Chapter 9

She sat on the couch, simply looking at him. The man didn't seem to be anything special; sloppy haircut, open long-sleeved shirt with a soft collar, nicely firm stomach, not too much hair on his chest. 'At least he has some muscles there, ' she thought to herself. She didn't admire that 'stove-in' look a lot of the 'young laddies' were genetically stuck with; tiny nipples, no pecs, long bony ribcage that deluded them into thinking they looked so sexy... 'Have you ever fucked a guy with no meat on him? Gah! It's like fucking a bony ol' skeleton!'

The forlorn look on the man's face, though ... she wished he wasn't so unhappy. She wasn't so eager to help him out of his emotional depression that she'd jump his bones or anything; she wasn't into mercy fucks just to make somebody feel better. If he wanted to feel better, he could rent one of her Tri-Ds and simply whack off while he watched her get murdered. That was her specialty, after all: Katie Kelly! World Famous Snuff Girl! She smiled to herself as she added 'World Famous' to her title; she'd never actually gotten that far in her career. Something had cut her life short, but she couldn't remember what. 'I was probably murdered for real, ' she thought to herself. 'That's why I don't look like myself anymore. I got reborn.'

Looking around the room, she didn't see a Tri-D platform, or even an old style flat screen unit. 'What do these people do to entertain themselves?' she wondered, then she remembered those distracting, naked young girls wandering the streets wherever she went. The people of this strange society fucked each other; a lot! Some of them right in public! Another oddity: What with all this fucking going on, there didn't seem to be a lot of pregnant girls running around. 'Do they keep them sequestered or something?'

Although Katie had always promoted a more hedonistic attitude toward sex, people, naked in public, was going to take some getting used to; Katie had been raised in a more conservative age.

"Lemonade, Jake, Katie?" Tanya chirped as she carried a heavy tray containing a lidded pitcher and several ice-filled glasses from the kitchen. "Having something to drink always helps break the ice..." Her voice trailed off as she stared from one to the other of her offspring: her daughter, Katie, who died and was reborn as this fiery redhead who couldn't remember her current husband, Jake Hedron, Tanya's grandson. 'I'm getting old!' she thought. 'There are too many generation gaps here for me to keep track of!'

"Thanks, mom," Katie smiled, then reached forward to hold a glass up for Tanya to fill from the pitcher. Her eyes darted to Jake's for an instant as she noticed his quick glance at the top of her blouse when she'd leaned forward. 'Pervy little fucker ... But ... if he's really my husband, as everybody here seems to believe, he's probably had his hands on these a few times. I shouldn't be put out that he wants to look at me.' She wasn't really upset that people wanted to look at her. As a Snuff Girl, there were at least twenty different Tri-Ds of her being butchered, and many fans simply wanted to see her scars. Lots of people thought she was sexy and she knew men jacked off to scenes where knives, axes and bullets had punctured her lasciviously nude body, wishing (she imagined) that it was their cocks making those bleeding holes in her. The fact that she didn't care for men (or their appendages) didn't mean she didn't get off on being penetrated – just not with dicks.

'So why would I ever be attracted to this ... mundane human ... enough to actually marry him?' she wondered for the hundredth time. The only person she might want to spend her life with was Beth. And then she was sad, again. 'Beth is dead!' she thought, and savagely forced her attention away from Beth and back into the room.

Frankenstein and Béla-twin came in, Ivory sitting down next to her while Frank sat next to his nephew. Katie put her attention on the screwy relationships scattered throughout the room. She was Frankie's sister, but not really, 'cause she'd died and now she was this person called Tabatha (stupid name – so easy to make fun of – Tabby, Tabby-cat, 'Bathy need a bath?) who was married to Slutster's son, who, if she was still Katie, would be her nephew, too. 'How did that happen? Did she fuck Jake way back when ... OHMYGOD SHE DID! That's why she named him JAKE! He's JAKE PESTOVA'S SON!'

Ivory had really fast reflexes, because she caught Katie's glass even as Katie dropped it from her suddenly nerveless fingers. The sudden movement jerked Katie's attention back to Ivory, her mind reeling with the horrid belief that 'Oh Sweet Jesus! I couldn't land Jake so I settled for his kid? That's just SICK!'

The slight flinch in Ivory's face snapped Katie's mind back into focus. Ivory had been snooping! That's why she was sitting so close! "You psychic bitch!" she snarled, "You're spying on me!" and sent a barrage of hatred at the little she-devil.

Instead of shielding against Katie's overwhelming hatred, however, she relaxed and simply let it flow over and through her mind, concentrating instead on an image of Katie (Tabatha), a field operative of a group called the OIC – Oceanic Intelligence Community – as she ran a pattern search across the desert beyond Albuquerque, searching for the missing head of a competitive intelligence group called Tomlin Security, scanning for a signal from a tracking device hidden in the man's shoe.

Ivory hadn't experienced any of this firsthand, but she'd just spent several hours mind-linked to a Praetor to learn as much of Tabatha's history as she could. Memory links with her husband – Frank Jr. – had helped her regain much of her own previous lost life, and that was how she hoped to help Tabatha. She was chosen for the task as she was the strongest telepath in this close-knit, oddly hedonistic family, plus she was familiar with the memory lapses that occurred along with the loss of a person's body. Not being able to remember was why two-year-old children were so furious, aside from the fact that their parents refused to believe what they said. It was also the reason why puppies ran away as soon as they could; they were trying to go home, not knowing that 'home' was lost forever in another city or even on another continent. She smiled to herself as she remembered that the first thing she had tried to do when she'd been reborn was to get back to Frank.

"What's so funny?" Katie snarled, leaning close to Ivory to intimidate the dark-haired beauty. This close, though, she could see some of the thoughts in Ivory's mind, and some of those attracted her attention.

"It's alright," Ivory murmured, directing her attention back to the image the Praetor had shown her of Tabatha's anxious search in the desert.

"I don't remember that..." Katie muttered as she watched her redheaded self land and rush over to check the body she'd discovered for signs of life. The anxiety and fear that she was too late was overwhelming. She'd searched for so long only to have missed by only a few hours? 'Searched for what?' she wondered, her mind completely overtaken by Ivory's second-hand memories. 'What was I looking for?'

'Your family... ' Ivory softly suggested. 'Like me, you needed to find your family.'

In the image, Katie stared down at the tousle-haired man lying unconscious and wounded in the sand. There was a puckered mark right in the middle of his forehead, like someone had stomped on him with a high-heeled shoe. She felt around the back of his head, wondering where else he might be injured, and found a sticky patch of skin where the hair was missing. 'Someone pulled hair out of his head? What kind of torture technique is that?' she remembered thinking. She pressed against the back of his head and his skull there seemed soft; pliable. A baby's head felt like that, and she was suddenly frightened, pulling away so as to not injure him further. 'I don't need to poke a hole in his head back there!'