Page 59 of Dark Chains: First Link
Petrov shook his head, and his expression turned sad.
"Anita never gets invited to those private parties. It's because she's on the older side, but even when she was younger, she was never called by any of the senior brothers. Or at least she hasn't mentioned it to me. If Losham suddenly asks for her, it will be suspicious."
He was right.
The brothel's request logs would show the anomaly, and the woman in charge of scheduling would notice and alert Hoken. Given that the other brothers were closely monitoring Losham, a sudden and inexplicable taste for an older woman would become a point of interest, no matter how trivial it seemed.
The collective turned the problem over. Eight minds examining it from eight angles.
"We could request her for ourselves," Number One said.
Petrov looked up. "You?"
"Losham offered the service to us before, but since we have no need for it, we thanked him and never actually made the request. We can say that Petrov has been recommending her services tous. That story will hold because we see Doctor Petrov daily, and he's known to visit the brothel and especially Anita regularly."
"Was known," Petrov corrected. "I stopped going recently."
"But your history there is established," Number One countered. "If anyone checks, they'll find that you were a regular client and that Anita was your preferred companion. It's not a stretch that you'd recommend her to us."
Petrov was quiet for a moment, the tempo of his foot tapping increasing. "Can you bring her here?"
Number One shook his head. "That would look strange. For the summons to look legitimate, we will need to ask for her to come to the hotel."
"Eight soldiers and one woman in a hotel room." Petrov's eyebrows were doing their climbing thing again. "That doesn't raise questions? Perhaps you should ask for more?"
"The assumption will be that we have specific tastes, and since we are always seen together, people will assume that we like doing that together as well."
Dimitri looked at Number One. "When was the last time any of you used the brothel's services?" he asked quietly.
The question carried no judgment, but the collective registered a faint prickling of something that might have been discomfort if they had the full bandwidth for it. Before the enhancement, the Eight had been young soldiers with the same appetites and impulses as every other immortal male on the island. After the drugs and the merge, those impulses had been dampened to near-silence.
"Before the enhancement program," Number One said. "Things changed after that."
"So, it's been over a year since any of you have been with a woman," Dimitri said. "And now, suddenly, you're asking for one? That's a change in behavior, and those kinds of changes get noticed."
He was right. It was a vulnerability in the plan that the collective didn't know how to resolve.
"Not necessarily," Mattie said. "Think about it like someone looking in from the outside and knowing just some of the specifics. The volunteers for the enhancement protocol went through a traumatic transformation that made them so volatile and dangerous that most of them had to be terminated, and the only eight who remained were locked up in a lab for testing. Then two Russian scientists arrived and managed to stabilize them enough so they could be freed. Things were out of alignment for a while, but now that some time has passed, and the Eight are stable, it makes sense for their old impulses to start resurfacing." She looked at Dimitri. "Right?"
"It's a plausible story," Dimitri said.
"Good enough," she said. "So, the story is that the new protocol is working, and their sex drive is slowly coming back, but they're self-conscious and don't want the other soldiers to know that it has been absent for such a long time. So, they ask for a patient and gentle woman, someone on the older side, to help them get back to the way they were before. They don't want to be seen in the brothel because that would suddenly highlight the fact that they haven't been availing themselves of its services for over a year and a half. They want it done in the privacy of their hotel lodging."
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The collective felt acutely uncomfortable hearing Mattie talking about their lack of sexual drive as if it were a problem. The hive mind was quite proud of ridding itself of the troublesome sex drive that had occupied such a large portion of their psyche before the enhancement. It was such a waste of time to obsess about base pleasures when they could use it to contemplate the nature of consciousness, and whether awareness emerged from matter or matter emerged from awareness. Whether the hive mind was something new in the world, or something ancient that biology had been marching toward all along. Those were questions worth the processing power that sex had been monopolizing. Now that the noise was gone, the silence it left behind was occupied by things that actually mattered.
Dimitri looked skeptical. "That still doesn't explain why they would ask for just one woman and not several who match their criteria."
"They like to do everything together," Petrov said. "Some males enjoy being watched, and others enjoy watching. It's more common than you think."
The collective processed the narrative. It was layered enough to be convincing and specific enough to deflect casual curiosity. A group of enhanced soldiers rediscovering suppressed urges, seeking discretion, and preferring an experienced older woman who would be okay with their oddities.
"The story will hold," Number One said. "The problem is that under normal circumstances, we would have never shared all of that with anyone. We don't need to explain why we are requesting someone specific, and over-explaining is suspicious in itself."
"All you need is to do it subtly," Mattie said. "Just a little hint here and there while pretending that talking about it is deeply embarrassing for you. It requires some acting skill."
