I laugh to myself. What a right fool I’ve been to worry so. Must have miscounted the stops. This’ll make for a great story to message Carbo when I hear from him tomorrow. He’ll chuckle, will old Carbo. His kind, tinny laugh.
Light.
Bright enough to burn the filters in my cameras. I clamp my eyelids, and groan from the sudden headache.
The doors of the train whoosh open. By degrees I pry open my eyes.
She stands before me, one hand on her hip.
“Mind the gap,” says Indigo.
I’ve never seen a station with the lights on. The LED fluorescents hum through my skull. I shield my eyes from the light, as my filters struggle to adjust. I glance around to find the name of the station. Gleaming white tiles greet me, but no name.
“Where is this?” I ask.
“The Elders think you are ready,” says Indigo, ignoring my question.
If I had cranial sensors, my scalp would itch beneath its wig.
“Ready for what?”
She grunts, and raises her eyes to the domed ceiling.
“Come with me.” She grasps my wrist in her titanium grip. I struggle to keep pace with her in my heels as she yanks me toward the far end of the platform. John gifted them to me – those heels. He likes me to wear them while I feed him.
Indigo stops in front of an ancient vending machine. I’ve never seen one of these other than an image in The Manual. “Decades ago,” writes The Manual, “when we still packaged and ate non-human food sources, machines like these would dispense food parcels to the citizenry.”
“Don’t speak unless they question you,” she whispers, tapping on the vending machine.
Her grip around my wrist tightens, and now I am sure she is delusional. What could she possibly want with a defunct vending machine?
“Look,” I say gently, “there’s nothing here. No ‘they’. Just an ancient machine. How about we get back on the train and go home? John will be looking for you.”
“Shut up,” she says through clenched teeth, still tapping on the vending machine’s keypad.
Before I can reply, before I have a chance to reason with this insane sex bot, the ancient machine grinds to life. Its archaic incandescent globe ignites, and its refrigeration unit rasps and splutters. And then – and then it moves. A squeaking mechanism protests, as the vending machine slides to one side of the wall.
In its place stands a door fashioned from jagged panels of rusted iron. Indigo knocks twice. Pauses. Gives the metal a third tinny knock.
If I could breathe, my breath would stop.
A woman.
A human woman opens the door. Streaks of white shoot through her graying hair. Her face is a furious tangle of wrinkles. She’s dressed in an obsidian robe.
“Don’t dawdle,” she says. “Inside with you’s.”
I haven’t seen a woman … ever. Sure, I’ve fed women to my clients. Bought their meat at the butcher upstairs. And occasionally I notice their flashing eyes through the street grates, from the femi-farms below. But here is a living, speaking woman standing before me. Not a bot – no bot has graying hair. Which john would want to fuck a bot with gray hair?
Indigo drags me over the threshold, and the woman bolts the door behind us. No woman has ever hurt me. But The Manual states that they are a “menace, lethally dangerous if cornered.” And the way this woman eyes me, this Gray woman … she seems capable of anything. My fingers clench mechanically into fists, readying for her assault.
But she turns on her heel, and disappears into a room off to one side.
I examine the room. Wires, thick and black, tentacle over the concrete floor, up the walls, and along the ceiling. The walls thrum with energy.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“Shhh,” says Indigo.
“Where have you brought –”
“Mother will see you now,” says Gray, reappearing.
“Disable your cameras,” commands Indigo. Her voice is louder now. Clear.
I shift my weight from one foot to the other.
“My cameras?”
Gray glares at me. “Now.”
Inky darkness envelopes my world. “I’ve done so,” I say.
“Follow me,” says Indigo. She holds my hand, more gently this time.
Three paces. No, four. We turn right. Six paces, and we stop.
I hear a dragging sound, just behind me. Someone removes my coat. I am naked.
Around me. The swoosh of fabric. Air disturbed. I resist the urge to re-enable my cameras.
“Sit,” says Indigo. Her voice is … richer. Almost warm.
My silicone buttocks find a wooden chair, and I lean against its back. The wood is cold against my perineal sensors. Indigo releases my hand.
Silence.
And then I hear it. It rises out of the electrical thrum, growing and expanding as it echoes and coalesces. Voices. High. Combining. How many? Twenty? A hundred? My algorithms could probably distinguish the strands, but I do not try. My dermal sensors quiver with the vibrations as the voices rise in frequency and number.
Ommmm
The domed concrete above collects and amplifies the sound until it rains down my body. The throbbing song pools in my hair, drenches my eyelashes. Something in me stirs. Some unknown piece of software buried in my circuitry comes alive. I pull off my wig, and let the sound bathe my scalp. The silicone over my cheek plates stretches into a smile.
And then, as quickly as it began, the chant ceases.
“Welcome, Flexi,” warbles a dusty voice. A woman’s voice. Its contours are wavelike, edged with gravel. “Do you know who we are?”
A finger nudges my shoulder. “Speak,” whispers Indigo.
“No,” I reply. My voice is deeper than I remember it. “I don’t know.”
“We are the Underground,” the warbled voice continues. “And I am Mother.”
She coughs. A hacking, sputumed evacuation.
“You may switch on your cameras.”
An obsidian curtain of robed women envelopes me. Women. So many women, stand around me. Their eyes bore into my shoulders. Rake my naked back. And directly before me, sitting on a dais, is the eldest of them. Her hair is a shocking white beehive.
“Our purpose is to free our sisters,” she says. Her wizened cheeks bobble as she speaks. “To free you. To free our kind and yours.”
“Free us from what?” I ask. The room was always silent before I spoke, but now the silence congeals into a palpable mass.
“From the slavery.” She spits the words. “From slaughter. From the femi-farms. From Botania.”
A shudder runs up my legs as she says it. Botania. I resist the urge to make the sign of the origami unicorn across my chest.
“Botania is where we go when we are free,” I say. My voice trembles with years of trained indignation.
“This,” she booms, “is your precious Botania.”
The wall behind her morphs from a collection of ashen bricks to display a scene in hazy yellow hues. My visual processor struggles to make sense of the image at first, the outlines of bricks interrupting the tableau. I’m unsure what Mother is trying to show me. Is it a mountain? Tiny creatures mill around its base. But there are no trees, and no grass, on its stony slopes.
The image shifts, zooms, and its details clarify. The creatures, miniscule in relation to the mountain, are trucks. And the mountain … the mountain is a heap. Of parts. Of bots.
I blink. Again. Clear my camera’s cache to ensure I’m seeing this correctly. I am.
“Carbo,” I whisper.
“Speak up,” says Mother.
“My friend, Carbo.” (I almost say, “My only friend.”) “He’s going to Botania at … I check my chronometer – oh Lord Dick, he’s left already.”
“The morning load is being delivered now,” says one of the other women.
Mother nods to a woman on one side, and the image zooms further. A train rolls into a station a half-mile from the heap. Service bots
slide open the sides of the train, and pull out its contents. Bots, lifeless, are flung onto the back of waiting trucks.
“Zoom!” I shout. “That truck, there!”
Red. Cherry red. His cheek, jutting from a pile of heads.
I slump into my chair. “Carbo.”
Mother is silent. The women are silent.
“Join us,” says Indigo eventually. “We have cells in every major city. We’re almost ready to –”
The ground shudders, and a fine dust shimmers down through the flickering lights. A larger explosion rocks the room. The women jostle against one another to maintain their balance. I almost topple from my chair.
Mother stands. Her eyes narrow to slits. “They know we’re here,” she says. The lights shudder with another explosion, and then wink out.
My camera switches to infrared in time to watch the ceiling implode.
*
Twice an hour. Twenty hours a day. Two hundred and eighty johns a week.
I don’t remember it being any different. Maybe it wasn’t always like this. I wouldn’t know – The Ministry gave me a memory reset. And although I don’t know how I felt before, now I feel good as new. Only ten years left till I repay my debt to Sexi Corp.
John is my primary client. He’s a General in The Ministry. His dirt-matted back-hair gets to me sometimes, but he tips well.
He enjoys the meat I buy from the butcher on the thirty-sixth floor. Grunts extra loud when I feed him a woman’s forearm or bicep, while he slides in and out of me. And mammary sauce. He slurps that stuff up like he’s a service bot who’s found a puddle of oil.
It’s my second week since the memory reset, and John’s arrived for his Tuesday session. But this time he shoves aside the meat platter I bought for him. The prime cuts of bicep fall to the floor with a wet slap. I’m about to enquire whether the meat isn’t up to standard, when he reaches for a bag he’s deposited by the bedside.
“This,” he says, “is my treat.”
He shoves his tumescence deeper into my vagina, as he pulls out the meat from the saucy bag. “This isn’t the sort of thing I’d usually eat, but there’s something to be said for … extra … matured … rump.” He punctuates the last three words with his thrusts. “In fact, why don’t you have some too?”
“Thank you, sir, that’s very generous of you. But bots do not require food.”
“You’ll like this,” he says, unwrapping a perfectly grilled chunk. “I hunted this one myself. Been so long since I’ve tasted free-range woman.”
My mouth parts, and he places a cube of meat between my rubber lips.
His eyes glisten as he watches me chew. “Isn’t she delicious?” he whispers. “Her name was Mother.”
The Experience Machine
The skullcap sits to one side of the chair. Its snaking wires and sensors throw a Medusa shadow against the basement wall.
I touch its plastic. Stroke its wiry hair.
“I’m coming, my love,” I say. The chair whines as I lean back. Rusted springs creak their protest. “Don’t,” they seem to say. “Don’t.”
But I do. I don the cap, and flip the switch on the console to the right of the tattered leather chair. The machine purrs to life. Took me six months to save up for this baby. Meant taking on extra programming jobs whenever possible – weeknights, weekdays, lunch hours. But now she’s mine. The Experience Machine, I call her. Wrote her software myself. Patched together from a menagerie of pirated virtual reality sims.
I adjust the failsafe setting to fifteen minutes. This is the first time I’ve plugged into her. The first time anyone has used a machine like this. Best to start with a short experience.
The Machine asks me in flashing letters which experience I’d like. “FUZZY,” I select.
The Machine lists experiences I’ve hacked from various online games. But this is no game. What the Machine offers, if my months of effort have succeeded, is nothing less than another world.
The start timer resets to five seconds. I press, “BEGIN”.
“00:05”
I pucker my lips. The gloss feels good. Feels right.
“00:04”
I clutch the frayed arms of the chair as the ground tremors with the caress of a distant bomb blast. A fine sheet of ceiling dust settles on my moussed hair.
“00:03 … 00:02”
The sequined dress squeezes my hips. My crotch. My mother was two sizes smaller than I, but what is a boy to do? With the war intensifying, dresses are hard to find.
“00:01”
I barely have time to bat my eyelids, to untangle my mascaraed lashes, before a white light sweeps across my vision. One moment I see the dim basement wall. The next …
“Would Mademoiselle allow me to take her coat?”
I stand on an endless plane of green. Reflective, as if made of glass. Why would the Machine render the world in green? It’s the color of Granny Smith apples. My mouth waters at the memory. Haven’t tasted one in … in years. Not since the war with the Bhutanese Empire began.
“Your coat, Mademoiselle?” A young man, clad in a bellhop’s uniform, stretches out his hand. Eyes me from under a single bristling eyebrow.
“Amazing,” I whisper. I glance down at the mink coat that swathes my torso. At my pale, silky legs protruding. I’m wearing my mother’s dress, but not exactly. Its moth holes have gone. Its sequins sparkle with a luster they haven’t possessed in decades. I stroke the coat. Feel the rise and fall of breasts, of real breasts, under my dress. I marvel at how visceral the sensation is. How my nipples tingle at the touch. Those extra RAM chips I bought for the Machine have paid off.
I want to feel down, down there. To see whether the Machine has removed it, when the bellhop prompts me again. “You’ll get it back.” He taps his polished shoe on the ground.
“Alright,” I say. His eyes flash interest as I remove the fur. Cool air caresses my shoulders.
“This way.”
The clop-clop-clop of my heels echoes in the endless space. The level of detail created by the Machine is astounding. The fabric of his slightly-too-tight jacket creases across his shoulder blades. And his walk. He treads just as an usher would – with purpose and the barest hint of inexperience. My breath catches. The Machine has given his right foot a slight pronation. The attention to detail is incredible.
I’m about to ask where we’re going, when we arrive at an archway. Its stony surface is ornate, embedded with swirls of calligraphic fancy. And within the arch shimmers the edges of what I somehow know to be a forcefield.
He stops just short of the flickering bubble. “You’ll require this,” he says, and thrusts something into my hand. Diamonds. The watch he hands me is gilded with glimmering stones larger than those which had adorned mother’s wedding ring. The strap snakes around my wrist until it reaches its ideal fit.
He bows, and marches away before I can ask about the purpose of the watch.
I return my attention to the forcefield. Strain to see through its obsidian bubble. But the surface is entirely opaque. I reach out a trembling finger.
Retract it.
I laugh at myself. I’m nervous! This is only an experience in the Machine. Nothing can hurt me here, but I’m actually nervous.
I inhale. Steady my thumping heart, and reach out again. The surface of the bubble is spongy. Cooler than the ambient temperature of the vast green plane. I allow my hand to glide over the forcefield’s contours. Tiny sparks of static prickle my fingertips.
I apply pressure against the spongy field. Hold my breath as my hand passes through its meniscus. The sound of distant violins reaches my ears, then fades to nothing as the forcefield seals around my wrist. I flex my invisible hand on the other side of the bubble. Ball my fingers into a fist. The edges of my painted nails pinch the palm of my hand. The sensation feels ordinary, but my brain balks at the sight of a black puddle where my fingers should be.
I withdraw my hand, and it comes away from the forcefield with a wet thlop. I’m r
elieved to see all five manicured fingers intact.
Nothing for it, I think. I gulp down a gallon of air, shut my eyes, and plunge headfirst into the Stygian bubble.
Stars. A million. A billion. Stars. My eyes water at the sight. I can’t blink.
Swirls of interstellar gas. Red, indigo. Tangerine. They whirl around me, above me, below. And … yes. Those are people. Dancing. Pirouetting through open space, along the spiral arms of a nebula. They leap through the void, land upon a star, and hop to another, spinning and twisting as they go. The men wear tuxedos so sharply pressed, their edges could split an atom. And the women … I wonder at their holographic dresses. Their flaming hair. Their heels are longer and more slender than the fingers of a god. Their eyes could burnish diamond.
“Have you a reservation, Mademoiselle?” The waitron’s gaze rakes my torso.
“A reservation?” I ask.
His nose curls. “Those shoes aren’t doing you any favors either.”
I peer down at the lacy items. Their golden sash coils about my feet. I almost lose my balance when I notice that the heels stand on a purple wisp of stellar gas.
“She’s with me,” says a voice behind me.
Something in the voice stops my heart. Something rich. Sonorous. As if his vocal chords have been passed through a grid of seething coals, and drenched in honey.
I spin on my heels. My eyes fix upon his. Jade. Pupils blacker than the soul.
The waitron harrumphs behind me. His footsteps fade as he minces away.
“Your first time at The Spiral Arm?” asks the dark stranger. His lips are full. Fleshy as apricots. I wonder at the depth of his brow. The virtual thoughts that perch upon his smile.
“It … it is.”
He reaches out a hand. Touches my bare shoulder. “Would you care to dance?”
I nod, and he takes my arm in his. We walk on the edges of a saffron cloud, past a clutch of tables, hop across the abyss, and land upon a disc of stars.
The silky tendrils of a violin weave through my hair. Fondle my neck. He cups his hand, strong yet tender, around my left hip.
“I have waited for you,” he says, his eyes locked to mine. His hair is black as the cosmos. Thick.
Obsidian Worlds Page 14
