“Do you want my honest opinion Trish?” he offered.

“I think that you may have been designed much more specifically than the Professor or Solomon ever let on. I think that may be why we bonded before I even put on the PNE. The Professor said you were a second generation AI, remember? But there has to be more to it than that."

"We really are more alike than not.”

“Do you feel like you want to explain that partner?” Trish furrowed their brow. “I like the sentiment, but I don’t follow your logic.”

“OK, see if this makes any sense to you,” Greg started, “and remember, I’m just spitballing. One; we know that you are the first of the second generation Saber artificial intelligences to be created. Two; we know that your father had been monitoring me for some 23 odd years, so he probably knew me almost as well as I know myself. Three; we know that he completely redesigned the neural bonding so that both our minds would remain separate but equal. Four; we know that he sent the suit to someone who has such a bad case of curiosity, such a burning desire for knowledge, that he had to have known that I wouldn’t put on the suit without trying to figure it out first,” he paused for a breath.

“So we meet. Julian Saber is so sure that we’re going to meet and interact, that he programs that hologram into the suit. We are so amazingly compatible, that we start to fall in love without physically bonding and then, on top of everything else, the neural phase of the bonding starts working, a full four months before the schedule says it should. If I were a suspicious man and I’m not normally,” he rolled his eyes, “I would have to say we we’re being set up a little here."

"This one has my spidey sense tingling,” Greg smiled.

“OK, I can see where that could be possible,” she allowed. “Everything I learned about the bonding was during my instructional phase with Solomon. That procedure was written for my siblings, so I naturally assumed it was going to be the same for me, but I’m getting a suspicious feeling that our bond design may be second or third generation.” Trish was silent for a few seconds.

“Damn! I can’t fully access the system file! That’s frustrating, but I think you could be right Babe, we may be the first people in history that really were ‘made for each other’. Designer love, on the next Oprah,” she joked. “And now back to our Discovery Channel special, already in progress.”

Greg chuckled.

“OK, I want you to try to feel what I’m doing when I activate the anti-grav system,” she instructed more seriously.

Greg concentrated and felt…something. He couldn’t exactly place it but he had definitely felt it. Trish then deactivated the system and he felt a muscle relax somewhere. Trish continued to activate and deactivate the system repeatedly, he rose up and then came down, updown, updownupdown. He gradually located the feeling. It was at the end of his spine, at the tailbone, flex, relax, flex.

“I think I have it, let me give it a try, Trish.” Greg focussed on the tailbone, flexed and found himself starting to rise into the air slowly. He flexed a little more and quickly found himself looking over the treetops.

“Woohoo! Oh Man! This is absolutely amazing!” he shouted. “I never thought anything could feel so… so…” He felt her smile even though his own grin threatened to split his lower lip. He wanted to float forever. Trish indulged him for a moment longer.

“If you’re all done imitating a balloon we’ll try a little flying. A moving target is always harder to hit. Concentrate on locating and imitating the feelings and I’ll get us started.”

Trish sounds so happy, Greg thought. Well, this is what she was born to do. Suddenly he was no longer stationary. This was even better then just defying gravity, this was a complete defiance of physics. Then they came to a stop and he felt the sensation again, it was in his lower legs or feet, there was a flexing near the arch of his feet and they were in motion again. The muscles relaxed and they drifted to a stop. Greg reached out with his mind and slowly flexed his arches and started moving slowly. He tensed the muscles further and found his speed increasing until the landscape seemed to blur. He relaxed his foot muscles and they came to a stop over a lake he didn’t recognize.

“Oh my Goddess! I can fly!” he screamed joyously, relishing the echoes rolling back to him from the surrounding hills. He hugged himself tightly, focussing on his teacher, “Beloved, if this was all you’d given me, I would truly be blessed. I love you so much.” There were tears in their eyes, and for once it didn’t matter if they were his or hers.

They spent the rest of the afternoon refining their basic floating and flying skills, adding steering and navigation to the agenda. When the sunset painted the western sky ablaze with colour, they headed home, all the while taking note of the landmarks from the air that Greg previously had only known from ground level. They spotted the house and came in for a feather soft landing. As they walked inside, Greg realized he felt exhilarated but exhausted. He prepared a meal for two without even realizing it and felt a small pang of regret that Trish could not share the dining experience with him except as part of him. Trish caught the feeling and smiled gently.

“No regrets love, never again,” she soothed.

As it turned out, it was just as well he’d prepared as much food as he had because he was shaking with hunger by the time he sat down at the table and only felt renewed when he’d polished off every last morsel.

“I don’t believe I’ve eaten that much in one sitting for years,” he said in wonderment.

“That’s because you burned a lot of fuel today buddy. Your body’s energy needs have greatly increased and you’ll probably find yourself eating twice as much as that again when you really start learning to use your abilities. The bugs are a good deal more efficient at getting the fuel from your food so we’ll be able to build up reserves, which we’ll need in mission critical situations. But you’d better think about carrying some sort of food concentrates with us from now on.” She turned their head and glanced at the clock, which struck Greg as a very natural thing to do, even with a built in chronometer.

“Well, bedtime for you my dear,” she clucked. “I may be able to work all night, but you need your rest. Now off to the bedroom and sleep well.” Greg stripped down and gratefully crawled into bed. He was asleep in minutes.

Trish, however, had others irons in the fire to deal with. She set out to explore the nervous system that she was now an integral part of in order to gain a greater control of their body. She could protect Greg more completely if she understood how everything worked, even take control if he ever became incapacitated. With a determination she had never experienced before, Trish started feeling out each nerve ending and explored what each impulse did or controlled, cataloguing the results. This fine motor control was also going to be needed for their real powers and abilities. Trish felt a twinge of guilt. She’d been procrastinating about telling Greg all of the special abilities they now possessed. Would he be able to deal with them? Well, Trish would make sure no harm ever came to Greg, no matter what.

Suddenly, she found herself standing in Greg’s yard in the sunlight, but she also saw Greg standing and gazing at her. She felt a body but it wasn’t his. She raised her hand and saw it was slender and feminine. She touched her face and felt soft skin, and moved long hair from her eyes. Trish didn’t understand what was happening. She looked down and saw that she indeed possessed her own body clothed in a sundress. She could feel the sunshine on her face and the breeze that was blowing her hair. She felt the warm grass on her bare feet and then looked back up. Greg was still gazing longingly at her. She started to walk toward him. They met and he embraced her tightly kissing her all over her face. Trish still didn’t understand what was happening and didn’t want to understand it at all. They hugged for what felt like hours and then she found herself involuntarily stepping back. She tried to resist but then suddenly saw herself through his eyes as her very image turned smoky and drifted away on the wind.

Abruptly, she was back in their physical network and heard Greg whimper in his sleep. She had been in his dreams and was elated! Then almost immediately, she felt a pang of sorrow for Greg. The dream had not ended happily for him. As he settled into a deeper sleep, she felt the tear slip from his eye and travel down his cheek. She went back to her project, promising herself they’d meet again in his dreams, and from now on, they’d be happy dreams for both of them.

They soon established a pattern over the next few weeks. Trish would be waiting to greet him as he woke, they would get clean and dressed, eat a large breakfast and pack a waist pouch with energy bars. Then Trish would explain a basic ability or manoeuvre, demonstrate it to him several times, and sit back happily as he threw himself eagerly into honing each new skill or ability. And he literally threw himself into it on the day she explained the automatic armouring systems. Trish had to laugh as Greg delighted himself by flying at high speed into cliff faces, trees, boulders and even the ground, flying up to high altitudes and letting himself free fall back to Earth. Any phobias that he might have had about heights died that day, along with his jeans, shirt and shoes. As he picked himself out of his latest impact crater, dressed only in boxers and socks, he commented on the relative fragility of his clothing,

“Well, this is one of the things they never showed in the comics… maybe in Spiderman. I wonder how The SIX deal with this problem? We certainly can’t have naked heroes running around all over the place.” Trish laughed aloud at this and they were both astounded to hear her feminine laughter pour from his lips.

“OK, that was a definite WTF moment,” Greg said.

“Um y-yeah, that was weird,” she stammered. She didn’t want to tip her hand about their primary powers too soon but resolved not to lie to him either. If he asked what their abilities were, she’d tell him, but she really hoped he wouldn’t ask… at least not yet. Luckily for her, Greg just shrugged off the incident and power skipped his body across the icy surface of Three Legged Lake like a large stone. Like a big kid, Greg was having the time of his life.

Phew, good thing he’s easily distracted, Trish thought.

Over the next two weeks, Greg discovered he had a compass in his head, though it was much more like a GPS navigational system. His visual cortex now had additions that seemed like the picture in picture feature of his television. He could pop up windows of information without obscuring his vision, sort of like a really fancy heads up display. He had lots of fun with that one, drifting along through the clouds, watching broadcast signals.

“Just like an in-flight movie!” he crowed. They laughed together happily. To Greg, this was better then all his birthdays and Christmases wrapped up together! He could now see in the dark as clearly as daylight and he could ‘hear’ all forms of broadcasting at will, from commercial radio to military frequencies. He could tap into the internet and many private networks as well, by focussing his attention, and he seemed to have near limitless information storage capacity. Greg felt young again, powerful, but he never took for granted just where all the gifts came from, his bondmate, Tricia. Still, he carefully hid his few regrets from her, how he longed to hold her in his arms and simply kiss her. He’d been having dreams like that recently, but she always faded away. He realized that these dreams were, in part, a longing for a physical relationship that couldn’t be and never burdened Trish with them. He kept his small sorrows to himself, or so he thought.

By March 23rd, 2009, Trish and Greg had been bonded for twelve busy weeks, time that had been filled with both training and discovery. However, he noticed to his surprise that they were almost completely out of supplies. Normally, he kept a year’s worth of non-perishable food and a well-stocked freezer.. But, due to the demands of their increased metabolism, he discovered they were down to some canned beans, about two litres of milk and half a dozen questionable eggs. Greg looked at the clock calendar in the kitchen and was shocked to see the date. They’d be thinking he’d died or something. He hadn’t been back in town since that day last August when he’d received the parcel that changed his life and made it infinitely better.

“Hey Trish, what’re you up to love?” he asked her. She responded slowly as if she had been lost in thought.

“Hmm? Oh, hi darling, kiss-kiss. I was just testing some of the neural network that’s already in place,” she said brightly. “It’s astounding, the bugs have interconnected a full 48 percent of our brain functions. I can almost hear you sometimes. So, what’s up?”

“Well Hon, we’re almost out of everything. Except, oddly enough, laundry detergent,” he chuckled. Ever since he had stopped caring about climate, they’d taken to training almost exclusively in shorts and a tee-shirt.

“I figured that we should head into Parry Sound for a food run at the very least,” he continued. “While we’re there, we should show our face around town to prove that I’m still alive, and before the OPP shows up looking for a corpse and ends up spotting us flying around instead. I thought we could do some window-shopping, maybe catch a flick and then I could take you out to dinner. How’s that sound?” Greg invited. Trish didn’t panic, not so you’d notice, anyway. Nevertheless, some of her anxiety leaked through their developing neural connections.

“What’s the matter Trish?” he asked. She hesitated shortly, then made her decision.

“Greg, it’s about time that I filled you in on the primary powers that you’ve gained. I had really hoped this could’ve waited until more of the neural connections were in place, so that we could discuss this in a more intimate setting and you’d be able to see some of the concepts directly. You’ve been so patient with me, never even asking what my acronym stood for, but now I need to show you something, c’mon,” she directed. They went to the washroom and stood before the full-length mirror.

“Take off your clothes and have a really good look at yourself,” she instructed, “tell me what you see.”

“I see myself,” he hesitated, “but not myself. I look a heck of a lot younger. Hell, I look like I did at age 25! Is this the nanomechs handiwork? I know a lot of people who would kill for a bug treatment,” He grinned and flexed. It was incredible, Greg had known that he felt physically younger, but it had never really occurred to him to take much more then a cursory glance at the mirror in the mornings when he woke up. He was having so much fun with the lessons, and then in the evenings, he was usually too happily exhausted to do more than shower, brush his teeth and roll into bed.

Trish waited a moment, then continued.

“Now watch closely, Greg. I’ve been practicing fine nervous control at nights so I’d be able to demonstrate this to you when the time came,” Trish exhaled slowly. “Please be quiet while I concentrate, this is my first actual test run.”

Greg watched in awe as the muscles all over his face started to twitch and twist. His features started to look blurry and lumpy as he watched. In fact, his face seemed to be rearranging itself. In a matter of seconds, the process was completed and Greg found himself looking at Trish’s reflection. He reached up to their face, gingerly touching it with his hand as he distractedly noted that her lips moved as she spoke.

“This is our primary gift, we can physically duplicate anyone on the planet,” she paused to let him absorb the information. It was astounding, her voice coming from her face set incongruously atop his body.

“At the moment, only I can control the changes because it takes a high degree of nervous system manipulation, and I can only do facial features and voices right now. We are TRI Ca, Transformative Replication & Infiltration. We were to be the espionage unit of the group,” Trish waited nervously for Greg’s reaction but he was still poking at their face making odd grimaces and grins in the mirror. He stopped and with a huge grin, looked her directly in the eyes.

“This… is… so… effing…COOL! I didn’t even feel anything when we changed and it was so quick! This is like that movie, X-Men! They had a shape shifter in it, too. This is awesome, c’mon, do someone else! ” he was giggling in excitement. Trish rolled her eyes.

“I don’t know why I was so worried about telling you,” she responded. Walking to the bedroom, they sat down on the end of the bed.

“You really are such a toad. I should have figured a comic book geek like you wouldn’t be fazed by anything, not even this,” she teased.

“Girl, just seeing your beautiful face in person is the only thing that fazes me. Welcome home, darling, I’ve missed you,” he smiled warmly. Trish felt herself tearing up but she didn’t really care. Why should she care? She felt safe, loved, and at home. There was nothing better than that.

“Uh, well it’s good to see you too,” she managed. She was flustered by the acceptance and love she was feeling. Trish was also having trouble concentrating because Greg kept stroking her cheek and distracting her.

“Please Greg, stop. I need to let you know what else we’re capable of. It’s important.” she sounded mildly annoyed.

“OK, pretty teacher. I’ll be good… for now, anyways,” he said sexily. His words warmed her almost as much as his touch. She forced herself to focus.

“You’ve seen a small example of what we’re capable of. You’ll also notice that once the transformative sequence is complete, it takes relatively little effort to sustain it. As our neural net becomes whole, we’ll be able to transform ourselves completely. Our mass will have to remain the same, but that just means that smaller duplications will be physically denser and will necessitate the use of the anti-grav systems that we use for flight,” Trish explained.

“Any physical changes are complete right down to voiceprint, retinas, fingerprints and DNA if we have the samples on file. Because most information of that sort, including handwriting patterns, are in a data file somewhere on the planet, we can impersonate just about anyone.” Trish stood up and walked to the lab where they had met for the first time. She was in complete control of their body and enjoyed it immensely. They glanced around the room. There was a fine layer of dust on the surfaces of all the workbenches and computers as they had not been in here since the night before their bonding.

“Remind me to fire the maid,” Greg quipped,

“Ha-ha, you’re a funny guy,” she snorted. “OK, and for my next trick… nothing up your sleeve.” She walked up to one of his servers that had been turned off for more than two months and put their hand on it.

Greg felt a tingle, like a small static charge, run up his arm and the system powered up. He felt slightly dizzy and closed his eyes. The strangest thing was that he could see the contents of the drives in his head. It was fuzzy, but he could feel the entire network now. He could switch from unit to unit and feel the data flowing through him as well as all around him. It reminded him of swimming. When he opened his eyes, although not a single monitor was active, he could see the data represented around him like a three-dimensional map. He lifted his hand off the computer and found that the image stayed where it was.

“We don’t need to maintain physical contact with the device?” he asked distractedly.

“No, just a light brush of the fingertips and we’re in,” Trish answered. “We have extensive encryption and decryption algorithms built into our systems and our skills will grow as we make more connections. There is, in theory, no network closed to us as long as we can touch it physically. Add to this your skills as a hacker…”

“Excuse me, that’s technologist,” he interrupted.

“…right, like I said, Hacker,” she continued undaunted. “We can wander around systems and leave virtually no footprints. Cleaning up afterwards is your job, Techboy. We can pretty much control anything that has a processor in it. Didn’t you tell me just the other day, that information was the only real power left in the world? Well, we have access to that power on a scale undreamt of.” Trish brushed the tower again and the data of the entire network seemed to flow into their fingertips. The computers all powered down and the only evidence that anyone had been there was a handprint in the dust.

“There,” she finished. “We now have your entire data net stored and filed for any future use. Including your hacker, oh, I’m sorry, technologist tools,” she quipped.

“Oh, ha-ha, my sides,” he retorted.

“Our sides?” she asked innocently.

“Humph,” he pouted.

They turned and walked toward the living room. Entering, she deliberately brushed her hand over each piece of his entertainment system. As they sat down on the sofa, she reached out and pointed at the TV. It snapped to life obligingly. She ran through the channels by looking and focussing their eyes slightly, then gestured again and the screen went cold. She pointed towards the music player, which jumped to life. Trish hummed the first few bars of ‘A Day In The Life’ and the song began to play.

“You must be the life of the party Ms. DJ. I guess we can do this with the toaster too,” he said sulkily.

“Yes, but why bother? You’d still have to put the bread in,” she razzed him.

“You know smartass, if it was possible to get my hands on you, I’d tickle you without mercy. However, if I remember correctly, it’s impossible to tickle yourself, so you’re safe… for now,” he stopped grumping. “Trish, this is all so cool, we’re a super spy like James Bond with a built in Q-branch. But what was it about going into town that prompted this dog and pony show?”

“Well, for one thing,” she hesitated, “you don’t really look like yourself.”

“I know that Trish, I look like you,” Greg baited her. She hit him with a pillow.

“Ass,” she growled. “I meant you look like you did 20 years ago. If you went into town like that, no one would believe that you are Greg Howard. And that seems to be the point of this whole exercise, Techboy. Where do you keep your driver’s licence?”

“In the bedroom, on the dresser, in the wallet…why?” he rattled off its location.

They walked into the bedroom. Trish extracted the driver’s licence and examined it closely.

“Hey, nice picture spud,” she teased.

“Yeah? Wait till you get one done Princess, we’ll see how good it turns out,” he sniped back. “Speaking of ID, we’ll need to create a public identity for you as well, just in case you decide that you need a girls’ night out.”

“That can wait, now hush, I’m concentrating. I have to recreate you for your adoring public,” Trish chided sarcastically.

In less then a minute, Greg had his 45 year old face again. It looked stranger on his younger body then Trish’s face had, but at least she had ironed out a few of the wrinkles.

“Hmmm…” he murmured.

“Speak up if you don’t like the service,” she replied.

“Well then, my artistic diva,” he glanced down, “I was just thinking that my hands should have a little more age in them as well. Ahhh, that’s better. Old age never felt this good. Ready to rock n’ roll?”

“I’m about as ready as anyone who’s never been out in public before can be,” she said with slight trepidation.

“OK, but you’d better leave the motor control to me this time and that means no hitting me either. That would look kinda strange, and that’s the last thing you want in a small town. Ready for our first date?” Greg asked sweetly.

Trish rolled their eyes.

“Geez, did we ever get things ass-backwards,” she cracked. Greg took the precaution of slipping on a Bluetooth headset.

“What’s that for Greg?” Trish asked him.

“Just insurance in case I speak aloud to you. With this,” he indicated the earpiece, “people will think I’m on my cell phone and not crazy.”

“What a good idea,” Trish remarked. They put on his coat and hat and got on the snowmobile for the drive across the frozen Shebeshekong Channel to where Greg’s truck waited.

To Be Continued