The Future of Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Future of Love

  Copyright

  The Future of Love

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Want to know what happens next?

  The Future of Love

  Aubrey Parker

  Copyright © 2017 by Aubrey Parker. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read this work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help spread the word.

  Thank you for supporting Aubrey Parker

  CHAPTER ONE

  “We need to talk,” Chloe said to Alexa. “Right fucking now.”

  Alexa stood, shocked, trying to regroup. It was too much, too fast. Too overwhelming. She’d just knocked down her mental overload a few notches by navigating a bang-bang-bang trifecta that was as nerve-wracking as it was relieving.

  First she’d told Parker everything, including her secret deal with Caspian and all that his Wild East data had shown them: Agile Four nanobots had been active on Voyos inside Nicole Shaw; the bots had built her a synthetic uterus; they’d used the familiar-to-them genetic code of Noah West to fertilize one of Nicole’s eggs and thereby created a child.

  Next Alexa had confronted Noah, learning enough to fill in the gaps while also leaving him high, dry, and angry without the answers he demanded.

  Finally, she’d connected the dots, again with Parker. The release of secrets was a breath of fresh air, the solving of their biggest mystery a relief beyond measure.

  But now this. Chloe Shaw barging into her home without granted access or credentials, while the fucking Crossbrace connection was physically disconnected. Chloe Shaw crossing her living room just minutes after Alexa and Parker had agreed that yes, their situation felt dangerous … but that it’d be okay as long as they could keep it all from Chloe.

  As long as Chloe didn’t find out about her odd birth and her unknown father.

  As long as Chloe never learned that decades and decades of research had been poured into this moment — into finding Chloe, into their determination to bend and break every rule to use and control her.

  Take it easy, Alexa had so recently told herself. It’s not all bad. When Chloe learns the truth — the whole, complete, entirely unvarnished and unrestricted truth — she will understand. There’s no way she couldn’t. Not given the person she is. Not given her legacy and what’s inside her.

  But it wasn’t time for that yet. Now was fragile.

  Chloe was marching toward her with murderous eyes.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing in my apartment?” Alexa said, opting for the offensive.

  It didn’t work. Not remotely. Chloe came so near, she could smell her skin. Inches between them. Chloe’s sapphire eyes on fire.

  “What the hell were you doing in mine?” Chloe retorted.

  “I was never in your apartment,” Alexa said.

  “Not just now. Not just yesterday. I mean forever. I mean five years ago. I mean twenty years ago, before I was born. When haven’t you been right there and nosing into my business, Alexa?”

  “You’re losing it. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Chloe stepped forward and Alexa stepped back. With the couch still behind her she almost tottered and fell into a sitting position.

  “Don’t deny it. I know. I have the records.”

  “What records do you think you have?”

  “All of them. Everything you did back when you were Georgia Bernard. Everything Parker did when he was experimenting with his patients, charming them into killing themselves.” Chloe glared at Parker, whose shock was deep enough that he didn’t even try to defend himself, though to Alexa’s knowledge only two of his patients had killed themselves … and it was years after his treatment … though likely due to instability his treatments had caused.

  “You’re out of line, Miss Shaw,” Alexa said. “I could have you arrested for this. I should fire you.”

  “But you won’t. Because you need me. Because you’ve built your entire fucking company on my back. How long have you been watching me? How long have you been waiting?”

  “Careful …” Alexa said.

  “Or what? Tell me what I need to be careful about. Tell me what I’d better not do, and what horrible things you’ll do to me if I so much as try them. Is it worse than what you threatened Andrew with?”

  Parker nudged himself between them, forcing the women somewhat apart.

  “We didn’t threaten Andrew, Chloe.”

  “Bullshit you didn’t!”

  “I don’t know what he told you,” Parker said, “but-“

  “He didn’t have to tell me! I’ve seen your files! All of your files!”

  “And I don’t know what you think you’ve seen of ‘our files,’” Parker continued.

  Chloe had mostly been facing Alexa, squared off against who she seemed to regard as her biggest enemy. She turned to Parker so fast that he nearly tripped and fell as well.

  “What’s your blazer size, Parker? I know; 44 Regular. And it is ’44,’ isn’t it? Still in inches, despite the fact that all of your tailors (the one on Elm, below the NetPlex office on 42nd) converted to metric after the fall like everyone else. Because you can’t think of it any other way than inches and you refuse to learn. You’ve been a 44 Regular since college when you ballooned up a bit and your pants moved from a 32 to a 38, and you’re a 44 today. Fuck the world if they won’t do things your way, isn’t that right? You should see the customer notes those tailors have on you. You wouldn’t think someone who spends as much on suits would be so hated by the people who trim them.”

  Parker blinked, his mouth hanging open. His face said what Alexa was thinking: How the hell could she know a tenth of what she’d just said?

  Chloe turned to Alexa.

  “I see your meddling fucking hands everywhere I look. You and Clive Spooner on Voyos back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Your meetings to figure my mom out now — to figure out where I came from. What does the rest of the O board think about the two of you meeting without them? What did they think when you met here, in this place, and talked shit about the others?” Chloe cocked her head at Alexa’s expression. “What, don’t you remember? That happened the time Parker kept swirling his wine and you shouted him down like you wanted to cut off his dick.”

  “How did you—”

  “I know everything. When Parker gave me that canvas, he said, ‘Have fun.’ Like I was supposed to figure it out. Well, I figured it out. Turns out I’m really motherfucking good at ‘having fun.’ Did you know you and your cronies at O left footprints all over The Beam’s digital history? I don’t even need your canvas to see it anymore. When I walked down here, I stopped at a bank and used the ATI. The interface didn’t even ask for my code to withdraw money. Instead, while standing there, I got curious about what you experienced when you went to a bank. What was it like to go to an ATI and see a balance in the millions or billions of credits? Well, I found out. Suddenly I’m looking at Alexa Mathis’s account, and your account wasn’t even at that bank. And speaking of finances, what did you buy on Granite Quarry yesterday, Alexa? A little toy you were too embarrassed to ask O’s clerk to get for you from your own stores?”

  “That’s enough, Chloe,” Alexa said.

  “It’s not nearly enough. I
’m tired of being your little plaything. I danced along like an innocent little girl for long enough, trying to trust the benevolent O and be a team player. But that was before you hired an actor to fuck me — two actors, as it turns out, one a lot better than the other. That was before you started messing with my family, trying to trick me into falling in love so you could figure out what would happen. That was before I started poking around and found more and more evidence that what Slava said was true: that O really has been on my case for fifty or sixty years. Who were you talking to on your cochlear implant when you made that little slip to Slava, by the way? That’s something I haven’t bothered to look into yet, though I doubt The Beam would give me any resistance if I did.”

  Parker looked at Alexa. “What’s she talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Tell him now, Alexa,” Chloe said. “Tell him how you kept going behind his back while you were busy using him to get behind everyone else’s. Do you even have a side, or is it just all you, all the time?”

  “Parker already knows everything,” Alexa said it evenly, even as Chloe continued her verbal assault. Part of her was terrified by what she was hearing — by the prospect, that The Beam no longer held many secrets from Noah’s prodigal legacy.

  But another part of Alexa was growing ever more furious.

  Chloe was more than Alexa had bargained for, but she was also a kid. She hadn’t gone through the ups and downs and torment and triumph like Alexa. Chloe may have won (or possibly lost?) a genetic lottery, but Alexa fought for everything she had.

  She’d fought when she was just a writer, determined to make her way and be taken seriously. She’d fought while shoulder-to-shoulder with the infuriating alpha males inside the Trillionaire Boys’ Club, all of whom had seen her either as a feminine joke or a pussy to home in on. She’d fought for literal life and death through the fall — something this little girl in front of her had never had to face. Time and time again, Alexa had watched her empire burn, then sighed and stood back up to build it back from the ashes.

  “Does he know that—” Chloe began.

  “He knows.”

  “—that you’re part of a secret club that—”

  “He knows,” Alexa repeated.

  “And how happy might all your partners be if they learned that—”

  “Learned what, Chloe?” Alexa barked, her patience gone. “Learned that you’re an insolent little shit who’s suddenly found a big gun to play with? Learned that you’re so determined to show the world how angry you are and how much you’ve been wronged that you’ll talk straight out of your ass if it suits you?”

  Chloe’s expression firmed. She’d paused, but was clearly raring to resume. “If you think I don’t know what—”

  “Who’s your father, Chloe?”

  Chloe stopped, her glare like razors.

  “Because that’s the problem with knowing it all, isn’t it?” Alexa continued. “You can figure out everything except for things that nobody knows. Nobody except for me, using the one thing that’s cut off from the network.” She tapped her temple.

  “The Beam knows,” Chloe said.

  “But you don’t, do you?”

  Again, Chloe said nothing. She seemed so righteous. Ready to strike. Fucking kids thought they knew better. In the end, fucking kids didn’t know shit.

  “Got the golden key, haven’t you?” Alexa said. “I know why that is, but you don’t. Am I right?”

  Stares. Nothing more.

  “You just saw how it all worked. Had a revelation. And you said, ‘Lay down, Beam, and let me fuck you. Because that’s how it is. But The Beam isn’t like a man. You can make a man do whatever you want with the right hole, but you can’t do that with The Beam no matter how hot and bothered it is for you. I’ll bet your porter told you he knows who your father is, but wouldn’t give you the name.”

  Alexa smiled at Chloe’s flash of recognition, waited for a beat then continued.

  “Mmm-hmm, I figured. Because mine did the same thing. At first, I thought she was being an asshole. Surely The Beam knew the answer, but a set of permissions I’m sure you don’t even understand was keeping my porter from telling me. But that’s not why she didn’t spill it. Same as yours. The Beam doesn’t actually know, Chloe. That’s what you don’t understand, and that’s why you’re not going to bend me over right now no matter how determined you are.”

  Chloe’s firm lips. Her unflinching stare. “You’re lying.”

  “The Beam is like a person, Chloe,” Alexa said. “It has a personality. Only it’s not just one personality; it’s a whole lot of them at once. And do you know what people do? They preserve themselves before preserving anyone else. The Beam doesn’t know who your father is. It has guesses, but only within a narrow range. It knows there’s no point in supposing, and that whatever it does to steer you to figure out, it can benefit from. It doesn’t want to admit that it’s wrong. It can’t stand to look like a fool.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Chloe said. “It’s just computers.”

  “Really? You’ve never seen emotion from your porter?”

  Chloe said nothing.

  “Especially irrational emotion, since that’s what we’re talking about here. Hasn’t your porter ever acted cranky, or belligerent, or bitchy? Irrational? Haven’t you ever just wanted to grab it by its holographic neck and shake the life out of it because it Just. Refuses. To make. Any. Goddamn. Sense?”

  Chloe’s jaw worked. “It has to know the answer, even if it hasn’t told me. The old Internet was all over the place even then. There are records.”

  “Then what’s the answer, Yoda? Who’s your daddy, if the answer is right fucking in front of you to read like a banner over DZ Square?”

  Chloe exhaled. Her body seemed exhausted, fury tempered by receding adrenaline.

  “Listen to me, Chloe,” Alexa said, making her voice more certain than she felt, knowing they’d reached a delicate moment. “The Beam doesn’t know this. You’re welcome to keep digging if you don’t believe me. There was a time when it did, before Crossbrace, when Quark had scraped enormous amounts of data from both public and private sectors of Internet in preparation for rollout. But there was a kind of virus that infected that data, and the records you’re looking for are gone.” She tipped her head and added, “Well. Not gone.”

  “If The Beam doesn’t know, why the hell should I believe that you do?”

  “Frankly, I don’t care whether you believe me or not. I do care that you have taken on authority that you’re not entitled to. I care that you burst into my apartment like a toddler throwing a tantrum. You think you know it all, Chloe Shaw? The truth is you know nothing.”

  “I know you hired Andrew to fake a relationship with me.”

  “Yes, you do … because I let you know it. Do you know why?”

  Doubt clouded Chloe’s features.

  “You have information without context. You have all the facts but no way to interpret them. So Parker got fat in college. Do you know why? Was it the pressure that kept him from exercise? Was his roommate in culinary school, providing him all sorts of impossible to refuse desserts? Or did romantic rejection hurl him into depression?”

  “I know you’ve been spying on me. I know you’ve been after me for longer than my mother’s been alive.”

  Alexa stood. “Come with me, Chloe. We’re taking a ride.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Through O’s massive front doors.

  Into the darkened conference room with the soundproof sex cells — the place where Chloe had come the first time she’d visited DZ to apply for her current job, sitting opposite Parker Barnes. But now those cells were scary, sad, pathetic. Menacing. A different sort of cell.

  The entire board was present. All of the people Chloe had seen in the projection with Andrew, though that had been in a different room, probably in the same building. She saw the fat man in the cowboy hat, the wiry woman with a chip on her shoulder, the duo be
hind the Nectar empire.

  Everyone watched Alexa enter with Parker behind her, then turned their eyes to Chloe the minute they saw her straggling at the rear.

  “What the hell is this, Alexa?” Olivia asked.

  “Chloe feels we’ve gone behind her back,” Alexa said. “I’d like to set the record straight, and the spindle drive in this room is the only place that has what I need.”

  Alexa raised a panel on the conference table, tapped on it while the new four assessed Chloe. Alexa didn’t look back at Chloe, having made something clear on the limo ride from her flat to the O building:

  Follow my lead and don’t say anything you know you shouldn’t, or you’ll never learn your father’s identity. The board doesn’t know about the father. The board doesn’t know a lot of things other than that we’ve watched you for a long time. They don’t need to know more … or else.

  It had felt like a thin gambit to Chloe while sitting opposite Alexa, a long seat distant from a fatally silent Parker. Alexa was making a mistake. In the apartment, it was only the three of them. Here, Chloe would have the attention of all Six. If Alexa had secrets, Chloe could threaten exposure. Then Alexa would bend to her will like a snapping twig.

  It’s not that simple, Chloe’s mind told her as the ride drew on. You’ve already shown her how well you can navigate the network. She knows it obeys you. She knows you could spill her secrets to the Six from any location you want, whether you’re in front of them or not.

  “Why did you call the others here?” Parker mumbled to Alexa.

  Houston, who’d overheard despite his whisper, said, “Fair question, Parker. Another would be, ‘Why were you there?’” He pointed toward the door, implying wherever Parker and Alexa had once again been together … without the others, in defiance of official Six policy.

  “I was nearby. Alexa called me when Chloe came to her place.” Parker’s eyes flinched just a little. It wasn’t a safe lie. He seemed to be hoping Alexa and Chloe wouldn’t snitch, wondering if Alexa called me first was any better in the others’ eyes than I was with Alexa from the start.