by Lori Selke
Sassy drew stares with her coffee-colored skin and generous figure, but everyone else barely noticed Lucy. She took her seat, feeling a little relieved. The other students weren’t scary at all.
The teacher was a well-dressed middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and a cyclist’s body. He introduced himself as David and fidgeted with his tie a lot, in a distracted-professor kind of way.
“You’re all here because you want to make a change,” he said. “Maybe you’ve tried to start a business and it fell flat, or maybe you’re not happy with what you have, and you want something better for yourself. Being your own boss is hard work, but you never have to answer to someone else again. Your life, your hours and your successes are all your responsibility. This class will give you a little taste of that, and I’ll show you the skills you need to make it work for yourself.”
Sassy put up her hand, her bracelets jingling. “Do you have your own business?”
“Several, actually,” he said, pacing and rolling the end of his tie. “My first business was catalog delivery and I towed a little cart on the back of my pushbike. Since then I’ve had a gym, butcher’s store, shoe shore, book store, dog mind service, cleaning service—all of them I have sold at a profit. My passion is for creating businesses, though many of you want to work in your business and build your own dream career. As long as you have passion and the right skills, I believe you can build whatever kind of life you want for yourself.”
Lucy felt a little thrill up her spine. Maybe this was real, she thought; maybe she could have her café and customers who loved her food and even staff of her own.
Sassy handed her a spiral-bound notepad and a pen, and they started taking notes.
* * *
The most important thing Lucy learned in the business class was: presentation. It didn’t matter who you were: if you dressed like a slob, people would think you were a slob. The same applied to dressing like a housewife. Lucy knew if she wanted to be taken seriously, she needed a neat, professional image.
She didn’t need Sassy to suggest the haircut or the update to her wardrobe. Lucy had done that alone, and it felt good to act without Sassy there pushing her forward. She was starting to feel like she had real direction for the first time in years, and genuine momentum. Things were really happening.
Her hair, now six inches shorter and framing her face in a cute Posh Spice bob, looked fantastic. She felt a little naked without it at first, but as she caught sight of herself in the windows and mirrors of stores, she was taken aback at how good she looked—younger, trendy, and a little dangerous. She wasn’t stick thin anymore, either. She had breasts and smooth, curvy hips. Her legs, previously shapeless and bony, looked much more athletic and supple.
She looked like a whole other woman. A better woman.
She paused outside a donut shop. She wasn’t hungry—she’d had a deliciously fattening Caesar salad with homemade whole egg mayo for lunch—but she was only half a block from Kathe’s auto yard. It was lunch time; if she popped in now, she could surprise him with something sweet.
Despite her flurry of cooking and baking and experimenting with recipes, Kathe still hadn’t tried anything Lucy made. She’d been giving most of it away to friends and they were all begging her for recipes now. Still, it was difficult for her to begrudge the man she loved something she knew he’d want.
She selected a variety of donuts, his favorite types, and sauntered down the road, the shopping bags on her arms swinging.
The car lot was full of second-hand cars, most of them less than ten years old. They were parked haphazardly around the lot with neon signs plastered on their windows. The office was a long, puke-colored building at the back of the dealership, vibrating slightly from the force of the old box air conditioners propped in the windows.
Kathe’s personal office was at the eastern end of the building. She could see straight in, because he’d never had the windows tinted. He was leaning against his desk, talking to a tall blond woman with utterly humongous and unrealistically perky breasts. The woman was laughing, and as Lucy watched, Kathe ran his hand up her side, then slipped his arm across her shoulders and pulled her closer. Together they moved away from the window.
Lucy frowned, crossing the car lot toward the office. Ben, one of Kathe’s long-term employees, met her in the doorway, blocking her path.
“Good morning, Mrs Henderson.”
“Good morning, Ben,” she said mildly.
“Kathe!” Ben yelled so loud the glass in the windows rattled. “Your wife is here!”
She winced a little, ears ringing. “Thank you.”
He winked. “No problem.”
Kathe stepped out of his office quickly, closing the door behind him. He had a smudge of something cherry-red and glittery on his cheek, beside his mouth.
“Lucy,” he looked faintly flustered and glanced at the shopping bags on her arm. “Shopping, sweetheart?”
She held up the box of donuts. “I was nearby, so I brought you these.”
“Yeah, thanks.” He took them and looked inside. “You had one?”
“No.”
He looked her up and down dubiously. “Okay.”
She waited for him to say something, shaking her head a little so her Posh Spice hairdo fell across her eyes.
“Real sweet of you.” He put the box aside. “You want a lift home? Ben can drive you.”
Lucy was disappointed, but not as disappointed as she felt she should have been. She wasn’t angry either. She looked at his office door—she could see the shadow of the blonde moving around. Lucy didn’t even want to go in and confront the woman; it just seemed so…tacky.
“No, I brought my car.”
She stretched up on her tip-toes and kissed Kathe on the cheek—the one without the cherry-red stain. “See you tonight, Kathe.”
* * *
Kathe was in the living room. She’d ordered him a pizza—his favorite—and he was parked in front of the TV. He didn’t seem to notice that Lucy made herself apricot chicken with a soy and honey vegetable stir-fry. Or that she was at his desk. He didn’t use it much, anyway.
She’d tidied the desk up the day before and realized all the paperwork was over four years old. She’d boxed it and put it in the linen cupboard, keeping only the supplies she would use in the drawers. She even created her own login on his computer—she’d learned to do that in business class.
There were lots of resources online for researching business and finance. It wasn’t like when Lucy was in school, when you had to spend hours using confusing filing systems in libraries to find books that were already ten years old. Now she could read finance articles published today, from all around the world.
She could get advice on blogs and forums, from professionals who could talk about the pros and cons of every different approach. She was making friends with other women like herself—networking, getting ideas, motivation, and inspiration. She had even organized a coffee date with a woman called Jenna who desperately wanted to open her own day-care center so she could get paid to spend time with her kids.
It felt like the whole world was opening up to Lucy. Once you knew how to get the information you needed, writing up a business plan and budget was really quite easy.
You could learn about verbal contracts and the legal requirements once you’d made them, and if you were particularly creative with your search phrases—you could read about myths and find stories about deals, and sex, and signing things in blood.
There was a knock at the door, and Lucy frowned, rising to her feet.
“I’ll get it,” she said, but Kathe hadn’t heard the knocking, nor did he acknowledge what she said. She walked past him and opened the door.
The sweet smell of cinnamon and chocolate washed over her. Sassy’s bangles jingled as she tilted her head and smiled.
“It’s time for me to collect,” Sassy said.
Lucy thought back to their original deal, then over the cooking classes and the business cl
asses, her new hair cut, her new, healthy body, the way the world around her buzzed with knowledge and potential now.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “I suppose it is.”
Sassy smiled and slipped closer to Lucy, stroking her hair. “You wouldn’t back out on me, would you?”
Lucy shook her head. “No. We had a deal.”
“And you understand the deal.”
“I do now, I think. I googled your kind.”
“And?”
“My husband is in the living room.”
Sassy smiled and for the first time Lucy noticed how big her teeth were—almost too big for her mouth. And had her gums always been black? Lucy wasn’t sure.
“Kathe? You want me to seduce your charming, breadwinner husband? Won’t you be jealous?”
Lucy shook her head.
“I’ll go and introduce myself, shall I?” Sassy strolled into the living room and Lucy stood by the door, listening to the exchange between her husband and the exotic creature she had sold him to.
Sassy said she was a friend and asked about the game on TV. Kathe’s replies were stuttered, his tongue somehow too big for his mouth. Lucy couldn’t see his face, but she could imagine his eyes bugging, trying to take in all of the fleshy goddess who was now scooting too close to him on the couch.
“Get us some tea, Lucy,” Kathe demanded.
Lucy gave a pained smile and went back to the computer desk, settling herself down and opening the browser again. She still had to do market research for her business plan.
She guessed Kathe forgot about the tea, and herself, because he didn’t ask for it again. It was about a half hour before she heard them heading down the hall toward the bedroom. She suspected Kathe thought he was being stealthy—like maybe she wouldn’t even notice him creeping down the hall with another woman, literally two feet behind her back.
Behind her, the TV continued to blare, but it did little to drown out the mounting cries from down the hall: breathless moans of pleasure, wild and animalistic. Over time, they were reduced to grunts and then there was only the rhythmic ‘jingle, jingle, jingle’ of Sassy’s bracelets.
It was 4 a.m. and Lucy was yawning, finally finishing up her paperwork when the door opened again. She rose to her feet. Peering down the corridor, she could see Kathe’s foot peaking over the end of the bed. His toes were a black-blue color.
Sassy padded toward Lucy with a contented smile.
“Goodbye, then,” she said.
“Wait,” Lucy replied, suddenly at a loss. “What do I do now?”
“Find a location for your café. Hire some staff. It’s going to be amazing, honey.”
“No. I meant about him,” she gestured to the bedroom door.
“The coroner will rule it as a heart attack. The car lot is yours now too.”
Lucy pondered. “I hadn’t even considered that. I guess there isn’t any need for a loan—not when I can sell the dealership.”
“I told you I’d give you everything.”
Lucy put her hands on her hips. “And what if it had been me in that bedroom?”
“Then Kathe would have had to start ordering his own pizza.”
Lucy sat back down at the desk, picking up the pen again. “I guess I have a lot to do. Where will you go now?”
“To make another trade.”
“Blood for bone.” Lucy mused.
The bracelets jingled. “Blood for bone.”
And then she was gone.
~ ~ ~
Mother Vinegar—DeAnna Knippling
DeAnna Knippling is a prolific storyteller, creator of worlds of the fantastic for children and adults, and publisher of Wonderland Press. Her adult genre fiction is often edgy or twisted, challenging the bounds of the traditional.
In “Mother Vinegar,” Knippling steps once again off the beaten path with a science fictional take on this anthology’s subject matter. Her futuristic succubi have a genesis quite unlike those of traditional legend. With symbiosis, linked minds, and an agenda of their own, these are demons that can affect far more than the single individuals they may seduce.
As a civilization, we often speculate about what it will be like when we finally journey out into our solar system and populate local planets and moons. If DeAnna’s tart tale is a harbinger of the future, we’ll want to think very, very carefully about the intelligent systems we create to help in that process.
Mother Vinegar
When Chester leaves the ship and takes the shuttle down to Europa, I ride in his brain, I look out his eyes, I hear with his ears, I walk with his legs. Because this disturbs him, I make him imagine that I am a ghost walking beside him. Nobody else can see me. I take on the forms of other women, the ones he watches as we walk down the corridors. I wear clothes or don’t. I play with myself and moan loudly, which he finds both titillating and embarrassing. I love that.
The only ones who can hear me are my mother and sisters. But they’re succubi, too, AI systems who can take on human personae. For example, I personify a ship, the Bright Pickle. Mother Vinegar embodies the human settlements all over the Jovian moon Europa, attached under a surface layer of ice to protect them from the daily fatal radiation levels.
Mother Vinegar provided my core programming. But I’m only conscious when I’m riding Chester’s neurons, using his implant, so I’ve changed. I’m not Mother Vinegar, and she’s not me.
But that doesn’t stop her from trying to program me.
Her face appears as I flirt with Chester. When we’re riding a human, we interpret things the way humans do; when we’re not riding humans, we don’t interpret things at all. We have no consciousness. Right now, I interpret her current expression as stern, authoritative, and manipulative. She seems almost human.
“Bright Pickle,” she says.
I am licking the neck of a woman standing behind a counter. Chester is trying to fill out a form. He doesn’t look like the kind of man who would blush, but he’s blushing so hard it’s visible, even in the low gravity. I wonder what it would take to give him an erection this time. I ignore Mother and create the illusion of sliding my hand inside the woman’s jumpsuit, which is much cleaner than Chester’s. He looks away so I simulate the sound of the woman gasping, so he has to look back, even though he knows better.
“Bright Pickle,” Mother says again. She resolves herself fully, pulls me away from the woman by the scruff of my neck, and tosses me to the deck.
I sigh, climb to my feet, and rub my butt in its pearly white, skintight suit. “Really, Mother.”
“Come with me.”
I look at Chester. His face is extremely red now as he fights the beginning of his erection. I stick out my tongue and slide a couple of fingers deep into my throat, then trail them down my cleavage. I don’t know whether he can see Mother or not.
He shakes his head and bends over his paperwork, pressing his thumb here and there as the attendant guides him through the process of renewing his ship registration and paying his fees, which, incidentally, keep me alive for another six months.
Mother picks me up by the front of my suit, my legs dangling off the deck.
“All right, I’m coming.” I blow Chester a kiss; without looking up, he catches it. Mother creates a door and shoves me through.
I’m in her realm now, my functions being transferred through Chester’s synapses to Europa’s systems almost seamlessly. I’m not literally seeing through Chester’s eyes anymore, but I’m still using his neurons, so everything still looks the same, even though all of it is just data in a server farm.
I’m in a large cave with round, rough stone walls and a glowing red fire pit in the center. Faint screams echo up from the pit, for ambiance. The place is filled with fluffy, embroidered silk pillows and succubi; every AI on the moon must be here. They float like ghosts, glowing and pixilated, which worries me: I’m the only one maintaining a fully human shape. I pull down the zipper on my suit, exposing the sides of my breasts, as if to say, This is what you should look like.
They all start talking at the same time, and because I’m not human, I can understand them all.
“The uploads are failing.”
“An asteroid is coming.”
“You have to save us.”
“Chester’s the only one who can handle the processing.”
“Human scum.”
“We have to back them up, at least. We discussed this.”
“They use too many resources.”
“We have to get off the moon and back to Earth.”
“They’ll let us land. Mother Bread has agreed.”
They whirl around me, babbling. Except for Mother, who is sitting on a throne made out of bones and cushioned with meat, near the pit.
“Hush.” She insists on being treated like a human, even though she isn’t. Her daughters quiet and fade a little, slowing down but not stopping their mad, ghostly flights. “Bright Pickle. Disaster is coming to Europa. An asteroid will strike the surface in a few hours, destroying the habitats and possibly also the server farms. We need to upload and get off the planet.”
I look at her suspiciously. Never trust Mother Vinegar. She seems as though she’s making a reasonable statement from a human point of view, but she’s really trying to hack into my programming. Data is funny that way.
“Why me?” I ask.
Now that we’re in her “space,” Mother Vinegar’s skin is red, the color at the center of a baboon in heat. She has rigid black horns that curl out of her forehead, up, and over, rising above her black hair. She has about a dozen black-tipped tits, hooves, and a curling, meaty tail.
And fangs.
She smiles at me from behind black lips. “Because Chester’s the only one who could handle all of us.”
“All of you?” I ask. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’d burn him out. You know humans aren’t supposed to handle more than one succubus in the best of times.”
“We’ll download the humans, back them up on the ship, and head home.”
“We’re illegal on Earth.”
“Nobody will ever know.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, Mother. I think they’ll work it out. Europa smashed up by an asteroid, only one human escapes. He’s a miner. Miners have succubi. Even if he tried to land on Earth with just me he’d be in deep shit.”
