by Simon Ings
“For me, then.”
“If it bothers you, you may leave.”
“It’s my apartment,” he said.
She began rolling up the second wire.
“Isn’t that one of the arms where you still—”
It was.
He’d made a point, when they were together, of kissing both, caressing both, fucking both, as if he couldn’t tell. As if they both were real, equal. In a way they were. But one—one arm still had skin. Her skin. He’d run his tongue over it enough to know the difference.
She could probably break his leg with a single finger. Then play the video that had led up to this moment, every sound, every expression, everything she had seen, downloaded, analyzed, to the police, who would immediately charge him with Violation D.
He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Ok. Look. Can you at least give me a reason?”
“I believe Meteors is on.”
From time to time she’d let slip bits about her past life. Before. He had not listened much, at first, but gradually a few small pictures began to float in his head, of what she had been. Before. A musician who had wanted her songs to live on, who had apparently given that up—he never knew the reason—for law school. A very ordinary state law school; she’d never had much money. She’d been paying off debts. She would always be paying off debts. He began downloading some of the songs she mentioned and playing them when she arrived. He thought he felt her relax more after this, linger on their kisses a little longer. Sometimes he ordered the viewer to play movies. Her silver-blue eyes—goddamn they look real, unless you’re kissing her you’d probably never notice, or think they’re just contacts—would flicker to the screen, to him, and back again. It was almost a smile.
“We’re sleeping together. If something happens to you during this, they’re going to ask me about it.”
You can do better than this, man, one of his friends had said. Maybe, he said. He’d made playlists for her, sending them in casual emails. The sex had gotten better. Way better. It had been amazing this evening, so amazing he’d assumed she might be leaving him or just preparing him for some bad news when she started to pull at the wires.
She liked astronomy, she’d told him. She liked science fiction. She liked living what had once been science fiction. She could seem perfectly normal when she wanted to. It was part of the point. She loved music.
He stomped off and opened a bottle of wine, poured out two glasses and returned, offering her one. “If you’re going to do this you should probably be drunk.”
“The nanowire structures prevent any influence from alcohol.”
“Humor me.”
“I don’t have time.”
He drank down both glasses of wine.
By that time she had accumulated a tiny, neat stack of coiled wires, and was beginning to work on the other arm. The one that wasn’t.
“Come to bed,” he said.
“No.”
“I’m going to bed.”
She was usually the one to lead them both to bed. She monitored his heart rate—it was automatic, she explained; part of her enhanced senses, part of her training—and probably other things as well. She knew precisely how tired, how stressed he was. How happy he was. How drained he was. How everything he was. It couldn’t just be the heartbeats; it had to be something else. She knew when he needed to sleep.
She never knew when he just needed the touch of her skin. Both skins.
“Sleep well.”
“Can you just tell me why?”
“I am trying not to be lost.”
He’d never taken a picture of her. Never asked for any of the pictures she had of him. Of them. She wasn’t going to change, after all. He would change. He might lose her. He didn’t need pictures of that.
She had a million images of him, a trillion, saved in her wires.
“You’re pulling wires out of your arm. How much more lost can you be?”
“Sleep well.”
“Fuck you.”
He went to bed, but not to sleep.
When he finally got up, hours later, to hunt down coffee, she was still in his living room, sitting quietly on the floor. Her left arm—the one that was entirely, completely, not real, even though it looked like an arm, moved like an arm, felt like an arm—was neatly beside her on the floor, as was her right leg. He had no idea how she was keeping herself seated upright. Five small coils of wire were stacked in front of her in a neat line. She had always been neat. Always. It was one of the things he most hated about her.
“My neural pattern synapses are failing,” she said.
“I need coffee.”
She’d detached her leg and her arm and put it on the floor. He needed a lot more than coffee, but he needed the coffee first.
“If no one’s arrived in two hours, you may need to call 911.”
“God, you think?”
“They have probably already been alerted. There are—warning systems for something like that.”
“So the fucking military is going to come here.”
“No,” she said quietly. “Just my employers.”
Fuck these coffee pods. How the hell was he fucking supposed to get them into the machine before he’d had his coffee. And what the fuck was the deal with having to put in two pods for the damn coffee, three pods for the milk. She always asked for just one milk, but he liked his creamy, milky, sugary. Girly, he told himself, laughing that she took her coffee blacker than his. His fingers were shaking. His whole body was shaking.
“… illegally downloaded…”
His hands were covered in the sticky syrup from the coffee pods. Damn it. He went over to the kitchen sink, turned both taps on, hard, put his hands under the water. She kept talking. Fucking coffee.
“… saved in the wires…”
He kept the water running even after he pulled his hands away from the sink and put five more pods in the coffee maker. He pulled out three pods for her, putting them on the counter. Idiot. She wouldn’t be able to lift the cup. Fucking coffee. It took forever to brew. He needed a new machine. He pulled out the cup, took a sip, turned off the water.
He wasn’t sure she’d even noticed he was gone.
“I do not want you to be lost.”
If he could have, he would have tossed her out just then for that. But he knew her remaining leg and arm, though original and organic, were enhanced. Could still break every bone in his body. God, he knew. His memory chose that moment to remind him of just how he knew. He felt sick.
“Please.”
A sharp knock on the door.
She had never begged him. Never. Not even when he’d gotten drunk two months ago and begged her, begged her to tell him what she wanted from him in bed, tell him everything. Everything she could tell him that wasn’t wrapped up in some damn security agreement. She looked up at him, flickered her glance at the neat piles of wires, then up at him again, her eyes wide, blank. And then empty. Gone.
He opened the door.
The removal—he thought of other terms, repressed them—was swift, quiet. They handed him a few papers that he immediately tossed into the recycle shaft. No goodbyes, no tears. He’d had plumbers come by with more drama. They did not ask about the wires. He did not tell.
He hadn’t even needed to call anyone.
Friends.
*
When the email arrived from her, three weeks later, he almost deleted it.
It was almost certainly spam. Almost. Someone had hacked into her account, or her employers were using this as one last attempt to set up an interview with him. (He’d said no at least six times already; their last missive had assured him that legal measures would be necessary.) It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her. He could still see her, her parts detached and on the floor, the neat rolls of wires before she was taken away to be—what? Melted? Reused? Buried? She’d said something. He hadn’t done a damn thing. Hadn’t listened. Hadn’t heard.
He’d lost her.
/> He hadn’t had much to lose.
He’d put the wires up on a shelf in the living room, where he could touch them, to remind himself just why he needed to forget her, to forget everything about her.
His chest hurt. He clicked open the email.
I should have let you help.
He placed his head in his arms for a long time.
N.
Six hours later, the wires were out of his house.
*
A month later, he told himself he’d forgotten her. Forgotten everything. Especially forgotten the image of her sitting on his floor, pulling out the wires from her arms, pulling out the things—he was not going to remember that email, not going to think about it—where she’d downloaded every fucking memory of them both. He’d moved on. Already put up a new profile on dating sites. Had signed up for kempo lessons. Was thinking about getting a dog.
He was on his third drink of the night when the knock came on the door. He ignored it. The knock came again. And again. He swore. One call from the neighbors and he’d be right back talking to authorities again. Damn it.
He saw the face, first, the suspiciously bright eyes. Something else you weren’t supposed to notice; something else he always did. The perfect skin. The bright tips of copper poking through her wrists.
He swallowed.
That was enough time for her to get inside and shut the door behind her. She hit four buttons on the keypad. I need to change that. The bolt slid shut. Not that it would stop any authority from entering. Or could have stopped this woman from entering, if she’d needed to. Wanted to. Not for long, anyway. Her eyes flickered back and forth through the room. Viewing. Recording. Downloading. She was shorter than N had been; thinner, with darker hair and skin.
“This place still isn’t clean.”
“Well, watch the woman you’re sleeping with commit suicide before your eyes and see how interested you are in cleaning.”
“James.”
“What the fuck do you want with me?”
His eyes closed.
“I want you to call me N.”
It was wrong. It was incredibly wrong. She wasn’t N. She was N. He’d already lost her, was already losing her. She was touching his face, his arms, his neck. He was running his hands down her arms, her back, her chest, feeling her skin, her not skin, her skin.
“Next time,” she whispered, “I’ll let you help.”
And without thinking, without feeling, he pulled her close, letting the wires in her wrists dig into his skin, kissing her before he started to lose her again.
(2014)
GANGER (BALL LIGHTNING)
Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1960 and lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and the US before her family moved to Canada when she was 16. Her novels often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling. Her first, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), set in a decrepit near-future Toronto, won a Locus Award for best first novel and a John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. She currently lives and teaches in Riverside, California. Her stories are collected in Skin Folk (2001) and Falling in Love with Hominids (2015).
“Issy?”
“What.”
“Suppose we switch suits?” Cleve asked.
Is what now? From where she knelt over him on their bed, Issy slid her tongue from Cleve’s navel, blew on the wetness she’d made there. Cleve sucked in a breath, making the cheerful pudge of his tummy shudder. She stroked its fuzzy pelt.
“What,” she said, looking up at him, “you want me wear your suit and you wear mine?” This had to be the weirdest yet.
He ran a finger over her lips, the heat of his touch making her mouth tingle. “Yeah,” he replied. “Something so.”
Issy got up to her knees, both her plump thighs on each side of his massive left one. She looked appraisingly at him. She was still mad from the fight they’d just had. But a good mad. She and Cleve, fighting always got them hot to make up. Had to be something good about that, didn’t there? If they could keep finding their way back to each other like this? Her business if she’d wanted to make candy, even if the heat of the August night made the kitchen a hell. She wondered what the rass he was up to now.
They’d been fucking in the Senstim Co-operation’s “wetsuits” for about a week. The toys had been fun for the first little while—they’d had more sex this week than in the last month—but even with the increased sensitivity, she was beginning to miss the feel of his skin directly against hers. “It not going work,” Issy declared. But she was curious.
“You sure?” Cleve asked teasingly. He smiled, stroked her naked nipple softly with the ball of his thumb. She loved the contrast between his shovel-wide hands and the delicate movements he performed with them. Her nipple poked erect, sensitive as a tongue tip. She arched her back, pushed the heavy swing of her breast into fuller contact with the ringed ridges of thumb.
“Mmm.”
“C’mon, Issy, it could be fun, you know.”
“Cleve, they just going key themselves to our bodies. The innie become a outie, the outie become a innie…”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
“They take a few minutes to conform to our body shapes, right? Maybe in that few minutes…”
He’d gone silent, embarrassment shutting his open countenance closed; too shy to describe the sensation he was seeking. Issy sighed in irritation. What was the big deal? Fuck, cunt, cock, come: simple words to say. “In that few minutes, you’d find out what it feels like to have a poonani, right?”
A snatch. He looked shy and aroused at the same time. “Yeah, and you’d, well, you know.”
He liked it when she talked “dirty.” But just try to get him to repay the favour. Try to get him to buzzingly whisper hot-syrup words against the sensitive pinna of her ear until she shivered with the sensation of his mouth on her skin, and the things he was saying, the nerve impulses he was firing, spilled from his warm lips at her earhole and oozed down her spine, cupped the bowl of her belly, filled her crotch with heat.
That only ever happened in her imagination.
Cleve ran one finger down her body, tracing the faint line of hair from navel past the smiling crease below her tummy to pussy fur. Issy spread her knees a little, willing him to explore further. His fingertip tunneled through her pubic hair, tapped at her clit, making nerves sing. Ah, ah. She rocked against his thigh. What would it be like to have the feeling of entering someone’s clasping flesh? “Okay,” she said. “Let’s try it.”
She picked up Cleve’s stim. So diaphanous you could barely see it, but supple as skin and thrice as responsive. Cocked up onto one elbow, Cleve watched her with a slight smile on his face. Issy loved the chubby chocolate-brown beauty of him, his fatcat grin.
Chortling, she wriggled into the suit, careful to ease it over the bandage on her heel. The company boasted that you couldn’t tell the difference between the microthin layer of the wetsuits and bare skin. Bullshit. Like taking a shower with your clothes on. The suits made you feel more, but it was a one-way sensation. They dampened the sense of touch. It was like being trapped inside your own skin, able to sense your response to stimuli but not to feel when you had connected with the outside world.
Over the week of use, Cleve’s suit had shaped itself to his body. The hips were tight on Issy, the flat chest part pressed her breasts against her rib cage. The shoulders were too broad, the middle too baggy. It sagged at knees, elbows, and toes. She giggled again.
“Never mind the peripherals,” Cleve said, lumbering to his feet. “No time.” He picked up her suit. “Just leave them hanging.”
Just as well. Issy hated the way that the roll-on headpiece trapped her hair against her neck, covered her ears, slid sensory tendrils into her earholes. It amplified the sounds when her body touched Cleve’s. It grossed her out. What would Cleve want to do next to jazz the skins up?
As the suit
hyped the pleasure zones on her skin surface, Issy could feel herself getting wet, the mixture of arousal and vague distaste a wetsuit gave her. The marketing lie was that the suits were “consensual aids to full body aura alignment,” not sex toys. Yeah, right. Psychobabble. She was being diddled by an oversized condom possessed of fuzzy logic. She pulled it up to her neck. The stim started to writhe, conforming itself to her shape. Galvanic peristalsis, they called its ability to move. Yuck.
“Quick,” Cleve muttered. He was jamming his lubed cock at a tube in the suit, the innie part of it that would normally have slid itself into her vagina, the part that had been smooth the first time she’d taken it out of its case, but was now shaped the way she was shaped inside. Cleve pushed and pushed until the everted pocket slid over his cock. He lay back on the bed, his erection a jutting rudeness. “Oh. Wow. That’s different. Is so it feels for you?”
Oh, sweet. Issy quickly followed Cleve’s lead, spreading her knees to push the outie part of his wetsuit inside her. It was easy. She was slippery, every inch of her skin stimmed with desire. She palmed some lube from the bottle into the suit’s pouched vagina. They had to hurry. She straddled him, slid onto his cock, making the tube of one wetsuit slither smoothly into the tunnel of the other. Cleve closed his eyes, blew a small breath through pursed lips.
So, so hot. “God, it’s good,” Issy muttered. Like being fucked, only she had an organ to push back with. Cleve just panted heavily, silently. As always. But what a rush! She swore she could feel Cleve’s tight hot cunt closing around her dick. She grabbed his shoulders for traction. The massy, padded flesh of them filled her hands; steel encased in velvet.
*
The ganger looked down at its ghostly hands. Curled them into fists. Lightning sparked between the translucent fingers as they closed. It reached a crackling hand towards Cleve’s shuddering body on the bathroom floor.
