Overclocked by K. S. Augustin Page A

snatched glances at her ex-rival while they worked and could have sworn he was look­ing younger than he did when she first saw him. Maybe it was the fact that her pres­ence con­firmed that only dozens of hours had passed in the real world, not the fif­teen years he thought he’d lived through. She wondered whether
she
, re­gard­less of ap­pear­ance, had also played a factor in his re­verse-age­ing.
    At one point, he caught her watch­ing him.
    “What is it?”
    She glanced over at where Tomek Miller was work­ing. Tom was bent over a far table, cre­at­ing cop­ies of his dazzling code cap­sule. If he wanted to, he could hear their con­ver­sa­tion but seemed too in­tent on his own task. She knew that level of fo­cus well.
    “It’s just…” She shrugged but con­tin­ued watch­ing Carl closely. “You’ve really changed, you know that?”
    An edge of his mouth lif­ted up in a jagged smile. “Yeah, well, I don’t re­com­mend the cure for every­body. Fif­teen years of al­most sol­it­ary con­fine­ment in a uni­verse of data is a slightly ex­treme route to take.”
    “It equates to less than two days in the real world,” she said. “Could be just the kind of ther­apy a lot of wives are after.”
    Carl barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I can see it now.” With his fin­gers, he mimed words flash­ing on an in­vis­ible ban­ner just above head height. “Base­ment Five Mar­riage Guid­ance Centre. ‘We straighten out your hus­band so you don’t have to!’ What are you say­ing? Let’s for­get about this whole cy­ber­space non­sense and lever­age the tech­no­logy to…save re­la­tion­ships?”
    “It’d make us rich.” Her voice was coy. “A lot richer than just banging out soft­ware.”
    “It’d drive most people psychotic.” He sobered sud­denly and walked over to her, grabbing a chair on his way. When he was close enough to speak without Miller eaves­drop­ping, he sank into the chair and edged it closer to her.
    “Do you know what kept me sane dur­ing all these years?” he asked.
    Tania gazed into his blue eyes. “No.”
    “You. It might have taken more than a dec­ade,” he knocked against the side of his skull with a loosely bunched fist, “and I can be a bit dense up here from time to time, but I star­ted think­ing of what was im­port­ant in my life. Mak­ing money? Buy­ing a yacht? Own­ing a New York pent­house? They’re all just out­ward trap­pings, aren’t they?”
    She laughed nervously, un­com­fort­able in the pres­ence of such na­ked hon­esty, es­pe­cially from Carl Orin. “Stop it.”
    He reached for her hand. “But it’s true, isn’t it? I’ve had time to think, Tania, lots of time and I can’t es­cape the con­clu­sion that I’d been a damn fool all those months we worked to­gether.”
    His thumb stroked the skin over her knuckles and it felt so com­fort­ing that she al­most be­lieved him.
    “Who are you,” she asked, pulling her hand away and try­ing to re­gain her men­tal bal­ance, “and what have you done with Carl Orin?”
    He flashed that jagged smile again. “I really did a job on you, didn’t I?”
    “You for­get,” she licked her lips, “only yes­ter­day, you had sex with me then left me blind­folded in bed so you could be the first hu­man in cy­ber­space.”
    She watched the ex­pres­sions flit across his face. Wry­ness. Re­gret. Shame.
    “That was yes­ter­day for you. Fif­teen years ago for me. And, as you can see,” he glanced mean­ing­fully at the other per­son in the room, “we were both wrong about be­ing the first here.”
    That was true. What had seemed so vi­tally, crit­ic­ally, im­port­ant one real-time day ago was…not so im­port­ant now.
    “And you’ve really changed?” she asked. Softly. Hope­fully.
    He lif­ted her hand and placed a del­ic­ate kiss on each knuckle. “What do you think?”
    “Hey,” a voice in­ter­rup­ted them, “do both of