The Bachelor Machine
Erotic Stories
by
M. Christian
Circlet Press, Inc.
Cambridge, MA
The Bachelor Machine by M. Christian
Ebook Edition Copyright © 2010 by M. Christian
Cover Illustration and Design Copyright © 2010 Wynn Ryder
An earlier edition of this book was published in 2003 by Green Candy Press.
Smashwords edition
This book's manuscript was carefully prepared in-house at Circlet Press and then converted to multiple ebook formats using the Smashwords Meatgrinder.
Published by
Circlet Press, Inc.
39 Hurlbut Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
www.circlet.com
License Notes
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Also by M. Christian
Brushes
Dirty Words
Filthy
Licks & Promises
Love Without Gun Control
Me2
Painted Doll
Rude Mechanicals
Speaking Parts
The Very Bloody Marys
Contents
Foreword by Kit O'Connell
Introduction to the 2003 Edition by Cecilia Tan
Everything But the Smell of Lilies
by Kit O'Connell
M. Christian is a writer who doesn’t let the reader off easy. I don’t mean that his books aren’t easy to read (he has a fine way with words and a unique, recognizable voice). The thing about his stories is that even at their filthiest, they also make you think.
As a reader, there often seem to be two ways to read erotic science fiction (as a writer, I doubt it's so cut-and-dried, but bear with me). Either the fantasy is so completely the focus of the story that the setting is constructed to suit it, or the author presents us with a fully-realized setting and then allows us to peek in on sexy activity happening there. Neither approach is inherently superior, but M. Christian's work is firmly in the latter category.
Take "Everything But the Smell of Lilies," one of his finest and most twisted moments. Our heroine is Justine Moor, a sex worker heavily modified by high-tech medical science so that her johns can kill her, have sex with her corpse, and then pay her when she starts breathing again. In the hands of another writer, our protagonist would be enough--an excuse to spin an edgy tale of erotic death where the victim is smiling at the end. While Justine may wear a satisfied smile at the end of this story, the readers' thoughts are likely to be far more complex because the author shows us not a typical transaction, but the moment when the script goes wrong.
This awareness of the fallibility inherent in life and technology is an undercurrent throughout his work. From the titular "Bachelor Machine" to the incompatible wiring of "Technophile," one almost gets the impression that there is more story to be found, and perhaps more eroticism as well, in moments of failure than in moments of perfection. Then again, doesn't every good pervert have a fond, albeit sometimes wry memory of the time the rope broke or the batteries ran out? I know I do.
Whether delightfully pushing the definitions of gender beyond all meaning (such as in "Fully Accessorized, Baby") or exploring the boundaries of consent (as in "Hackwork," another favorite), M. Christian is tweaking his readers' minds as well as their hormones. The implications of "Guernica" disturb me, and after several reads I still don't know if I agree and that probably means I should read it again.
In the years since I first read The Bachelor Machine, I've shared these thought-provoking tales with many friends. The stories have never failed to provoke both reaction and discussion. Long after arousal is gone, there are stories here that haunt me. I'm glad that now you can share that too.
Kit O'Connell
Bryan, Texas
Introduction to the 2003 Edition
by Cecilia Tan
I’m going to tell you a secret. There are only two people in the world I envy. One is the late Roger Zelazny, whose talent for an almost jazz improvisational way of writing I could never match. The other is M. Christian, for writing exactly what I’d write if only I could get off my ass. Which is to say, raunchy hallucinatory sexfuture dreams that never fail to arouse me and kick me in the gut at the same time. Good stuff.
I’ve always said that if there was someone out there who would write exactly what it was I wanted to read, I wouldn’t have to do it myself. Honestly, when I discovered M. Christian, I had that half-formed thought: gee, maybe I can quit... (of course, I didn’t).
It was the summer of 1994, if I remember correctly. I had founded Circlet Press three years before, to fill a void in the literary world. At the time, there was nowhere to publish erotic science fiction, or futuristic erotica, or whatever label you want to put on the wild, genre-bending stuff I and Lauren and others were writing. So I became a publisher, starting with chapbooks and slim little volumes of under one hundred pages. As news of the press spread to other speculative sex writers, manuscripts had begun to pour in for our anthologies. I decided I needed help getting through the growing slush pile and cajoled Lauren and some of my other authors to sit in my one-bedroom apartment one afternoon and read, read, read. We ordered Chinese take-out and delved into the manuscripts, pausing from time to time to eat a crab rangoon or read a “clunker” aloud. There were a lot of clunkers that day, and we were a pretty raucous group.
Then everything got quiet. I looked up from the story I was reading, and two of my readers were looking at each other. They then traded manuscripts: “Here, now you read this one, I want that one!” They’d found not one, but two, really good somethings. Lauren then brought the manuscript in her hand to me and strongly suggested I read it that instant, not later. “Just read the first sentence.”
I saw the words “I almost lost my virginity at fifteen, but his batteries ran low” and was hooked.
The manuscript was “Technophile” by M. Christian. Lauren had written on the comment form she handed me with it: YES YES YES. I agreed. It wasn’t just the best story we’d read all day, it was one of the best stories we’d read in the genre, ever.
The other story we received that day was “State,” a story I liked so much, I’ve published it twice. These two began a slew of stories Circlet published from Chris. At slush-readings in the future, people would go HUNTING for his name on envelopes, hoping to be the first to read something new. I’d like to say I had to break up a fistfight when “Fully Accessorized, Baby” was discovered, but that would be the fiction writer in me trying to sensationalize. (We just took turns.)
When the story “Heartbreaker” came in, my then assistant Susan Groppi read it without knowing who it was from. “A very very very good story,” she wrote in her comment form. “I often find I can’t describe what it is I like, just that it’s good.” Her editorial instincts were right on--when a story just kicks ass, your initial reaction isn’t a critical one, it’s simply “woo hoo!”
One of the reasons I bought so many stories from Chris over the years is not only that the stories are consistently great, but that he has been able to write for any sexuality, from any point of view, man, woman, alien, third gender, robot, robot-wannabe... and of course sexualities and identities yet to be invented. For me, the whole purpose of combining two often formula-bound genres, erotica and science fiction, was to break out of the expected molds, to create something exciting, arousing, and provocative in all senses of the word. Chris has done that better than most who have tried their hand at it. He has a gift. And through that ability to see the world as it is not, to envision things wholly beyond our real boundaries of gender, technology, and identity, he is able to create characters that grab me. Characters I believe in. I empathize with Kusa, the rebuilt cybernetic woman-cop in “Heartbreaker.” I want to fuck Fields “the perfect love doll” in “State” and see if I can crack her facade.
Even better, Chris is one of the few writers who has been able to sell me stories where everything is not happy and rosy. I’ve always insisted on a sex-positive outlook for Circlet Press--no rape, no dismemberment, no homophobia, you get the idea--but the result is a lot of happy stories, where sexy people have good sex and both they and the reader enjoy it. The problem here, from a literary standpoint, is that without conflict, there’s not much of a story. Chris is one of the best at creating the kind of conflict that works best in an erotic story: inner conflict. The kind of conflict that many a writer has shied away from because it is the most difficult kind to portray believably and intriguingly. The kind of conflict that in science fiction is all too often replaced by external action, a fight, a battle, an explosion. This is why an M. Christian story is not just some of the most excellent, cutting-edge erotica around, but also great science fiction.
This is also why Chris’s stories quickly found homes outside of the specialized niche of Circlet Press. I started seeing his name in anthologies like Best American Erotica and The Mammoth Book of New Erotica. Since then, I find it hard to name an erotica market or anthology that he is NOT in. The secret is out--I don’t think Chris’s manuscripts even go to anyone’s slush pile anymore. (These days they don’t even go to my office; I take them directly into the bedroom.)
There’s one more person I envy, and that’s the reader who is picking up this book for the first time. Prepare yourself to discover the intense pleasure within.
Cecilia Tan
Cambridge, MA
Once part of a sprawl of temporary industrial units floated into Kyushu harbor to make a Korean-owned nanochip factory, the building was industrial architecture that had been stuck on a shelf and left to forget--or really just rust. As far Fields knew--and could see--rust still really managed the property. Rumors said that Mama had scored the old building for cheap, had found some hungry jacks to scalp juice from the main grid, and some mysterious “sources” for the rest. The girls? They came from wherever lost girls always came from: the cramps of hunger or addiction, the Devil of father. They came and Mama fed them, sprayed them when they were sick, and put that rusting roof over their heads. In return, they worked.
Friday nights weren’t usually this busy. There were even rumbles from Mama’s office that Fields might be called down from her box to work the cribs with the pie-faced girls. But someone asked for the special of the house and she was spared having to watch the ordinary flatscreen with the rest of the girls. She was the special, so she had a while to get ready, and even watch the end of Don’t Drop It (her favorite) on the antique Hakati tank and--yum!--relish the new host.
The antique took a long time to power down, and she always (since Mama had sold it to her) felt that thrill-tingle of worry that some client would come in and still see the spray/wash/float of green/blue/red hanging in front of her cheap holo print of Tokyo At Night that masked the unit and would ponder a bit too long over why a Mitsui Automaton would be watching a game show.
The streets, and common knowledge, said that Autos took awhile to power up, boot up their software, get their circuits warm and ready--though never really willing: the perfect love doll. The perfect toy. The real fact was that it took Fields time to get completely into her Act.
Her friendly gray robe went first, into the hidden closet behind the false wall of phony blinking tell-tales and dummy flatscreens playing loops of technical gibberish, with the rest of her reality: hung on a hook next to her vid discs, street clothes, wigs, pills, towels, creams, sprays, and plain-faced bottles of special dye.
Very special; an incredibly durable bonding polymer that she applied each morning--but she was always careful to reexamine every inch of herself in a roll-up plastic mirror, lathering on the thick blueness at the faintest signs of her real pinkness before the light over the door flashed green. Her hair, every brown strand, was months gone--and kept at an imperceptible level by a chilling spray of tailored enzymes. Sure, she could wear any of her wigs, and sometimes did for those who just couldn’t deal with a too-inhuman Automaton, but for the most part she liked going smooth and streamlined: you paid for a machine.
The little yellow hexagon pills still had about another two hours to go--her skin texture and temperature would be just that different. Not quite human, almost machine synthetic. Anyone, of course, who knew the real Mitsui would know the reality of pink-skin and blood Fields under the blue, behind the contacts, beyond the re-engineered body. But then the Autos were very rare, their legends and rumors huge, and who would know the real thing, after all in the dim shadows of big, sprawling, bad Kyushu?
Fields’s body was a gift from Mama, really an investment: those long days two years ago with the Osaka Scalpers had taken what nature had lucked her with and shaped her into an almost perfect Auto Class B--still one of Mitsui’s most popular models. Strong shoulders; round face with high, almost too-wide-for-nature cheekbones; tiny, pert, full lips; huge crystal blue eyes; high, wide and moderate tits, huge against her actually small frame, with aggressively large nipples--some of it was really hers, some was machine made for her machine act. Her looks, real or made, would be good and profitable as long as the real unit was State of the Art... and the rumors of how good, and how hot, kept flying.
Fields’s cortical jack was a gift from Sammi; now long gone--his gift of matched wet dreams through cheap Kobe scalp implants was also gone, one quick brain-trip with the tall and lean New Tokyo hustler had been enough for the pre-teen Fields (spasms of her riding him, his impression of nothing-but-sex nothing-but-sex and her always on fucking top running/stomping all over her images of that one time, that one good time, at that Osaka shrimp stick stand when he had just smiled at her oh so special)--the jack was the one and only thing that really remained of him. It was important to the Act, so she kept it polished and in good repair. The clients knew, if they knew anything, that no one had shrunk the hardware for the Autos enough for them to be self-supporting. They expected and got her--Regulation Blue, hairless, eyes also blue but no irises, just slightly cool, perfect little ass, perfection tits, and trailing her braid of cables: a love-doll lifted from a Japanese collective consciousness, a manga sex-toy, all eyes and ass and tits and mouth and cunt. Pure fantasy, rolled off the assembly line to a male libido’s factory specs. Her body was flesh, tricked by drugs and chemicals--the jack on the crown of her head was real, the line was dead, but she was still State: the perfect whore, the perfect trick, perfect in her Act.
And, god knew, she liked it. Liked it a lot--
The fountain of basic colors died, and with it Fields’s ritualistic fear of discovery. She sat on the stool, made sure one last time that she was jacked into the dead line, and that her breathing was cool and calculated. Mama buzzed her, as she was supposed to, that the client was coming up the stairs.
Green light over the door.
He was nice. She had been there, in that maze of old modular sheeting and drop-in offices, long enough to know it. That night, that Friday, she was tingling with work lust, and she liked it. Don’t Drop It had that great new host, the one that rang of Sammi, her Tokyo hustler, when he was cruising and straight, and she had enjoyed a quick little jill while watching--running a blue finger up and down her little blue slit, bathing her blue pearl with her own juice. No cry, no come, not enough time for that. But a trembling thrill up and down her, up from her blue pussy, vibrating her back and jigging her leg. She was wet for the client, always wet for him (Mama schooling), but she was going to be really wet for this one.
And he was going to be a good one. Mama school and her years there clicked through her as he opened the door and came in. Shy and kind of reserved. He looked everywhere but where she sat on her stool in all her blueness, the Act full blown: a square room, walled with semi-transparent white plastic, bare save for the stool, a simple futon, one wall the brains of the Mitsui Automaton (closet, bathroom, etc.), and the “Unit” itself sitting on that black and chrome stool waiting for the Job--almost lifeless, almost perfectly human (Regulation Blue, so if they should impossibly break free they could never pass), waiting to do just what you wanted. Anything. At all. Your heart’s desire, your cock’s (and sometimes clit’s) desire.
She stood up and took a neutral position, making sure her legs were just-so parted enough so he could see her blue slit and the dot of her blue clit. Her nipples were hard from her near-jill and Mama’s school, and she knew her scent was filling his nostrils. Perfectly lifelike. Perfect imitation of a machine that was supposed to be better than lifelike.
He was a surprise. Still a type, but still a surprise. Away from the Company tour, maybe? Shy and inside about this, maybe not wanting to be seen with the rest of his Contacts diving into perfumed pools and being given tepid blowjobs by bored/hungry girls? What better way to do the same kind of thing without the examining eyes: find someone who didn’t care, who couldn’t shoot him down with a bat of dull, professional eyes.
“Stand up and come here.” Stone, gravelly, deep. Young, yeah, but childish, no way.
As Fields stood and walked, in that special loose-hipped way that the Autos really did walk, she took better stock of Johnny. He was youngish, maybe mid-thirties. His synthetic suit was simple and professional. The tie, though, was real silk, and the scenario changed. And the tone, the strength, the gravel: maybe he was one of the managers, out to do something special with someone who couldn’t complain or say no . . . to anything.
Didn’t believe it was possible, but Fields got even wetter. She liked it rough and fast and maybe metal-tinged dangerous. And she was in the mood, anyway. She liked her job, the other girls, for the most part, and the customers quite a bit.
“How can I please you, sir?” It had taken her a while to get the voice just right: just enough of a non-inflection. Mama’s School. The Medicos. And something that was just part of the Act.
The programs were varied, and rumors circulated. The Units, the Autos, were soft and hardwired to be the best--they could surprise you--so Fields was loose in her Act. Without waiting for his commands, she got up and walked to him, listening to her cables sing across the futon. A tinge of fear again: maybe he suspected, maybe the dye was wearing thin, maybe he knew the real thing. But he didn’t move, just let her come forward, drop to her knees and breathe on the tent of his pants. “Will you allow me to pleasure you?”
He shook his head and moved past her to sit on the stool. “Come here--” patting the fine synthetic of his suit leg.
The tone was just right and the Act reached beyond even Fields to click her into it. Like a dancer who knows just the right moves to get from one end of the stage to the other, Fields moved her head just so to untangle the trailing decorative umbilicus, a debutante’s hair toss, a flirt’s bat of shaved eyebrows, and a step, walking an invisible line to give her hips and bare breasts just enough of a sway. Her lip got jutted: impertinent and pouty, her hands ran through her non-existent hair and, instead, tugged a bit on the cables to make sure they didn’t grab or snag. Across the room now, in front of the Client, she stuck a finger under her chin, lowered her eyes and shuffled her feet.
She made a move to make a noise (“Daddy?”) but caught it in her throat at the lights in his eyes, the firm tent in his finer pants. The Act had her then, and it had him. His fire and need leaped the gap as she moved closer, putting him into her heat--letting it wash over him.
“Come here,” he said, patting his knee.
She nodded, her age now lost somewhere between naughty girl and playing strumpet, and moved towards him, letting the tingling Fields of his excitement bathe her. Her eyes batted: part Act, his excitement.
On Daddy’s knee, she turned and looked at him. So close, so close, the heat of him--this was his treat, this was what he’d come for. She didn’t pretend to know (his hand lifted and traced a fingernail line up the side of her arm and across her left shoulder) what drew them to Autos, but they came. Maybe this was something tight and shut and secret within him, maybe he had suggested the game to someone else and they’d shut it down further so now the only person he could tell this heat to was someone artificial and consciousless. Supposedly.
On Daddy’s knee, she arced her back just a bit. One thing they always did come for was the fresh enthusiasm. It was perfect for Fields, she really looked forward to each and every chance to refine the Act. An Auto would treat each and every client as if they were the only Client, man, woman, in the world. They matched: the fact of what she was supposed to be, and what she was.
His breath was hot and faster, it warmed the side of her left breast. The nails turned and glided under: her nipple tightened and knotted in front of his eyes. His breath tingled her nipple and she ached to reach around his head and draw his hot and soft (she knew, she knew) mouth to her nipple, to reverse the play and become mother to him. But she resisted, and let she him take the way.
The hand dropped to her thigh and rested there. She resisted again, trapped in the Act. Fields was in bondage to her performance: Think like the machine, be the machine and let the Act take it’s way.
I like being the machine, she thought, her mantra as he pushed just a bit against her tight thighs, so she took the cue and spread them ever just so. I must be the machine.
The terror came as he brushed his fingertips up along her slit, tickling the bead of her clit ever just so. The Act: she responded a bit late, a second after the thrill itself, the wave itself, went from pussy to head. A second delay. A second second, and she moaned slightly. She wanted to turn and slip off his leg, turn and face him, spread her legs to let his fine, smooth fingers (nails trimmed professionally short) touch her, explore her. She wanted to be free, but the Act was around her, close and confining. Invisible bondage of acting.
He said something. Something lost in the heat.
“Pardon, sir?”
“Have you been keeping clean?” he said. His voice was constrained and hard, but broke with a crack of excitement. These were his lines, and the fact of it actually happening was taking its toll.
“Yes, Daddy,” she said, tones of slight shame, embarrassment. Resting her hands on her own thighs, she spread her own legs a little wider on the balancing Act of his knee.
“All over?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Even your coochie?”
“Yes, Daddy.” (Machines do not laugh, machines do not laugh, machines do not laugh . . . you sweet, crazy guy.)
She knew the next line (“How did I tell you to do it?”) but that didn’t stop the tingle when he really did say it. Leaning back into his arm, tucking herself under his arm, she put her head on his shoulder: a silent-language I’m embarrassed.
He stiffened somewhere else, and she could tell that a wave of shock had made its way through him. This was almost, his thoughts almost ringing through her head, too real. The fear made him soften a bit under her leg, made his posture twist. Too real, too real.
Time to bring him back, to let him go. Give him his money’s worth: she whispered her adolescent fear into his shoulder again I’m embarrassed, Daddy and let him stroke her back, tisk-tisking her into comfort.
“I use a washcloth on my private place,” with small hands over her slightly-spread thighs.
It took him a while, coughing it up from his own real embarrassment through his brain via his now-hard steel/rock cock. “ . . . careful to clean everywhere?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Especially your pearl.”
Quiet, shushed. “Yes, Daddy.”
Knew the next line, too, but let it come from him real and quite strong: “Show me how you do it--how I told you to do it.”
Dropping her hands into her lap, she spread a bit wider, balancing herself on his knee, leveraging herself on the ridge of his cock. Her clit was a tiny button under her finger, and the first touch was almost too much, too hard and chaffing. The finger went down lower, scooping up a shine of her own juice, and returned to her knot. The first stroke was clumsy and childish, in character: a quick, hard rub up and down with the meat of her hand, pressing up and in. The feeling tore, rather than washed over her. It was a near-kick in the clit. It was too much too hard too soon and she had to use her Act, use the breathing of the machine to keep from making a noise. State of the Art, she thought, gripping herself inside to keep from making noise, tightening her thighs too much. State of the Art--
“That’s it, that’s it--” his voice a deep whisper in her ear “--it feels good to clean yourself, doesn’t it?”
That was the way she would have started, if she was what he really wanted, so she had given it to him. But that was the Act, that was the realism that he wanted from a machine. Now what he really wanted, what she really fucking wanted: the next stroke was leisurely and circular. She cupped hand in another hand and moved them slowly counter-clockwise, cupping and working her cunt with her fingers. One thumb stroked and ringed her hardening and hardening clit while the other fingers, and the other thumb, worked into her cunt itself, relishing the muscularity of her, the rings of her muscles, the little no-man’s land between cunt and asshole.
Under her, behind her, Fields felt him tighten, and caught a whiff of the metal tang of his excitement. The gates had been passed, and the Act was running smooth. A quick jill come climbed up out of her cunt in a series of throbbing quakes. Her legs, her thighs, her tummy jiggled with the coming wave, and she pressed harder and moved faster, and chanced a quick skirt right across the top of her clit.
The orgasm was real--it reached out of her cunt, through her gut, up her throat in a low moan, finally spilling out of her lips.
Leaning back, she twitched and quaked in his arms. She let herself fall only so far, not letting him have to support her entire weight. She was, after all, supposed to weigh something like five hundred pounds altogether.
Propped, balanced on his leg, she slowly let herself slide down to a crouch on the floor. His hand was on her shoulder, stroking her. His fingernails were lights gliding through her closed eyes. A good performance, a fine come. Act 2:
Turning, she pulled herself now back up, pulling with all her real weight on his pants, climbing the fine suit with clenching hands till she was where she needed to be.
Rubbing the bar in his pants, tracing with her first and little fingers the crown of his circumcised head, she admired it, lost herself in her contemplation of it, getting off on its length (average) and hardness (the Act was really working, it really was). She was contemplating, working herself up with another hand between her legs (and the sweet slick noise of her cunt juice, and her hard clit swimming in it), and she was feasting on his cock without really touching it.
Sign: his hand gently rested on the back of her head: “Clean Daddy now.”
With fluttering skill, she found the zipper and glided it down on its nylon-Teflon teeth. His underwear was peach and also silk. A darker, salty-smelling dot ended at the tent of his ridged crown.
The material was clean, with the fine wine of his sweat and the tingle of a few pubic hairs poking through the fine material. She washed it with her tongue, bathing him, tasting the salt of his pre-come. Fields pulled back and admired her work: a darker spread on the fine peach: his cock slowly becoming visible through the damp fabric.
His pants came down: fingers snaking up, she hooked his belt with one hand, unbuckling with the other. With a hiss of Tokyo tailoring mastery, and the creak from the stool as he stood, they came down.
Dimly, as she pulled down the peach and licked and kissed his hard cock, she was aware of him undressing over her. Tongue around the head, tasting salt and skin. Hands in his short, almost shaved pubic hair, fondling his balls, feeling their wrinkled sacks, their bristling hairs.
Too quick, maybe, too sudden probably, but he was hanging way down, his breathing was quick and deep, his legs were columns of meat and tension. He slid down her throat: the head rubbing against the ridges of the top of her mouth, the softness, smoothness, of the back of her throat. She swallowed and pulled him close, and kept swallowing him down and down--using those hungry, swallowing, eating muscles to draw on his cock, milk it, and work it inside her.
Dimly, through all this, she became aware that her other hand was back inside her, three fingers deep and working her own reverse throat, playing with the twitching, clenching muscles of her cunt. Her clit was a tight singing, throbbing, pulse between her legs. She soothed it and calmed it and bathed it with a circling thumb, pressing on that special spot just to the right of her slit, hitting her special COME button at just the right instant--
--and somewhere, he was standing over her, his hard, hard, too-hard cock down the back of her throat and she was consuming him, swallowing it down deep--
--and somewhere was the room, somewhere was Fields and her trailing umbilicord prop in a small room in an old factory building in the old, bad part of Kyushu--
--and here was Fields in the Act, connected and linked to this man, this man who came to her, who let it down and showed it to her, and she played with it, and made it real safe and fucking hot. State of the fucking Art--
--he came, a shudder and two hands hard on the back of her head, not pushing, not forcing, just holding himself there. The jets (one, two, three, four--good boy--five, six . . . ) were beyond taste but his body relaxed and oozed the come out of his skin. He broke out in a head-to-toe shine of sweat and giddy release.
Opening wider (was it possible?) she eased him out and kissed and licked him clean, then let her own deep and rumbling come, a thigh-trembling and spine-arching (was that her head on the floor, was that his hand on her hand, steadying her, easing her rough ride?) spasm that left her panting almost out of Act, almost to the edge of mumbling “Fucking grand, man.”
Final Act, lady and gentleman: She got to her legs in a supreme Act of control (without a quake, without a mumble, no hand to reach to steady herself) and walked to her private corner of the room.
With the stainless steel bowl of warm water and the soft cloth, she bathed and cleaned his cock and balls. She let him prattle a bit, his “Oh, Gods!” and such washing over her. Applause. Applause. Applause!
Cleaned, she helped him dress: cocksucking whore to Geisha in one quick move. The Act for him was over, the orgasms tasty and filling. The Act, though was not quite.
Fields showed him to the door, and concluded with a “Thank you, sir. Please come again,” in the voice, in the Act. The tones of coolness, not of boredom, but of very, very expensive circuits. A stance slightly stiff, slightly posed, more than slightly mechanical.
She closed the door behind him and stretched out on the futon. The applause of her come, the applause of his come, the applause for the Act. This was someone, and something, she really, really enjoyed, and could do a really, really long time--
The purr interrupted her quick sleep. Not soon, just long enough for her head to rest.
Mama glowed, a wrinkled goddess with a thin black cigarette, as always, between broken tombstone teeth. In chopped English she woke Fields up--
--the message worked its way through (“Okay, Mama, okay . . .”), “He say he want you--”
“That’s great, Mama. I’m broken, though, right? Little Miss Robot busted for the night--”
“No, no, no, he want you. Buy you. He want buy you--”
Fields smiled back at the broken, smiling teeth. “Good night, Mama.”
Applause, applause, applause . . .
. . . to sleep.
Bluebelle
I see myself sometimes. I don’t like it. It’s not that I’m ugly; if anything, I’m ‘utilitarian.’ It’s just that... when I cruise the downtown towers, past the reaching, blown-glass castles of the Acro-cologies, I sometimes catch my reflection in their rippling monomolecular glass. Dark blue, distorted by the organiform architecture, I look even though I don’t like the view.
Looking at yourself and seeing that you snore, that you have hairs coming out of your nose, or that you always have to get in the last word--none of us likes that, but we always look anyhow. I saw a machine, but I knew that. A globe, the shape dictated by the inversion drive, an embedded ring making up the scanning gear, the millimeter radar array, the counterinsurgency black boxes, the air-to-airs, the air-to-grounds, the suprasonic crowd suppression stuff, the heavy assault cannon, the 22mm assassination rig, the foam and spasm-gas bomblets. I rarely see myself, but I know what I can do. I’m capable of kicking ass.
I call her Bluebelle. No girlfriend, no old car; no crap like that. When they first strapped me in, I just thought of it. Right out of the, well, what else would you call her? LAPD Enhanced Patrol Unit D-277. She might be a rumbling ball, churning through the stinking air of LA, her inversion drive rippling the smog into oscillating ridges of dark yellow, but she’s Bluebelle to me.
5-12 IN ZONE B-3. SUSPECT: CAUCASIAN, MALE APPROX. 35-40. NIGHTMARE FIST GANG AFFILIATION IDENTIFICATIONS. GET MOVING, ROGER. She’s big, blonde with gold skin. Big tits. Great ass. Like a racehorse. Man, is she strong. Beat the crap out of you. But I hold the reins. Long, strong leather strips strung from my gloved hands down to the bit in her teeth. My saddle is black leather, too, shining like a black bitch’s cheek. My uniform is perfect, as only my Personalized Command Interface can make it.
* * * *
Pico and Sepulveda, the smoke from dozens of car fires turned the night blacker than my saddle, but Bluebelle saw through it all. First they were dots, then they were glops, then children, then adults, then they became the heat signatures of citizens, glowing at 98.6 degrees in her infrared eyes. The fires were there, too, but discounted for their higher temperatures. She flew down till her nipples hinted at scraping on the asphalt, and I quick-scanned for the perp using the low ultraviolet, seeking the tell-tale fluorescence of Nightmare Fist body work--a prompt action that got me a reward. GOOD CALL, ROGER. THAT SHOULD FLUSH HIM OUT. She turned from her flight to look back at me, a melting smile on her red-leather plush lips. Then her hand, lithe and strong as a golden snake, reached back between my legs. Her fingers closed briefly on my half-limp cock, warming it, pushing it up my own infrared scale.
Only a small reward, the hand pulled away; the smile lingered, but not for that much longer. Hadn’t caught the asshole yet. Dispatch thundered in my ear, the voice of records and sentence. Again I disagreed, but didn’t argue with them. I loved her too much for that. WE’LL GET HIM, DARLING. THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH.
He glowed different, a pulsing blue against the smoky darkness, among the fireflies of citizens, between the wire frames of downtown as seen through her millimeter radar. I roared as we tore down Pico towards him, a deep-throated battle-call echoed by her rumbling Inversion Drive. GET HIM, DARLING. GET HIM! I knew he ran because they always do, his image and data growing more complex despite his amplified muscles trying to get him away. When he flared in front of me I caught the brighter glow surrounding his right hand, something trying to mimic the ultraviolet signature of his tribal skin grafts (a mosaic of dead rivals sealed onto his body) but not accurately. Sloppy work, thank god.
I spurred her hard and we banked right, cutting between a pair of skeletal buildings in the middle stages of growth, frames furry with nanotech in her powerful-zoom eyes. The particle beam made a sound like loudly tearing paper, its appearance a score across her vision from where the Fist stood to the corner of one of the structures. The nano-grown diamond lattice vanished in a skyrocket blast of sheared atoms. Again I blessed her speed, her vision, and her bleeding-edge counter-insurgency software that kept the Fist from getting a quick and sure lock. FAST THINKING, ROGER! GREAT JOB!
No time for rewards, though. I unholstered my pistol, spun the chamber until it got to meat-seeker. She’d seen him, and unless he could shed his skin he was dead.
“Should I, Bluebelle? Should I?”
BLAST HIM, ROGER!
I didn’t need to aim. That might have been my pistol, but between my legs was my gun. Finger on the trigger, my dick was hard. Cock was very hard, pulsing and throbbing. Gloved hand high in the air, I pointed at a faint sliver of moon and fire. As the shot arced through the sky, part of her vision the eyesight of the tiny bullet, we pulled up until the city was a toy below. WONDERFUL, DARLING, WONDERFUL! She faced me, golden and gorgeous, nipples happy and hard, downy triangle between her legs hot and moist. As the bullet screamed down the street, eating up hundreds of feet per second, her hand wrapped around my suddenly exposed cock. As the bullet watched the Fist grow bigger and bigger, she took the bit from her mouth and kissed me, her sweet tongue dancing with my own. GREAT JOB, ROGER! As the bullet touched his patchwork chest, she slid her hand up and down my throbbing cock, making me somehow even harder. As the bullet exploded, its precise shockwave turning his chest inside out, painting the building behind him wildly red, she smiled at me.
“Please?” I asked her. “Please, Bluebelle--don’t I deserve it?”
Then--bliss--she said, “YES, ROGER; YES YOU DO.”
Above LA, my real body long forgotten, she smiled at me golden and gleaming. Her nipples, as red as the carbon monoxide sunset, hardened before my eyes. The downy hair between her legs looked like the polished brass of an old coin. Her lips: no words for her lips because as I was trying to find something around the dying corpse of LA to compare her to she bent down and slowly slid them over my hard, hard cock. No, no words. Sensations, yes, but rationality left as the wet tunnel of her smile dropped down, inch by inch over me. WONDERFUL, ROGER. YOU DID WONDERFUL!
She had my cock in her mouth and all was right in my world. She said yes, I was being rewarded, and there was nothing better in the whole wide world.
Above the stink of the city, she bent to slip her mouth onto my cock. Her mouth was the best mouth in the whole world, her tongue the best tongue I’d ever felt. Beyond the plushness of her lips, the delightful firmness of her teeth, it was the giving, my reward. She sucked me, she licked me, she nibbled me--she pulled me up, higher and higher, harder and harder until there was no place else to go but out through hot virtual jism down her insatiable throat.
When I opened my eyes we were above the yellow clouds of the city, and the sun was just starting to warm the horizon.
* * * *
Later: not much later, but later. A few calls between then and now, but nothing that really made my blood pump, that got Bluebelle to even look back at me. We cruised, checking on hot spots for any visible flames; we crawled along the freeways, looking for unauthorized transports; we swept the industrial centers, eyeing green sabotage and illegal dumping. Aside from a few homicides, a few felonies, a few sex crimes, it was quiet.
It started, as it always does. 5-19 IN ZONE A-2. MULTIPLE SUSPECTS. NIGHTMARE FISTS GANG AFFILIATIONS. THIS IS IT, ROGER.
We were the closest. Dispatch rumbled the sitrep in my ears, confirmed by her long range eyes. Large building downtown. Doctor’s offices. Insurance offices. Municipal offices. 12 perps. 36 hostages. The first demands hacked into the Muninet were for a complete police pullout of Clearlake. LIKE HELL, ROGER.
The canyons of the city opened below me as I dropped down. They swallowed me and soon the roadway again threatened to scrape Bluebelle’s nipples. The hot, smog-tainted air swept around me, kicked up by our speed into trailing corkscrews. In her standard vision, the building was a brilliant rectangle among too many other brilliant rectangles, but then it became a wire frame cage containing bright red (hostages) and flickering blue (the Fists). The hostages were on one floor, most of the Fists were on the floor below--only two of them mixing, making a corner of the office a flickering purple. NOT GOOD, DARLING.
Not good was right. I knew SWAT was on the way, knew it as well as my blood pressure, as the number of rounds in my 9mm anti-assault weapons, but I was also first on site. WE GOT TO SCOPE THEM OUT, ROGER.
We boosted, Bluebelle and I, tearing down the office-walled canyon until we could see the infrared-blurred silhouettes of each and everyone there. We scanned, looking from the basement to the penthouse, cataloging everything and everyone inside, especially certain things that didn’t belong, things like compressed crystal matrix explosives or tailored mutagenic bacteria. Nothing there, though, but men, guns, and frightened people.
--and millimeter radar tracking weapons. In the saddle, her golden back under me, I felt her long, lean torso tense with the contact of their screaming probes. I saw her muscles clench as they touched, then held on. GET THEM OFF ME, ROGER. So I took the reins and pulled her hard and to the left, towards the industrial chaos of a satellite receiving array on top of the Microgyne building. In a hot second as their weapons fired and the missiles reached us, I took my Bluebelle through the forest of antennas and dishes at close to Mach 1. I watched the micromissiles hit those antennas and dishes, cascades of sparks showering down on us, making her bronze skin shine and shimmer like molten metal. She turned as I turned her back towards the building, smiling up at me, and there I caught the brilliant red of her swollen nipples. Things like that make life worth living.
We leveled off, my hands tight on her reins, the building suddenly beneath my feet and the skyline in front of my nose. Bluebelle turned then, flipping as only she and I could do until my saddle rested on her smooth belly, her perfect, big tits in front of me. My reward: she smiled at me, promising kisses and the wonder of her mouth.
LOCK ON, she said as I felt the shimmering contacts on her body. Close. Too close. I knew them without having to look: Australian-made anti-armor, AI-governed, supersonic interceptors. They’d cut through permaplast, they’d cut through reinforced steel, they’d cut through both Bluebelle and I as if we weren’t there, and there were three of them behind us. Not close enough to see the marks, MADE IN THE SYDNEY REPUBLIC, but not far behind by much.
ROGER, she screamed, SAVE ME. So I did. I turned, I dove, I twisted, I turned. I brushed her luscious thighs against the sides of downtown architecture (trying for once not to look at us in the glass and ruin the illusion), I skimmed her nipples along the roofs, I nicked her toes on cornices. One exploded into a holographic billboard, sending twists of light into the night; two exploded on a rooftop, tossing up neat octagon chips of nanotech-built carbon with the fireball; and number three hit us in the back.
I don’t feel pain. I’m not wired that way. But Bluebelle screamed, a high frequency electronic bellow of agony. Her body under me shimmered and shook as if in a seizure. Her eyes unfocused, she bared her teeth. We dropped quick, smashing off the corner of a rooftop, but my girl is tough and strong. She shook, she sweated, but she kept us front smashing down hard on the pavement. I’M OKAY, ROGER. FLIGHT CAPABILITIES DOWN 21%, DEFENSIVE SYTEMS DOWN 32%, OFFENSIVE SYSTEMS DOWN 10%. LET’S PULL BACK.
I turned her away from the looming black wall of a department store, for a moment seeing our image there in the glass. You have to look; I said that, didn’t I? I did, seeing the cold reality of her armor, her systems, the gaping hole in her side, the thin trail of plastic-reeking smoke. Under me she was a goddess, a woman of divine light. Her tits were conical perfection, topped by wrinkled delectation. Her ass was tight, a peach delight. Her cunt was steaming velvet. Her mouth a hot tunnel of pleasure. She was mine, and I was hers.
I pulled on the reins, turning her hard. In the distance, the building was still lit by status reports and complex graphics from the SWAT teams. Soon it was looming, a geometric Christmas tree of assault percentages, casualty projections, and weapons assessments. I armed the high velocity, multi-personnel rockets. PLEASE, ROGER. PLEASE, ROGER--
I drew my revolver. I didn’t need to aim, but I did. With her squirming under me, trying to reach my gun, I still managed to aim. I didn’t wait for her to say anything more. I pulled the trigger.
I didn’t wait for the explosion. Didn’t wait for the casualty reports. I pulled the trigger, send the explosives on their way, then turned and soared her away from the city.