The Gate Read online

  The Gate

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  The Gate

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor

  (C) copyright by Kaitlyn O'Connor, December 2011

  ISBN 978-1-60394-671-1

  Smashwords Edition

  Published by New Concepts Publishing

  Lake Park, GA 31636

  www.newconceptspublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

  In loving memory of my son. I miss you more every day not less.

  For my favorite Arapaho, Ben. There’s always a silver lining in every black cloud and he’s mine.

  &

  For my fans, who’ve been far more patient and understanding than I probably deserve. Ben’s teaching me how to find the joy and laughter in life again. I hope soon I’ll be able to pass it along to my friends in the stories I write for them so everyone won’t think I’m Miss Doom and Gloom … at least not all the time!

  Chapter One

  The sound that escaped Carly’s throat was low, barely more than a breath of sound in the darkened room and still carried a wealth of emotions—anticipation, frustration, pleasure, agony ….

  It was always like that. There was always the doubt as she struggled to reach that special place that, this time, she might not reach it and she would be left with a hollow sense of defeat and disappointment. She would be left aching and miserable instead of gaining the sense of fulfillment and peace she needed.

  But then that was part of the appeal, the realization that it was a gift that was only dispensed when everything came together in just the right way. It couldn’t be taken for granted.

  As if he sensed that she was teetering on the brink and could fall either way, he cupped one of her breasts and sucked the nipple into his mouth, pulling on it in just the right way to produce an electric current along her nerve endings. Sensation arrowed downward through her belly and her womb contracted. It set off the avalanche of glory she’d been struggling to capture and Carly sucked in a sharp breath, going rigid for a moment as every muscle in her body seemed to contract at the same time. A shudder traveled through her when the contraction eased and she sucked in another harsh breath.

  “Daniel! Oh god! Oh my god!” she gasped as the contractions reached a peak that snatched her breath away, curling her arms tightly around the man above her to anchor herself to the world as she was swept away on the glorious rapture of her climax.

  But of course, her arms were empty. The sense that she was holding the weight and warmth and flesh other than her own began to vanish as quickly as her climax dissipated. By the time she’d reached the lower plateau once more and her body began to cool the illusion had vanished.

  “Sim off,” she whispered, even though the command was completely unnecessary. She’d achieved orgasm. The computer would have registered that because she could never keep quiet enough to fool the damned computer.

  Carly allowed her arms to drop to the bed at her sides, struggling to close her mind to the emptiness around her and hug the illusion to herself just a little longer. A shiver raked through her as the heat left her. Feeling sluggish, she struggled to find her coverlet and pull it across her.

  “He isn’t gone,” she muttered to herself. “He was never there at all.”

  Rolling on to her side, Carly squeezed her eyes closed, trying to force her mind to empty itself so that she could find the rest she’d sought when she got into bed.

  She was too tense—not still, but rather again. Disappointment gathered at the fringes of her mind as it so often did these days … afterward. She struggled with the urge that struck her and finally yielded to it. “Trude … who is Sim Daniel 378251?”

  She didn’t know why she’d given her Home Entertainment and Surveillance System—HESS—a name at all, let alone the one she’d settled on—Trude the Prude—but the computer had assimilated the reference to it and responded immediately. “Sim Daniel 378251 is a sexual simulation, Carly.”

  Irritation flickered through Carly. “But it’s based on a real person, right?”

  “Unknown. There is a high probability that the Sim is a hybrid.”

  “What do you mean by that? You can’t simulate human behavior without a human.”

  “That is correct. However, the central entertainment center has catalogued human behavior and characteristics. It is most likely that Sim Daniel 378251 is a sim created specifically for you, based upon your personal preferences.”

  Carly’s disappointment was disproportionate for the situation. She was certain of it. Trude was liable to recommend a psyche evaluation if she pursued it. She debated with herself briefly. “Just out of curiosity … I would like for you to assimilate the data associated with Sim Daniel 378251 and give me a list of the humans who contributed to the Sim.”

  The computer didn’t respond. Uneasiness trickled through Carly. “The purpose of the report?”

  Carly’s heart skipped a beat but frustration was hard on the heels of her anxiety. “Curiosity,” she said, struggling to keep any inflection from her voice, “like I said.”

  “When would you like the report?”

  Carly resisted the urge to demand it immediately. Instead, she faked a yawn. “It’s late, Trude. Won’t it be easier to access the data during low demand hours?”

  “Affirmative, Carly. However, everyone does not share your sleep cycle. Minimal output demand hours are between 0400 and 0500.”

  Disappointment bit deeply, but Carly managed to keep her heart rate from reflecting that and the surge of excitement that followed. “Well—I guess you could give me the report with my coffee in the morning?”

  “If the data is available and I’m allowed to compile the report, I will give it to you then.”

  Why wouldn’t it be available? Why would there be a problem accessing the information if the central system had it?

  Carly decided not to ask. The yawn that time wasn’t faked. “Good night, Trude.”

  “Good night, Carly.”

  * * * *

  The dream was always different and yet there was one aspect that remained the same—HE was always there. Well two. The dream always started with Daniel making love to her, but the focus wasn’t on the sex act itself. It was the way she felt afterwards, when she was wrapped in the warm afterglow of a satisfying climax and wrapped in Daniel’s arms while the two of them struggled to catch their breath and waited for their heart rate to slow.

  Daniel dragged in a final, deep breath, and released it gustily against her throat, following with a gnawing kiss along her neck. The warmth of his breath and the faint abrasion of his teeth raised an army of pebbled flesh that traveled upwards along her neck and made the hair on her head prickle, downward along her arm, and across her chest so that her nipple puckered and stood erect. He chuckled. She liked the sound of his chuckle and felt herself smiling.

  “What’s this?” he murmured, finding the hard nub with his palm and kneading her breast. “Woman, you’re insatiable.”

  Carly chuckled. “Erectile tissue. I’m completely satisfied so don’t get your hopes up.”

  He humped her thigh with his hips and she felt his flaccid cock stir to life. “You sure?”

  “Positive. Put that away. I’m hungry.”

  “Well … if you’re hungry ….”

  “Not for that! Food!” Carly responded with a laugh.

  He rolled off of her with a s
how of reluctance and a theatrical sigh. “Alright. I know when I’m not wanted. Guess I’ll go.”

  Dismay instantly filled her. “Don’t! Aren’t you hungry?”

  This time his sigh wasn’t feigned. It was filled with … regret? “I don’t need food.”

  There was an edge to his voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to go.”

  “Daniel?” She couldn’t help the note of pleading that entered her voice even though she knew it would probably only make him more anxious to leave. “Stay. We’ll do something together.”

  “Like what?”

  The anger was more pronounced now. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  “I want my life back!”

  * * * *

  Carly woke with a sense of falling and an allover jerk.

  “My sensors indicate that you were dreaming.”

  Carly opened her eyes when Trude’s voice intruded. Her eyes burned, though, felt as if they were full of grit, and she closed them again, tightly, to ease the sting. “What time is it?” she asked, pushing herself upright and turning her head toward the window to try to discern from the light what time of day it was, never an easy task on the moon colony when the sunrise and sunset was nothing like Earth.

  “The time is 0700.”

  The information sent a jolt through Carly. Her eyelids flew open. “Seven?” she echoed with a mixture of dismay and dawning anger, scrambling out of bed. “Why didn’t you wake me up! Damn it! I’m going to be late.”

  Never at her best when she was woken abruptly, Carly wavered once she was on her feet, trying to find her equilibrium, and then staggered a little drunkenly toward her bath.

  “Take care! You are not sufficiently awake. Your motor functions are sluggish. Did you imbibe anything with an alcoholic content last evening?”

  “No,” Carly said crossly as she reached the bathroom door and it slid open. “You woke me out of a sound sleep and I’m not awake enough yet to have any coordination.”

  “I did not wake you,” the computer reminded her.

  “Exactly!” Carly snapped. “You should have woken me thirty minutes ago!”

  Her argument wasn’t reasonable, she knew, and she didn’t give a shit. Stepping inside the tiny room, she hit the door close mechanism and cut Trude off in the middle of a query as to her mental state. “Bitch!” she muttered.

  The bathroom was her inner sanctum. She’d insisted on having it completely mechanical and excluding the computer’s intrusion in this one area of her apartment. She knew the tech and workmen she’d hired to block the computer from access to the bathroom had thought she needed a psyche evaluation, but she didn’t care! She had to have one space, one little place, where she felt like she had complete control and complete privacy. She’d responded to their suggestion that she needed some way to access the computer in case of emergency—if she collapsed for any reason or slipped and fell—by allowing them to install several emergency call buttons. She’d also had her computer programmed to allow her no more than thirty minutes outside its sensor range. If she exceeded that limit, the computer could override and scan the bathroom for evidence of an emergency.

  Turning the shower on, she peeled her night shirt off and stepped in as soon as the water was tepid. A shiver skated through her and every inch of skin prickled when the cool water hit her far warmer skin, but her muscles relaxed as the water reached the desired temperature.

  Two minutes into the shower, her brain began to function more normally and she dismissed the rambling of her mind, which had been sorting images from her dream as uneasiness filtered through her.

  Trude was suspicious. That was what was ‘off’ about the computer’s questions and unsolicited comments!

  It took her a few minutes to figure out what the computer might be suspicious of.

  It was the dream!

  Thankfully, they hadn’t fucking figured out yet how to program the computer to read her mind! Nevertheless, the computer knew enough about human psychology and physiology to determine when a person was dreaming and ‘guess’ at what sort of dream it was. She’d been dreaming Daniel was making love to her, she recalled. That would’ve raised her heart rate and she didn’t doubt the computer had figured out she was having an erotic dream.

  Then she’d ‘argued’ with Daniel and he’d left. No doubt the sensors had picked up the distress, as well.

  “Damn it!” What were the chances, she wondered, that Trude hadn’t figured out the dream was about Daniel—or what the computer might construe as her obsession?

  She had a bad feeling that Trude had a very good idea of the focus of the dream even if she had no way of knowing exactly what the dream was about.

  The shower shut off and Carly cursed again. She’d been too wrapped up in figuring out whether or not there was any danger to actually bathe and she’d used up her shower quota! Telling herself to look on the bright side—at least she hadn’t soaped herself up and wouldn’t be left with a film of soap!—she got out and finished her morning ritual.

  It wasn’t until she’d finished and headed to the door that the real source of her distress hit her.

  Daniel had said he wanted his life back! He’d been angry, but she’d sensed other emotions, too—frustration, sorrow.

  What would make her dream that?

  Chapter Two

  Carly’s focus was off during her entire work shift. She hadn’t dared asked the computer to produce the report she’d asked for the night before when she realized Trude was already suspicious of her behavior. Instead, she’d pretended she’d forgotten all about it and rushed through preparing herself for work and then rushed to the job.

  Unfortunately, she was distracted enough with her thoughts that she had a bad feeling her performance had raised more alarms. Despite that uneasiness, the debate of whether or not to find her friend, Brenda, when it came time for her lunch break was a brief one.

  “Hey! I’m taking my lunch break. Want to join me?” she said by way of greeting when she found Brenda at her console where her friend monitored the trawlers harvesting the helium three from the moon dust. “I need to talk,” she added in Arapaho.

  Brenda had turned to look at her with a smile of greeting. At that last, her smile stiffened slightly, but she merely nodded. “I’ll catch up with you in about …,” she glanced at her console to check the time, “fifteen minutes. Can you grab me something from the cafeteria while you’re there?”

  Carly grinned. “Lazy! What do you want?”

  “Whatever you get. It always looks better than what I get,” Brenda responded with a grin.

  “I know what you mean. No matter what I get, whatever you picked always looks better.”

  It occurred to her forcefully that the request might just be another nail in her coffin, so to speak, yet one more deviation from ‘normal’ behavior that the computer would make a note of, but a sense of defiance welled inside her. She didn’t care!

  Well, she did. She just didn’t care enough, at the moment, to worry too much about it.

  She was almost due for another psyche-eval anyway, she reflected. Anyone stationed on the moon base facility was required to have a quarterly evaluation even though conditions on the base had improved dramatically since the facility had been opened over a decade earlier. Then—for the first four or five years, actually—there’d been a legitimate reason to require the careful monitoring of everyone’s mental health. The conditions had been atrocious. The facility had been barely adequate to sustain human life and there’d been nothing else on the moon—no place to go to relax and feel as if they were ‘at home’. No one had been allowed to stay on base more than six months without at least a month on surface (back on Earth) as a break.

  Because half of the first crew to inhabit the station had ‘cracked’ from the isolation and the harsh conditions.

  Carly pushed those thoughts aside as she joined a ‘herd’ of other workers heading toward the cafeteria. Fortunately, the breaks were
staggered so that there was never very much of a wait to get food, because they were only allowed a thirty minute break and nobody wanted to spend half of that waiting in line just to get the damned food! Of course, when she decided to eat with Brenda in their ‘special’ place, she never had more than fifteen minutes anyway, but it was worth it.

  Brenda had found one of the few places on the entire moon colony where they could relax and talk freely without being under the watchful eye of the central computer system.

  Carly had never figured out how Brenda had managed to find it. She hadn’t wanted to infringe on their friendship by asking, but she suspected that Brenda had ‘rebel’ connections, a shadowy group of people that distrusted ‘the system’ and electronic surveillance even while they used technology to outwit technology.