I don't own Frozen.
A kissed Jane awake with gentle pressure at her cheek.
"Morning."
Jane stretched underneath the covers and opened her sleep-sandy lids, A blurry and poofy-haired above her. Jane rolled back over and tugged the covers overhead.
"Is this a ploy to get another kiss?" A asked, dragging the covers down.
"Unh, unh," Jane shook her head.
"You know, princes wake up their true loves with a kiss," A told her, diving back down for a lazy smooch. To be honest, it was a little on the slobbery side for so early in the morning. Jane wind-shield wipered her fingers across her moistish lips.
The snoozing blonde hummed a reply, but didn't open her eyes. "Those fairy tales are ludicrous. Waking people up from comas with kisses? More like 'true love's kiss' was the original name for CPR."
"You did give me CPR, once."
"Then I suppose we're covered."
"I'd like to do something about that," A said, whipping the covers back and throwing a leg over Jane's body, straddling her hips. "Awake now?" A asked, pulling Jane's hands up and holding her wrists above her head.
"Grudgingly," Jane said. "You always wake earlier than I."
"What time did you fall asleep?"
"Later than you... I normally do."
She didn't want to tell A her night had been restless. She remembered staring at blue numbers on the bedside table until 4:52.
A wriggled her fingers against Jane's pinned wrists.
"You're my captive."
"Captivated," Jane replied, and leaned up for a closed-mouth exchange. "Please let me get up and brush my teeth so I can spare you this torment."
A huffed and rolled off of her. Jane shimmied out from under the sheets, set to her morning ablutions, and returned to an already dressed, fed, and hyperactive conwoman sitting on the kitchen countertop of their suite.
"You're ready surprisingly early."
"It's almost eleven o'clock Jane, and after lunch on the east coast."
"Oh, shit! Your spa appointment's at one. We'll hardly get to spend any time together, before… tonight."
Jane cast desperate glances about the apartment and decided she had never seen such fascinating stitching in hotel drapery before. Gold threads on a burgundy red sheath, deep, probably matching the fierce color in her cheeks.
Blushing fifteen minutes after waking? Never a problem until A.
"It's okay," A said. "In a weird way, these next couple of hours are like the night before Christmas."
"What?"
"You know, Christmas? Around December, and families unwrap gifts they give to each other, and kids can hardly sleep at night, and reindeer and Santa Claus?"
"I know what Christmas is, it's just hard to understand the emotional sensibility correlated with it when one has never experienced it before."
"That… turned a happy conversation very depressing," A's brow was v-ing down sharply. She looked like a disappointed school marm ready to drag off the offender by the earlobe, the evil entity who had deprived Jane of Christmas holidays growing up.
"I'm sorry, I didn't intend for it to," Jane fiddled with her gloved fingers. She didn't truly prefer them covered, but old habits do indeed die hard. "I'm sure you'll find a way to make something as joyful as Christmas suggestive, and then we'll be right back on track."
"Hmm," A continued, hopping from the counter. "I have lots of favorite parts about Christmas," A said, sauntering up to Jane.
"Please, enlighten me."
A's hands fell to Jane's waist, unraveling the silk tie of her robe with attentive procedure. Jane imagined A would be the type of child to rip into her presents, caring not for paper cuts or snagged fingernails under transparent Scotch tape. Just get the green, peppermint stick printed paper out of the way and lemme at it! But A pulled Jane's robe tie as if it were a delicate, shiny bow string, and looked at her with such possessiveness it made Jane weak in all the joints used for properly standing. Her hands slipped inside the robe and onto the thin cotton fabric of the blonde's t-shirt, but the whole thing was just so erotic. Jane swore her lightheadedness was due to heart palpitations induced by A's touch.
"S-S-So," Jane squeaked. "I'm your present?"
A grinned wickedly but didn't kiss her again. She just stood there, Jane imagined salivating, with every desire to eat her up—
Nope, disable that thought train before we even leave the station.
"But what's my present?" Jane asked, desperate for more conversation. If something didn't happen soon to break this concrete block of tension in her gut she'd throw A on the countertop and take her right there while the coffee was still percolating.
Thrust, drip. Thrust, drip. Ahhhhh, drip-drip-drip.
"Your present?" A asked, still refusing to do more than hold her. And after last night, Jane knew how great more felt. "As if my body isn't present enough?" A's voice dropped to her grifter octave, the one she used for her scintillating authority that held some dark, clandestine appeal for Jane.
A's hands crinkled the fabric at her sides, each individual finger warm and comfortable, like a hot water bottle under a blanket on a cold night. Those little thieving fingers, so paradoxically generous and selfish, trained to handle fine art work with such delicate attention, sliding in and out of chemical treatments for the canvases, it was as if she were making love to the—
Fuck, I'm so... turned on.
"You are!" Jane retracted, mind flashing back to the pert, jiggling breasts she had suckled only hours ago.
"No, no, I'm obviously not enough. How about this," A said, removing her hands and sidestepping so only her lips could tickle the lobe of Jane's left ear. "You've already pulled out all the stops, so let me give you something. I'll even tell you right now, what it is. Do you want to know?"
Jane nodded weakly, and A's voice dropped to somewhere between a growl and a purr.
"One mind-fucking orgasm that will make free-falling from skyscrapers feel like hopscotch. When I shove my fingers inside you, you'll be tighter than a slackline, and I'll make you come hard enough to black out all of Vegas."
Some hybrid bleat-turned-expletive tumbled from Jane's lips without her consent, and A relinquished her tantalizing tone for the moment.
"So… I need to remember you like the swearing? A little dirty talk maybe?" A asked.
"I've already made a mental note that you enjoy biting," Jane smiled, reassuming the curtained shade in the apples of her cheeks.
A traced an indeterminable shape on the counter top, attention caught by a fully brewed coffee pot. She poured herself a mug full and brought down a kettle from a cabinet for Jane.
"Tea?"
"No, maybe not this morning, I'll just have coffee with you."
A repeated the pour and Jane inhaled the rising steam. There was still something about stimulants that held a sense of foreboding, even something as innocuous as caffeine. Then again, it might have been that suspicious feeling from last night resurfacing. Like a half-remembered nightmare. Adding voice to her concerns, A spoke out of character.
"Are we fucked up?" A asked, on a tight rope of seriousness and dark humor.
"Fucked up?" Jane asked, sipping her coffee black.
Bitter.
As she had been, for the majority of her life. She huffed through her nose, and pulled her knees up under her body on the bar stool.
"Because of the biting and the dirty talk thing?"
"That doesn't even scratch the surface of kinky," A said. "I meant… I don't know why I said that. Out of left field, I'm probably just nervous about tonight."
"Nervous?"
"Not nervous, exactly. Anxious? Excited? I never thought my first time would be…" A shook her head, sipped her coffee, composed herself. "Too many emotions, all together. I only wonder if…" she regarded a scrunched-up Jane, but didn't seem to find the answer she was looking for. Jane watched A take a turn at studying the curtains. "Sometimes I feel it's unnatural how much I love you. But I've never been in love, not really, so I have nothing to compare it to. I've been in love in my imagination, and in my fantasies, but it's never felt so… cumbersome? Heavy? Don't take it the wrong way. I just didn't always know if I'd ever get to be in love. I can feel it on me, I can feel you, on me."
Jane grabbed her hand, squeezed, and tried to love A with her eyes, with her tone, with her touch.
"If we're fucked up, at least we're fucked up together," Jane offered. "Maybe being fucked up is just another way of saying you're in love?"
There was more question than comfort in the response, and A didn't linger on it, moving along to lighter material.
Jane helped her choose which treatments she'd like the most, though the blonde had little knowledge of relaxation and pampering. She herself had plenty of work to do before the night commenced, and was almost relieved when A departed a few hours later for her afternoon at the spa. They agreed to meet back up at seven to get ready for an eight o'clock reservation, which gave A plenty of time to go shopping for their night out.
"Don't you want to come with me? You said we were dressing swanky," A said. "You'll need some help."
"I have it handled."
"Really?" A asked skeptically, leaning against the door to their suite. Her pigtails were loose and her eyes were bright and Jane wondered how she hadn't fallen for her the second she yanked the redhead into her van on that gravel road in upstate New York.
"I want it to be a surprise," Jane insisted, arms over her chest.
Stern. Implacable. But wholly susceptible to what came next.
"Fine, then. I'm just going to have to… trust you," A finished pointedly. "I'll see you tonight, love you."
"I lo— I know," Jane caught herself.
A grinned as she twisted the door handle. "That's very Han of you."
"What about Hans?"
"Not Hans. Han. As in Han Solo? As in Star Wars?"
Jane shrugged and resigned herself, despite her memorization of all those silly movie lists, that she would never match A's incomparable film knowledge.
"Never mind. We'll work on it," A said, and out she went.
"I love you," Jane murmured to the closed door.
Jane, in fact, did not have it handled. She had no dress, no shoes, and didn't dare think about face paint and hair arranging and appropriate underthings. But hell if she wasn't going to do this herself, if she wasn't going to show A that she was a semi-functioning addition to society, who could walk into a shop and request help without her girlfriend tagging along to translate geek to chic. If they were to build a life together, she wanted to be able to do normal things. Like go to the grocery store and interact with the cashier without hiding pears in her pockets. Venture out in daylight. Drive the speed limit. Have a damn conversation with someone.
But for the moment, time to research.
"Wes…Gen….Tech…" she typed, settling back into the cushions on the wrap-around party couch.
"Let's see… WesGenTech, an American based multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Norway, and headquartered in Salem county New Jersey in the U.S. The company ranks third in Forbes Global 2000, and specializes in medical testing and technology infrastructure, renewable energy production, consumer and industrial ventures, and electrical, computer, and mechanical engineering."
Click, clack, click, clack.
"We have, one reserved president and a handful of board members ranging from the staunch to the absurd, crazy scientists, resentful lab technicians, overworked engineers, and…" Jane clicked a tab on the personnel folder of the webpage, Hans's trademark smirk half-cocked for his photo I.D. "One twisted, psychopathic 'freelancer adviser and consultant'. Let me just…"
And Jane set to work, figuring addresses, compromising firewalls, hacking password generator applications. It took longer than she expected, looping around digitized blockades, doubling back over certain coded instructions, but she just needed to get inside. Not the website, but WesGenTech's company files, the ones from which they had copied A's 'Subject Beta' profile. Why, why would Hans be putting together shell companies when WGT had enough money and government contracts to get a team to Saturn and back without NASA's help? What kind of project was so off-off-off-the-books that they had to set up an entirely false (but sort-of looked true) investment scheme for it?
It had to be expensive, to warrant the type of funding Hans had been set to acquire. They were probably building something, employing unenlightened hundreds, the likes of Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1942.
Nuclear weapons?
The latest renewable energy source?
Flying cars?
"What the— fuck!" Jane yelled, slapping her hand on the cushion beside her. She'd been at it for hours, and was no closer to infiltrating the digitized walls than when she had started. She stood, paced about, stretched. She lowered herself into a backbend and then pressed off with her feet, tightening her core, balancing her weight in a handstand, clearing her mind of jumbled letters and petulant numbers that would not succumb to her touch.
Jane returned to the couch and the laptop still thrumming with life and battery power lying half open and catawampus on the coffee table. Code trickled down the screen like stubborn green raindrops on black slate, numbers upon letters upon symbols defying her practiced, capable hands. It wasn't right. She could hack anything. Everything. The only thing she had trouble hacking was her own—
Shit.
A had called her a goddess. And as an all-powerful goddess, did she create a stone so heavy that even she couldn't lift it? Unbreachable, divine computation.
So Jane changed tactics. It had been a while since she had hacked her own security, but she needed the practice. More code, different patterns (patterns supposedly unknown), a red herring and two strategically placed imbeds later and Jane had access to WGT's company files. The fact that she had just hacked a system the twin of her own was placed on the mental backburner as the names of confidential files flooded her desktop.
"File search… 'tortoise & B4'."
The file search showed Hans's plan, B4, along with twelve others. She tagged the file and followed the information tree up the grid, hovering over other files with peculiar headings. B4 was housed in a file called Tortoise, which was in a larger file entitled Funding, which was in another file called Project Fractal, which was but one subset of the 'Special Projects' file, which tied back into 'Energy Development', but the 'Medical Technologies' folder housed a duplicate copy.
Only certain employees were authorized to view the information. Accessing the deepest files in the projects folder required hacking skills that laymen didn't have, that even I.T. workers didn't have. The communication platform WGT utilized was one of her own design, their uploading network system similar to her own Dropbox-come-iCloud saving space. It explained how hers was hacked at A's beach house, because they had the exact same structure, identical programming.
It didn't explain how they got the programming in the first place, and that lack of knowledge scared the shit out of her.
How do they know my codes!? How have they used my codes? They'd need a team at least, an army otherwise.
And just when Jane thought it couldn't get any worse, her computer starting blipping, screen tics, modem seizures, staticky looking lines the color of dead teeth dividing and killing sections of her screen. Jane knew there was no escaping the virus currently devouring all of her data. She knew because she had created it. And someone else was using it.
Someone STOLE from me…
The computer screen was black. The little fan inside hummed apologetically, and then died.
"Eeerrruugh!"
Jane hurled the device across the room and tried not to hyperventilate. Plastic and glass crunched, sharp pieces shattered, and Jane was pretty sure they'd be billed for the lamp the computer had dislodged on its trajectory toward the wall.
She shut her eyes to calm her breathing, and listened to anything but her mind. There was a ticking wall clock that lit neon pink when the lights went out, mocking her with every passing second. It was five o'clock.
Five o'clock.
She jumped off the couch.
A!
Jane had two hours. Two hours to find some strip of apropos garb that translated into a confession of undying devotion and love. Jane wanted to be sexy for her, and tender, and hot, and gentle, and she had wanted that with a dress, wanted that with the dinner reservation, with the chocolates she was having brought up later that night, the real champagne for A, the indulgences that made A feel special… but now all she could think of was a company with her code, a conglomerate using her tricks, and it made her blood boil and froth, and it made her tears well, and it made her spiteful and resentful and regretful; but most of all, it made her sad, because it had the potential to ruin one of the best nights of her heretofore sucky existence, one of the most memorable nights of her life, let alone her relationship, by triggering panic attacks at inappropriate moments.
The lighting system in the suite dimmed and then surged back to life, blowing two bulbs in the kitchen behind her.
It'll hurt me, but only if I let it.
Jane sucked air into her lungs and checked the clock again.
It's only fifteen after, the stores on the strip and central lobby are open practically twenty-four hours. I still have time for this.
Jane picked herself up and threw on her most basic tee and a pair of skinny jeans. She left her duffel and traded it for a smaller black backpack, determined that she would try again tomorrow.
On someone else's computer.
They still had time, the pair of them, to find out information from the gamblers coming to the game to celebrate the sham that was B4. Odds were, the revelers didn't know their inclusion was anything more than a scam, a sheet to pull over the government's eyes when the IRS came knocking and auditors flooded the halls and requested every expense report WGT housed on its premises. Odds were Jane, the real Jane, was still somewhere in those files, and the truthful odds were she probably wasn't getting into them remotely. She had made that virus, it was inescapable. Unless she knew specifically what she was looking for, she'd need time to sift through all of the information. And if she had to break into remote office headquarters in rural New Jersey every night from here to eternity, then she would, until she gifted herself with a name she had never known, a family she could seek, and an identity she could finally, finally cherish. And then she could give herself, a whole self, a self useful and known, to A.
She wanted to be normal, or something close to it, for A.
She could separate professional endeavors from personal ones. She owed A that much.
She was going to go out to dinner. Dance. And then make love to her girlfriend.
And no fucking conglomerate with a pretentious title like Weselton Genetics and Technologies, Inc., was going to stop her.
So... I think some of you might have seen this one coming, not too big of a shocker. WGT was vague enough to flit between Westergaurd and Weselton, and I liked the ambiguity there. Thanks to the 700ish followers of this story for being rockstars. Drop me your thoughts, or leave a critique if you want!