Page 7 of Tyton: The Spider and the Dragonfly (Tyton #1)

“Let me guess, it was someone Sparx set you up with?” Callie found her voice. The way the mixer’s face lit up told her she had hit the mark. Picking on Sparx was common ground. “What the fuck, Sparx? You’re like the anti-cupid here.” Callie nudged her with her boot.

“Listen, I need to finish my shift here, but the next drink is on me. My number will be at the bottom of the glass.”

Callie blushed and bit the inside of her cheek.

“I’m gonna say you’re a bourbon girl.” The mixer narrowed her eyes playfully.

Callie scoffed. “We both know there’s no such thing. It’s all flavoured grain alcohol now.”

“A connoisseur then?” the mixer smirked.

“Callie, stop being a pedantic twit. You’re going to talk yourself out of a date.” Sparx muttered.

“What’ll it be then?” the mixer asked, recovering.

“Your choice.” Callie put on her best flirty smile.

The mixer nodded and went to make a drink. “Smooth.” Sparx tilted her drink in a toast and finished the last of it. She ordered another.

When she returned, the mixer slid an amber-coloured concoction with a cherry in it across the counter. Even without picking it up, Callie could smell the extra alcohol she’d added.

“Oh shit, I forgot the stem.” The mixer pulled the Hexel cherry stem from her mouth, tied in a knot and placed it on the rim of the glass. She winked and left to tend to other customers.

“Okay, that was hot, but also gross.”

“I thought you liked it when women came on strong?” Sparx took a sip of her new drink, this one a violent shade of purple.

“That was a third date level of strong, though. What the hell would she do to me on date three if that’s the starting point?”

“Wouldn’t you like to find out.” Sparx waggled her eyebrows.

“I don’t have enough alcohol in my system yet.” Callie slid off the stool.

Sparx followed. “We were about to fix that, you know.”

“You’re kind of a dick, Sparx.”

“Is that why you’ve been ghosting me?” Sparx tilted her head and flashed her puppy dog eyes.

“No,” Callie sighed. “You’ve always been a dick.”

“Which, as we’ve learned, you don’t like,” Sparx recited.

“As you learned. I already knew.”

“So why have you been ghosting me?”

“I don’t know,” Callie sighed. “It just feels like all I’ve been doing is surviving. Got in a rut. Couldn’t get out. You know?”

“Oh honey,” Sparx looked genuinely concerned. Which is why Callie liked her. She took nothing seriously, would barge ahead with the most ill-thought-out ideas, but no matter what, Sparx actually cared. And that was rare in this world.

“I know Brin fucked you over bad. You carried her for too long and she still couldn’t be helped. You’re too good for your own good.” Sparx wrapped her arms around Callie and squeezed. Callie let her. “Now,” Sparks grabbed her by the chin and forced Callie to look at her “Why did you come here?”

“I dunno. I wanted to see the Lumijute, I guess,” she mumbled.

“See? You still have something in you that wants to be excited. There’s still some hope.

” Sparx hugged her again. “Take some time off from arguing with your robot friend. I’ll tell my boss that I need an assistant for this next job, and you can come hang out with me for a week.

You can relax and I’ll fill you in on all the gossip. ”

Callie nodded into her shoulder. “Thanks, Sparx. You’re the only dick I like.”

“For a lesbian, you make a lot of dick jokes.” Sparx pushed her away. “Come on, let’s go dance.”

Callie quickly downed her drink. Her Opti snapped a pic of the mixer’s number, and the shots hit her system. She caught the mixer winking as she was pulled away.

With Thermabulles, coat check had disappeared.

With PalmInters, wallets had disappeared.

With Optis, phones and computers had disappeared.

You brought nothing and you left with nothing, but the heatsinks from everyone’s cyberware made crowds obscenely hot.

Venting panels opened higher up along the walls, the excess heat being pushed out by the bass.

From the outside, the building must have looked like a throbbing cloud.

Callie closed her eyes and let it dictate her movements.

The slip of sweat covered limbs and torsos made her feel part of something alive, which was more than she had felt in months.

Here they were, humanity shrinking every year, enjoying its last gasp on the planet, together.

It was a good feeling. Sparx had been right to drag her out.

“Wanna fuck?” she heard Sparx yell, snapping her out of her reverie.

“What? No! You don’t even like women, Sparx! What the hell?”

Sparx grinned and shrugged. “Just giving my best friend first dibs before I find someone else.”

“Fuck off, Sparx,” Callie laughed.

“If you insist. Call that mixer , have some fun!”

Callie rolled her eyes and shoved her friend away. Sparx had enough eyes on her and enough connections that she wasn’t worried about anyone taking advantage.

And she had Sparx. Any fool dense enough to try anything with her would have to deal with the repercussions later.

They weren’t a gang by any means, but they had been seen together, and she was one hundred percent confident that if she got into trouble, Sparx would be there with a dozen people ready to rack up DocPod bills.

The music changed. The crowd slowed and stopped, turning their attention to the stage. A woman, dressed in some sort of kimono-ish robe and her black hair in a bun held together with glowing sticks walked on to the front holding a length of rope. This must be the Lumijute demo.

She recalled the first time Brin had introduced her to shibari.

Callie hadn’t known it, but giving up control, small pieces at a time, had been exactly what she had needed.

The relief of being beautifully bound and no choice but to struggle or slip into that subspace had freed up so much mental energy. Mental energy she didn’t know she had.

Mental energy that had gotten her promoted to AI psych Primary. And she had excelled. The extra money had allowed them to rent a bigger flat.

Then Brin had lost her security job in a merger. She hadn’t been worried at first because only humans worked security. Bots were little more than closed circuit drone turrets since anything AI could be taken over by a bigger, faster AI. A few companies had learned that the hard way.

When her contract ended, so did Brin’s subscription to her tactical implants, including her adrenaline boosters and hormone regulators.

And while money wasn’t an issue for Callie, civilians couldn’t just buy tactical implant subscriptions.

That tech was proprietary and for good reason.

Black-market reverse engineering had, so far, only achieved moderate success.

Brin’s mood became erratic. Her body had become too dependent on the chem tech.

She had turned into a completely different person.

Violent outbursts. Cracks in the Hexaline.

Half-cut chem substitutes. Absurd amounts of alcohol.

Then picking at her hair and skin. One day Callie came home, and she just wasn’t there.

Callie held on to Brin’s stuff for a couple of months and tried to look for her, but the larger flat just didn’t make sense anymore. She moved out. Even if Brin’s absence was a relief, she felt more stressed and anxious than ever.

Callie hadn’t done rope since, even though her friends from the scene had offered.

She just couldn’t get herself into that headspace.

It wasn’t their thing. They were nice. They only wanted what was best for her.

But Callie had a new mental barrier. They would be doing it for her.

Not because they wanted to. And Callie couldn’t help but feel guilty about it.

And so, she distanced herself. Callie focused on work. She took a yoga class. She read shitty detective novels. Everything else became too exhausting. But Callie found she just kept getting more and more tired, no matter how much she withdrew.

And yet, now she was here. Simply existing in public and feeling better than she had in a long time. She reminded herself to thank Sparx later.

The robed woman stepped forward and bowed toward the audience. She knelt and unrolled a bundle, revealing several lengths of rope. It looked like ordinary, undyed jute. She could feel the crowd’s disappointment.

The woman chose a length, untied it and threw the bundle. It uncoiled and fell limply across the stage. She gathered the ends and found the bight. Restlessness rippled through the club. Callie could tell they were getting bored.

Rope, unlike floggers or cuffs or anything else, wasn’t instantly exciting. You needed to be someone who appreciated the buildup. The suspense.The slow burn. Callie feared this might have been the wrong place to demo the Lumijute.

Then the woman presented her palm to the audience. The carbon grey dot of her PalmInter clearly visible. She made a show of pressing it to the jute which immediately blazed to life in an incandescent blue. The crowd erupted into cheers and the house lights cut off.

The model walked on stage, but you could only make out a faint silhouette if you squinted. Or if you had the right Opti soft to compensate. The Lumijute provided the only light.

In the grand scheme of things, rope that lit up wasn’t particularly impressive. GloCord was already a thing, though it was just GMO jute with fluorescent proteins and needed to be exposed to UV light to work - something that was in short supply in the Arctic. It also tended to degrade quickly.

LightWire also existed, but as the name implied, it was entirely synthetic. Both models and rope masters hated it because it was stiff and tended to stretch.

Lumijute was something else entirely – designed to have the exact look and feel of jute, but also brilliantly light up and stay lit for as long as it received the signal to do so. Anyone shelling out for this stuff would have the cachet of a true enthusiast.

As usual, no-one had any idea how it worked.

Callie’s Opti couldn’t detect any Auratomic wire - which probably wouldn’t be flexible enough anyway.

Even if the jute fibres were printed rather than grown, she couldn’t understand how they could light up.

But that was okay. Because no-one understood anything anymore.

They all lived in the shadows of AI creations they couldn’t fathom.

The model stepped forward, turned and placed her elbows behind her back. They were going to start with a TK. The rope master began with a simple single-column tie, around the shoulder, nodome, reverse tension.

Callie only half remembered the terminology, but seeing the quick, efficient movements of the rope master’s hands brought the memories flooding back.

Even from here, she could see the perfect tension.

The rope master had practiced these ties hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Each length of Lumijute bit into the skin with exactly the same amount of force and when she lifted the model from the floor, she hung in perfect balance.

Perfectly comfortable. Perfectly helpless.

It was almost too perfect. Callie wondered if the rope master had some sort of tension calculator in her PalmInter.

Or maybe she was just that good. People could, theoretically, practice something until their muscles simply knew how to do things without thinking, but with implants, why would you?

If no-one could tell the difference, what would be the point?

Callie caught her mind racing again and that was the opposite of what she wanted tonight.

What Callie wanted was to shut it off. To leave her responsibilities, her job, her self behind, at least for a few hours.

She gazed at the model, bound and blissfully cared for.

Illuminated in a perfectly symmetrical web of luminescent rope, suspended and on display for all to see.

What Callie wanted most of all, was to be her.

“Which one are you looking at?” The deep feminine voice came from her left. She turned and saw a tall woman with bright red spikes on her head, wearing a full face mask. “The model or the rope master?”