ACCUMULATOR (2)

2.0: Flight Angst

"I hate space shuttles. I hate airplanes. I hate Admin for giving me such short notice of this. And more than anything I hate dealing with people. Humans. Earth. I hate going down there. Fucking gravity-change nausea, all the stupid gomi piles of data forms to ack. I just love how the bloody GAIA AirSpace Perimeter Bot almost shot us down for a bogey back there. Why, but WHY, in a zillion years under the sun and every star in the Great Infinite Brain of Ohmzone! WHY couldn't I have been left out of this?"

Ellysine Vanarrchtika takes a deep breath and once again, wills her whole self to calm down and not react... wishing that she could get just a short break from Zor's grousing and whining. It's been bitch, bitch, bitch out of him, long day in, long night out, for months.

Travelling to Earth from the asteroid belt and the Ohm Clandestiny colony ensconced in their dozen little hollowed-out worldlets takes way too long for even their die-hard Ohm Special Forces-trained minds to endure. For months, Elli has been trying to help her cranky, glum partner on this assignment - who's also been a good friend and sort of part-time "guru" of hers for a long time - get his mind out of itself. The stir-craziness alone...that could put anyone, Ohm or not, into a pretty shitty headspace.

That shuttle had landed out in an isolated area of the Nevada desert, where it had disgorged the two of them, plus a tiny airplane and a pilot, who's shunting them to northern California, where he'll hide his plane somewhere out of the way and live in it for a week or so, or however long this business takes, to guard it. Then the pilot will bring them desertward again for the next shuttle back to Phlayze.

Ohm have to be very spare in their Earth travel, since they are considered enemies to shoot first and not even bother asking questions about later.

Ellysine has fared fairly well, which rather surprises her...makes her inwardly proud of her own discipline. But today, Zor seems to almost be trying to take her down, rain on her parade, as though he resents her for having it.

"You've been hating everything ever since we left Phlayze. Zor, do you have to always be in such a terminally lousy mood? You know, when you're in a closed space like that space shuttle travelling with a group of Ohm - and trained psionts, yet! it has a way of spreading around! I had to actually firewall you out for hours at times just to keep myself from spiraling down into YOUR depression! Do you have any idea how much psi force that drains out of me? How much energy that wastes?"

"I'm sorry..." he says quietly, almost to himself. "I should have remembered that. I've been alone for so long...I've forgotten my social graces. If I had any to begin with."

"Apology acked and accepted." She knows that Zorlorn Narlok is not just feeling lagged, and it's not just the boredom that's ailing him.

Shaking his head slowly in glum contemplation of what was ahead in the week to come, Zorlorn tries to tame his negative mental energy at least enough to keep it from being so loud it soaks through to the tiny plane's pilot as this is a very illegal flight into what is still - for the time being - "enemy territory."

"Why, oh why, do our wonderfully perceptive administrators actually go and pick me - of all the available agents at the OSF - to do THIS infernal assignment? Really. I'm not the type for this at all. It's...not my department."

"Zor, you know damn well why you were selected for this. If what we have on our hands here is what they think it is, you're the only one with what it would take to deal with the situation."

He reaches inside of his black, socketed carryall, and pulls out his datasoft, unfolding it and opening the screen. Trying to use softscreens on a moving vehicle or an airplane always makes him dizzy. He calmly instructs his mind to bypass sensation "dizzyness". It's like routing air traffic, in a way, routing network signals in another.

He looks contrite. Stops hiding his face behind the grey-streaked black curtains of his hair, pulling them aside with both hands and turning to face her.

"Elli, I'm sorry. Really, I am. Oh scruzz." He dances fingers over the softscreen in rapidfire tapping. I'm getting too old for this..." he says. "It...it hasn't got anything to do with my fucking age. In numbers, anyway. Look, put yourself in my place. Imagine yourself with my problem...getting this kind of a job. Of all jobs to get."

He hides his face behind his curtain of black hair again, which hangs down straight and long enough to go past his shoulders. "Oh, what the fuck do you know...you're what, nineteen?"

Ellysine corrects him. "Twenty-three. I guess I do look like a little kid sometimes...It's because I had been nodding off daydreaming of some stuff that happened when I was younger...and I let my face slip out."

Zorlorn gives her a sideways, quizzical look. "Your face?"

"Oh, you didn't know? One of my sillier talents. I'm a facial contour projector - a facedancer - and sometimes that starts slipping out when I don't will it to. Gotta work on that, I guess. It's one of those things that just came out of nowhere...I didn't even train to do it."

"Could be handy for a few OSF situations, I'd imagine."

Elli shrugs. "If I was a spy instead of a healer, it'd be more useful. Actually, it's kind of embarrassing sometimes, since I'm not in control of it completely yet..." She's back in her own face now, which isn't so different from the teenage girl face of a moment ago...more serious eyes, maybe. More developed brows. Zor realises this ability of hers must have a lot to do with why her gene-mix seemed so uncertain...one moment she looks Mediterranean, the next, Icelandic. Even Amerind. Her face doesn't change, it's the mind viewing it.

[[[...No wonder she keeps her hair shaved off like that...]]]

(((...Not just that. It also makes me able to travel a lot lighter, not have to worry about messing with it. But sometimes it makes me feel less Ohmlike to have no hair. It's sort of become our flag, one of them, anyway...somehow always has been, and sometimes I would like to wave it, too...)))

[[[...Ach! I didn't know you were listening when I thought that. I thought you said you had me firewalled. Startled me...]]]

(((...I did firewall you earlier...when you were thinking about how much you wanted to be dead. That's no fun to have winging its way unbidden into my mind, Zor. You have to get a grip on your soul, stop feeling so worthless and accursed. Stop thinking of yourself as unwhole. You're still Ohm, you know. You still have the superior mindpower, you still have multicellular will, you still have everything that makes an Ohm an Ohm and not just a human...everything but that one thing, which is just one part of the Power. It's not the whole thing...)))

She pauses for a moment, letting this register.

(((...Everything...all the press releases and pictures and other Invasion propaganda that Elan X. blasts all over, on Earth, back home in the Clandestiny, even on that interminable shuttle trip...the stuff's making you think that a certain single aspect of our Ohmness is all there IS to Ohmness. it's getting to you, I think. This stuff is intended for Earth people, realize that...though certainly he knows we watch, too...he plays every angle up for maximum effective potential. With that collage-montage immersion imagery style, with that illegal Neuratonal soundtrack--that stuff gets some of the higher-psi among the humans all frothy, I hear...)))

He nods, slowly.

[[[...It's true. I read about that sort of thing a lot. I brought some electrophysiology manuals and Dynamist Philosophy files to either read, or to have the deepdarks read to me, along for this trip. I remember thinking Neuratonal was just another kind of retro-Twen-Cen noise music, but I dissected some of it. You hear Neuratonal, you hardly think it's music or even noise...but it's actually mixing two subsonic signals together and creating a third, audible signal. It's a "sympathetic vibration" - you can hear that, but it's the actual layering of the two vibrations together that makes it what it is. That's the frothyness factor. Subliminal gentle nerve-caressers. I actually like it...]]]

(((...and all that colour-treated video of his seduction of that girl, and the stuff he DID to her in that room...that pretty fawn of a debutante, the GGN president's daughter...and he keeps jamming the airwaves with...Oh my! What a piece of fire he is...mmmmm, he's got it ALL figured out...Ahhhhmmmmmmmmmm--)))

Eyes closed, she sits there rocking back and forth in her seat...her face has shifted again to look like a starstruck twelve-year old thinking of her favourite immersive star.

[[[...Ellysine, you're going off on a tangent. Getting off on one, more like...You were trying to tell me something... ]]]

(((...Uh, oops! Eeek! Sorry about that...Anyway...well, see? The way my just remembering it got my mind going like that? With the Invasion underway, your mind - and everyone else's - is getting extra big helpings of the Slasm-as-Persuader idea. The "meme" of that is all over the place. So naturally...you're going to be convinced it's more important than it really is. It's important - hell yeah! But not our only superiority...)))

She looks at him more intently and speaks out loud:

"I do think that you might find that not having that particular Power is going to actually serve you someday."

Getting flustered and needing to release it somehow, he also speaks out loud, and loud enougn to hear over the plane's motors.

"I get the same damn peptalk from the admin at OSF. They specifically hired me for my disability. Not my ability. What's that supposed to be, empowering?"

Elli is losing her patience again. Thankfully, they'll be landing soon...and their stomachs will stop churning, and they can stop worrying about getting hit by GAIA deflector bombs. Kinda puts even an advanced Ohm on edge to worry about their stealthed plane suddenly becoming perfectly visible in Earth airspace. She tries to calm down; lest it make her project her "harpy face" again. She hates when that happens.

"Any word to the Phlayze Admin from the Elan X. contingency?" she asks, smoothing her scalp with her hand.

"Yeah...Matter of fact, there has been. Message just received last night from him, a typical Elan Xanaste way of putting things: "The Seed is Planted! Beware of Growing Gardens."

"Cute." She smiles, thinking - as a thousand Ohm girls do every day - of the ravishing Kommandante Elan Xanaste...who not only had the charisma and force of will to unite the entire dissipating Ohm Clandestiny into a single group, but then decided that wasn't enough. He'd gotten inside an odd and enormous cylindrical spacecraft filled with a small crew and a huge cargo of arcane machines...and burst into the stars, laughing into his commset...

After several months, word reached the colonial Ohm that Elan X. had splash-landed into the Pacific Ocean near the tall cliffs off the California coast, about two hundred miles north of Los Angeles. A huge conical drill had pushed its way from the front of his craft, followed by four other smaller, similar drills on its sides, all spinning madly. He had actually engineered the versatile vehicle himself, with this exact purpose in mind. He effortlessly drilled his way into the cliffside and scooped out a gigantic hole in the side of the mountain by the sea. And, after yet another two months an encoded message was recieved by the OSF: "Project Ohmaega's first thrust: complete."

He's always been big on symbolism: he wanted to fuck the planet before he...well, fucked the planet. Obviously.

Elan X. had commanded his robots, aided by his handpicked skeleton crew, to build a cylindrical fortress around the ship with a spiral-shaped internal structure. He is using it as his HQ on Earth...and also, his secret technosexual chamber and "oscillation research lab". It is pretty much assumed that he does not merely fuck anyone he abducts and brings there; they'll also find themselves becoming vitally important beta-testers of a bewildering array of oscillators, conductors, electromagnetic devices and subsonic generators...all used by him on them as he had his way with them.

The Invasion is paramount, but his mission is twofold; the other half being his private quest to discover the optimum vibrational patterns for facilitating control of consciousness when combined with sexual arousal and climax.

"How old is he, anyway? In years, that is?" Ellysine finds herself obsessing a little too much for comfort, and twitches her eyebrows.

"Old enough to know better. But too young to pay enough attention to the knowledge."

Zor thinks - and Elli listens to the thoughts - that there were about a hundred more efficient ways that it could have been done than going through all that just to get to infect one single girl with the transversion mutagent.

[[[...Of course, I have a lot of personal bias affecting my thoughts about Elan X. So young. So in control. So whole...]]]

(((...Yeah...I see what you mean about personal bias. Sorry I brought it up...But Elan's plan is to move slowly and let them do their own infecting of themselves with the Mutagent...that seems like...very good logic to me...Sneaky, too...)))

She looks over at Zor with a serious face, and says, out loud: "What do you think of it all, from a purely political perspective?"

"The Invasion? Of course I agree with THAT. What the hell else are we going to do? Ohm can't function as Ohm living inside of those little rocks. Isolated. Closed-off. Not much you can do out there, especially out in the boonie colonies like Grey or Indigo where there's hardly even enough fucking air to breathe, and water? What's that?"

Ellysine nods in agreement.

"We might make it with the Toroid Project" Zor adds, hopefully, "because that's shaping up to be enormous, a big enough place for a bunch of us to live with our minds far enough apart from one another to have some sanity...and what with the nanotech breakthrough, they have that torus up there building itself.

Elli is particularly excited about that. "And they're setting up the surface domes and oxyplants and dihydrogen monoxide plants and two thirds of the thing's being set up for agridomes, for PLANT-type plants! No more living on synthetic protozoa! I had Earth food once. It was like heaven. Come to think of it, we'll get to eat good food while we're on this assignment. I hadn't even thought of that!"

"That will be nice, Elli. I'm happy for you."

"You don't exactly look it."

Ellysine has been very close to him for years: like a younger sister, a close friend. Maybe they could have been lovers, or at least do as most Ohm do and have a few encounters with one another, if Zor were only still whole...

But he's not. Long ago, he made a mistake.

He did something stupid.

2.1: Transversion

Usually, sex between two Ohm, whether male and female, or in same-sex configurations, becomes, among other things, a sort of game to them. In any sort of interaction involving two Ohm who attract enough to one another, sex becomes a contest: a way of measuring psi ability, personal control, and, of course, interpersonal control.

With humans, it's the corporate money game, or the various sports, or violent warfare...but for Ohm, it's always some twist on the game of psionic sexual domination. And each new twist brings forth yet another, and another, until one of them becomes the usurper and the other, the invaded.

It can go on for hours. Occasionally, days, when it involves evenly-matched participants who aren't in a hurry to make either themselves or their partner crest the wave of orgasm. They play with the tension, strung so tightly it sings in the very air between them.

In this still-young 22nd Century, the game is also now being played between Ohm and regular humans, with a new twist: the Transversion.

Nearly all Ohm have plugged this new set of instructions into their psychosystems: it creates sexual fluids containing the mutagent.

Long ago, it had to be implanted by delicate physical brain surgery...then, after it was developed further, it could be passed on if simply patched on and passed through skin into bloodstream with a transdermic.

But in 2100, Ohm psi-bio researchers were thrilled to announce that they'd finally hit upon the formula to give it ultimate transmissibility: When specifically triggered by a transmitting Ohm's will,it could attach itself to the DNA of a human being...and immediately begin the speedy process of converting human genetic patterns to Ohm genetic patterns.

Now the mutagent is now manufacturable by the Ohm body itself - once one "initializes" the sequence, every drop of sex-fluid will be swarming with it. And after that: their offspring will be born with the ability wired into their DNA, to awaken when they became older.

A general protocol evolved: The Transversion is only applied to humans who are sufficiently sexually mature to receive it. They must understand their human sexuality before ever hoping to be able to comprehend the vastly more complex Ohm sexuality. Ohm have no pre-defined age of consent amongst themselves; since they're all mid-to-high range psionts, they automatically KNOW when an adolescent is ready. Humans, whose psi is dormant or lacking for the most part, have always, out of concern for their childrens' safety, set the consent age in an arbitrarily high range.

Whatever their own desires to the contrary, Ohm implicitly avoid sex with younger human teenagers: it would only mean trouble with the GAIA police...and since the global dictatorship considers "the remnants of the DECON cult" to be Public Enemy Number One, it takes care to destroy any Ohm it can capture. Usually not mercifully.

But now, with the Transversion thing, it's even more complicated.

Transversion of a human before he or she has reached true sexual maturity unfortunately frequently proves disastrous. The change can't usually "take" right. Because human hormones are still unstable in young adolescence, the Ohm mutagent cannot properly execute its bioprogram, and the transversion victim is left in a state of mental and physical chaos that makes the worst nightmare of a bad drug trip seem relaxing by comparison.

The worst part, though, is that while a drug trip wears off, Premotransyn - Premature Ohm Transversive Syndrome - does not. The neurological and genetic disorder multiplies...sometimes touching off dormant cancers, mega-resistant bacterial diseases and autoimmune disorders that either make the unfortunate's life a living hell, or a dying one: the leading cause of death amongst the afflicted tends to be suicide.

Ohm - all but the very worst Rogue Ohm, at any rate - flat-out don't like causing death to humans OR to their own kind. It is not a matter of morality to most of them: it merely represents the "sin" of energy wasted, along with that of Threatening The Species by Antagonizing The Humans.

A few of them - like Zor - even have those strange, essentially human brain artifacts known as "emotions" and "compassions"...and what's more, they combine with a high level of empathy. The notion of causing pain and death in the name of feeling power "doesn't compute" to them. In point of fact, they usually feel terrible about doing it, regardless of their tendency to belittle ordinary human beings. How could they not, when even the base-level empathy of the Ohm mindset causes some of that pain to be felt by the one giving it?

Zorlorn Narlok has particularly strong emotions: feelings...empathies, compassions. Unfortunately, all they've ever seemed to bring to him has been pain. Lots of it.

2.2 - The Stupid Thing (Flashback)

Years ago, around the turn of the 22nd Century, soon after the Ohm first started becoming "transversion agents", Zor - his hair jet-black and his face unhaggard - travelled to Earth for the first time, choosing to vacation in Los Angeles, California. He hated the culture there...but there was an ocean nearby, and he had never seen a large body of water before in his life.

Almost immediately, it seemed like he was being followed everywhere by a girl. Very tall. Big-boned, Hawaiian-looking, tawny brown skin, white flowers in the hair. A gauzy blouse that did something filter-like to sunlight.

Long, long legs. Standing almost seven feet tall himself, towering over everyone in sight, Zor found it rare to meet a female - especially a human female - whose eyes could meet his own without her tilting her head back so far that it looked like it might flip off and roll down her back.

This girl, Lola, still had to look up to him, but he could see that she didn't feel tiny while doing it. He liked that.

For a little while Zor spent some lazy time with her, choosing - for reasons he wasn't altogether certain of - to completely mask his heady Slasm-filled pheromones, wanting to see if this simple, playful creature would want him solely at face value, without any psionic persuasion applied.

She did seem to be very attracted to him. She said and did all the silly little things that the humans did when wishing to drop each other hints that they might like to get intimate. Finding excuses to bend over and show off her ass. Reaching over and touching his arm a lot. Accentuating any words with possible double-entendre in an overly emphatic tone. Making a big point of looking at him while trying hard to appear as though she hadn't been. Laughing at his jokes when he had just been pulling obtuse, meaningless dada-babble out of his ass in chunks,and conversationally framing it in jokemode. He'd watch her laugh whenever he did this for a while, and then start in on her, ask her to explain the humour of what she had been laughing at. She'd just smile sweetly at him and not say anything. That "clamming up and smiling whenever flummoxed" thing was surely in her Flirt Training course, too.

Zor had found that stuff to be sort of quaintly cute and deeply sad at the same time. It was so full of implied communication that just wasn't real communicating, or that was little bits of real communication bundled up in dishonesties - it seemed to have something to do with insuring against embarrassment, or "saving face".

He supposed that humans responded differently to this kind of behaviour, that it got them horny. It made him feel an affection, a childish sort of fondness for her, but it did not arouse him in the erotic sense at all.

She did have a nice ass, though...one wide and sturdy enough that he felt he'd not break in two if he were to actually...

He had asked her how old she was. She'd said "Eighteen."

He looked past her eyes, saw the quick twitch-tremble of the lie.

"How old are you really?"

"I told you."

Zor sighed, and his yes rolled to heaven. "You're not eighteen. Almost. Not quite."

"Am too...."

He stood in front of her with his arms folded. "Prove it then. Where's your ID bracelet?"

"I took it off. A protest against the new GAIA mandate that they must be worn at all times. I think that's dehumanizing. Anyone can know anything they want about me now."

[[[...Little big girl, you don't know the half of it...And by the way...if you don't like "dehumanizing" you are taking a ride on the wrong bus...]]]

Of course, he thought this only to himself; her "third ear" was as deaf as a brick.

"Don't you agree?"

"Huh wha...? I don't know. Look, I have to go now. I have business to attend to." He quickly said it had been nice meeting her and left, walking away briskly.

Business indeed...alone. In his room...Stripped naked splayed on the bed, with deepdarks strapped over his eyes, deeply involved within the hyper-meta-level mindfuck twists of a good Ohm-style immersive.

Ohm immersives, especially those of a more forwardly orgasm-oriented type, had so little in common with immersives on Earth. Yet, even though this was an Ohm immersive, it had one thing in common with most human pornography: an overload of sex that wasn't real. Zor doesn't care for a steady stream of fuck images or - at least tonight - the feeling they induced of being raped by synaesthetic chaos.

He'd skipped the immersive - [[[...Ach, it is so unnecessary!...]]] and just let himself spring erect and feel himself be brought up - and off - by his own powers...with the fire of frustration transmogrified into aural and visual wavelengths...rising sounds of deep drones humming louder, pitch-shifting and bending to higher frequencies...the strobing psychedelic lightshow surrounding him blinking at faster and faster rates...

And he watched as the vortex-vulva of the projected dream-lover unfurled itself to him...a multiform hallucinated goddess made of the droning sound and rolling light...filled with coiling springs and twisting spirals, the translucent, almost invisible cables carrying the pure and perfect bioelectric voltage of Slasm.

She tuned herself to him...to his unique inner signature. She had no human body at all. She was a mass of tendrils and shifting plasma with that great big Void in the center...around which everything else was spinning. He was at the event horizon line of her Black Hole.

And the thrumming oscillation burst -- the cables inside the goddess-cunt thrashed, snatched onto him everywhere, latched tight and driving their tiny buzzing points home in all of his nerve-centers. And pulled him. In.

She - the magnificent goddess in Zor's imagination - the One that he called Electrophilia - always ate him alive...and it gave him joy. Surrender. It was private, his secret escape from himself, from always having to be the active principle.

He thought of a wave of the sea crashing in slow-motion, spreading drops of water filled with light across an empty sky...

Without warning his supercharged Ohm jism sprayed everywhere, as his lower body wildly twisted in circles, his organ like a tank-turret, or a madman spinning around dizzily with a machine-gun, aiming nowhere, and everywhere.

After the breaths died down, the glorious vision collapsed; drained of Slasm, it was naught but facade.

Nothing left but the deep sleep of the autoerotically-drained. Of balls and brains, the same: darkness.

But the next night, he was again standing on the beach, looking out at the moon-glittery, great big amazing ocean, which had slowly risen higher and higher over the last century as it swelled with polar melt-off. And she had come for him again. That damned pretty Hawaiian girl...Had...Tracked him down.

Had felt, she said, "something about him which was just so unbelievably different than any other person she'd ever met before."

[[[...Come on a little spaceship ride with me, Little Big Girl, and I'll introduce you to a few hundred thousand others...a bunch of them who happen to be a lot younger than me...and you'd forget I even ever existed...]]]

But she goaded him. Was so...forward. Tried to get him drunk (he declined, alcohol not having quite the same effect on Ohm as it did on humans) and then, stoned (this, he almost accepted, marijuana having an effect more consonant with the one it had on people.) But then declined also, making an excuse that it made him too sleepy...just out of not wanting to lose control.

She'd stopped trying to feed him drugs then and in a frenzy borne of last-ditch madness, threw herself at him. Pawed at his body, stretching and arching like a cat in heat.

[[[...I guess maybe...maybe she's psychophysiologically grown up now...she has no reservations...no apprehensions...And she would make an awfully lovely Ohm girl. Wonder what her advanced talents would end up being? ...]]]

And he had sat down, Indian-style, and turned to her, and put on his Deep and Serious face. She did exactly as he did in front of him.

With the moon and stars and sea and girl with him, he felt a twinge of ridiculousness, feeling like life had become one of those horrible romantic immersives that little girls just loved and loved and loved again, loved in the days before immersives, when it was all about "film" and "video" instead, loved in the days before movies when it was all about "books and "poetry".

It was so fake-feeling. He didn't even love the girl, he hardly knew her, and if he had sex with her, so young as she was, without a store of pre-accumulated sexual data in her mind...she would never, EVER let go of the memory...likely blotting out any hope of future attractions on her part to anyone who wasn't him...or at least, who wasn't Ohm.

The sand felt cool and soft under his body, so different from everything on Phlayze which was so artificial and metallic. He was feeling dissipated. He stared down, lost in consternation and concern.

She had climbed onto his lap, wrapping her legs around his middle in a "yab-yum" position. She had smiled all mischievously. He shook his head and sighed.

"Lola..." he sighed, resigned at last. "Do you even know...what I actually am?"

"Beautiful......" she'd cooed. "That's what you are. Strong and silent. Dark. You have a power feeling about you. Like air after a lightning storm."

[[[...This is all so very touching. Too touching. Touching...my gag reflex. She doesn't even know what I am. She probably has never even heard of us...]]]

"I have to tell you something," he'd said, drooping his head. "I can't...do it with you. Though I would sorta like to. Things could...get too far out of control. There'd be bad consequences."

[[[...Please, just let her take that for an answer...even though it came out completely, utterly wrong...]]]

"But I'm sterile for another five years. I've had my shots, I can't catch anything. You have had them, haven't you?"

"Look, there IS something you can "catch" from me. I'm not human. I can make you not be human. All it would take is...for me to do that with you. I'm supposed to be able to shut it off if I want, but I haven't really learned how. Takes a very strong will."

She looked very confused. "What in heaven's name are you talking about?"

"Have you ever heard of the Ohm?" Then, remembered that they hadn't taken that name until the Clandestiny had established itself. It had been almost a hundred years since they'd gotten chased off this planet. They were history by now.

"Of the...Do you know...what DECON means?"

Confusion morphed into awe instantaneously.

"Oh my god! Of course! You are one of THOSE people? No way! I thought you all disappeared somewhere."

"Sometimes we come back."

"But of course! I heard what you can do, with that...With that whatchoocallit...wham...slazzy..."

Zor suppressed a sigh. Made a solemn promise to himself to never take another vacation in LA again.

"With that slowgasm...or whatever you call it..."

"Slasm. It's called Slasm." He had felt the urge to actually spell the word to her. "And it's something to be careful with. It can be dangerous for people who...aren't ready for it."

"What would happen if you put your weener in my puss?" she'd teased. He realized she was drunk.

"That sounds dumb. Don't say it like that." He had, for a moment, broken free of the desire. Oh, if only he had just gotten up and started walking away from the girl and the beach and left it behind like a bad immersive, forgotten forever after...

"I'm sorry...I'm from Encino. I guess it shows." She laughed selfconsciously, the laughter sounding more forced than the laughtrack from a bad comedy. Then, she turned, all seriousness again, asked, "Is there a better way to say it?"

"Thousands of better ways to say it. And also, to do it. To us, sex is sort of...abstract. I think you might not like it, really. You're beautiful, but I don't think I am your type at all. Even though...Well, I mean, I've brought myself to your level as far as I can right now. Trying to...not be abstract. I'm not even using any Ohm power on you right now, do you know that?"

"Ohm power? Is that like DECON? Isn't that the power that...can turn people into gods?"

[[[...Oh my! We've certainly become the Stuff of Legend around these parts, if this is any indication. That is a bit of a turn-on, can't deny THAT...]]]

Zor pondered to himself, finding it sort of soothing to be able to think completely secret thoughts without having to exert the energy to erect the defensive firewalls that he needed to in order to think to himself amongst other Ohm,

"Not if they aren't already predisposed to godhood..." he replied to her. As good an answer as any...

"What would it feel like if you did use it on me...that power?"

Her curiosity was getting the better of him. Never once had he ever been asked that question. He had never, as a result, felt that special about what he could do.

And that's what did him in.

"Like this...."

[[[...Something simple. Really simple. Low-volume....]]]

And he had stared right into her eyes. Held her attention steady. Held his hand about six inches from her bathing suit bottoms. Grasping air with his fingers, slowly flexing his hand open and closed, but not touching her at all. Not her skin, anyhow. He concentrated on holding onto the sluice-gates of the power tightly, to cause them to remain open only a sliver...

She swooned. Fully tensed and untensed every muscle of her body. Zor must have had a stronger current running than he thought himself capable of emitting. Too strong. He'd not had much experience with humans, and none at all with a girl. The current was throwing her for a loop. She looked like she would faint.

"Oh, Zor....Please....." Her voice was in a cadence, rolling like the seawaves behind them. "That...feels...so....good. Heaven....musta sent me...an angel...."

[[[...Oh hell....Just when I was starting to get into this, she says some idiotic thing like that. She talks like she never does anything in her whole life but watch videos and immersives. Maybe she's even a born-again Christian. One of those ones that fuck, but then feel guilty about it for a week and call that penance...]]]

He felt something aggressive start to pound in him: that pulse that was not his heartbeat.

"Look, let's get one thing straight here. You think I'm an "angel", you're way off track, kid. Miles off track." A wave crashed behind him. The tide was coming in, and fast.

There it was again. That mad, volcanic feeling of arrogance and domination-urge...

[[[...Tease a poisonous snake long enough and it =will= lash out at you...]]]

He started to loathe the girl sitting there with all that sugarcoated alcohol-laced baby talk dribbling and drooling from her mouth. Not really her, personally. Just her culture. Her species. Its lack of imagination, or capacity to experience all the possible ways that things...that things connected to each other. Her silly over-romanticized sexuality, which was all she knew because it was all that had been spoonfed to her.

He'd gotten hard then. Ultra-hard.

He made a sound something like a cheetah growl with a flange effect on it. Inhuman...vibrating. Felt the power - the undertow of it carrying him to sea...the unbelievable rush of it flashed, flushed through him - ominously...He felt the dissonant tug of fearing it and getting off on it at the same time.

The time for arguing with himself had passed already. Logic and compassion had both joined hands and fled from his mind, running away together, fast...afraid of the growing storm on the horizon of madness.

Breathing heavy and sweating he made himself snap out of it long enough for a final attempt to slow or stop the course of events spiralling out of his hands - and also, straight into them.

He said to her, voice low and warning-slanted, between deepening pants of breath, "You...are possibly too young...For this. I cannot. Be. Sure...If you have any sense, you will get away from me, and do it RIGHT NOW, and...and FAST. I'm no good at impulse control. I like you, but I don't love you. In...point of fact...I should in all honesty admit to you...that there's some things...that I really don't like about you at all. You set something off in me that wants to do...things...to you. For a girl your age, it might result in permanent insanity. Is being...with...me worth this?"

"What would happen to me if I WAS old enough?"

He explained what would happen if her sexuality was mature enough to handle it and transvert.

"You would change. Your consciousness would expand. Sort of like taking a psychedelic substance. Have you ever done that before?" He resolutely decided if she had not even ever done that, he would not allow anything further to proceed.,,

"I took some metalysergic acid once. At this party. I hadn't really wanted to, but this boy kissed me, and had it on his tongue. So I thought 'what the heck?" Know what I mean? It was...not a very big dose. I started to see stuff. Pretty colours. Some of it was scary, mostly it was really cool, though." He explained that if she became Ohm, she would probably never get to see her family again. Explained she'd be trained with him for a week in the use of the new mental abilities - and that there was no way to know what those would end up being. And then, he would have to leave her. She would be left to fend for herself. Explained that as Ohm she'd run the risk of death at the hands of the GAIA Government, or an anti-subversive terrorist group allied with it. He would - if she wanted him to - take her back to the Clandestiny space colonies...but he really didn't think she was cut out for space life, having developed too many attachments to the things of Earth...she would likely not do well there until she'd lived as Ohm for a number of years first.

"I want you to do it. Use the power on me! I heard this story once about a DECON guy who used it on girls...and the girls would end up, well, I think it was like, something changed their genes to make their bodies prettier than before...so they could seduce anyone they wanted to...I wanna have that done to me!"

[[[...I can't believe I'm hearing this...she actually thinks all this power does is make her LOOK LIKE SOME IMMERSIVE BIMBO?! Arrrnggggg!...]]]

Tripswitched. Triple-switched power-throttle went into the ON position. The stupidity of her! It made Zor turn red and the power swell in him like a blossoming mushroom cloud.

[[[...Foolish little girl! I think...KNOW!... you have a lot to learn...]]]

Breathing too heavily, he tried to turn aside, but she would not release her clasped legs around him.

[[[...You want it? Well gosh, I guess I'm just going to have to...Maybe...maybe THIS will put something in that hole you have for a brain--]]]

"...Put something in that hole you have for a--" He realized he had spoken those last words out loud.

And had swerved over her there on the sand, her legs still wrapped around his back. She had been whining softly and in a sort of rhythm.

The rhythm, that was the last straw.

It had released the physical urge.

He'd pushed down the shiny-silvery pants he had on so that the big straight pole of his prick popped out. And aimed forward.

Ever forward.

[[[...Ever forewarned...]]]

Instantly the aggression zapped into total focus: in the forefront of the backbrain...reversion. To normally scheduled perversion.

"You didn't---listen. You didn't---care!"

"What's wrong? What's--oouuuuuuewowwwww, that feels nice! So nice! --- oooo--- ---why do you---stare---so hard at me---like that?"

Her pretty eyes had the tincture of fear in them.

"I like...your...sense...of...adventure!" he hissed, while pronging her slishy girl-hole deeply, "but I'll bet you never saw... this ...in any of your silly Hollywood...prefab immersives...before...!"

Zor made a sound like a line of vowels pulled through his clenched teeth. A cluster of invisible Ohm mindfuck tendrils whipsawed into position one after the other and uncoiled with breakneck speed, flashing without mercy over, under, around, through and between her two round, scared eyes.

They quested...twisted...braiding and unbraiding, hunting centers of electric current and thrashing with frustration when none were immediately found. They all conjoined into a single ropy braid, congealed into a single force, found - all-too-easily - the bright glowing sphere of the mind's center.

Zor tried with all his psychic might to slow things down. So much he didn't realize, having never been with a human female before. Like how bare and unprotected her core was, how out-in-the-open and vulnerable.

To Ohm, the body is no "temple of the spirit": it is fortress of the soul and factory of the mind, complete and replete with all the appropriate defensive systems, offensive weaponry and esoteric trappings.

If she had been Ohm, that sphere - that bare, naked core that lay there without so much as a single negative charge field surrounding it - if she were Ohm instead of merely human, it would have been nested within layer after puzzle-boxed layer of cryptic mazeworks, encrypted coded locks, and spiky electric fences, dotted with booby traps and tripwires strung everywhere. Anywhere where it was even conceivable to possibly make an entrance...there'd be a block of some sort, something that the aggressor would have to either puzzle-solve to open, sneak around, distract enough to dart in past, or simply burn right through. (And THAT took power beyond the abilities of all but the

There was always a way in, of course. The game between two Ohm sexually mind-wrestling together was to find it...and the sense of victorious release after a challenge like that! Exhilaration! It gave the Ohm ways to gauge their own powers - and the prize for passing these tests was the sense of knowing one could...combined with the ecstasy of mind-core violation - the gift of Slasm that the vanquished offered up to the Conqueror.

This totally unprotected mindcore seemed all wrong to him. Piercing it would not prove anything. No wiles, dexterity or intelligence were necessary - just plain old lust. He could have done it with a tenth of the lust he had at the moment.

He let his long hair fall on her breasts, limbs, whipped and lashed her with it, bit her shoulder a little hard. Eased up. When her little whines turned to gasps, and to repeated dreamy calls of his name, the mindfuck prong nonchalantly twitched once and struck, as it always did, as it always could.

Into center.

Where it calmly deposited the little seed. And...flicked the little nano-bitswitch from 0 to 1. Initialization by Will. The bioprogram would begin, immediately now.

He opened his mouth to utter the customary "Gewalt Absolut!" - a rough translation of German meaning "Absolute Power!" - it was a traditional utterance Ohm made while in orgasm. It lodged in his throat and nothing came out but a heavy breath. He was using up a great deal of energy trying to hold back the strength of his mindfuck because she was so weak, weaker than he'd thought even at first. He doubted she had even come, but he hadn't really even thought to make any attempt to facilitate that. He'd schlanged her out of peevish contempt - nothing more.

Why the fuck had he even done this? It was profoundly unsatisfying.

[[[...At least...maybe the transversion....will give her some substance now...And well, she HAD done everything to start this herself, Ach! She had gotten fair warning and chosen to ignore it. But still...]]]

And as he'd pulled out the parts of himself that had been sunk into her on all levels, he watched in horror - the resolute horror of one watching Something One Just Fucking Knew Was Going to Happen - as the girl collapsed onto the sand, unconscious. Her feet pointed inwards at a funny angle.

She had a pulse. Not dead. Relief washed over him at that, but sometimes, death was better than what DID end up happening. Her tendons and muscles had clearly been spasming involuntarily. She had overloaded.

[[[...Damn it. I guess I didn't know my own strength. Or could it be that most humans just won't be able to handle this at all? This may be an omen, a terrible one...]]]

He'd taken her back to his room and held her gently, used hypnotic inductions to try to calm her, stroked her hair and played relaxing subsonics, but she was a mess of tears and chattering teeth and words that made it only halfway out of her mouth...and then the chattering cut them into little bits of words that meant nothing. And she wasn't changing. If it was, it was only for the worse.

By the morning she had fallen further still into pandaemonium and dementia. Alternating between half-sleep delirium and some nightmare about "the devil", and wide-awake bouts of addled confusion (falling over her own feet, unawareness of walls, forgetting who she was or where) and spouts of hebephrenic babble burbling up so overfast as to suggest a mounting neural overload. The kind of overload that usually killed the overloaded one.

When she finally screamed at him again and again to GET AWAY FROM HER! over his frenetic pleas to relax and breathe, and assurances that he had been trying to help her, he realized with the starkness of finality that helping her was not going to be within his ability now. He heard footsteps racing down the hall to investigate the screams in the room.

He was going to have to run for it - and quickly.

Soon, her family would be seeking her out. If they found him with her...found out he'd caused what he'd caused, it would be death.

He felt he deserved it, but the survival imperative won out.

He ran. Out the door, without looking back.

Away from the hotel. From LA.

From the Earth.

Back to the asteroids and their terrible artificial air and dark caves of musty deadness. He spent every night in his tiny little ensconcement of an "apartment" carved into the rock. He didn't come out for a week.

That was when he'd done it. Calmly sat down, with a machine that played soundtracks for Ohm self-willed biomutation rituals: not music at all, but instead, fine-tuned deep-metaconsciousness-programming subsonics that vibrated into him from everywhere in the room, and from underneath his prone body lying naked on a cold, terribly uncomfortable metal table specifically designed for such things.

He concentrated with mute blankness on his objective, and all around that blankness and the direction of his goal, there flowed around him the feelings of terrible guilt, anger with himself, regret and sadness about what he had caused to happen to that girl. And more selfish sad feelings about saying goodbye to that which he knew he'd have to sacrifice, if he were ever to be able to have his soul share his body with his own mind ever again.

Zor was utterly silent, stoic as a monk...and felt the central structures of the Slasm-oriented parts of him twist into a tight kink, tie into a tight knot and snap off from the center of his mind. Zorlorn had psychosterilized himself.

It had hurt more than he ever knew it could. He opened his mouth to scream but it came out as whimpers and tears and sounds of such piteous weakness that had he not fasted for 72 hours prior to the psychosterilizing, he would have definitely vomited. But after an hour of concentration he could think clearly again, drink water, eat his goddamn protozoa dinner.

He'd seen to it that the Ohm mindsex power was purged from him forevermore, so that this thing could not ever happen again...not by his mind.

It was a stupid, stupid, goddamned IDIOTIC thing to do.

Every single day of his life he hated himself for it. He hated himself, eventually, more for the abominable "operation" than he did for the act that had supposedly necessitated its occurrence.

It did not, he vacantly, stupidly realised, do a damn thing to make that girl's mind return to her. It had only destroyed an enormous chunk of his own.

And whatever poetic justice there'd been in it: in the end, this had served no one at all.

"Look. Elli. Let me get this off my chest. I'm so pissy today because...well, let me put it this way. He takes a deep breath and feels his emotions and his anger getting ready to explode, "I spent the last twenty or so years of my life shunting from rock to rock doing every little thing I could do to help preserve this crazy race I am part of. Twenty years, and almost none of them fun, or intriguing, really, and worst of all, in a state of near-constant psychic pain that is something even an unrepentant psi-criminal - as officially defined by the Ohm in the Articles of Clandestiny - shouldn't, in my humble opinion, ever have to suffer. And what happens?

"Only NOW is there finally - FINALLY - an invasory maneuver occuring, the one all of us have dreamed of since...well, forever ago. And I CAN'T EVEN DO IT. Do you realise just what this planet is going to look like in about a month or so...maybe sooner than that, even? It's going to be Total Chaos of the kind all of us out there..." he waves an expansive arm up in the direction of space, "are going to be bonkers about. They'll come down here in droves. The world will be ours. And I can't be part of it.

"All those years working and this is the reward I get. I get to WATCH the world's biggest orgy and psi-fest unfold...blossom...and erupt all around me! And since I had it stuck in my head twenty years ago that doing a Stupid Thing to myself would somehow cosmically nullify the fact of my having done another Stupid Thing to someone else...because of that brilliant leap of logic, I will be completely...utterly...USELESS. Because I had to go and arrive at the party twenty years too fucking early, I got thrown out. I get to watch everyone ELSE having the most exciting month this planet's ever seen...from the outside.

All I wanted to do was...was to make sure I never caused anyone any more pain. I became my own fucking martyr. Do I get a special religious holiday in my name for a consolation prize? Something? Anything?!"

Drained by the catharsis, he collapses into the plane's seat, silent. And weary.

2.3 - Landing and Briefing

The plane finally touches down in the mountains to the east of the area south of the San Francisco Bay. A couple from the Half Moon Bay Ohm commune meet them on the hillside, while the pilot taxis the plane into a makeshift concealment unit. They'll reconnect with it and their pilot on the way back up again.

The two rather superannuated Ohm who meet them look rather plain by Ohm standards; being on Earth they are cool, cautious, laid back...and don't flaunt their powers. They either could not physically handle life in space or lacked the conviction that the Ohm asteroid-based colonial system would work. And it seemed that they had been right all along.

Zor wonders if the two of them - a male and a female, though from the outside their gender is indistinguishable - know about Elan X. and his "seeding" of the seat of Earth media power with his superactivated sperm...and what this act (and any others Elan X. has up his sleeve) will mean for everyone.

The commune keeps itself really isolated - hardly any of them even ever leave their house - but one of their housemates, according to the androgynous couple who greet them, is a really good "listener", even if he's not much of a "talker".

"He's the one who left the message with OSF, calling for help. Says he picked up a really, REALLY strong anomalous signal coming from the south edge district. From a house next to an abandoned 7-11 market." She points her hand southward and waves it slightly.

"Says he smells someone there - someone who is definitely one of our Own Kind. He started to walk towards the place but when he was about a block away, he stopped. On a dime. Turned straight clear around and broke into a run...We had no clue why. He just wouldn't even talk about it for days. He wouldn't...think about it, even."

Zor and Elli turn to face one another, each searching for guesses in the other's mind.

"Someone - some Ohm someone - is doing some really strange things out there. We finally managed to get him to talk, our "Listener". In the last two months, he told us, his voice all weirded out, that he's been picking up some sort of energy spike with his "third ear". He said it sounded like..."like an atonal chorus coming from the Wheel of Terror and Ecstasy."

The old Ohm woman looks as quizzical as they do.

"He hardly ever says a single word out loud to anyone - and that's all we could get out of him about it. But he's terrified. He...he shut off his "ears" completely...he's packing his things right now, leaving us, he says, before it "gets him too". He thinks we'll "get gotten to", by who or whatever he is talking about. I dun' know what to make of it. What does all this sound like to you?"

"Sounds like another fucking idiot got the idea that he or she is a Slasm vampire. Isn't that what this is all about? That's what the OSF Admin made it out to be. I deal with that pretty extensively...I guess they've decided it's my specialty or something. Great." He stares at the ground, offhandedly wondering when the last time he saw real grass and dirt like this was.

"I deal with that a lot, like I said. There was this whole cult of Slasmic Lamia out on Purple World, the colony with all the drug cults and whatnot on it... who decided, one day, that it would be the pinnacle of coolness to band together, go around power-sucking all the weaker Ohm on that asteroid and not stop soon enough to prevent death. Said Purple was too crowded and there was not enough food, so they were going to go to the next evolutionary stage beyond Ohm. Like every other Ohm sect of any kind always does, but this one wasn't a Good Thing, and they sent me to go and deal with it. Wasn't fun."

Elli - her ever-changing face now resembling that of a dedicated scientist taking lab notes, wrinkled slightly and concentrated - tunes her many senses and tries to get the biggest picture possible. "The thing is...I don't feel any death here. Not the sort that would signal something like that going on, anyway."

The somber face of the other Earth Ohm, an older female, goes crooked. She speaks up, softly, something like air blowing through dead branches. "You are correct. There has been no psychoviolent death in a fifty mile radius from this point in...many, many years."

Zor agrees. "Parasitic Ohm leave trails of corpses. That particular urge...is impossible to keep in check. Slasm drainers...they're like opiate addicts. They need to keep going, and there's no way back. If they're around, we'd sense that people were dying."

The haggard-looking, yet calm Ohm male who appears to be her mate remains silent. They keep walking down the hill. A breeze blows, but everything else seems oddly still.

The old Ohm woman continues: "I came here from Mexico...lot of Ohm down there who aren't...well, the cohesive variety. Loners. The Unbonded. What we call the Skews...the ones you call Rogues. There are lots of them. Maybe every other one you meet down there's some sort of Skew or another. GAIA mostly leaves Mexico alone, so they run away when they are banished here, and go there. Just like fugitive humans. I have seen the most terrible Slasm vampires and their victims...up close. Much, much closer than I wanted to."

[[[...Join the club, sister...what's your name?...]]]

:::...It cannot be pronounced, even here...The hills have ears...:::

[[[...Just tell us where to go and find your troublemaker so we can pick him - or her, or it, whatever - up and get the hell out of your way...]]]

:::...My Mate and I will take you there. Then we must leave you. Sorry to be so brash, short. I've seen too much trauma, through too open a mind, I guess...:::

[[[...My sympathy is not just made of words, then. Take us there, and take leave. And thank you...]]]

:::...We should be the ones who thank. I don't envy your job...:::

Too tired to even talk silently anymore, Zorlon drops quiet, and the four of them silently wind down the path on the hill. It is very quiet and gloomy here.

After walking for a while, Zor slows down, falls back from the pair leading the way, so that he might walk near Elli again.

"What she said checks out." he tells her. " I did my homework. Looked around a bit on the computer on the trip over, checked some records. It's not happening. There have been no deaths by enervation or people going into coma for weeks or any of that stuff going on down in this area at all. I can't figure this out. Why were we called here?"

"So what we have," Elli said thoughtfully, "is either a psi vamp who figured out how to do it without going too far...and somehow, I don't think this smells like a vampire at all. It's...Something Completely Different. A New Situation."

"I fucking hate New Situations." Zorlorn mutters under his breath. And trudges on with the rest out of the hills, into the town-city of Half Moon Bay - and the New Situation that awaits them there.