Tahiti, outsidesuburbia.com
By evening we were back at the hotel, the four of us, eating, socializing if you could call it that, the women in command of our thoughts and talk. We enjoyed a delicious meal of tropical fish and just as exotic drinks, listening to polynessian music and now and then dancing. We retired into our two rooms early as this was where our female partners held complete sway. I’m pretty sure they just sent us to bed with the blink of an eye, tucking us in and putting us to sleep with a kiss, then spending half the night on the balcony overlooking Papeete, holding hands and making plans for their bright, dominant future.
I awoke in the morning before Claire, and I knew I was right. She’d been up late into the night. I left the hotel and wandered the streets getting breakfast at a small cafe, wandering with no purpose, no volition, like a dead soul, an empty human being. Then they found me, the three of them around noon, like an escaped prisoner and I was again a lackey tethered to Claire’s will.
But a surprising thing happened on the way to the hotel. There was a small, outdoor, patio bistro only a few doors down from it. We sat there for brunch, the other three not having eaten yet in their search for me. While they were polishing off their sandwiches, an unusual looking American came walking down the street, stepped onto the deck and ordered a tall drink, sitting some four tables away from us. He was in a state of mild agitation, and he caught almost everyone’s attention. His eyes were blinking and his hands were quivering, which he tried to conceal by rubbing them together in his lap. He was wearing a suit, inappropriate for this weather, which only made him stand out all the more.
“I know that man” Jaime blurted out to us in a muffled voice, “that’s Bob.”
Claire instantly pricked her ears. “Your right” she said. “Samantha you know the routine. It’s time for action. Come with me.”
Samantha and Claire rose from our table, Claire saying: “Jaime take my seat, so your back’s toward him. He might recognize you.”
Jaime did as he was told. But I had a perfect view of the scene and what a sight it was.
Claire walked out the nearest entrance to the deck and around to the far one taking a seat at an empty table directly behind him, her head practically back to back with his. He didn’t notice this or much of anything for that matter. She ordered a drink from the waiter.
Bob’s drink came first, and he was now quaffing it and at the same time fumbling with a small metal pillbox from his pocket. He finally got it open on the table and took out a white pill which he immediately swallowed. It seemed to calm him down after a few seconds. He looked around as if to acquaint himself with his surroundings. This is where Samantha moved in. She had gone straight toward him and sat alone at the tiny round table next to his and ordered herself a tall drink. When it came, she took her first sip then turned to him and said: “You’re an American, I can tell. How long have you been here?”
It was hardly seconds before she was sitting at his table, leaning her head forwards towards his and even though I was ten feet away I could hear the mental, telepathic shout of joy between the two women: “He dosed himself.”
Now I could see how they operated in perfect synchronicity. Samantha engaged him in trivial conversation, distracting him but her hand always creeping ever closer to his, like a snake. Claire, invisible to him, leaned back on her chair. The backs of their heads must have been only four inches apart, and I knew by now she was hard at work with her new found powers of mind control. In the next instant, I saw him clutch at Samantha’s hand with a jerk, one of his eyelids blinking and his lip quivering. A moment later she’d laid out a large bill on the table, smiled at the waiter and was leading him away by the hand, both their drinks only half finished.
Claire followed ten paces behind, but he never looked back. He was in Samantha’s grip now. They walked into the lobby of the Mandarin. I followed, pulling Jaime in tow some thirty paces behind. When I got there, Samantha and Bob were at the front desk, and as Bob turned away, I could see he had a key in his hand.
They walked up the staircase, still hand in hand, Claire right behind them. I left Jaime in the lobby on a couch and followed this curious procession up the stairs. At door twenty-nine Bob turned the key and they went in. A few seconds later Claire entered the room, not noticing me at the top of the stairs down the long hallway. I approached the closed door but waited outside, my mind racing with all kinds of crazy possibilities. I was reluctant to bust in and see what was going on but at the same time I had to find out.
Then I thought of Jaime in the lobby. Five minutes had already passed, but I decided that when I was going to bolt into that room, I would drag him in too to witness the ugly truth. So I ran downstairs, grabbed him and was at the door again. We burst inside to the most disturbing sight. Bob was sitting on a couch in the middle of the room. Samantha was right next to him, holding him, her other hand around the back of his neck and starring him straight in the face inches away. Claire was on the other side of him and just as close, her lips almost touching his ear. He was frozen, motionless, Samantha pinning him there, his blank eyes staring straight into hers and I could tell that Claire, as I’m sure she had done to me on some occasions, was sucking volumes of information straight out of his brain.
I rushed towards them, but Claire saw me coming and stopped me with the gesture of silence, her finger to her lips. I realized right away that what she was doing was valuable, or maybe it wasn’t my thought, perhaps it was hers in my head. But it stopped me either way. I crouched down in front of the couch to watch the operation proceed.
It must have gone on a full hour. I noticed as time passed that my mind cleared, as Claire’s was so busy with the task at hand. I could sense quite strongly a sort of inebriation in her pretty head; she was taking in so much information that all of her thousands of processors were overwhelmed. Finally, the two women stood up, leaving Bob in a catatonic state slumped on the couch. But my head was perfectly lucid, and I wasn’t going to let them get away with this.
“Claire what did you do to him?” I asked angrily.
“Only what he did to me three months ago. I’m not killing him, but when he wakes up, he’s going to have all the information I just copied burst upon his waking mind, ten thousand screens all at once, in screaming vividness and feel the pulsing migraines he gave me before I could bottle it up after five days. But maybe he won’t be able to bottle it up. Then he’ll go insane.”
“How can you expect me to love you when I see you do a deed like this. We’re through Claire unless you fix him. You’ll soon be chasing me around the world like a woman looking for her lost dog, and when I put a dozen steps between us, you can’t control me. You’re both distance retarded. And you Samantha, look at Jaime sitting on the bed in the same catatonic state. Nice work, two zombies. You’re a real prize of a girlfriend, with a real catch of a boyfriend. Where are you spending your honeymoon, In some dungeon? I hate you.”
Samantha took two steps away, positively scared at the truth of my outburst. But Claire grasped my arm plaintively.
“I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it Roland, but I do have to put him out of commission for a day or two.”
“How’s that” I asked.
“Because he has a lab here Roland. This is the greatest unexpected boon we could ever imagine. He was going to produce chips here. All the equipment was flown in and supplies too, all the components to make countless wafers. And I know everything. I read his entire mind, how to make them, where his lab is, who’s there and when and where he gets all his supplies.”
“And they have no security. We can steal it all tonight with two trucks and sneak the entire project to Mr. Tanaki’s island and be in production within weeks. When he wakes, he won’t have a clue or even a thought to follow up on. Rolland, we have to do this for the good of mankind. You said it yourself; we can’t let this fall into greedy hands. And you chose Mr. Tanaki as a good man, so if we give it to him, we’re doing the right thing.”
She did make sense in her Gorgon-like way.
“And you have a valid point with Samantha and me, Roland. Samantha, please help Jaime out, wake him up. We need him right now more than ever. I’ll handle Bob.”
Samantha went over and sat beside Jaime and put her hand on the back of his neck just like she’d been doing to Bob. Claire once again put her face close to Bob, a scene that was unsettling to me, and was completely motionless for five minutes, after which she laid him down on the couch with a pillow. Jaime on the bed looked like he was just waking up, yawning and stretching his arms. He hadn’t seen a thing. Samantha didn’t want him to, and now he was asking where he was. But he did suddenly recognize Bob on the couch, and a dozen questions came out of him in a flurry.
Claire said: “I’ll tell you everything later but we have urgent work to be done. Jaime, you’re going to get your lab back. Rolland, we have got to find Higgins right away.”
The four of us left Bob sound asleep and closed the door to the room. We knew where Higgins was staying in town. He wasn’t at his apartment, but the landlady told us which bar to look into down by the boats. We found him there, sitting with friends smoking his pipe and managed to pull him aside and tell him our urgent business.
Claire began, laying out the whole scheme which she’d already plotted out in her head in every detail. I noticed how devious she was. She had no mind control over him so she used her sex appeal, standing on her tiptoes to be face to face, placing one hand on his shoulder then moving her lips close to his ear, almost whispering.
“We need to rent two trucks right away. We have plenty of money. I saw the lab and the five of us can easily load up all the equipment and files in an hour. It’s Sunday, and no one is there. It’s in a secluded location in the hills a half hour from here. I know the way. The only thing between us and what we need is a deadbolt, and I just happen to have borrowed the key to it from Bob.”
“But that’s stealing!” He exclaimed, almost too loudly, as we were still in the bar.
Claire went to work on him some more, all of us by our nods in total agreement.
“What we’re doing is for the benefit of everyone. These people are evil, and I wouldn’t know so much about them if I wasn’t a victim of what this lab can do, in the wrong hands. There’s a lot to explain here it’s just we don’t have the time. But I promise you we’ll tell you everything when it’s done. Mr. Tanaki, your employer, brought us here on just this mission and he’ll reward you beyond your dreams if you help us. You won’t be piloting the ‘Gitgo’ in a few months; you’ll be owning one just like it.”
“But if you don’t want to help us, I understand. We can rent the trucks and another launch. It’s just that time is of the essence, and we could use a fifth hand. We need a skipper. Are you in?”
He paused for a moment in thought, lowering his pipe from his lip.
“Well, I guess I’m in. I do owe Mr. Tanaki a lot, and if we do get caught, I suppose he can get me out of a fix with the authorities, as he’s done many times before.”
Claire stretched even more on her toes to hug him and off we went. In an hour we were driving the two trucks up a winding and deserted mountain road through the lush, tropical jungle. At the end of it sat a small mansion of sorts, square, well built, with iron bars on all the windows and open storm shutters made of some hardwood. We entered the front door with the key. No one was in the house. Then Claire opened another locked door with another key, and we were in a small lab, some thirty feet long. Jaime recognized much of the equipment and was amazed at the miniaturized versions of his own lab gear. There were three computer booths with brand new computers straight out of the box, so these were operational, no EMP blast touching them and never plugged into the internet to fall to Claire’s malware. The rest of the apparatus was also new and fully functional.
Claire pointed at this and that for us to pack up. We all sped to work, loading the trucks under her directions. I noticed that she ran straight to a large safe in one corner of the room and was spinning the tumblers, opening it in no time. Inside were binders, some twenty of them full of stiff pages with rows of plastic sleeves, like those postage stamp dealers used to arrange and sell stamps, but in these sleeves were wafers in various stages of development, fifty wafers to each side of a leaf and fifty leaves in each binder. She boxed them up carefully while we emptied the room of pretty much everything, closed the doors and drove on down the hill to our launch, which we loaded with our cargo and then returned the trucks.
We fueled up and set out to sea by evening.
Mr. Tanaki was overwhelmed when we ran up the hill and told him what a treasure we’d brought back. He ran back down alongside us, instructing aides to collect all his staff at the dock, waking them up if need be. While some unloaded the boat others began the trek up the hill with full arms, to one half-empty warehouse near the mansion. There were no vehicles to his enclave beside a few golf carts, as there were no roads, only pebble paths immaculately maintained.
The two boxes of binders Claire and Samantha handled personally, following Mr. Tanaki to his safe in the office. He was awestruck again, all three were, as they turned the full pages over, the wafers sparkling back at them like so many diamonds. They could barely fit all the binders in the safe, but they did, taking all his other papers out, insignificant now and stuffed in a drawer. He shared with both of them the combination as he closed the door.
That night as I lay in bed with Claire my head was crystal clear, as cloudless as the starry sky I had gazed at from the boat a few hours before. Claire was motionless beside me, staring straight up at nothing, eyes wide open, saying nothing, perhaps incapable of speech as her mind raced with so many thoughts and possibilities. For the first time in two months I had to put myself to sleep with my own thoughts. It was a pleasant affair. I wondered if Jaime was enjoying the same freedom.
