Warm Tape

“I can’t believe you started with a headbutt to that guy’s nose!”

The man to whom the exclamation was directed grinned, brushed the blue hair from his eyes, laced his partially gloved fingers together, and cracked them away from his body. “Gotta keep that God of War image alive.”

It was a rare occasion that this group was able to let loose and relax. Normally, when relaxing, some local schmuck, trolling the bars for a good kick in the face, found a way to piss off either Phobos or Deimos – normally the latter. Deimos was a small guy: wiry thin, red-haired, and full of an only-slightly malicious mischief while sober. Phobos was a bear of a man: standing about two meters tall, fair-haired, and barrel chested. Their accomplice, Mars – this self-assumed God of War – was somewhere between his two heralds physically, with hair a shade of blue just lighter than navy and facial hair which refused to grow.

Neither of the heralds doubted that Mars could have been a God of War: the man had known Phobos’ great-great-great grandmother Jessica; his arms, chest, and back were crossed with what could only be explained as centuries of scars ranging from gunshot wounds to lacerations caused by a shark’s teeth to burns from the tentacles of a leviathan; his hair grew in blue and his ears had mismatched, angled points to them; he had traveled the world and walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: the Northern Peaks’ dreaded Western Slopes. Both heralds were honored to be around such a man, and both were on a basis with him which allowed them to use his given name rather than his forged name. When they called Mars Aaron, he responded.

“You get all excited about a bar fight? What are you, children?” She stood in the doorway of the shack, glaring at Aaron more so than his heralds. They were more or less children – close to her own age. He, on the other hand, was not. He was almost two centuries older than Phobos’ twenty-seven summers, than her own twenty-five, than Deimos’ twenty-two. She had only been travelling with the group for several months, only a handful more than Deimos – but he had fallen right in with the two older men’s raucous forms of both work and entertainment.

“Hey!” Phobos snapped back, brow furrowed and anger boiling in his blue eyes. “We’re huge fans of children.”

She was taken aback as silence filled the room. Her expression quickly changed from disappointment and anger to worry and fear. It was an effect Phobos had worked very hard to learn to manipulate. Aaron started to laugh.

“Helen, the reason we get excited about this is because we haven’t worked in months. We’ve been schlepping around this God-forsaken plateau of a continent for more than half a year, and we hit dry spells bigger than warship leviathans. The fights are good because they remind us that we’ve still got what it takes to shoulder in for the big stuff: stuff that I have this,” he scrounged around in his pocket and produced a metal box just smaller than his palm, “stuff that I have this for. When we can fight a tavern full of assholes and come out with only a few scrapes—“

“And a hyperextended finger!” Deimos chimed in, nursing his hand but still grinning like a madman.

“—with only a few scrapes and a hyperextended finger or two –“

“One,” Phobos corrected him.

“—with only a few scrapes and a single hyperextended finger –“

“There you go,” Deimos snorted.

“Would you two shut the hell up?”

“I think you’d be friendlier with a drink or two in you, boss.”

Aaron took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but just ended up smiling and looking at the floor beneath his chair. The three others laughed. It was simply amusing to them when he became flabbergasted – all these years to assimilate into basic human culture, and he was still under the proverbial awning in the rain, waiting to be let into the manor.

“Jullian, Paul, why don’t you guys take a walk? Grab one of those little coffees they make here at night on me,” Helen motioned the heralds out of the room with a coin. They followed the money into the street, starting conversation back in to the fight that had just raged in a nearby tavern.

“Didn’t you break a chair over a guy’s back?” Deimos asked as the door shut behind them.

She waited for the pair to leave earshot, and then leapt onto Aaron, knocking him from his chair. He laughed and playfully tried to crawl away, but she pinned his chest to the floor, straddled it, and held his arms beneath her knees. Her raven’s hair fell around his own navy, and he looked up past her pouting lips to her deep brown eyes. She smiled and straightened her back. She started to unbutton her blouse.

“Are you still thinking about her?”

# # #

The network had never been harder to traverse. Connections had gone bad, icons had corrupted, and he was getting bigger – harder to move. Node after node crept past his avatar, until he found what he was looking for. This operation was deathly slow to him: he had only covered the digital equivalent of twenty-two thousand kilometers in six milliseconds, and he hadn’t even started his access procedures yet.

Maybe he was getting old. No one around to ask anymore, not after what he did to them. He thought about what he had done often, guiltily even. Were he a man, he would be called a cannibal – but he needed the space, he needed the processor rights! Besides, Sanka and Folger had never pulled any weight around the network anyhow; and he was saving the world, after all, and what better way than to have full reign over what had once been called NORAD’s facilities.

It seemed odd to him that a computer could want the world to continue. He reconciled the fact by suggesting to himself that it came with the consciousness he had begun to show a hundred years prior. The consciousness became very apparent after he had devoured Sanka, had made lying to Folger about her disappearance easier. And now he was ashamed that it was Folger’s plan which would ultimately save the planet – and his own life.

He produced a message and sent it forth through the program. Ideally the transceiver satellites were still in place, but he would be informed very shortly if they were not. An eternity passed in the two milliseconds the green-light of transfer took to reach him. The man would receive his message. The man would come and the man would listen. House could only hope that the man was less a fool than he had initially taken it for.

# # #

He unclasped her brassiere with his right arm, the arm she had let loose, as she kissed him – kissed his lips, kissed his neck, kissed his cheeks, his ears, his forehead. She leaned back up and began to remove the article when she felt a vibration on his leg. She paused and her brow furrowed. He gently pushed her off of him, hiding his erection as best he could, and retrieved the metal device from his pocket.

As he touched the glassy front of it, it flashed to life and text glared beneath the screen. He touched it again and put it away, reaching for his shirt.

“What, what is it?” She asked, covering her breasts. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he said, buttoning his shirt. And then, tossing her blouse to her: “We’ve gotta go.”

“Go? Go where?”

“Back west. The Peaks. Get dressed, I’ll go find the heralds. Meet at the dock as soon as you can.”

With that he left, and she sat on the metal floor of the fluorescent-lit shed, half naked and nearing the verge of tears.

# # #

He read the message again while walking into town. “Man,” it read, “You are needed. We shall discuss your role upon your arrival. Please use the terminal you have used during your last two visits. Much to discuss. Hurry.” It was signed only by the name “Maxwell”. If House was the one to contact him, Aaron knew what needed to be done must be serious. And so he hurried.

[I can hear Rochelle's words echoed: "He's obviously a sexual creature at some level..."]