters. Real life in the movies kind of sucks, with gross food and a lack of fashion, while the virtual world is pretty cushy.”

“Wait,” Elijah said, and the three of them did as he requested and gave him a few moments of silence. “The pod thing, with all the wires, that’s how we’re all living now?”

“If the movie was accurate, then yes,” Dev told him, “but we have no reason to believe the movie is any more accurate than Star Wars.”

“True Blood hid a lot of truths in fiction,” Elijah noted, and Genie wanted to high-five him, but she let Dev answer him because she wasn’t sure which direction Dev wanted to take this.

“It absolutely did. There are a few incorrect things. Vampires are always going to propagate the bloody tears thing, because it’s a way to prove they aren’t vampires. You’re correct though, that the truth is sometimes best hidden in a lie. We have no way of knowing if that’s the case with The Matrix, other than the chicken-default thing, which rang a little too true and probably has a basis in some other truth. However, I’m not inclined tobelieve a future artificial intelligence burned the sky and is now using humanity as batteries to power themselves.”

“Well, when you put it that way, it does seem a bit farfetched,” Elijah said with a roll of his eyes.

“Actually, that synopsis makes me a little more likely to believe it,” Ezra said. “Aldrich has been encouraging me to research where the experts are on various technology-related accomplishments, and AGI, artificial general intelligence, is one of the things I’ve been reading about. It’s damned scary when you delve into it.”

“It is, but that’s a subject for another time. We have a treat for you this afternoon,” Dev told them. “Clive’s property has a walled-in two-acre plot, with no trees within thirty yards of the wall. Also, there’s an electrified fence on top of the wall.”

“What he’s saying,” Genie said, “is that your cats are going to be given an opportunity to run and hunt. It’s a gorgeous day outside, sunny and chilly. Upper forties, which I guess you still think of as eight degrees, which sounds crazy to me.” She was suddenly afraid to ask the next question, though Dev had told her she had to ask it before he’d consider allowing it.

“Will your cats be okay with me in human form? Is there a danger they’ll hurt me?”

“We like you,” both men said at the same time.

They looked at each other, and the look must’ve passed more between them than Genie could see, because Elijah continued and Ezra seemed fine with it.

“Our cats are sometimes more here than our human parts, even in our human bodies. Brooke seems to know whether she’s talking to the cat or the man, and sometimes I think Dev realizes.”