Emily was fiddling with her phone. Oleg (choosing to retain the name he had used the day before in case the blonde café waitress lounging in his bed had overheard it) didn’t like having strange hardware in the house, but he couldn’t very well just shag the girl and then throw her phone out of the window. He had modestly covered his strategic parts after they’d fucked, with only his tattooed upper body uncovered by the duvet, while she lay naked on top of the half-made day cover, waving her legs up in the air. These Essex girls. He liked her, though.
Based on what Oleg’s laptop was telling him, something was wrong with the subject. He was getting a lot of activity. At first he thought he might have been having sex, but clearly Oleg had just been projecting. Looking at the feed sent by the beacon, it was clear the subject was in serious distress.
The ground team must have gotten to him.
He detached the keyboard part from his laptop, holding just the screen as a tablet. He walked out of the bedroom into the kitchen of his family-sized AirBnB and opened the fridge. The cold air hit his bare legs and cock. He tapped the tablet screen a few times to open the feeds from the client’s extraction team. He dragged the panes next to each other, looking at all of them all at once.
“Do you want something to drink?”, he yelled, with the ‘r’ catching again.
“Yeah, I’ll have a grape soda!”, Emily replied from the bedroom.
Grape soda? What did she think this was, a Tesco? He grabbed a bottle of champagne. Close enough.
He returned to the bedroom struggling to hold the bottle, two champagne flutes and his detached laptop screen. He threw the screen onto the bed. The gorilla glass was designed for toddler tantrums, it could withstand nearly anything. He turned around, put down the glasses on his dresser and opened the champagne with a pop. He didn’t spend money on much, but good bubbly was always worth the price.
Turning around holding two fizzing glasses, he found Emily lying on her belly, looking at the tablet screen. “What’s this game?”, she asked.
For a moment Oleg panicked.
What would he do now?
Would he have to kill her?
That was ridiculous. He had never hurt anyone. He was a hacker, not a killer.
He decided to play it cool.
“It’s a like a hacking game”, he said, handing her a glass of champagne. “Grape juice.”
“Show me”, she said.
He lied down on the bed next to her. The screen was split into four quadrants, each with green text on them. The top left quadrant was on fire, figuratively speaking, text running rapidly through it, stopping when Oleg held the pane down, springing back to life when he let go. “This is my main character. I think he is under attack.”
“And this one?”, Emily asked.
Oleg looked at the bottom left quadrant. “I think that’s who we need to fight”, he said.
“And what about these two?”
The two rightmost quadrants were not moving. Both screens said, <WAITING FOR INPUT>. Maybe the transmitters were malfunctioning, though that was unlikely. They were older models with attached power sources, they should have been reliable.
Oleg shrugged. “I think these players have exited the game.”
He took the screen from Emily and threw it across the bed. He was off the clock, and this could wait. The extraction team captain seemed to be online and in control of the situation.
He splashed a bit of his champagne on Emily’s lower back and lowered himself to lick off the bubbling puddle before it had time to leak onto the sheets. She shrieked at the surprise of the cold shower, and giggled at the sound of his mouth slurping up the bubbles.
Oleg took the nearly-untouched glass of champagne from Emily’s hand. “Now, did we come here to talk, or did we come here to fuck?”