The Saphirine, Part 2

"Un-bee-LEEV-ah-bull!"

Each syllable echoed in the small room after the show. Pony Tail was agitatedly waving his arms and glaring at his friend. "So, let me get this straight: one of the richest women on the planet proposes to you, she's got access to tech shit we can't even BUY yet even if we had the budget which we don't and won't in a million years, you'll probably live longer than anyone you know, offers to PAY you for it, and you wanna run home to Mommy? A mommy who's batshit and wants to ruin your life? And has said so on numerous occasions?"

"But-"

"NO BUTS!! This is your future, a future I would gleefully KILL you to get, and you're my best friend and I'd STILL kill you, but I don't fit the bill - " here he waved his extra-rashy arm around, even as a tech was trying to apply more salve to a section that looked burned.

"But-"

Even as distressed as she was, the Saphirine marveled that she could lay a bare hand on his arm. "You are afraid," she whispered. "It is understandable, that this fairy tale ending is suspicious. More so, considering your mother sounds... less than supportive."

Pony Tail - no, John, he'd introduced himself much earlier - suddenly deflated and slumped in the nearest chair. "He's a fucking genius, when it comes to computers. He's too good for his family, too damn good for this whole damn STATE. Do him a favor and give him a chance, and any computer he touches will sing!"

"I am a computer. Partially. Well, technically. And I have offered for him to touch me."

John just glared at the world while his friend blushed. And stared at his own arm like it had betrayed him.

She took a sip of leftover wine; she hadn't talked this much in decades. Her voice sounded husky from the disuse, even in her own enhanced ears. "I have given him the offer, it is simply his choice to take it, or not. I will not compel." But she took his hand in her own, again struck by the ease of touching real skin and not having to flinch for their safety. "So, a different proposal, one less emotionally charged: come and live with me and my techs for a month. See if you like this lifestyle. Get to know me, and what life with me is like. During that time, see if you like me. If so, if the life is agreeable, stay another month. Then another. After a year, if you are still here, we'll re-negotiate. Deal?"

She could feel his hand shaking. She held up her other hand; it was shaking too. "The last time I was this afraid," she said quietly, "I was named MaryAnn, and I was the third person to try on this ring. The previous volunteers had died graphically during their attempts. I knew the risk, their blood was still on the walls under layers of fresh paint, and yet I did it. But even with all that fear, what I gained was worth it." She nodded at the computers. "A chance to try fun things, and even if you think this a setup, you can leave a rich man. It will set you up for life. Is it worth it to try?"

He stared at the computer arrays avidly. He thought about it. He was still uncomfortable, but he nodded. Her smile quite literally lit up the room. He reached out to stroke her cheek, and John huffed out of his chair and towards the door. "I'm going home - ALONE - and don't you DARE try to follow or I will KICK your ass all the way back here!! And I cannot WAIT to tell your miserable mother that you'll be in the company of the really REALLY rich and famous-" and he was gone down the hallway.

He frowned after his friend. "He didn't mean that."

"Oh, yes he did. All of it. He's wanted to tell your mother off for a long, long time. If it keeps her away from us, I'll send him a vid copy of the kiss myself, to show her repeatedly on permanent loop!"

*************

A month's time, and worlds away from anything he knew.

That first night, on her private train: techs setting up a second bed in her room so they could talk till they fell asleep, and his shock (delight if you asked other parts of him) when she stripped in front of him to take a shower, and invited him to join her. He didn't, and when she returned, dripping, she gave him a wicked smile. "You lose many inhibitions in a long life when you are never left alone. And I would dearly love to seduce you, so forgive me if I seem exhibitionist. Never alone, but lonely for a long time."

Her glance moved lower. "And if you need any relief for that, I would be more than glad to provide it." He blushed and dove under covers, and she shrugged as she dried her waterfall of blue hair. Blue? Flexible threads of living sapphire mingled with her real hair.

Of the techs swarming him, to find out how he could touch her when none of them could. No one ever did figure it out. But soon he was chatting with them, and then suggesting upgrades, and soon programming those upgrades. New, faster, more integrated cyborg implant patents rolled out. These could actually double a human lifespan, and at the whole team's insistence, they were made available to the public, not just people with money.

With the new implants, her techs no longer needed the touchpads to communicate if they chose.

Of stressful meetings, or distressing ones, where all she had to do was return to their private room and peel out of her plastic clothing and fall into his arms, where he'd stroke her to sleep. Utter bliss, and the techs would creep away with their vials of tranquilizers as if they never existed.

Of the night where he was giving her a backrub, and she shivered in delight as he traced the blue veins...and stopped, and re-traced, rubbed a spot. "Mmph?" she asked, already relaxed and half-asleep.

"Did you start changing your skin patterns?"

"Uhhhhh, nnno, why?"

They look more like tree branches now, they're not just following your veins anymore."

Techs overheard, techs swarmed. Techs took way too many pictures, compared to pics on file, confirmed pattern migration. Unprecedented! Unheard of! Excited chattering in the bedroom, talk of producing papers and fame...

She rolled over, stared emotionless at the ceiling. "Only here, in this rarified stratosphere, would a famously rich woman be naked in a man's lap and surrounded by other people taking pictures to excess, and it not be considered a porn shoot..."

Of the day he was helping the techs unseal her from yet another plastic gown from another function (Come see the Saphirine's NEW crystal patterns in person!!), and he suddenly grabbed her arm and stared. The techs freaked out and readied their wrist recorders, and she craned her head around to see a light blue flower under her elbow, glowing like a radioactive forget-me-not.

"Why the change?"

She smiled and shrugged. "I'm in love. That's the first place you touched my bare skin the second night, and we wanted to remember."

"We?"

"You know I come as a package deal. That living sapphire crystal inside me is so intensely curious about the world, and your new place in it with us. Can you blame it for marking a spot so important to me?"

"You've only known me for three months - "

"I've known you for a lifetime. Time is artificial. I should know."

"But we - "

She gently touched his lips. "But nothing. You've gotten to know me, and you even like my techs, and we all work well together. You've been going crazy, touching me so intimately but so afraid to go further. I've been going crazy because I want you. Not because you're the only one who can touch me, mind. But because I like you. I want you. The only question worth answering is, do you want me?"

"Of course, but - "

She kissed him passionately. When they came up for air, she whispered, "Then come, and make love to me." The techs cheered when she led him to the bedroom, but she snickered quiety to him, "I know they have money riding on this. Wait till they find out that the new implants have reverse biofeedback!"

***********************************

They learned.

Some learned to blunt the feedback from her lovemaking sessions, but others?

Well, there were a rash of weddings with her techs. And other coupling-related things. Moving right along...

**********************

Screaming. Echoing, never stopping, a crescendo of sound, dischordant cacophany, like nails on chalkboard if anyone ever remembered what chalkboards were.....

There was blood everywhere. Techs were passed out, and no one could get close enough to see if they were dead or not. Even medics couldn't reach past the last barriers to get through. It was as if a force bubble of solid air prevented anything from coming in the room - and nothing left the room, either. Except the sound.

Techs and medics alike couldn't see straight enough to get through, since their implants were overloaded. They were essentially blind and collapsed in pain-filled puddles on the floor in the corridor. The closer they'd gotten, the worse it was.

By the time someone thought to call the Diamant and have him remote into some of the police's implants to shield them, and then started dragging the poor affected workers away from the room to where they could get aid, and then finally through the shield when the Rubine, and Diamant, and Smagardas finally got there in person, the Saphirine was just about indistinguishable from the sapphire threads that had erupted from her body. There was just enough video feed left - the Rubine helped to recover what hadn't been completely wiped - to piece together what had gone on.

See, the living gems were rather protected by their symbiotic hosts from most methods of assassination. Not as much, their lovers or partners.

But for the fanatics, who were either jealous of status or fame, there were ways to get attention of another sort. Someone decided to take her lover out of the equation. There were enough implants embedded in the Saphirine's lover to slow things down when a deranged guy burst in with a knife - emergency message gotten out over circuitry, time slowed for quick reflex, but couldn't be stopped entirely -

She'd been only a room away, getting ready for another soiree. Later, the techs swore she'd teleported back.

Not in time to save him from the knife embedded in his chest, but in plenty of time to completely disintegrate the attacker. And she'd screamed, and that scream hadn't stopped echoing in their heads till the room's barrier was breached, and now there was a filament-covered statue in the center of the carnage. They knew that Safi and her lover where under all that, but they didn't want to disrupt whatever-it-was she was doing, fearful to suffer the same fate as the assassin.

There was a shimmer at a corner, and her hand peeked out. Waves of desperation followed the slight movement. "Circuitry. NOW. Implants..."

Fresh techs scrambled to help. All of them kept random modules lying about, mostly to give away, since theirs and hers hardly ever went bad. They grabbed some randomly and passed them to the living gems, who handed them off to Safi. Threads pulled themselves right out of her wrist, prodded them all, tossed some to the blood-soaked carpet while others were wrapped in blue filaments and pulled back behind the rippling curtain. "More, pleeeeease...."

Lather, rinse, repeat. Smagardas thought to record it, thinking the techs would want to see this. Later. Much later. The screaming in the back of their minds tailed off and vanished. Techs started to wake up, and shielded medics could finally assist.

Time. Much time passed.

Reports from outside converged with their attention. Of all the sapphire jewelry within hundreds of miles shattering, of non-critical implants overloading, of energy being sucked out of power plants and unessential appliances to feed into... well, whatever she was doing. Hospitals and essential equipment weren't touched, though.

The injured techs? They were all alive, and some had recovered a little. Some were still out cold, and many had to have their broken circuitry replaced. Techs from the other living gems were filling in, and they compiled lists of people who needed help, and followed the medics to do whatever they could.

They recovered, they healed, and still no one got near a blue-wrapped sculpture in the middle of a blood-crusted room. No one tried cleaning it either. Her chief tech was still out cold from being too close to her teleport. The living gems stayed with her until her own people were cleared and mobile.

It took weeks. The last piece that she asked for was a particular large star sapphire from her personal collection, fifty carats, so rare and beautiful for a natural gem. She'd collected it herself from the mine, and had slabbed and cabbed a few smaller ones from the same crystal. Not quite pure blue, because all sapphires have color changing in their ancestry, but this one was more a teal color in the right light. Unusual, in that it was a twelve-rayed star, not the regular six. She hadn't asked for any nutrition, just for circuits that were accepted or rejected, and now this final piece -

Oh. OH. They belatedly figured it out. And she was doing this without the backup equipment, the labs, any techs at all? Madness born of pain and teetering on the edge of ultimate loss, or could she really pull this off?

Her hand eventually pulled back into the shimmer, and after a bit of rustling, something emerged. The knife, still bloody, point first. It clattered on the floor.

They took that as a sign, and began recording again. They hated being in this now-smelly room, with the violence still quite literally painted on the walls. But when the threads started rippling like they were in a high wind, and there were gaps in the waterfall...

The shimmer seemed to split. It parted and receded like a strange sentient waterfall, flapping like a frayed curtain. They saw that the Saphirine had entwined herself on top of her lover. Whatever clothing each had been wearing was gone. Half the threads pulled back into her, and the other half - pulled back into him.

The star sapphire was embedded in his chest, very near the scar where they assumed the knife had entered his heart. His veins showed the telltale teal glimmers through the skin in the same patterns that hers used to show.

The medic was amazed, and someone shoved a scanner into his hand before he thought to approach. And he wasn't thinking, no one was thinking clearly, he just reached out to touch her wrist like he usually did, to make sure she was okay, her pulse was so shallow he couldn't detect it at first. He touched her neck, her cheek - and nothing happened.

No filaments emerged from her skin to penetrate his.

His scanner lit up with soft light. Tired. Hungry. I'm so sorry, I panicked. I couldn't lose him. Take us home, please? I'll make amends.... later.... tired.... sorry.....

Techs came in, bundled them up, and took them home. It was easier when they didn't have to wear protective clothing.

******************

Where were you when the Saphirine got married?

The amphitheater was packed. Not only was it a who's who of celebrities and royalty from around the entire globe, but also spots were reserved for regular people and military and first responders. Supporters of all the living gems, not just a spectrum of blue. Even Jolly Old Guy and John had front row seats, with matching teal star sapphire pendants on thick chains.

The guests had been advised: wear your best gems. And don't be afraid when the lights go out.

And go out they did. From the edges of the city towards the stadium as epicenter, all types of lighting dimmed and went out. City residents had been warned, and had left town, and most had found sanctuary with friends and family in other cities and towns. All were glued to their vid sets, they didn't want to miss the spectacle.

Emergency personnal and their charges had been evacuated. Thieves thought better, and laid very, very low.

The darkness raced like a wave from all sides to the stadium itself, and came up over the wall and into the stands. There were startled cries and giggles and oohs of delight, which settled once the darkness became complete. Only the stars above the transparent dome were visible, and a few drones that were allowed to record from above.

And more exclamations, when everyone's jewelry began to glimmer.

In the dark it was easy to see the people who appeared in the archways at the very edges of the outer seats. Each person was haloed in color: yellow, purple, light green, dark red, light blue, blue-purple, pink, forest green, even a shimmering black. The Citrinine, Amethystine, Peridine, Grenadine, Aquamarine, Tanzanine, Topazine, Tourmaline, and Onicine all walked slowly towards the platform in the center, and as they passed, each gemstone under their control glowed brighter as they approached.

Only later did people realize that they were only wearing enough clothing to not appear indecent. Their skin, and the gem's patterns on their skin, glowed right through what little they had on.

As they took places and stood like sentinels around the platform, more figures appeared at the cardinal points. Brilliant white at the north, glowing red at the south, verdant green at the east, and multicolor at the west.

Arm in arm with the Opaline was another person, radiating blue - the cerulean Saphirine. Glowing blue, coruscating blue - and obviously pregnant.

With Smargadas at the east was another, the deep teal of the Saphiret, grinning fit to burst.

As they approached, each gem that was in their purlieu burst into sparkling fire in necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings. Even those who couldn't afford such things were given a piece to keep as a memento.

She was wearing an incredible tiara; he was wearing a collar that had an opening for the star sapphire on his chest to shine through like a captured star. No one even paid attention to the poor Diamant as he led the ceremony; the vids recorded the words and the responses from each of the living gems as they all witnessed and honored the union. But everyone remembers what looked like a full-body kiss, and how the filaments erupted from each and made whirling patterns around the couple and sparked when the ends touched, and all the gems flared brightly-

And everything went completely dark.

And the gems glimmered to life again, and stayed that way for the rest of the wearers' lives.

But when the lights came back on, the living gems had disappeared from the stadium.

It was quite the way to start a honeymoon.

The Saphirine, Part 1: https://vocal.media/futurism/the-saphirine-part-1