For the first time, he held her in his arms.

Gamnilk looked at the words she’d just typed, satisfied.  She kept typing, knowing every word was read in realtime by someone or something on the ISSA Net.

She was older than he thought when he first saw her enter the room with her husband — tiny wrinkles just like little crow’s feet attached to the outside edges where two delicate eyelids met, light pock marks from childhood acne hidden under a mask of facial makeup covering her cheeks and forehead.

Guin watched the words scroll across her inner eye, a network interface that allowed her to see the communication channels of tourists using the ISSA Net to send innerMartian information as well as instant messages off-planet.

She knew Gamnilk was a tourist who’d traveled with Lee and Shadowgrass earlier in the day.  Guin’s tourists were safely settled in their pods for the evening, getting a marshour’s rejuvenating rest before getting up and ready for the next tour.  Lee’s tourists were already waking up.

Guin also knew Gamnilk was what was once known as a novelist, back in the day when the luxury of paper-based text and image storage was, indeed, novel.

Millions of people still clung to the old ways such as reading blocks of text, some with illustrations, packaged as isolated storylines with a beginning, middle and end, containing interlinked storylines, the main one called a plot and the subordinate stories called subplots, sold as “books” or “novels.”

He had never held her this close before.  He could smell her breath, her shampooed hair, the scent of her skin.  She asked him to pull her closer.  He did.

Guin opened her thoughts to Lee.  “Are you seeing this?”

“Yes.”

“Did you…”

He answered before she could finish her thought.  “Yes, I danced with her.  Shadowgrass asked us to.”

Her son confirmed his father’s statement.

Guin took a deep breath.  “Is she writing about you, then?”

“Maybe.  I let her see my thoughts while we danced.  What harm could it do?  Besides, we need the publicity.”

Guin turned her head and blinked, clearing her mind’s eye to look out of the cathedral window of their home.  She never paid much attention to the tourist pods in the distance, which represented important labour/investment energy credits for their research facilities.

He looked at her green eyes a few inches from his, feeling the small of her back with his right hand.

Wait a minute!  Gamnilk has brown eyes.  Guin realised that Gamnilk was mixing Lee’s first memories of holding Guin with his new memories of holding Gamnilk.  Hadn’t Guin and Lee left Earth to get away from thought hackers?  Were they now just going to let one in again without the slightest protest?

This was what he had been waiting years for, the first touch, the first embrace, feeling their bodies as one on the dance floor, her showing him how to lead her, the two of them tuning out the world around them, including his wife, laughing and giggling like kids having too much fun.

Guin read the words again, confused.  Were these the thoughts of her husband with Gamnilk or the thoughts of her husband with her?  Were they, instead, the thoughts of Gamnilk’s husband whom Gamnilk praised constantly as “the one true love of her life”?

Guin knew how to open up Gamnilk’s thoughts without Gamnilk knowing.  However, she and Lee had agreed not to tap into the tourists’ thought patterns, as opposed as they were to the ubiquitous ISSA Net monitoring and thus controlling almost all aspects of their society in the solar system.

She kept reading Gamnilk’s novel in progress.  Might as well make sure her memories were represented well!