The Exchange Part 1

Project Sapphire: The World’s first AI. A top-secret project exposed to a select group
of scientists. Lei Heaton, a man desperate to save his daughter, is at the top of
the bionics empire. He not only hired the team to repair his daughter’s damaged body,
he plans to reanimate her dead mind using the Sapphire AI.

A dangerous man—a killer that is no regular human…

Maxwell Landon—codename: Deimos—is the Adelphi Organization’s top agent. His M.O is
simple: Never fail. He's used to annihilating anyone that gets in his way. But this
time, he's being called to protect and deliver. Deimos is aware that this mission
won't be like any other. Then he lays eyes on the resurrected Ms. Heaton, and instantly
he knows:

That is
not
Magdalena Heaton.

And he will never be the same again.

Control, his most prized possession, is ripped from him with a single glance...

The violent attraction he feels for the girl complicates matters immediately. But
what Deimos doesn't know is that things are about to get much worse. Sapphire isn't
just a completely different person than the dead Ms. Heaton—she's the AI miracle of
the century. An advancement that many would kill to own.

Including himself, no matter how hard he fights against it.

A girl determined to protect her creator. A man determined to protect her...

Despite the fact that she is not Magdalena, Sapphire is bent on taking her place as
Mr. Heaton's daughter in order to keep her creator safe. Deimos knows that he has
to honor her wish. But the thing inside him is demanding more. More than a touch.
A lot more than a taste. It responds to everything about her...every stuttered breath
that lets him know she wants him as much as he wants her.

How does he walk away when he knows that no matter how far he is from her, she’ll
always be in danger and he'll always hunger for her?

Acknowledgements

Elena, as always, words cannot begin to describe what it means to have you in my life.
A bitch cannot be more possessive of another female than I am of you. Thank you so
much for all that you do, and all the insanity you patiently put up with. You are
the Ying to my Yang and will always mean the world to me. I love you and will love
you until the day I die.

Liz...wow. You came into my life so unexpectedly and you rocked my world. You became
one of the few people to have faith in me during one of the darkest points of my career
and girl, you won me over for life. I love you hard. Keep being amazing.

The girls over at The Subclub Books. Girls, girls, girls. You
own
me on a level I don’t even fully understand yet. You all singlehandedly restored my
faith in myself and my talent. I cannot begin to thank you for being so fucking awesome
that it hurts. Emily, Nina, Lisa, Rachel, Laurie, Neda, Gas, BSG, Jen, Georgana, if
I live to be a 100, I will never, ever forget what you’ve guys have done for me.

To anyone reading this, if you haven’t stopped by and liked The Subclub Books yet,
you need to click on the picture below and
go do it now.
 

Patty...don’t get me started. I start an ode to how much I love you, and I’ll never
shut up. You and your sister Cathy dug your way into my heart. Meeting you was one
of the highlights of my year. I cannot wait ‘till we all get to spend time together
again.

Carol, same to you baby girl. Meeting you has become one of the many blessings I was
given this year. You are truly a sweetheart. The world needs more people like you.
Working with you is freaking awesome, to put it bluntly LOL I love that you are a
business woman, but more than that, you are a
human being
that cares. You truly do and in this world full of vipers, that heart of yours is
worth more than gold to me. StarAngel’s (Promo Stars) & MaE are gonna make it BIG
one day baby. I promise you <3 <3 <3

Copyright © 2014 by N.  Isabelle Blanco

Malfunction Erotica

(The House of Malfunction)

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used
in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except
for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either
a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Edited By: Elena M. Reyes & Liz Fisher

Cover Art By: N. Isabelle Blanco

Photo credit: 123RF/ @Irina Pusepp

I can't take it anymore. She's ruined me. My entire sanity hinges on being inside
her.

“I want you. Need you.”

“Oh, God.
Yes.
Take me.
”

And that it was all it took for my life to get ripped apart, torn into unrecognizable
pieces that didn't make sense and never would.

Adelphi Organization Site 0012

Exact Location Unknown.

Leipzig, Germany.

“SINCE WHEN DO YOU HEAD the security ops, Deimos? Your specialty is slaughter and
maim.”

I ignore Logan’s question and continue staring down at my tablet. He’s right. I didn’t
earn the code name
Deimos
by accident. I specialize in death. Gruesome, all-consuming, creative, no-man-left-standing
type of death.

Which is why I was chosen for this mission.

That and the fact that I am familiar with the field of bionics. After having major
surgery to replace both my arms with bionic parts, I’ve become one of eight bionic
people on the planet.

I'm also on a whole other level compared to most of them. The best that technology
could create. Top secret. The world's governments—those that are heavy power players—go
to extreme lengths to hide from the public that certain technologies exist.

Both of my arms and hands are now made of that type of technology. Practically indestructible,
seemingly human, bionic parts.

Actually, considering the information in front of me, there’s nine of us now. And
the new addition seems to be as advanced as I am.

Logan gets fed-up with my lack of response. With a huff, he gets up and comes to stand
behind me so he can read over my shoulder.
“Oh… kay. Yeah. She’s attractive. Looks familiar, too. That’s your assignment?”

He’s not lying. The young girl in the picture is beautiful. With her long, dark brown
hair, pale skin, and her mixed features, she’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

Her eyes are large and golden-green. Mr. Heaton, her father, is British and Asian.
Her mother, Luisa Heaton, had been Spaniard.

She’s a perfect genetic mixture. As she would be. Lei Heaton had his deceased wife’s
genetic code tested and analyzed with his own
to
ensure maximum compatibility.

Logan reaches forward, putting his finger on my fucking tablet and scrolling. “Magdalena
Heaton…
the
Magdalena Heaton? As in the daughter of Lei Heaton, owner of Heaton Corp?”

Heaton Corp. is the leader in medical technology.

Namely... you guessed it: bionics.

I nod and push his hand away.

Logan, being the annoying fucker that he sometimes is, rips the tablet out of my grasp
so he can continue reading. “Father is Lei Heaton, age 45. Mother was Luisa Heaton.
Deceased at age 41. Blah, blah, blah. All this is common knowledge.”

I raise an eyebrow, waiting for it…

“Date of birth is June 9th, 1996. Age nineteen. Date of—” Logan blinks down at the
tablet. Then, he brings it up to his face, as if having it that close will help him
make sense of what he’s reading. “Confirmed status: deceased.”

He lowers the tablet, red brows furrowed. His light blue eyes are locked on the floor
and he looks so concentrated that it seems like he’s trying to solve
Femat
’s Theorem or some shit. “This states that her date of death is December 17th, 2014.
So… what? They’re sending the ‘terror’ of the Adelphi Organization to deliver a
corpse
? And why hasn’t there been anything in the news about Lei Heaton’s daughter dying?”

I wave at the tablet still in his hands. “Keep reading.” I turn back to my touch-screen
computer and begin putting together a message for Misty Johnson, the IT genius of
our unit.

By this point, I have memorized everything Logan is reading. No matter how many times
I go through the file, it still doesn’t make sense to me.

Magdalena Heaton was in a car wreck about four months ago. It’d been late at night
when the car skidded right off the empty road and straight into a ditch, thirty-feet
down.

The driver somehow survived with only a few minor injuries; Magdalena Heaton, however,
did not.

I hear Logan approaching before he speaks. “So Lei Heaton tries to save his daughter
using every bionic advancement at his company’s disposal. And when that fails and
his daughter dies, he… what? He brought her brain back to life by uploading a
computer program
into it?”

Disbelief is evident in Logan’s voice, and it’s understandable. The ramifications
of what Lei Heaton has done can’t even be counted. The ramifications of what Dr. Allen,
the creator of Project Sapphire, has done go beyond anything I could ever comprehend.

If this gets out, governments will go to war over this technology. Religions will
crumble. The weak amongst us will have no idea how to deal with this knowledge.

“Not just a computer program,” I tell Logan. “From what I understand, Project Sapphire
was a
fully
functioning, self-evolving AI.”

Logan blinks at me.

“It—
she
was a consciousness. A computer-birthed personality. One that now exists inside a
human brain and is programmed with memories somehow extrapolated from another woman's
mind.”

“Shit.”

“Pretty much.”

Logan hands my tablet back to me and runs a hand through his red hair. He spends a
lot more time thinking about the philosophical and scientific reasons behind humanity’s
existence than I do.

If I’m shaken, he’s mind-fucked.

“Lei Heaton was so desperate to keep his daughter that he had a different personality
uploaded into her fucking mind,” Logan says with a shake of his head. “A personality
created inside a computer. Dude, I wasn’t supposed to live to witness this happen.
This is way too advanced.”

My
inbox
pings. I bend down to stare at my monitor and find a reply from Misty. “Different
personality, but as I said, Magdalena’s memories were loaded into the software. The
entire algorithm was also changed to mimic
Ms
. Heaton’s personality.”

“But it can’t possibly be the same person. Can it?”

Logan’s question tells me that he suspects the same thing I do; who I'm picking up
can't be Magdalena Heaton. “Try telling that to a narcissistic, egotistical man who
is obsessed with his biological creation and is convinced that he has Godlike powers
at his disposal.”

When I turn my head toward him, the twitch in Logan’s jaw tells me how much he still
has to say—and how hard he’s fighting to keep it all back. He rolls his shoulders,
cracks his neck, and just like that, he’s slipped back into professionalism. “It seems
to me like Misty should be going with you. The
intel
mentioned the Bayesian algorithm, among a dozen others. She’s familiar with that
and the Gaussian Mixture Model. It’s best to have her around. ”

“She won’t be coming with me but I forwarded all the info to her. I’ll be in constant
communication with you two in case shit gets rough.”

Lei Heaton hid his daughter's accident and resulting death from the world
, a
nd he’s called us in to transport his daughter back from Japan to London.

This isn’t simply a novel case; it’s a cauldron brewing with hundreds of possible
fuck-ups and my gut is telling me that this mission will in no way be as simple as
everyone hopes.

“You’re taking Gage and his team with you.”

I nod at Logan, pick up my tablet, sat-phone, and slide my HK45C into its holster.
By the time I arrive in
Utashinai
, I’ll be carrying weapons a lot more dangerous than my HK, but for now, it’ll do.

“I have a bad feeling about this one, Max.”

He’s
one of the
few people alive that I allow to call me that, and yet, it still annoys me when he
does.

I wave at him over my shoulder, heading toward the freight elevator. Aside from the
narrow staircase on the other side of the floor, it’s the only way out of the upper
level of our facility.

“I do, too,” I tell him as I press the button to open the elevator doors. “That’s
why I plan to keep in touch with you guys at all times.”

Logan is still staring at me, tense, as the vertical doors close.