The Administration Series (6 page)

Toreth realised what he meant even before Warrick elaborated.

"The code word."

The code word. He'd completely forgotten . . . and yet he hadn't forgotten, not really, not for a minute. Game, set and fucking match. He lay there, unable, for one of the few times in his life, to think of anything to say. Then the clock on the mantelpiece began a soft, complicated chime.

"Ah." Warrick stood. "Time's up."

Warrick escorted him out of the building; apparently security was only required for the way in. The first part of the walk passed in silence, but as the lift descended, Toreth began to feel a slow burn of anger building. No one did that to him. No one.

"Thank you for the demo," Toreth said as the lift door opened onto reception. He kept his voice light, casual.

"My pleasure. Are you quite sure you wouldn't like to get a drink in the cafeteria? The coffee is tolerable."

Toreth shook his head. "I need to get back to the hotel . . . and change, amongst other things."

Warrick laughed. "Of course. Well, it was a most enjoyable afternoon and a welcome distraction from the mounds of paperwork in my office." They reached the outer door. "Goodbye."

That had a very final ring to it. Toreth made it a rule to never do the chasing — or at least for it never to look as if he were — but he couldn't let this go. He'd comprehensively lost this round, and they both knew it.

"I think I got rather more out of the experience than you did."

"Not at all," Warrick demurred. "It provided some useful data."

Data
? He was not fucking data. "Let me buy you dinner. The Renaissance Centre, eight o'clock this evening?" Toreth saw him starting to form the refusal. "I'd like to pay you back," he added, and the edge in his voice wasn't entirely deliberate.

Warrick stopped, his hand on the door, his lips still parted on the beginning of a 'no'. Got him, Toreth thought. Can't resist an open challenge.

The sardonic mouth curved into a smile. "Why not?"

Toreth took a long, hot shower, and then sat in his room wearing just a towel, bumping up his next expenses claim with the contents of the minibar. He poured a drink, noting absently how very convincing the gin in the sim had been. He could still be inside, and he would have no way of knowing. After a few minutes of trying to come up with a definitive test for reality, he decided to abandon incipient paranoia and work on more immediate problems.

Dinner tonight — all arranged and settled and already he was tempted to send a message cancelling the whole thing. Dinner had seemed like such a good idea at the time, when Warrick walked him to the door of the AERC, relishing his victory with every step and bland word. In fact, it had been tempting simply to punch him in the face right there and walk off.

However, that would have been cheap and easy. Worse, it would only have increased the score in Warrick's favour. Revenge required more than that, and dinner was the first step to getting it. He would see Warrick again, and he would come up with some way of demonstrating to him exactly how experienced professionals played mind games. Something to wipe that smile off his face and teach the bastard a lesson he'd take to his grave.

The only problem was that his experienced professional mind was drawing a complete blank on
how
.

On the way back to the hotel, he had run through a very satisfying scenario involving drugs from work, a set of handcuffs and a prolonged and nasty rape. Or, given the mood he was in by the time he'd finished polishing the details, short and nasty. He'd elaborated upon it in the shower, then discarded the fantasy to concentrate on finding something practical.

Warrick had the kind of prestigious position that made him an impossibly dangerous victim for anything overt. Apart from some fairly outrageous expenses claims (a semi-official perk for senior paras), Toreth didn't, by and large, do anything illegal. He saw the consequences every day at work. A bruised ego was hardly sufficient reason to risk prison or worse.

More importantly, it was too unimaginative, almost pedestrian, after the experience in the sim. Worst of all, Warrick would win again. However much he screamed (and he
would
scream — the part of Toreth's mind that didn't want to drop the fantasy added a gag to the list of props required), it wouldn't change that basic fact. Toreth would have resorted to force to get what Warrick had managed to enjoy without.

So. What exactly
had
Warrick done? He'd humiliated Toreth completely. He'd made him lose every shred of self-control. He'd made him beg, and then keep begging for more after that. He'd stood at a safe distance and watched every detail on Toreth's face while it happened. For God's sake, he'd even told him what he planned to do in the message he'd left at the hotel.

And he'd made sure Toreth had a way out for the entire time.

Every second of the sim, a single word would have dropped him back into the real world. Two easy syllables, and Toreth hadn't said them, even though nothing had prevented him from it. As far as he could remember, he'd never been unable to speak; in fact, thinking back, Warrick had never even touched his mouth. Not with fingers or lips.

Which meant, of course, that Toreth had gone along with it. He'd
wanted it
.

That wasn't like him at all. He didn't play that kind of game. All his preferred positions were on top, in charge and in control. He didn't get off at all on the idea of being tied up. Except that Warrick had done far worse than just tie him up and he
had
enjoyed it. He had to admit that to himself, much as it didn't mesh with his cherished self-image.

Absent-mindedly, he topped up his glass, caught a spill that ran down the neck of the bottle and licked his thumb. Would sucking a disembodied finger feel real? Probably. Everything else had been
very
real. Kissing disembodied lips would be extremely peculiar, although it would solve the problem of noses getting in the way. Warrick's well-shaped mouth had been one of the first things Toreth had noticed about him, back at the buffet after the lecture. That and his extraordinary dark voice . . .

Toreth realised that he had wandered rather a long way from the subject in hand. Specifically, revenge. He reviewed his options.

Part of his mind still stood by the drug-him-and-rape-him fantasy-plan, impossible as it was. Another part suggested cancelling the meal and forgetting about the whole experience as quickly as possible. And he was horrified to discover that a treacherous but insistent little voice advocated turning on the charm over some expense-account wine, persuading Warrick to come up to his room, and then the two of them fucking like amphetamine-crazed mink until they both passed out cold.

Of the three options, the last one sounded like by far the most fun, and that with a man who had as good as said that he despised him. He sighed, and opened a second miniature bottle of spirits.

His self-image was having a wonderful day.

Then the answer hit him.

There was a simple, safe and logical response. Warrick had screwed with his self-image, so he would screw with Warrick's. Go to dinner and find out something about Warrick he could use. Something the man wanted without even knowing it, without daring to acknowledge it. Something dark and dirty. And then give it to him, gift-wrapped, for him to enjoy.

Half an hour after he had escorted his guest from the premises, Warrick lay at full stretch in the white marble bath. Blowing scraps of bubble-bath foam into the air from his hand, he admired the rainbow play of light as they floated back down. Another tricky simulation problem beautifully cracked.

Set flush with the floor, the round bath — almost a pool — was large and deep enough to have a submerged ledge for sitting on all round the circumference. Warrick preferred to float, held in place and supported by invisible cushions. The rest of the expansive bathroom was silvery-grey marble, with fluted columns and niches holding oil lamps. Peaceful and good for thinking in, it was one of his favourite sim rooms.

He heard a noise from a small cabinet by the side of the bath. Feeling too lazy to move, he concentrated on the catch, his fingers twitching slightly. The cabinet opened, and a dozen yellow plastic ducks in assorted sizes spilled out over the floor. The largest of them sprouted stubby legs and wings, righted itself, and waddled over to plop into the bath.

It paddled busily through the foam, bumping into the smooth marble sides, and Warrick watched it with a slight frown. Someone had been at the artificial life programming suite again. Not that he minded — in fact, he encouraged it — but it had been careless to leave this installed. Corporate sponsors on a surprise visit might not be impressed by the abuse of their very expensive facilities.

He caught the duck and turned it over. It quacked protestingly, and then stopped when he stroked its smooth belly. Nice touch. The legs were rather good as well. Letting the duck go, he watched as it disappeared under a mound of bubbles. He must find out who'd created it, and apply a little carrot and stick.

Not too much stick, though. That would require a fair dose of hypocrisy, considering that he had cancelled a fluid dynamics test this very afternoon in order to mind-fuck a stranger whose name he didn't even know.

A scandalous waste of sim time and he would have been furious to catch any of the others doing it. Still, the fuck, mental or not, had worked out well. Not surprising, since the deck had been unfairly stacked in his favour, but that was the way he preferred to play any game. Especially with dangerous opponents.

Accepting the invitation to dinner had been a silly mistake, but one easily corrected by a message left at the hotel. Time to call a halt while he had a decisive victory to his credit.

The duck bumped into the edge of the bath, corrected its course, and circled for a while. Its collisions with the edges were now far less frequent, he noted. Not a bad little learning algorithm.

He pushed a wave of water towards the duck, setting it spinning, and laughed. Hypocrisy aside, he'd had a good afternoon. To start with, he loved showing people round his sim. ('His sim'. In a formal sense, Warrick acknowledged the large team behind the project. But, in his heart, it was his alone.) God, he loved to see visitors' faces when they first looked round the meadow or the coral reef, and Toth had appreciated it.

At least, he amended, Toth had appreciated it to begin with. Then he'd turned a coldly professional eye on it. Just a particularly unsavoury example from an endless procession of Administration vultures, picking over his creation for their sordid little purposes. Warrick fully intended to resist as long as possible, and to make them pay dearly. However, in the long term, they would no doubt take it away and cut corners, rip out features, and cripple it until all its beauty was gone and it became a cheap, mass-produced tool. A tool of oppression, as that suicidal idiot had said in the lecture.

Warrick didn't object to the idea of the sim generating profit — he hoped to profit extensively himself — but he intensely disliked the idea of the uses the sim would be put to in somewhere like the Investigation and Interrogation Division. If Toth's reaction hadn't been so obvious, Warrick might not have gone through with his little scene in the bedroom.

On reflection, he'd never done anything quite like that before. Oh, he'd shown personal guests round various sims, and he'd even abused the expensive facilities from time to time. Nothing, however, so deliberate and, well, cruel. Not, Warrick told himself, that he'd done anything wrong. Toth could have stopped the sim any time he wanted to. He hadn't, so he'd enjoyed it. But had he been frightened, too? Perhaps a little. A little afraid and a lot out of control.

That was something in the sim reality Warrick couldn't duplicate for himself. He knew intimately how very safe it was. He'd designed it that way, and that was how he'd always liked it. Still, he felt an unexpected touch of envy at the unattainable experience. How had it felt to be so controlled? Held there, so absolutely in another's power. Old fantasies stirred, unexpectedly revived. It must have been . . .

He stretched out in the warm water and thought about what he'd done, how he'd constructed the encounter. He'd enjoyed doing it, which was perhaps a little disconcerting. At the time he'd been concentrating too hard to appreciate it fully, but now, replaying the scene in his mind, it brought a flush of arousal — the man's face had been so responsive. It would be good to see that again, to watch his eyes while he came.

Maybe he wouldn't cancel dinner after all.

The thought startled him. What he had done in the sim was one thing; it had been under his control and, above all, perfectly safe. It would be stark raving insanity even to consider doing anything with Toth in the real world. The man, whoever he was, tortured people to death for a living.

However, he had to admit that it had been a long time since he'd felt this intrigued by the idea of having someone outside the sim. Inside the sim, everything was so perfect, so pleasant, that he had lost interest in that aspect of the world outside.