Specimen

She snickers and rolls over to snuggle against me.

“We could just stay like this all day.” I know my suggestion is pointless, but I say it anyway.

“I do have work I need to get done.”

I sigh and relax my grip. Riley crawls off the bed and gathers her clothes from the floor while I get myself over to the shower. By the time I’m dressed, she’s already pounding away on the computer.

“The techs are performing some maintenance on the virtual systems,” Riley says. “I need to run home and check on a few things, and then I have a meeting later. Do you want to hang out in the lounge while I’m gone?”

“Sure.”

Now that we have met, Isaac, Pike, and I are able to meet with each other in a lounge near the virtual training centers. It’s a good place to talk about the missions we’ve done and compare tactics. Most of the time, we all agree on what approach to take, but on the few occasions where we disagree, I find their reasoning interesting.

Riley escorts me to the lounge, where Isaac is already sitting at a table, leafing through a manual of some sort. It’s a pointless activity—he could just have the information loaded into his implants, but he says he likes the tactile sensation of the paper.

I drop my ass into the chair beside him, and he pushes the manual away.

“Boring day,” he says. “No training.”

“Me either. The virtual systems are offline.”

“I heard. I was going to go to the gym, but Shweta said she had a meeting to go to.”

“Riley, too.” I reach over and flip the manual so I can see the cover. It has the Mills Conglomerate logo printed on the top corner, and the title is Healthy Today, Brighter Tomorrow. I thumb through a few pages. All the articles are about the benefits of synthetic food sources.

I’ve found Isaac to be a very relaxed guy most of the time. He’s thoughtful and soft-spoken but an animal when threatened. When he talks about Dr. Rahul, he gets a glazed look in his eyes. He says he’s in love with her.

I can’t define how I feel about Riley. Love is too simple a word.

Though I have spent approximately the same amount of time with both Isaac and Pike, I identify more with Isaac. Pike smells too much like Dr. McCall, and I don’t trust her. She has it in for Riley, and despite the adjustments Riley made to keep me from going after Dr. McCall when she says something derogatory about Riley, I still struggle against the desire.

I flip another page of the manual, and there’s a photograph of someone planting seedlings in rough soil. The man in the picture is older and red-faced with sweat on his brow. Many of the seedlings are already turning brown.

They won’t survive.

I blink, the image reminding me of the dream I’d had last night. A vision of my hands pushing tiny seeds into little paper pots fills my head.

“Do you ever dream?” I ask Isaac.

“I guess,” he says with a shrug. “Sometimes I’ll dream about one of the training missions from the virtual center. Usually it’s because I thought of a better way to accomplish the objectives—like my head wants to try it out again.”

It isn’t the kind of dream I want to hear about, but I can only nod. Though I have similar thoughts in my head, I don’t recall actually dreaming about missions. All my dreams are on a much more personal level.

But I can’t tell him that.

The doors open, and Pike strides in.

“I hear they’re getting ready to send us out on a real mission,” Pike says as he takes a seat across from me.

“Oh yeah? Who said that?” Isaac leans back in his chair, making the two front legs rise up in the air.

“Who else do I ever talk to?” Pike says with a laugh. “Helen slipped me the info while I was slipping her the dick.”

Isaac chuckles, but I just roll my eyes. I know the others are just as sexually conditioned as I am, but the very idea of having my dick anywhere near Dr. McCall leaves me feeling a little queasy. How can they talk about missions while they’re fucking?

“Did you get any actual information?” I ask.

“Something about a defector,” Pike says as he shrugs his shoulders. “I was a little preoccupied and didn’t ask for a lot of detail.”