Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1) by Niall Teasdale (e reader TXT) 📕

Izanami smiled. ‘I can’t wait to see what you get up to.’

‘And stop watching me fuck!’ It was a waste of breath; Izanami was gone. ‘Bloody nosy AIs.’

11th July.

The Hole was as noisy as it ever got. Weekends were not necessarily worse than weekdays because the majority of people in Chiba did not work. You got more tourists in at the weekend as well as a few more locals. Still, things tended to get a little more rowdy on Saturday night, perhaps because it was a symbolic thing: party hard at the weekend.

Tatsu cruised through, ignoring various propositions and offers of drinks, until she arrived on the top floor where, once again, Kobayashi was dancing in a cage. Tonight, the dancer was wearing sky-high platform boots, and nothing else, and she was surrounded by men who were probably in from the west side where the Hispanic street gangs dominated. Tatsu leaned against a wall nearby and watched the dancer do her thing. After a few minutes, a message popped up in Tatsu’s sensorium.

(Sachiko K) Working?

(Tatsu Y) No. I get the odd day off.

(Sachiko K) When you said you’d call, I figured we were done.

(Tatsu Y) Well, I haven’t called. If you’re busy…

(Sachiko K) Only for another twenty-eight minutes and three seconds.

(Tatsu Y) I’ll get ready to beat the Mexicans off you with a stick then.

~~~

‘W-why aren’t w-we d-doing this in oh-my-god-that’s-it your ap-partment?’

Kobayashi had collected a number of sex aids since coming to Chiba. One of them was a dildo with a sort of hook on the end which, when appropriately inserted into one woman, could be used to great effect on another. The dancer was on all fours on her apartment floor. It had taken Tatsu a little time to get the rhythm right, but now that she had, Kobayashi was having trouble breathing and the various bumps on the ‘hook’ were starting to drive Tatsu mad too.

‘Your place,’ Tatsu grunted, ‘has… a cleaner… floor.’

‘P-practical.’

‘I’m… like that. Shut up and come.’ Tatsu’s hands tightened on Kobayashi’s hips as she increased her thrusting speed and the dancer let out a wail which the neighbours had to have heard. Possibly their neighbours too.

When Kobayashi had done as ordered and Tatsu had followed her over the edge and they were lying, still connected by the plastic cock, on the floor, Kobayashi said, ‘You’re good at that.’

‘You’re better,’ Tatsu replied.

‘More practice. If you hadn’t called, or turned up, I’d have let it be. But I really wanted you to call.’

‘I don’t think I’m addictive.’

Kobayashi giggled. ‘I could give it up. Any time.’

‘I thought me being a machine might put you off.’

‘It might have. Then I realised you’re not. A machine. The really important bit is organic, and it’s supplemented by a body that can keep going until I pass out. Human imagination combined with cybernetic endurance is a winning combination. In my opinion. I guess it doesn’t always work for everyone.’

‘It certainly doesn’t.’

‘Their loss. Besides, I think you’re an interesting person. I think you might be an interesting person. I mean, how did you end up like this?’

Tatsu began moving her hips, drawing the long, thick dildo out before sliding it slowly back in again. ‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’

Kobayashi let out a long moan. ‘I can live with that.’

12th July.

‘Spring of twenty-eighty,’ Tatsu began. ‘The Russian Measles pandemic had been over for four or five months and the Cyberwar was in full swing, but it hadn’t come to Japan yet. China was attacking us in the hopes of getting their hands on tech which could help them against Rasputin.’

‘I learned this stuff in history,’ Kobayashi said around a mouthful of cereal. ‘I wasn’t born until November of twenty-eighty.’

‘Huh, I was eighteen.’

‘You don’t look eighteen years older than me. Except, I suppose, you wouldn’t.’

‘I haven’t changed since I got this body. Anyway, no one’s sure whether it was a Russian or Chinese thing, but there was a release of a viral nano-weapon in April of that year. It was contained pretty quickly, but it killed fourteen hundred and thirty-seven people, including my parents and little brother.’

Kobayashi paused her chewing. ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘It was eighteen years ago. There was one survivor, and she was not in a good way. The nanomachines attacked the nervous system, so I was alive, so long as I stayed on a ventilator. They had to restart my heart every other day or something. I survived because it didn’t damage my brain for whatever reason. Well, there was some memory loss. I don’t really remember much from before. There are fragments. They say it may be the result of oxygen deprivation at some point rather than the virus.’

‘That doesn’t sound undamaged.’

‘Well, everything else was working. And it meant I didn’t really mourn my family because I didn’t really remember them. Anyway, the only way I was going to keep surviving was a complete body replacement, but I was now an orphan and my family had never been well-off. The government stepped in. Specifically, Izanami had a project going which needed people willing to go full cyborg. In exchange for some military service, I got a new body. A better, stronger, faster body.’

‘So, um, you fought in the war?’

‘The Chinese stopped attacking in October and I wasn’t ready then. They’d rebuilt me, but there was training. A lot of training. By the time Rasputin started his run on Japan–’

‘Twenty-first of October twenty-eighty-four,’ Kobayashi said with a grin.

‘Right.’ Tatsu returned the grin. ‘By then I was already doing ops for the Ground Defence Force and things just got more intense from there.’

‘How’d you end up a cop? In Chiba, of all places.’

‘When the war wound down because Rasputin stopped caring about