Recovery of Rez 7

At first it was heaven. She literally hunted him down and all but raped him. Her aggressive behavior was totally outside his experience, yet typically what haunted the testosterone fueled dreams of young men. He didn’t understand what drove her interest in him. On the one hand, he was too lost, too completely cast adrift from everything he knew. She seemed totally inflamed, both angry and fascinated, by his instinctive lack of response to the crazy things she said and did. On the other hand, his implant kept him from ever appearing clumsy, which would have betrayed his confusion. His body knew what to do, even if his mind was still floating in the cosmos far away from any solid ground.
But it was entirely because he was totally unsophisticated socially that it left her entirely in control. He had the word “dominatrix” in his vocabulary, but not anywhere in his experience. Rez was not simply under the spell of a beguiling young lady, but was wholly owned as her slave, without having any idea such a thing was possible.
He didn’t jump at her every word, of course; it was far more subtle than that. Feminists only claim they want that, but despise it when they get it. His physical finesse continually surprised her. Anything he tried to do for the first time seemed to work out just fine, because he could do whatever he could see others doing — dancing, sports, and everything in general. She wasn’t the only one impressed. But in some distant future day he would come to realize his intrinsic slowness to jump at her whims, as he would for his own whims, must have struck her as something resembling a strength he didn’t actually possess. She seemed to believe she didn’t own him, when she actually did, but she was not the sort to be patient. Her instinct to dominate was provoked with unquenchable fury.
Within a week, the head games began.
It was at about the same time his training exposed him to a wide array of devices. There was a need for his skill because every war seemed to wipe away some portion of technological memory, and each corporation was trying to understand things they had captured or found in the wreckage. He had a phenomenal ability to turn the camera to angles no robot could have imagined, seeing the image on the electronic display with a clarity few others saw until the image was saved and transmitted for analysis. Rez was consistently able to capture the essence of a device in the fewest images of anyone working on the same projects. He literally became famous among his fellow students at the academy.
His training was accelerated. It kept taking him away from the facility, and his girlfriend fought tooth and nail. Rez never really understood, except that it had something to do with her incredibly possessive nature, as if she feared he might find some other girl when he was away from her. No amount of assurance from him would soothe her on this point of tension.