Free Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition by Nas Hedron Page B

It didn’t change a thing.”
    I have nothing to say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and watch her leave. I go to bed, hoping I can sleep at least two or three hours before getting back to work. When I dream—despite the evening I’ve had, or perhaps because of it—they are not good dreams. I am back in Tijuana, glimpsing small scenes of what went on there. In my dreams, though, Porsche is there, laughing, flirting with the soldiers, riding them and going down on them between atrocities, during atrocities. I wake up earlier than I’d intended to, cold with sweat.
    Somewhere in my unconscious, below the level of the orgy and the drugs, my mind has been at work. I wake with the conviction that, no matter how good she tastes, Porsche is evil. She is not just the bitchy, catty kind of woman I usually fall for, she is genuinely, thoroughly sociopathic. My dreams are an unconscious representation of that fact, but the fact itself rests on more than a few nightmares. I think about her casual disregard for Sherry, who was just a prop for her in an evening of sex. I know that she has just as little regard for me, and that I was nothing more. If seducing me was intended—despite her words—to subtly co-opt me, it has done just the opposite. I never doubted that she was capable of having her grandfather killed, but now it seems more likely than ever that she has at least tried to find some way to circumvent her wiring. For someone like her it would be just too tempting not to.

Eight: UIFs and the Felon
    As usual I meditate for an hour, but I’m off my game. People think meditation is easy—it looks like it in the sims—but the truth is that real meditation is demanding and today it’s a challenge.
    HardOn and Sunday Best have built in controllers to prevent morning-after side effects, but Porsche does not. Unless you're a monk there’s nothing chaste about a dharma practice, but there is something specific about sex with Porsche that is the antithesis of a contemplative practice. I started meditating after Tijuana—because of Tijuana—and I had the same feeling then.
    My thoughts are scattered and chatter at me like monkeys scolding me from the trees.  My emotions pull in conflicting directions and make it difficult to get centered.  Maybe the truth is that I’m ashamed of myself and the last place I really want to be is inside my own head.  I try to face that shame, to abide with it, but it’s an active, taunting thing that seems beyond my reach.  And to be honest I suspect that the 
pleasure
 of fucking Porsche is still too fresh for me to get a handle on the shame that comes along with it.  And from somewhere in that morass of feelings and impressions comes a very real sense of threat.  Porsche, I now think, has no center—at her core there is nothing at all—and people like that are always dangerous.
    At 7:00 I rise, shower, skip breakfast, and leave.
    What I really need to do is get over to Cloud City and see if Carmen’s found anything. She’ll have been there all night, I have no doubt of that. This is the kind of puzzle that she lives for, and I’ve seen her go two, three, even four days without stopping, without sleeping, without seeming to 
need
 
to sleep. She simply keeps working at the same methodical pace, in the same meticulous way, until either the problem is solved or even 
her
 prodigious reserves of energy begin to run low. If she can’t solve the mystery in one sitting, she catnaps—falls fast asleep in the blink of an eye and then wakes an hour later apparently refreshed and starts all over again. I know she won’t have a complete solution yet or she would have called, but she may have made progress and if so I want to know about it. I could call her, but after a night of guilty pleasures I feel a compulsion to go out there and look around the place myself, as if diligence in my work can somehow make up for my sins.
    I descend in the elevator to the underground parking lot,