The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (91 page)

Caroline grabbed his hair (quite long) and gave a firm yank. "Stop right there," she commanded. "Get it out of your system if you have to, Lawrence. You fucked up. You will find me the first to accuse you of that. But we are here and we are alive and we are damn well going to stay that way. And you are not going to beat yourself up over this. If it hadn't been you, it would have been somebody else."
"It was my idea," he sniffled. "Nobody else was even close to duplicating my work."
Caroline shook her head. "That doesn't matter. You didn't create Prime Intellect alone, Lawrence; our culture did. Look around. Do you think you'll be building any self-aware computers here? You had a lot of encouragement and a lot of help, and all you did was provide what everyone thought they wanted. If it hadn't been Prime Intellect then it would have been something else, maybe hundreds or thousands of years later, but it's all the same. A dead end."
He tried to get up but she held him down. He was stronger, but she had the skills. She felt him getting hard, probably from his fear reaction and the closeness of her body. "You must hate me," he finally sighed.
In answer she shifted, and impaled herself on his cock. He gasped as he felt her envelope him, taken completely by surprise. "Does this feel like hate, Lawrence?" she asked as she began humping. Then they said no more until the ancient rhythm had spent itself, in a surprisingly long and pleasant interlude. Lawrence in particular was overwhelmed by the feelings, since he had spent most of his life at a biological age of forty-seven and thus had hardly any memory of what adolescent hormone levels did to a person.
Afterward Caroline rolled off of him but lay close enough to touch as they recovered. Lawrence broke the silence. "Why did you do that?" he asked.
"Because it was the right thing to do."
"Why?"
She sat up. "Call it instinct. Look, we need to start a fire before it gets dark. Let's collect some kindling."
"How are we going to start a fire?"
She smiled. "Lawrence, I've been dropped naked into strange territory more times than I can count, and you would be
amazed
at how good I am at surviving. Or have you forgotten how your own little Task Challenge started?"
He sat up. "You mean you really think you can deal with this?"
Caroline laughed. "If I was alone, and if I was handcuffed, and if there were six or seven guys chasing me with night-vision scopes and rifles, then I might be a little worried. But really only if they had a helicopter too."