Reality Bytes Part Two--Free Falling

Just as she was beginning to fear that she was going to be sick to her stomach for real, she came to a sudden, jerking stop. Then everything tilted crazily once again, but this time in a slower, more controlled manner. In a moment, she saw what had happened. Adam had anchored himself to one of the handholds on the floor and reached out to grab hold of her clothing, putting a stop to her end-over-end tumble. "My hero," she said in a poor imitation of a nineteenth-century southern belle. She grabbed hold of his shoulders and drew herself to him, giving him a strange but delightful upside-down kiss. She went to pull away, but he held on and she felt herself relax, melting into total, dreamlike comfort as she floated. He softly withdrew after what seemed like an eternity, so slowly that it was hard to tell when it had actually ended.

Alicia sighed contentedly, then gave him a wicked grin and pulled her body down alongside his, but still upside down. She steadied herself and floated free for a moment, then began to undo the fastenings on his clothing.

"What are you doing?" The question was posed in the slight singsong of mock disapproval.

Alicia tugged down the waistline of his pants. She addressed him in a lecturing tone. "I believe the technical term for it...." She put her tongue at the base of his semi-erect member and drew it slowly up the shaft, eliciting a satisfying shiver from Adam. "...is fellatio, oral sex. Now shut up and pay attention." She exhaled lightly over the end of it, then, deciding best how to proceed, brought her hands in. One she placed at the base of his cock, cupping her fingers around it to use for anchorage. With the other, she gently pulled back the foreskin, exposing the more tender flesh beneath. She had never done this before with her previous boyfriends, and it astonished her that she was doing it now, even if it was virtual. She closed her eyes and took him into her mouth, bringing a surprised but pleasant sound from him. She flicked her tongue once, twice, across the smooth, tender flesh, then tried putting pressure from her lips.

She looked up--down, from her perspective--still holding him in her mouth, to see him watching her. Running her tongue along the ridge beneath it, she watched his eyes glaze for a moment as he murmured something she couldn't quite hear. "Let go of the floor," she told him. "I want to drift." He nodded once, then she felt a barely perceptible movement of what must have been him pushing off with a toe. They spun slowly, lazily around as she explored him with her lips and tongue. He made a disappointed sound when she pulled away.

"You're going to have to help me," she said, using him as a handhold to help turn herself around. His eyebrows were arched questioningly. "To get out of these clothes," she explained.

"All you had to do was ask," he remarked with a wry grin. But then he caught her by the shoulders and drew her to him, the touch of his lips on hers suffusing her with a warm glow. She returned the kiss eagerly, wrapping her arms around him and pressing herself in close to feel him, all of him, against her. She knew that it was all nothing more than synthetic neural impulses being dumped into her brain, but the distinction seemed to have ceased to matter.

She licked her lips as she drew back, nearly panting with excitement and need. "I want to make love to you," she said softly. She kissed the side of his neck, then up across his cheek and back to his waiting mouth. "I want you inside me."

She looked into his deep green eyes that studied her as if seeing her for the first time. "Yes," he said, "yes, Ally." He fumbled at her buttons--he had large hands, strong but gentle hands--finally undoing the last so that he could help pull the strapless dress from her. She unlatched her bra and he released that, too, to drift. His roughened fingers on the smooth, sensitive skin of her bosom felt nice, but...

"No, I need you, right now," she breathed, stopping short his foreplay. Without comment or question, he finished by helping her to take off her panties. She glided up against him, wrapping her legs around him for the necessary leverage. "Um, could you give me a hand?" she asked with a grimace after she bumped clumsily against him. Gravity just made certain actions much simpler to perform. He used the fingers of one hand to lightly explore her, getting the positioning right. Then he used the other hand to guide his waiting member into her, letting her take over as she felt the tip of him slip inside her. Only when he was fully within her, their bodies joined together seamlessly, did she pause long enough to strip the remainder of his clothes from him.

She wrapped her arms around him, as much for the necessity of a handhold as for closeness. With her face close to his, the long blonde hair of her sim floating wildly around her, she began to move her body in rhythm, so that in moments she had Adam panting and moaning. She was panting to, but partly from the exertion of having to hang onto him tightly when her own motions wanted to send her spinning away. She altered the length and direction of her strokes so that she only had to move her hips rather than her whole body. Adam's lips touched hers, so lightly that for a moment she did not recognize that he was kissing her. She slowed in her motions long enough to open her mouth, the tip of her tongue finding his and caressing it in sensuous swirls.

Time seemed to disappear, except that gradually, she was beginning to feel the ache of maintaining her difficult posture and movement. Though it felt good, it was almost a relief as she heard his breathing quicken. He came long and gently, not quick and intense like the first time they had made love. At the end he brought her back to finish with a passionate kiss which she returned fiercely, her heart still fluttering with excitement and exertion. Then they simply embraced, not speaking or moving, floating freely in the center of the dome. Alicia was content to relax into this warm oblivion, safe in the arms of the man who for a little while had become all of the world she could ever want.

"I don't know you, Adam," she said, the words tumbling out of her, "not really, since we've only met here." She felt as if she were merely listening, hearing someone else say them. "But I think I..." She hovered at the edge of the precipice, fearful of saying what was in her heart, of admitting it was real.

She must have hesitated for longer than she realized, because he Adam was peering at her with a concerned expression. "Is something wrong?"

The moment passed. "No." She forced a smile. "I'm fine."

He looked unconvinced, so she smothered his worry with a kiss, and soon he was repaying her across her whole body, until she could almost forget what she had been about to say. He hesitated when his kisses began to reach the insides of her thighs, but she parted her legs readily and stroked his long, silky hair in encouragement.

He proceeded cautiously, but seemed to pick up on her cues quickly, so that in a very short time she was able to close her eyes and surrender herself to the wash of sensation he stirred in her with his hands and mouth. She began to approach climax very quickly, her body still charged from their lovemaking of a few moments before, but as her orgasm grew closer, more inevitable, Adam seemed to change something slightly in what he was doing, so that instead of being pushed over into it quickly, her body balanced on the edge. Her middle felt like a clock spring, winding tighter, tighter, and warmer by the moment as Adam somehow managed to keep her there.

She opened her eyes suddenly, if only because she could no longer bear the grinding anticipation. The earth was a perfect, shimmering pearl of blue and white, its face now completely in daylight. She stared, unable to speak, unable to think, to breathe, even, trapped like a moth being drawn to a candle flame. And then Adam gave her the final nudge with a well-placed flick of his tongue.

Everything froze as Alicia's body reacted, time once again seeming to cease to be. The first clenching of her orgasm tore a ragged cry from her, her voice reverberating through the cold, still quiet of the dome. Colors danced at the edges of her vision as a pulse of pure joy trembled through her body. She could not have said how long it went on, but the lull after lasted only moments before another wave reached her, very nearly as strong as the first. A third orgasm followed closely on the heels of the second, and that one was as strong as her first. As that one faded, she could feel herself sliding towards another and another. She wondered if it would ever stop.

Sudden, cold fear abruptly snapped her out of it, her body's pleasurable responses shutting down at once. Sensing the change, Adam ceased whatever he had been doing to her. She felt oddly relieved that it had stopped. Her fear, which now seemed a little irrational, had been that it wasn't ever going to stop. Adam must have seen something in her face. "Did I do something wrong?" he asked.

Oh, just giving me the most intense sexual experience of my life, she thought to herself ruefully. Still, there was something about it, something about losing her control completely to him, that made her feel wary. "I don't know what happened," she said. Adding, "You were great."

Maybe he picked up some of her apprehension, because he did not try to kiss her or embrace her now. "Maybe I should go," he said quietly.

"I'll ping you," Alicia offered, "I know where to send it." He nodded at that, then disappeared. Alicia looked around at the extravagant sim then, sighing, sent the exit command.

Emerging from VR was not unlike waking from a dream, though the two states had surprisingly little in common. The word, "SAFE" in bright green scrolled across her visor, indicating that the nanofilaments used to stimulate the sensory processing centers of her brain had dissolved completely. The rig lifted easily from her head. As she sat up, she thought she felt a slight ache and fatigue in the muscles of her abdomen, but she forgot about that immediately at seeing a red message light flashing in the corner of her wallscreen. Someone had left her an urgent message. She opened it and read the single line in bold type,"Call me." The sender was Tiffany.

Alicia dialed in the number. At the last moment, she remembered to blank out the visual before Tiffany answered the call. She was still naked from her session in VR.

"Alicia, is that you?" Tiffany asked, her face appearing on the screen, dimly lit from lights in the background. She looked like she had been sleeping.

"Yeah, I got your message. What's going on?"

"I was thinking about part of what we talked about today, at lunch, and...maybe it would be better if I came over. I've been trying to reach you for hours. Your call manager said you've been home but unavailable."

"Hours?" She had been under an hour, maybe, at the most. But then a glance at her clock confirmed it. It was after 10 o'clock at night. She had gone in at half past seven. Had she fallen asleep at some point? "What's going on?"

Tiffany started to speak, then hesitated. "I'll be right over," she said abruptly, then cut the line. Alicia grimaced to herself. Tiffany could have at least have had the decency to ask, to pretend to wonder if she had company.

Alicia put some clothes on and began to fix herself up in the mirror, but the sudden knock on the door interrupted her halfway through. Alicia was surprised to see Tiffany there, who for once must have dropped everything and rushed right over. She bustled her way inside as soon as Alicia opened the door.

Alicia dropped down on her sofa, grunting at a twinge of pain from her stomach muscles. Tiffany sat more slowly into a cushioned chair. "So what's this all about?" Alicia asked.

"Well, like I said, I was thinking about what you said about how the sim became more real, so I ran some discreet searches on the net and I called in a few favors. Before I tell you anything, I need to know what time you went into VR last night."

Alicia picked up her datapad from the coffee table and retrieved the records from the house computer in a few seconds. "8:22 pm until 10:35."

Tiffany nodded, confirming something to herself. "Damn, that's what I was afraid of. Someone hacked into VR Travel's central node last night. There wasn't any damage done to the system, but some files were accessed and a private session was actually breached."

"You mean..." Alicia licked her lips and tried to swallow the hard lump of anxiety in her throat.

"Someone managed to get past both the server's firewalls and the datastream encryption. In other words, somebody was actually able to get into and affect a simulation. I wasn't able to get any names, but the session in question ended at the exact same time yours did. That alone could be coincidence, but here's the real kicker: the files that were stolen were part of a new set of tactile stimulation algorithms, supposedly some of the most realistic yet. They were still in the alpha test phase."

Alicia knew who that "someone" had to be. Adam had hacked through some of the toughest security on the net, stolen experimental sim algorithms, and then used them on her. The unanswered questions were how and why. She felt unexplainably violated, though at the time what she had done had been completely voluntary, or at least seemed that way. She felt her slightly tender muscles over her stomach again, now realizing that those real-seeming orgasms probably had been real. But why would he want to do this to her? What was he really after? "God, I'm scared," she said, clenching her hands to keep them from shaking, "what am I going to do?"

"Stay off the net," Tiffany said at once. "I'll keep searching for info. Probably VR Travel has already turned over its findings to the authorities. With any luck, they'll nail this bastard. If not, I'll do what I can. You're gonna have to promise me you won't go on, though."

Alicia nodded. She thought of the things she had done, the words she had almost said, and was suddenly angry, at Adam for deceiving her and at herself for being so blind. He had given her signs, but she had not heeded them. "Alright, I promise."