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She placed her hands gently on his shoulders and swung one leg over, snuggling in close to him and sliding her hands down to wrap around his waist.
Jubal felt a jolt of desire so strong it nearly took his breath away.
You will have her. That’s what this is all about. Just hold it together until tonight.
“Good,” he told her through a clenched jaw. “Here we go, baby, nice and easy.”
The little moped jumped eagerly to life the moment he gave it juice.
Chloe squealed loud enough he could hear it through her helmet in spite of the engine noise. But she just held on, like she was having fun.
He smiled to himself.
Gods, what he would have given for something like this when he was a teenager, walking everywhere.
He made a mental note to pick one up when he got home.
Then it hit him that back home there would be no Chloe to impress. And he would be caring for a tiny baby.
If these were the last of his moped days, he figured he’d better live it up.
He gave the little thing all there was, and it shot forward, sliding down the country road as Chloe’s laughter sang out.
Before long, the road began twisting around a mountain, overlooking a lush forest.
When they got high enough, Chloe suddenly squeezed him tighter.
He glanced over to see that the ocean was now visible below, a shimmering blue blanket, spread out all the way to the horizon.
And still the little moped climbed, higher and higher, until they were able to see the curving edges of sandy beach and volcanic rock formations that formed the coast.
Something about the way she held him made him feel a closeness that he hadn’t felt in so long. Something beyond the physicality of it.
As they drew closer to their destination, Jubal found himself hoping he didn’t have to solve any more clues to get Chloe alone.
8
OBERON
Oberon set two of his trackers to closely monitor the movement of the client and surrogate, and a third to monitor the speed and trajectory of the motor vehicle.
Then, aside from the portions of his memory needed to maintain the Center and all its other inhabitants, he applied himself fully to the problem at hand.
Oberon had been the pride of his creator, who had designed him to build cities and solve the galaxy’s trickiest location puzzles. But it turned out that the young AI had been destined for something a little less grandiose.
When his zoo project design on Jani-Finn-12 caused a pair of endangered and notoriously choosy hurleyquarz birds to mate due to his careful environmental design and manipulation, it made his creator famous.
And though the Midsummer Fertility Center didn’t exist yet, the founders were already scouting locations and architects. They were so excited by Oberon’s work that they refused a rental contract and insisted on buying the promising young AI outright for a kingly sum that his creator could not refuse.
Once he was in their possession, the first thing they asked him to do was to consume tens of thousands of romance novels, in order to better understand what was needed to encourage biological coupling in human and human-like beings.
The young AI had gone from what a biological being might describe as indignant at his new role, to mystified, to fascinated and charmed. By the end of his readings, he found that he was a true fan of romance.
When he finished the last book, he dubbed himself Oberon, after the matchmaking fairy king in the Shakespeare story.
And then he let the founders know that he was ready to begin his work designing and implementing the Center.
Unbeknownst to them, he was also ready to begin his secret project, a desire he had to keep under wraps, as it ran contrary to the entire mission of the Center.
