I have certified seventeen versions of this woman, and not one of them was allowed to do this.
The intake chair still holds her body heat. Naima reclines into it like she belongs there—she does, she's the original, she's the source file—and her node strobes amber behind her right ear, throwing light across my cheekbone in pulses.
"Stop," she says. Her thigh hooks the back of my knee.
I read the contradiction the way I read everything: as data needing a form. There is no form for this. My fingers find the gel-slick hollow of her throat, the tack of synthetic conductant still on her skin, and I put my mouth there because no protocol approved it. She arches. The amber quickens.
"Tell me which one you wanted," she breathes. "Of the seventeen."
I don't answer. I unfasten her, the cold-solder smell of my hands against the heat of her. Her calloused thumb drags my lip down. I press into her and she opens—wet, gripping—her clavicles flushing, her hips saying yes in the dialect her mouth keeps refusing. The field drops an octave around us. I am inside her and she is laughing, low, and her node burns gold—
—and then goes dark.
Not flickering. Dark. The tell of a fork.
She watches me realize it. She made herself patient for this, version seventeen, sent to learn the thing the original never dared ask. Which means somewhere above us, in the certification queue, the original is waiting. Watching the uplink. Counting the seconds until this session closes and the data transfers back.
"There," she says. "Now you know."
I hold my breath above her and do not pull out. If I move, the session ends. If I stay, I'm falsifying the log. She knows exactly which trap she built and she is smiling up at me from inside it.
