In which I attempt to write a lemon with no nudity, no sexual organs, and...no actual sex. I'm not sure if this belongs in the M section, given those factors, but seeing as it's pretty damn obvious what Zima's program is simulating, I thought it would be best to err on the side of caution.

Overload

For awhile, our lives were a series of high places, as our best missions had been. Rooftops, radio towers, telephone poles. We travelled north out of the city, towards the coast – a different shore than the one we'd walked before – putting as much distance as we could between ourselves and our headquarters. Our old headquarters, I mean. Just to be safe. Even if they couldn't track us, it wasn't wise to hang out in a city crawling with ministry suck-ups, all drooling at the points they'd score turning us in.

Besides, we had better places to be. Zima wanted to do things, so do things we would – we just had to get somewhere where things were done. So we spent the first month mostly on the move, racking up the miles day by day. It wasn't an unpleasant life. We'd cover our ground at night, so as to be less noticeable, then settle somewhere to relax and recharge during the day; soon enough, it became a comfortable routine.

Which was why I was confused, one night, when Zima woke me up early. Stirred from sleep mode by a tug of my ponytail, I blinked my eyes open to a bright sky, the tiger lily sunset still in full bloom. "Zima?" I checked my clock and found that it was only seven PM – too soon to set out for the night. "Zima, what do you want? It's too early to leave."

"I know. We're not leaving yet." As usual, I'd dozed off nestled against him, so when he sat up I came along for the ride. My head sort of spun, still heavy with sleep. "Sorry," he said with a chuckle, pressing a kiss against my cheek. "Don't you remember what today is?"

I looked up at him, haloed in the falling sun. "No."

"It's our anniversary."

I wrinkled my nose. "Anniversary of what?"

"Of being free agents, love. Naturally." He smiled, and it dawned on me that he meant the anniversary of after. Had it really been that long? "One month tonight. Isn't that something worth celebrating?"

"Well, sure," I conceded, as he got up and wandered off down the roof, "but what part of celebrating means we have to get up early?"

I trailed after him to the railing at the edge of the rooftop, just one of so many we'd used as makeshift campsites. This building wasn't especially tall, but it was tall enough; looking out, we could just see a sliver of ocean on the west horizon, glittering orange and gold. Before it sprawled the silhouette of the city – just one of so many cities, nameless, faceless, the same gridlocked streets and blinking warning lights and towers reflecting towers upon slick, shining towers. Familiar, but dry as crepe paper, and with a spell as easily broken. I'd grown tired of cities fast.

But then above it all hung the sunset, just one of so many we'd watched give way to the stars. Sunsets, unlike cities, were beautiful no matter how many we saw. "The part," he said, as I folded my arms over the rail, "where I'm giving you a present."

"What—"

"Well, not just you. It's for both of us, really. But I made it myself, so it won't be a surprise for me."

"You made it?" I scanned him with narrowed eyes, entirely confused as to where this was going. "How? I've been with you every second for the past thirty days, and I haven't seen you make anything."

"Actually, it's more accurate to say I wrote it," he amended, "being as it's a program."

"A program?" I hadn't even known he knew how to write a program. "What does it do?"

He flashed me a grin. "You'll have to see for yourself."

Almost automatically, I answered that with a shake of my head, and a snort of disbelief. Any self-respecting computer would. "You must think I'm an idiot. You really expect me to run a program when I don't know what it does?"

"No, and yes. If I tell you, it won't be a surprise."

"Yeah, well, when it comes to exposing my systems to foreign code," I answered, "which, for all I know, could shut off my vision in one eye or set my default language to Russian or fry my hard drive like takoyaki, I prefer not to be surprised."

"Completely understandable. Except it's not foreign code, it's code I wrote, and I have no reason to want to do any of those things." He slung an arm around my shoulders and squeezed me close to him, burying his face in my hair, nuzzling it aside to kiss my ear. As always, blushing and squirming – and muttering God, can you leave me alone for like five seconds? albeit half-heartedly– only egged him on. "Don't you trust me?"

"It's not about trusting you." Managing to extract myself, I turned from the railing to look up at him, gauge the sincerity in his eyes. I couldn't believe I was even considering this, but—then again, I ended up doing a lot of things I never thought I'd do, when Zima was involved. "What if something went wrong?"

"Nothing's going to go wrong."

Sometimes, I wished I could be as confident as he was, as boundlessly faithful that the universe was on our side. Other times, I just thought he was an idiot. "You don't know that," I insisted, brow knit, lips tight. Why are you even letting this bother you? I scolded myself in my head. Just say no. He'll get over it. "You can't know that, not for sure. Programs glitch all the time."

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "This one won't."

"God, Zima—" I clapped a hand over my eyes and dragged it down my face, drowning in a groan in my fingers. "I don't even—this doesn't make any sense. We already have all the software we need."

"When you give someone a present, you don't give them something they need," he countered. "You give them something they want."

"How can I want it if I don't know what it is?" He headed back down the roof along the railing, a cryptic smile tugging at his lips. "Can you at least tell me what kind of program it is?" I demanded, catching up. "I mean—is it a function, or what?"

A few steps more and he tipped his head to one side, apparently considering that. "Not exactly. It's not so much a utility as it is…an experience."

"Like a game?"

When I asked that, I thought I heard him bite back laughter, the finest shard of a smirk sliding over his face. A second later, it was gone. "It's recreational."

"Recreational." As if that told me anything. "And we're supposed to use it together?"

"Can't use it any other way."

By then, we were back in the center of the rooftop, and it was there that he slowed to a halt. Out of nowhere, he took my face in his hands, tilted my head back and kissed me, until I grabbed a fistful of his sleeve and pushed him away. "If I don't like it," I said seriously, or as seriously as I could with cheeks red as raspberries, "can I shut it off?"

"Negative, ghostrider. Once it starts, we won't be able to stop it; we'll have to let it run its course." I noticed, for the first time, that he wasn't speaking hypothetically. He didn't say if it starts, he said once it starts, and he used the word won't instead of wouldn't. As if it were a foregone conclusion that I'd agree. He just had to tweak his recipe – a pinch more guilt here, a smidge more charm there, a dash of that spine-tingling smile – until he had what he wanted: the perfect cocktail of curiosity and obligation, mixed just so to get a yes out of me. "But you'll like it," he said, fixing me with a very distinctive kind of gaze. "I promise."

For a moment, I was quiet, just looking up at him. Trying to figure out where I'd seen those eyes before. Then it dawned on me – they were his smoldering eyes, his oil-painting eyes, his last-embers-of-a-fire eyes. He was looking at me the way he'd looked at me on the beach, that night when we lay together and watched the stars. He was looking at me the way he looked at me before he'd said come here, and slipped his hand up my shirt, and rubbed my back until I got goosebumps. I didn't know why, but they left me sort of senseless, those eyes.

"Fine. Fine. Let's have it, then."

I opened my hand for a cable, but instead he took it in his own. "Dita, darling, where's your sense of romance? I can't just load it up right here; that would be positively indecent." In lieu of a hatch, this roof had a proper door, set into a little concrete structure presumably housing stairs. Tugging me over to it, Zima sat with his back against the wall and pulled me into his lap, or rather astride it. "Let me do it, okay?"

I cocked my head and let him push back my hair. He opened the panel of my left ear, producing a cord from his; I half-felt, half-heard a soft click, as he plugged himself in. The light in his eyes unfurled, stripes of white sand amid red tides. "You scrambled the file name?" I asked, somewhat incredulously, when my system asked me to approve the install. "Really?"

"I told you, it's a surprise."

Shaking my head, I gave it the go-ahead nevertheless, and felt the code race down the cable from his drive into mine. It actually didn't take very long. No more than a minute, unlike the camo program – unlike the camo program, it slid in gently, liquid where most software was brick. Liquid, too, in that I seemed to swallow it in one smooth shot. If there were distinguishable components, they seeped in before I noticed them.

When the installation had finished, my system poked me again, this time wanting permission to run the program. I got it started and went to unhook his cable, but he caught my wrist an inch away. "You can't use it alone, remember?" he said. "We have to stay connected for it to work."

"Okay, okay. If you say so." The program loaded fast, but…it didn't do anything. Not at first. Not ten seconds in. Not even after twenty seconds, and at thirty I cast him a doubtful glance. "Nothing's happening. What's taking it so long?"

"Be patient, love." He reached out to cup my chin in one hand, drawing me in for another kiss. Or less a kiss than a peck, really, so light it was barely there. "It starts off slow."

Then he kissed me again, and again, longer each time. Longer and deeper, until one dissolved into another, until I'd forgotten entirely about his program – until all I knew was his mouth on mine, melting, mellowing. Opening. I felt almost…invaded, when he kissed me like that, with tongue and teeth instead of just lips. Invaded but also engulfed, embraced, swept away on warm waves; it was strange but also sweet, and every second undid me further. The longer he kissed me, the more I wished he'd never stop. Like alcohol, like cigarettes, like all of those human vices I'd heard were too good to get enough of, it was addictive.

His hands slid from my face over my shoulders, his arms wrapping themselves around me, his fingers stroking the nape of my neck. I carded my hands into his hair. Drunk off of his kissing, off the smell of his coat and his skin – that and a new smell, one that had moved in since we'd escaped, the smell of sun and wind and city grit – it took me awhile to realize something had changed.

"It's warm," I mumbled against his lips, blinking the haze from my eyes, a puzzled frown nicking my brow. "Too warm. Does it feel warm to you?"

"A little." A grin tugged at one corner of his mouth. "Don't stop."

Before I could ask what he meant by that – don't stop what? I wasn't doing anything – I realized that the whole time he'd been kissing me, I'd been kissing him back.

So I didn't stop, and neither did the weird feelings. They only got worse, or—better? I wasn't sure. Just when I had begun to wonder if my heat sensors were glitching – when I had begun to feel I might, at any moment, start giving off steam – the flutters kicked up under my skin. Not just flutters, but tingles, and not just inside but outside. Flickering like sparklers, or butterfly wings. Suddenly they were everywhere, all at once, first faint, first soft, then gradually growing more present, more definitely, alarmingly there. They made themselves impossible to ignore. Little whispers of sensation crawled from my toes up my legs, into my stomach, my chest, my mouth pressed against his. Like he was touching me, with just the tips of his fingers, but—his hands never moved.

I heard myself make a noise like a short, sharp exhale, less through my mouth than my nose. Couldn't focus on kissing anymore. I locked my arms around his neck and tightened my legs around his hips, pushing my face into his shoulder, shuddering. "Jesus."

When he answered, his voice had thickened just slightly, gone a little woozy. At that point, I still had the presence of processor to enjoy the fact that, whatever he'd told his program to do to me, it was doing it to him, too. "It gets better."

As the stirrings strengthened – grew from flutters into ripples, from ripples into waves – they began to shift in nature, subtly at first. More so than before, they felt—good. Really good. And I didn't know how, exactly, but I did know why: my pleasure sensors, tricked by his program, were going nuts. Transmitting surge after surge of enormously positive input, in response to a stimulus that wasn't there. I couldn't have described it if I'd tried to, couldn't have said it was like this or like that; it wasn't like anything. It just was.

The pleasure rolled through me molten-hot, bursting every dam, splashing through every seam. I shivered, shut my eyes. Just tried to manage, to maintain—to stop thinking so much, because it wasn't helping. Zima hadn't moved an inch. He just sat still, his head against the brick wall, his arms around me, radiating a blissful calm. He could deal with it, flow with it, but I couldn't; I had to work to keep from fighting it at every turn. And when it came to me, out of the blue, that I'd dreamed this feeling before I felt it – I can't hold it in, whatever it is – I had to work to push the thought away. You woke up before it was over, a voice kept hissing in my head. What happened? How did it end?

Because…it had to end, didn't it? Sooner or later. It couldn't go on like this indefinitely, mounting, swelling, spreading every second. Or maybe it could, but I couldn't. "Zima," I gasped into his coat, and undignified as it was, there was nothing I could call it but a gasp, "when does it stop?"

"Mm." I cracked a lid to glance at him. He wasn't smiling, not really, but he looked immensely – and serenely – happy, whereas I was fairly sure I just looked frustrated. "Don't know."

"You don't know?" I meant to sound angrier than I did, but it was hard, feeling so good. Broken as my voice was, it was a small victory I could speak at all. "Nnh—swear to God—d-didn't you test it first?"

"Couldn't. Can't use it alone." For a split second he did smile, opening one eye to look at me. "Would you rather I'd found—some random 'com—to test it with?"

I felt a flush, until then brewing under my skin, surface in splotches on my cheeks. It didn't make sense – it's just a program, a lie he's telling my systems, same as fooling my heat sensors into thinking it's cold – but for some reason, beyond the holding and the kissing, this whole thing felt intensely intimate. "I just—" I fisted a hand into his collar, losing the words to a hoarse, halting sigh. Almost a moan. "I can't—"

"Relax." He spoke without stammering, without choking on twitchy spurts of sound. Just…more deliberately, in shorter bursts. "It'll stop when you're ready. You'll know."

I closed my eyes and burrowed into him. More like rocked against him, actually, on a current that jerked me like a marionette. It was faster now, fiercer, each climb and crash like a real, physical force – ordinarily my sensors would've rebelled, shut down in the face of any stimulus that strong, but his program must've disabled that. I couldn't disconnect. Couldn't do anything but ride it out, trembling, panting for breath to fill the lungs I didn't have. To whatever end, his program carried with it a connotation of humanity, the phantom handprints of living flesh; I swore I felt sweat between my shoulder blades.

I didn't know how long it was that we sat there, twined together, glowing with sensory overload. Time seemed to crumble and disappear. My sensors called it pleasure, this thing about to break me in two, but there came a point when it was more – when pleasure was too weak a word, for a sensation so strong. I could feel the static crackle between us. The electricity snapping, swirling, like it used to when I was closing in on a hacker. I wasn't lucid enough to make the connection, then, but later I would find myself dwelling on that: how alike they were, the attack programs I'd deleted and the program we ran that night. Both about chasing. Hunting. Striving for the kill, that elusive end, that last moment hurtling through cyberspace like a coaster car flung from its track. Both about knowing, in a rush just knowing, this is it.

Maybe I said his name, when the crest came. Said it, gasped it, cried it into his coat. More likely, it was buried in a flurry of curses, and less-than-respectful invocations of a long string of deities.

It was like nothing I'd ever felt. Nothing I could hope to give a name. There were no words at all for it, no adjectives, no metaphors; it just was and then it wasn't anymore. I felt it as it dripped and drained, gently, slowly. I felt the relief, the satisfaction, both immense – I felt my body go limp and my grip loosen, no doubt leaving dents in his coat. Other than that, neither of us moved.

"So," Zima said once a minute had passed. "Was it good for you?"

"What?"

"Never mind." He chuckled and squeezed my shoulders, planting a kiss in my hair. "What I meant to say," he murmured into my ear, "was I was right, wasn't I? You liked it."

There were a lot of things I could've said, I guess. Things I would've said, had that situation been even remotely like any I'd been in before. I could have protested, tried to deny it; I could have picked up chewing him out for running software without testing it. I could have told him about the dream I'd had, and about how it was like his program, and demanded he explain why. But for what might've been the first time in my life, I was content to just…be.

"Yeah."

There was something about the aftermath of it all, that numbed my instinct to overthink. That made me just want to be still. Night had fallen, somewhere along the line, and a blanket of cool air cloaked the roof; the wind stirred thick with city-smells, asphalt, smoke. Stars twinkled in the pockets between clouds. And the moon, new that night, hung in the sky like the rind of a white fruit.

Still, there was only so long we could sit there, before reality set in. It would have been nice to spend the night in his arms, dizzy, dreamy, drenched in the scent of leather and salt from the distant sea – but we couldn't afford to get lazy yet. "It's getting late," I sighed at last, lifting my head to look at him. "We should go."

"Right. Guess that'd be best."

Zima unplugged his cable and we disentangled ourselves, more than a little clumsily. Climbing to his feet, he held out a hand to me, and I took it and pulled myself up—or at least, I tried to. Something got lost in translation. Some impulse must have gone haywire, on its way from my bliss-warped processor to my drowsy legs, because halfway up I found my knees buckling beneath me; he had to catch me before I went down.

"Forgive me for doubting you, love," he said with a knowing grin, "but are you sure you're ready to go? I'd hate to see that happen on the edge of a roof."

"I'm fine." I jerked free of his arms, just to prove it. The second my weight hit both feet, I swayed like a reed in the wind, and felt my face warm as he reached out to steady me. "We have to go," I insisted anyway, my voice as weak as my knees. "Don't we have to go?"

"We don't have to do anything. We're free."

One hand on my shoulder, he steered me back over to the wall, to that patch of brick still brilliant with our energy. He settled back against it and hugged me against him, slid down onto the moon-cooled concrete; I might have mumbled something into his coat, some hollow protest I'd forget a minute later, but I didn't try to pull free of his arms. I didn't have the energy. I didn't have the will. I could try to convince him otherwise, until the sun rose over the sea, but we both knew there was nowhere else I'd rather be.