In the hallway outside, a non-descript looking maid picked up the ashtray, carefully setting it on her cart of linens and towels. She did not empty it, but took it away just as she'd found it.
Ron finally found her at the compound, going through her hard-copy messages in the cafeteria.
Getting out of school hadn't been easy. Coming here without Kim or Josh hadn't been easy. Persuading the Director to even gethimhere hadn't been easy, either. But the evening he got the e-mail from Shego, “Ron, please”, he knew he had to come. HAD to come, and HAD to come NOW! It was strange how he'd felt that way… based on a two-word e-mail, he couldn't wait for Kim to come back from her away-game, and didn't want Josh to put off what he was doing with Wade, and so he came alone.
The Director had been hardest to convince. I can't believe I used the ‘F’ word in front of Dr. Director!, he thought. But when he had, she'd looked at him funny, tapped each of her fingers – just once – on her desk, and made the call. Only a commercial flight, nothing super-sonic, but still, for her to do that just because he had a feeling was pretty incredible.
So now he looked at Shego, in her undercover clothes (I'm GREEN! How undercover do you think I can get!), as she calmly paged through her hard-copies, wadding them up one by one to throw away, he wondered what the deal had been. Perhaps his feelings were wrong.
“Shego?”
Her motions abruptly stopped, and she seemed, from the back, to be frozen.
“Stoppable”, she finally said without turning around. She got up from her chair to face him. “What brings you to this neighborhood?” Suddenly, a worried look flashed across her face, “And… are you… did you come alone?”
'Stoppable', again, is it?Ron thought. Something IS wrong here!
“Yeah, it's just me… everyone else was… busy”, he said cautiously. “Shego… comrade,what's going on?”
Shego was visibly taken aback at the word comrade, but she seemed to regain her composure almost immediately.
“Perhaps we should talk about it in my room”, she offered, and began leading the way through the long, deserted corridors.
Ron was trying to decide if he should make small talk of some sort, feel her out… because something was decidedly strange here.
“So, what's your mission here, anyway? Since I'm here, I guess it's okay to tell me, now. Besides, you said it would only last a week. Ought to be just about over…”
But the rookie GJ agent didn't seem interested, “Well talk in my room. It'll be… safer”, she said cryptically.
Once in her room, with the door closed, she faced him and began speaking directly: “Why are you here, Stoppable?”
“You sent me an e-mail. Remember?”, he said, not giving too much away, for now.
“I did no such thing.”
“Check your log. You did. Is… is there a problem, me being here?”, he asked.
Shego considered the question. “Maybe. Depends on you, I guess.” In the back of her mind, Shego wondered why she was behaving this way – like Ron was the enemy. Ah, of course. Because he'll resist the idea of me adding Ko to our little “group”. Well, fuck, who needs him and his gay lover anyway… I must remember to get my keys back from them, when I – when WE – get back. She decided to tell Ron what was going on, after all. Perhaps he'd clear his stuff out of her life before she returned with Ko, sparing her at least that bit of awkwardness.
“I've met someone. Her name's Ko. I'll be bringing her back with me, and the three of us are going to live together. I'm afraid you and Josh will have to move out.”
Ron was aghast. “Uh… the ‘three’ of us?”
“Me, Ko, and Kim, idiot. Count ‘em. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a dinner-date, as of five minutes ago.”
Ron was still standing just inside the door, blocking it.
“I said, ‘excuse me', Stoppable”, Shego glared.
Looking into the deep green eyes staring at him from behind all that black-purple hair, Ron saw something. It reminded him of when he and Kim had surprised her in the parking-lot of Bueno Nacho, and yet it was different. There was one way in which it was the same: something had happened to Shego. Not the same thing, but something.
“Shego… can we talk for awhile? Just… a few minutes? I'd like to know what's been happening while you've been here. I… I think it's important that we talk…”, Ron stammered, realizing it stood almost no chance of working.
“Later. Get out of my way, Stoppable”, she took a step forward.
“No. Now, Shego”, Ron answered back. Would Shego fight with him over this? Because if she did, he stood no chance of winning. His only option was to bluff, and he didn't have a lot to bluff with.
Shego's eyes narrowed and Ron instinctively went into his stance. She lashed out with a left-right combo, easily blocked, even by him. A round-house followed, and Ron – still easily – got out of it's way. They were only warning-shots, Shego's way of telling him that more would be coming.
He remained in front of the door.
More came.
Ron had learned a lot in the last year - and even more in the previous month, sparring with the very woman he was fighting now - and Shego still hadn't managed to actually land a blow on him, but it was taking every bit of Ron's skill to prevent it. Good thing she wasn't mad enough to use her plasma. He would stand no chance against that.
Shego managed to get one of her legs behind his before he could move out of the way, and she spun him around to face the door, following that with exactly the same move, again, to spin him right back where he was. By the time Ron had figured out which way he was facing now, he realized that Shego had place the palm of one hand against his forehead.
“Good night, sweet prince”, she said, and then zapped him, hard. Ron crumpled to the floor.
Shego kicked him out of the way of the door, opened it, and left.
It was a rainy evening outside, as Shego made her way to the hotel. Down here at sea-level, that meant it was also incredibly humid, and steam rose from the streets that had been sun-baked only hours earlier. She wasn't actually late for her date – that had just been an excuse – so she stopped into a pub, one of the left-overs of British ownership of the city, for a drink.
It was called the “Occidental” pub, for some reason… perhaps to distinguish it from “Oriental”? And it featured a dartboard, walnut bar, and posters for English ales. She sat at the bar and ordered a Guinness. The real stuff, not that “draft” crap the Americans liked. She pulled over a bowl of crackers in order to have something that needed to be washed down. If only they'd had some cheese, or peanut-butter…
Peanut-butter…the mundane image of a plastic jar of Jif, with a butter-knife sticking out of it, appeared in her mind.
… this is how it's going to be. This is how it's SUPPOSED to be. Me, Kim, Ron, Josh. It can't be wrong…
WHAT HAVE I DONE!
It took Deep Blue all of 15 minutes to churn through Wade and Josh's data. The IBM techs were amazed. Because this was strictly number-crunching – there was no data-retrieval lag time. All the data could fit into it's memory at once. So for the world's fastest super-computer to take a quarter-hour of solid processing time was… unprecedented.
At the GJ's computer-lab, Josh and Wade looked at the results. Obviously, there wasn't going to be a simple answer. Josh sighed, this was going to take awhile, and he really wished he could have gone to Hong Kong with Ron. Well, might as well get started… he thought, and uncapped an erasable pen to begin marking up the white-board walls.
An hour – and 3 walls – later, Josh stepped back to look at his handiwork. Wade was making a run to the vending machines. He'd finally settled on a way to display the results graphically. With axes labeled Area of Damage, Impact, and No. Victims (the third axes was imaginary, sticking out of and into the wall), he'd drawn a maze of circles, arrows, diamonds and – perhaps due to his lack of familiarity with the Greek alphabet – hearts, moons, and clovers. Minuscule labels next to each symbol held data about it. But it was a mish-mash. It made absolutely no sense.
Josh sat down and leaned back in the chair, yawning. Still looking at the walls with his eyes squinted shut, the labels and lines blurred into the background, leaving only the shapes themselves.
And without that distraction, he finally saw it. His eyes almost popped out of his head, and he fell over in the chair.
It was like an Escher print, or a fractal. Repeating patterns, like tiles that fit into each other, the spaces in between being part of yet another pattern, also fitting into each other. The pattern repeated at a smaller scale. The pattern repeated at a greater scale. In fact, the WHOLE pattern could be part of an even greater pattern, one that would have covered the ceiling and floor. And, extending the dimensions, the pattern could be…
Josh closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. This was no time for theoretical notions of universality. What could it tell him about what was happening now?
Looking at the walls – at what would, in later years, be known as the first “Mankey Diagram” - through new eyes, he could see missing parts; holes in the pattern. And other parts that didn't line up quite right. If only he could fill in…
Wade returned with two Diet Dr. Peppers and 4 bags of Funions. “Okay, before you complain, Funions were all that was left. So it was either this or Life-Savers. I made a command-decision for the Funions, and I take full responsibility.”
“Wade!”, Josh yelled excitedly, startling the poor fat (but getting slimmer) boy, “You had a program that categorized news stories, didn't you? That Ron asked you to make?”
“Yeah… haven't used it for awhile, I kinda blew it off eventually…”
“Well, uh, blow it back on. I wanna know news stories with global impact, thousands – no, millions -of lives potentially at stake, and… uh… maximally disastrous. How long?”
Wade thought about it. “Probably on the order of a minute. Give or take half a minute.”
“Do it! I gotta go see the Director!”, and Josh was out the door.
Wade watched the door gently, pneumatically, close. “Why, yes sir!”, he said to himself out loud and sarcastically, but still only joking, “Anything for a bud…”
For Josh, the flight to Hong Kong was aboard a super-sonic aircraft.
Ron was still lying right where Shego had left him, so she picked him up gently and laid him out on the bed. She had zapped him pretty hard, she estimated he'd be out for a good 6 hours, at the least. She propped his head on a pillow, took off his boots, undid his belt, covered him with a blanket… she did everything she could think of, until finally there was nothing left to do.
She stood in the far corner and sank down to the floor, her knees to to her chin, her arms wrapping around her legs, and she cried.
She had been so close! She had had everything she'd ever wanted, really wanted, for a month, and then she'd thrown it away. For a good time. For a good Lesbian fuck. For Ko.
And what was so great about Ko, anyway? She was skilled. She knew how to push Shego's buttons. Boy, did she.
Well, hell, Kim would learn, eventually. Just as she would learn – was learning - Kim's turn-ons. They had already made quite a lot of progress… the sex with Kim now was an order-of-magnitude better than it had been that first night. For both of them. It was a mutual -
With the thought of that single word – mutual - something occurred to Shego that made her face burn with rage: She had never even needed to learn Ko's buttons, because she'd never had to DO anything TO the girl! The things she had done, had been for her own thrill only! She'd never had to worry about trying to thrill - or get off, or even turn-on - Ko! Because Ko didn't need it. Because Ko was – basically – a machine. A human vibrator. A sex-toy. Nothing “mutual” about it! SHE HAD BEEN USED!
AGAIN!
Even worse and if possible, more unbelievable: SHE HAD KNOWN IT!
-----
Bonnie surprised Kim on the bus-ride home by sitting next to her. She didn't even so much glance at the red-head though, pretending to survey the seating arrangements instead. For a long time, they didn't speak, although the rest of the bus was full of chatter.
Eventually, she said, non-commit ally, “So, how's it going?”
Not sure if Bonnie was referring to that night, she said “Fine, I guess…”
“Decided to take my advice?”, Bonnie asked.
“For now”, Kim replied, looking at the other girl from the corners of her eyes.
“Good. Look… I'm sorry if I came on a little strong, uh”, she looked around to see if anyone was listening to them, but decided to keep speaking in code anyway, “that day.”
“'S okay. I guess… well, maybe you were right. I don't know…”, Kim sighed. “Seems like I've been wrong about a lot of things, lately.”
“Yeah? Well, you're doin’ good, Kim. Keep it up.” Bonnie got up to take the empty space next to Brick.