From: fjohnson@gandalf.rutgers.edu (Ronin)
Subject: Allen's Wrench, or Why Ask Psi?
Date: 5 Nov 92 13:44:08 GMT

The reason I posed that question about mental powers was to determine
if I went beyond the realm of believability in revamping Kate Jensen,
the lady presented in the following piece.

Over the last year, I have off and on submitted portions of a story
centering on a black AI who has the same "liberal" philosophies as his
inventor. The latter being slain by right-wingers (a la Louis
Farrakhan), the AI is deployed into the world, having taken his
inventor's name. He soon bonds with a white woman, Kate Jensen, who is
at first impressed by his ability to fight, then by the the fact that
he's looking more at her eyes than at her body. Nevertheless, things
really get going when he learns that she's psychic, the folks who've
been after him are machines, and that their controllers aren't too
thrilled with the fact that he's in an interracial relationship. On
top of this, he has to break it to her that he is a highly sentient
cyborg, as well as come to terms with the fact that they have a
relationship despite this.

With all that out of the way, let's battle:



	Shots came at them from a perch thirty feet away. Kate tumbled to her
right, and fired her pistol. Darrin crouched, summoning his grenade
launcher, but had to dodge a volley before he could line up the shot. The
sniper, apparently sensing Darrin's eye movements, launched himself into
the air, performing a backflip as the airborne grenade exploded.
	While tracking the mechanical beast, Darrin saw another pair of
glittering eyes, locking in on Kate.
	"Shit, there's two of 'em!"
	He dove into the path of the flying lead, getting knocked backward as
each round struck his flesh. He tried to get to his feet, but the barrage was
too heavy.
	<Fuck you>, he thought, <you sorry-assed excuse for an AI.>
	He quickly worked out the rate at which the gunner moved, then fired
two APGs at his position. The twin blasts trapped the high-jumping gunner,
rendering him inoperable. Satifsied, Darrin collapsed.

	She turned from nailing the other sniper, seeing him fall.
<Darrin?> she called to him, getting no answer.
	<Darrin, are you alright?>
	Dead silence reached her mind's ear.
	<Oh please, no, this can't be.>
	She rushed to Darrin's side. His face, although recognizable, was
streaked with blood from a wound to the head. About fourteen rounds had
perforated his body. She felt for a pulse. Something very shallow. He was
fading fast, and her attempts at CPR, both physically and telekinetically, did
not seem to revive him.
	<Please, don't do this to me. You're the only someone I've ever
had.> She could feel tears welling up, unsure whether or not to fight
them back. <I--I don't want to be without you.>
	Something snapped as she heard a detail of Nemesis machines
thunder up the walkway from which Darrin had been downed. Rage began to
take hold of her, as if her grief had transmuted itself. She got to her feet,
hissing, "You bastards are gonna pay."
	As she drew her arms in front of herself, forming a sort of "X", she
concentrated on everything that fell into a foot-wide path before her.
Gathering her anger, she made the part of her brain that allowed for
telekinesis focus on projected karate blows, much like a laser
circulates light through an excitable medium. She released an
ear-splitting yell as a beam left her hands, vaporizing a section of
the catwalk, its handrails, and most of the wall behind it. The
machines slipped on the twisted metal, landing on the floor before her.
	Kate fired again, pirouetting as she did, carving an arc of
destruction.  Each machine exploded as the beam sliced through it. A
security camera soon  became the next victim to her wrath, melting
into an unrecognizable mass of scorched wires and aluminum sheathing.

	"Damn! She got a beam weapon implant."
	A security underling had just seen the destruction of twenty Nemesis
units by a woman who fired a particle beam from her hands.
	The chief technical authority was incredulous. "Say what?!" he
countered. "They still can't get 'em that small."
	"If you don't believe me, check it out."
	The watchman reloaded the video that had just been taken. It depicted
a tall white woman, with short red hair, spinning on one foot. Her hands
were crossed in front of her, and a brilliant white beam emanated from her
hands. Three feet to her left lay a long form in a trenchcoat, in
similar repose to Richard Allen after a Nemesis unit emptied a pistol
into him. The fallen figure's left hand was visible, the nut-brown of
the entity known as Darrin Allen.
	An ebon behemoth entered. It was Mustafa, the founder of the Order.
"The Allen project", he began, "was a powerhouse on the drawing board, and
he apparently fell in with some equally powerful company."
	The monitor flared a brilliant white, then filled with static.

	Darrin's vision returned to him-slowly, he thought. He saw the
woman he loved standing close to him, producing a particle beam from her
hands.
	<I must've gotten REALLY fucked up.>
	A check of his sensory apparatus showed no problems, but he still
could not accept the images he was seeing.
	<Kate>, he called out, <is that you?>

	She stopped in her tracks, then shrieked, "Darrin!"
	He struggled to get to his feet, but she dropped to one knee, sweeping
him into her arms. Tears formed in her eyes. "I thought you had been killed."
	"I almost was", he replied, semi-stoically. "Virtually all my
power was diverted to auto-repair. I couldn't even think." He took a
deep breath. "I don't know how to tell you this, but I think this was
the first time I felt seriously afraid. I was in darkness,
alone-without you."
	With that, he wrapped his long, slender arms around her.
	"I know the feeling", she whispered, pulling him to her shoulder. The
first tears she had shed in almost a decade flowed freely from her right eye.
*******************************************************************************
It hasn't got the luster of "Silk and Steel", but I thought it told me
a ton about her.

Comments anyone?