Romancing the Raptor

She closed the box.

No. There was no getting out of it. If she wanted to stay out of the camps she needed of the full dose of pheromone inhibitors to make it through until the heat broke in September.

Chastity walked back to the bedroom. The body was gone. She had stayed in the shower long enough to grow gills so that she could avoid the coroner's pick up team and worry about what the Think Tank wanted with her.

"How many this time, Alex?" Chastity asked, more out of habit than curiosity.

"Three men, one woman."

"Were they upset that the freak show didn't do a meet and greet? No, don't answer that. I already know." Chastity walked to the closet and took out a slick black bodysuit. "Did they steal anything this time?"

"The woman pocketed the pink bra that you left tangled in the sheets." Alex flashed an image of the culprit on the monitor. It was a perfect recreation, down to the overbite and mousy brown hair.

"At least she didn't take my favorite ones," Chastity said with a frown, sliding the bodysuit's zipper up from the swell of her mons to its stopping point at the curve of her neck. She always tried to put away her things before people came in, but she'd been distracted this time. People were always stealing clothes, bras, panties—towels, even. Men got high and would jack off to the smell of the succubus pheromones, women would wear them or rub them all over to try and up their chances of getting a Saturday night hookup. It was like a freaking modern-day Fuck Potion #69.

If it were legal to bottle it and sell it, she would be a millionaire.

"I scanned her ID chip. Want me to cause a little trouble? If not, I should remind you that she was here for the last pick up when your sports bra went missing."

Chastity felt the corners of her lips curl into a soft grin. Brinkley had programmed in adaptive personality subroutines, which Chastity was glad of. Sometimes it was nice to have a friend, electronic or not, who had your back. "Do what you want... Wait! Within limits, though. It was just a couple of bras, not the Mona Lisa."

That was added as more than an afterthought. The last time Chastity had okayed "trouble," Alex had deleted the man's entire financial history, exchanged his identity with a political extremist's, and had him deported.

Sometimes having an electronic friend who could hack through almost anything in milliseconds was nice.

Sometimes it was awesome.

***

Chastity walked through the glass and steel doors of the Think Tank. That wasn't the name on the front of the building though—that was The Deangstrom Research Institute of something something. The last two words were ones that she never seemed to catch.

"May I help you?" the flat-haired receptionist at the welcome desk asked, her tone clearly indicating that that was the last thing she wanted to do. Apparently, there weren't a lot of visitors who came in wearing skin-tight black bodysuits.

"Tom Frye. He's expecting me."

The receptionist—Lana, according to her nametag—eyed her doubtingly. After a few speedy taps on the phone and one eyebrow raised in disbelief, Chastity had a visitor badge and was in the elevator to the 32^nd floor.

The doors slid open with a ding to an office space with a dozen desks and twice as many people going through the routine business of the day. As soon as she stepped through the door, eyes drifted toward her.

It turned into gawking on the third step.

Except for a few.

The few who knew her.

Their eyes rolled away from her as she walked by. They blamed her for what had happened. She could hear it in their silence and in the muttered "ma'ams" from the few who weren't exactly friends, but had always been pleasant when she visited Brinkley.

She increased her pace until she passed the uncomfortable edge of the crowd and reached a mahogany door that seemed out of place with the modern décor that was shellacked everything else in the building.

Chastity started to knock, but the door opened inward before her knuckles could make contact.

It was Tom. A lanky young guy with hair just on the right side of red.

"You've lost weight," Chastity said, unsure of what else to say.

"Chas," he said, giving a nervous brush to through his hair with his hand. "Hope you've been okay. Come on in."

Chastity felt like she'd walked into another building in another decade. The walls were paneled wood, mahogany too by the look of it, and lit with the warm light of real incandescent bulbs.

"You've moved up in the world," she said, sitting down in one of the matching Victorian parlor armchairs that faced the front of the room's massive desk.

"Not my office," Tom sat in the chair beside her.

The next five minutes was filled with the monotonous tick tock of a desk clock.

"So why am I here?" Chastity finally broke the awkward silence. "What do you want?"

"We should wait for Director McMurtey to get back. You're late so he went to get a report from one of the labs."

"Not like I can control traffic, Tom."

"Yeah, the prison thing is causing a mess all over. The entire east end is gridlocked." He turned to look at her. "Look, Chas... I'm sorry. I was pissed off—Brinkley was my best friend. I've had to live with all those things I said for a year now. They weren't right... You were just a convenient excuse. He's the one who did what he did."

Chastity made eye contact and let the bitterness ooze out. It made Tom flinch, if only just a little. "You're sorry. You and this damned agency locked me out of anything that was left of Brinkley's life after the funeral. I couldn't even get my damned clothes from his house. I couldn't take any pictures. I couldn't take anything from the life we had together. I can't even visit him at his grave because you and this damned place had him declared a mad scientist and had him brain boxed."

Chastity turned away from Tom and started taking controlled breaths. It wouldn't do to lose it at this stage; she needed this place, at least until the job was finished and the money for whatever they needed her to do was deposited in her account. Plus, she could feel her pulse rising. She didn't need her autonomic nervous system to kick in and start pumping out sweat when she was in the middle of a building half-full with men.

"I'm afraid you place too much of the blame on our young Mr. Frye, Miss Summers."

The voice came from behind them. She hadn't heard the door open or close, but here was Director McMurtey, standing close enough to touch her and Tom if he wanted to reach out and do it.

"Our Tom did spill an unfortunate amount of verbal vitriol in the past, but the rest—that was me. So if you must place blame, place it here." He sat in his chair behind the massive desk. He was a stout man, former military, Chastity guessed from the way he walked and spoke.

"Fine," she said. "I'll ask again, why am I here?"

"A temporary job. Sensitive in nature." He leaned forward in his chair and interlaced his fingers. "But something else needs to be discussed before we get to that. You seem to be good at self-defense."

"Your name is tagged in our system because of you past relationship with Brinkley," Tom said. "Reports come in anytime your name is mentioned in the public record."

"There was an incident with a Jim Carlton earlier today?" McMurtey asked, making it sound like a question even though it was more a statement of fact.

Chastity folded her arms tight across her chest. "It was cleared by the Judiciary—justifiable homicide. A girl has a right to protect herself if a man tries to strangle her, doesn't she?" The words felt icy on her lips and disingenuous as they crossed over her tongue. She'd planned it out. She knew what he was and she lured him back to her apartment with the intention of killing him. He deserved it a dozen times over for each time he'd twisted those thick fingers around the neck of some unsuspecting woman.

"The public records show that this was the fourth incident of 'self-defense' in two months that ended up with a body being brought out of your apartment," McMurtey said.

"Women with my condition are at high risk for assault and sex crimes," Chastity said.

"I think we all know what it's about," Tom said.

"Oh, you know. Right—you know. You know that I can get raped a dozen times a day and it's not even considered assault because some psycho detonated a dirty biobomb over the city and I had to go and get infected with the retrovirus it sprayed out. You know what it's like to worry about running out of antiperspirant every day. You have to worry about men forming a rapey conga line up to your pussy all night long and it still being your fault because of the way you smell. You sure as hell know a lot."

"Don't be rude, Tom," McMurtey said. "You're the one who suggested we invite Miss Summers, after all." Then to Chastity, "Miss Summers, you'll find no judgment from me about your actions. I've reviewed the files of those four men and they were murders and worse. Each had killed women and the police did nothing because of the current laws. Each of them in turn tried to murder you, so yes, I see your actions as justified."

Chastity gave a small nod in acknowledgement.

"You're a survivor," he continued. "That's a quality I appreciate that in a person. But to survive, you need help."

"I've been doing fine on my own for the past year."

"That can't last much longer, can it. Tauron Pharmaceuticals keeps increasing the price of their pheromone inhibitors. You've been struggling financially. That much is obvious."

"Are you keeping tabs on my bank account too?"

"We can't access those, but we have been following your employment history. There hasn't been a steady one for the past six months. It doesn't take a building full of scientists to predict the eventual outcome."

There was no use in denying it. He was right. She knew he could see it in the deflated slump, slight as it was, in her shoulders.

"You were dealt a bad hand. Life isn't fair. Accept it because there isn't any fixing it. I also know that unless you want to move to one of those godforsaken refugee camps out in the mountains, this place"—he spread out his arms to indicate the room around him—"can keep you safe in civilization a little longer. Unless you can afford to get the pheromone inhibitors someplace else."

She couldn't and he knew. It was too expensive on the open market and odds of finding something on the black market that wasn't snake snake oil laced or rat poison weren't good. Unless she wanted to pack up her life and live the rest of her life in some refabbed, rundown ghost-town gynarchy in the middle of the boondocks, she didn't have any real choice.

"Okay," she said. "What's the job?"

McMurtey took a sip of coffee and gave a smile that showed he knew the outcome of the meeting long in advance.

"One more interview question before we proceed." He leaned back and ran his index finger around the rim of the coffee cup. "What do you know about the nature of Brinkley's experiments?"

Chastity looked at him for long seconds, deliberating on whether she should admit to knowing information that was so far above confidential that it was only documented in one computer in the world, knowing that if she said it there was no turning back.

But, again, there really wasn't any choice.

"Time travel," she said. "Brinkley was building a time machine."

"Very good," McMurtey said. "Shall we escort Miss Summers downstairs and brief her on the assignment."

***

When Chastity stepped into the elevator, she didn't expect that being briefed would include an armed escort down to sublevels so deep beneath ground that she could feel the coolness of the earth bleeding through the facility walls.

The elevator stopped at Sublevel 33. She stepped out into a closed antechamber. McMurtey placed his hand on a scanning pad. It flashed green and a horizontal fissure opened with the grinding sound of titanic metal gears turning.

Chastity had never been here, but she knew what was beyond those doors. It was where Brinkley had spent most of his working hours. Where he had stayed long nights, obsessed with saving her.

Where he had died.

She was finally going to see the time machine he had built to save her.

McMurtey, with Tom close behind, walked through the door. Chastity followed a few steps behind. The time machine was a massive amalgam of metal, flickering buttons, and arcs of lightning leapfrogging through the air between glass tubes and globes. The sense of apprehension that she had about being in the lab—being this close to where Brinkley died—was physical, something in the pit of her stomach lurched, trying it's best to her back to the safety of the elevator.

She kept walking. She had to see it.

The time machine was a massive labyrinth of titanium and circuit boards that had been piecemealed together in some places. Chastity kept following, stepping over humming power couplings and ducking under arcs of electricity leapfrogging through the air between glass spheres and tubes.

Then they were there—at the control panel at the heart of the machine. She had seen Brinkley's schematics and virtual designs, and this was the same as she remembered... except for the one obvious addition that made her stomach churn with bile.

A round glass tube, filled with a clear liquid and topped with a processing core, had been routed into the control panel by thick conduits.

There was a human brain in it.

Chastity didn't have to wonder about whose it was. The inscription on the side was legible from where she stood.

Edward Brinkley

Born December 15, 2091

Brain Boxed September 13, 2018

Chastity walked to it. A latticework of metal filaments and tubes held the brain in place in the center of the cylinder. There was a soft pulsing in the pale ridges, and a hint, though she couldn't be sure, that something was moving deep in the furrows of the sulci.

Beyond grief or anger, Chastity simply asked, "Is it alive?"

"On a cellular level, yes. But not alive in the manner you mean," McMurtey said. He tapped the screen and a stream of diagnostic data began to slide across the curve of the glass. "Our cybernetics division has made great strides the revitalization of dead flesh through nanotechnology. What you see here is merely an organic add-on to a much more complex quantum computer—storage media, if you like. See?" He made a series of motions with his index finger on the glass and a holographic image of nanite activity overlaid Brinkley's brain. Chains of them joined together through every layer of Brinkley's brain. "We've mapped his neural networks in his prefrontal cortex."

"Why... why would you do this? He was brain boxed— the government pamphlets said that he would be kept in cryogenic storage so that his brain could be used to study the mad scientist gene."

"Miss Summers, I'm sure you already guessed the truth. The pronouncement that Brinkley was a mad scientist was... based on his actions, not a genetic evaluation. He destroyed all documentation regarding his work on the time machine and scrubbed the artificial intelligence that controlled it from the memory core. We had to do something to recover the lost data—which we have! The machine is functional again."

He said it as if Brinkley's life had been nothing more than a collection of data to pilfer.

"So you 'misdiagnosed' him so that you could turn what was left into a cyborg zombie brain."

"Not the language I would use, but essentially, yes. You have to understand, Miss Summers, Brinkley was an amazing intellect. We couldn't let that go away. We had to continue his work."

"I understand," her voice was smoldering at the edges. They should have told her. But if they had, would she have come this far? Would she have walked out before the offer was made? "So keep going. I'm not walking out, I want to know what the job is."

"We used the time machine," Tom said. "It worked, but it didn't."

***

The briefing started with Tom going through flip charts diagraming schematics, the importance of photon decay in multidimensional physics, and a dozen other topics that Chastity had no clue about.

"Look, my PhD is in cryptozoology, not this. I don't have a clue about fourth dimensional physics. That was Brinkley's thing, not mine."

Chastity squeezed her note sheets into a wrinkly paper ball.

"It's fifth dimensional physics, and it's important background data." Tom gave a scowl that could crack concrete.

"Just move on to the current situation," McMurtey added from the other side of the table.

"All right," Tom said, the disappointment showed in his limp brows. He clearly wanted to flip through the thick layers of diagrams and algorithms. "Well, if we have to stay simple, I suppose I should say that my team's first attempt at recreating Doctor Brinkley's work was less than successful."

McMurtey said, "Technically, the process worked, but there was an... irregularity in targeting."

"We recreated Brinkley's time travel program," Tom continued. "The virtual simulations were spot on so we decided to do a real-world test. Everything going as planned until something disrupted the targeting system. A rift opened in the city and swallowed a portion of Chamfield Penitentiary. Twenty-three high priority prisoners and portions of seven floors are missing. We need you on the team to recover them before they're eaten." Tom turned his head to McMurtey, "That good, sir?"

"Wait, eaten by what?" Chastity asked, unsure where this was going.

"Our best guess," Tom's voice was cold sober, "is by dinosaurs."

Chastity stood so quickly the chair slid back and banged against the wall. "You're kidding me," her voice was incredulous. "You bungle open a door to sixty-two million years BC and you want me to jump through and laser-blast dinosaurs to save a bunch of convicts? I don't think so."

"Actually, we've estimated the opening is closer to one-hundred and twenty million years in the past," McMurtey said.

"What good am I going to be on that team? You need firepower and muscle. I'm okay with poisoned nail polish and a gun, but you need professionals."

"We have professionals and we don't need you for shooting skills, Agent Summers," McMurtey said in an even voice. "We need you because of your condition. We need you as bait."

***

Tom slipped through the shrinking gap between the elevator doors despite Chastity's irate stabs at the door close button.

"Chas, I know you don't like me and I deserve that, but please listen. McMurtey didn't give you the whole picture."

"Really? He was pretty damned clear to me. Jump into the middle of two-dozen prisoners who haven't seen a cock socket in years, shake my titties, and hope that you and your team stop them before I'm orgied to death—and, oh by the way there are dinosaurs!"

"The team won't—I won't—let anything happen to you. Yes, we need your help to corral any of the targets that may have wandered out, but that's not the only reason. We need you to help evaluate the threat posed by any packs hunting in the search zone."

"You need a paleontologist. Other than what I read in two or three paragraphs in a comparative anatomy textbook, I don't know anything about dinosaurs."

"Paleontologists wouldn't be any help. They dig up fossils and study them in a lab. That's not what we need. You have the practical field experience that we need."

Chastity kept her arms folded tight across her chest and lips tight.

"I know your history, Chas. You had a life before the infection. Brinkley was proud and liked to talk about the things you did. You found and tracked a herd of Bigfoot through the mountains in the northwest for thirty-seven days. You were hunted in the Yucatan jungles by a pack of chupacabras and you survived."