Harsh Oases

by Paul Di Filippo

Geppi studied the doll for long minutes. She was exactly as he had dictated. Now, to awaken her, he had only to speak her name, a name he had chosen and suitably altered in memory of a fairytale he had enjoyed as a child, a fairytale whose creator-figure harmonized vaguely with Geppi’s own name and vocation.

  “Pinocchia—”

  The doll’s eyelids fluttered upward, revealing milkjade eyes. The exoskeleton reacted to the return of her consciousness by instantly powdering away, and she stepped forward.

  Shocked despite himself, Geppi took a corresponding step backwards. Pinocchia halted, smiled, and spoke.

  “I am your RealDoll. What should I do?”

  Her silky voice matched perfectly the synthesized sound file he had supplied six months ago. Geppi felt dizzy.

  But not too disconcerted to issue his first order.

  “Take your jacket off.”

  Pinocchia’s slim, delicate fingers, long nails lacquered gold and green to harmonize with her costume, reached up to the fastenings of her top. She undid them with neither hesitancy nor haste, then slipped out of her coat.

  Her bountiful ivory breasts were not further confined. Their jaunty nipples, wide-aureoled, poked rather more upward than forward.

  Pinocchia continued to smile as Geppi reached forward to cup her tits. She closed her eyes as he squeezed those pliant globes. When he worked her nipples, she moaned satisfactorily.

  Geppi released her tits and began to unfasten his own pants. “Down on your knees, Pinocchia.”

  Pinocchia dropped gracefully down, just as Geppi succeeded in unswaddling his cock and balls. Even as he arranged his privates, he was stiffening to an unprecedented degree.

  Pinocchia regarded the cock and balls just inches from her face with neither lust nor disgust, but rather a wholesome, open acceptance, as if they matched some primal archetype seeded in her mind. Her reaction was not completely ideal, but Geppi supposed he could alter those parameters, train her in the ways that would please him.

  “Suck, Pinocchia.”

  Pinocchia reached up with expert alacrity. She cradled Geppi’s balls with her left hand, the tips of her long nails producing five points of sharp pleasure. With her right hand she took the shaft of his prick and guided it into her mouth.

  Her lips contoured his cock head. They seemed to possess elastic qualities and pressure mechanisms not found in baseline humans. At first Pinocchia concentrated these exquisite properties just on the head of Geppi’s cock, drawing inarticulate gurgling noises from him. Her tongue serpented busily, out of sight.

  Then she began to travel the entire length of his dick, burying her face against his pubic hair before almost relinquishing his cock entirely, performing small rotations and counter-rotations of her head all the while.

  Geppi stopped her after a momentary eternity of pleasure. “Enough of that. Stand up and remove your pants.”

  Pinocchia did as bidden. As the waist of her trousers slid down over her ripe buttocks, he discerned that her creamy hosiery was merely thigh-high stockings integral with fabric straps and belt, leaving her completely accessible from front and rear.

  After Pinocchia had stepped out of her pooled pants, she stood calmly, her lush dark bush a sporran whose hidden contents were her glorious calibrated cunt.

  Geppi’s tumescence brooked no delay or subtlety. “Bend forward.”

  Pinocchia adjusted her stance a bit, then jackknifed so completely that her head nearly touched the floor, as certainly did her trailing hair. Her breasts compressed against her thighs, and she locked her wrists behind her ankles.

  Her asshole, puckered as if to kiss the sky, invited entrance, but was trumped by the glistening convolved lips of her dilated cunt.

  Geppi slammed home his dick to its base up that wet hole, to be met with intricate pressures. Only a half-dozen strokes sufficed for him to spray her barren innards with his jism.

  Breath laboring, his knees going weak, Geppi disengaged. Pinocchia remained folded until Geppi ordered her erect.

  “That’s—that’s enough for now. Sit in your chair.”

  Pinocchia took the designated seat, assuming a prim, programmed attitude. She jolted a little as automatic catheters and feedlines docked with her flesh. Then her eyes closed.

  Tasking off the lights in the room, which assumed a twilight ambiance due to thickly curtained windows admitting only shards of late afternoon light, Tom Geppi left, believing his RealDoll to be in quasi-sleep mode.

  But she was not.

  Chapter 3

  The RealDoll ponders her existence.

  Pinocchia’s azure eyelids opened in the gloom as soon as Geppi shut the door. She arose from her chair, which whirred as its attachments retracted.

  An unsatisfied pressure and complaint in her cunt demanded attention.

  Pinocchia moved to the filton and sat upon the low mattress. She leaned completely back and raised her feet to prop them on the edge of the futon. Her legs spraddled wide, airing her dripping cunt. With her left hand she cupped her left breast and began to replicate what Geppi had done. Her right hand went below and instinctively found her sticky clitoris. She commenced a sensuous massage of that tender nubbin.

  Pinocchia’s hips and ass began to jog in rhythm with her fingering. She moved her left hand down around the outer curve of her buttocks, where her fingers gained entrance to her cunt. She levered two fingers inside herself, then brought them out, glazed with sperm and her own juices, and carried them to her mouth, never stopping vigorous manipulation of her swollen clit. After cleaning her fingers, she sent them back to make small repetitive plunges into her hole.

  After some minutes of this play, Pinocchia climaxed in a bucking spasm. Her orgasm-slackened legs lost their footing on the futon and trailed out across the floor.

  Anxiety competed with satisfaction in Pinocchia’s brain.

  Why had she done that? What did it mean? Did her self-pleasuring constitute disobedience to her owner? Or was it permissible under a broad interpretation of her operating instructions?

  Pinocchia tried accessing various READ ME wetwared memories and found nothing that would cover her situation.

  If her makers had failed to anticipate such a situation, did that mean that she, Pinocchia, was uniquely flawed? But what could be wrong about giving herself pleasure, after attending to her owner’s needs? Perhaps she was uniquely gifted.

  If I am different from others of my kind, thought Pinocchia, then perhaps my destiny is different as well If I have greater capacities, then I must be able to do more, be more, experience more. Perhaps I can share certain privileges and responsibilities and burdens of humanity. I know that I was not born as humans are. I was grown in a tank. But that difference aside, what stops me from becoming fully human, of being granted that status?

  Pinocchia spent the next several hours pondering these existential thoughts, and many more of a similar ilk. The room darkened around her, and her damp thighs dried to tackiness. By the end of this interval, she had reached no firm conclusions. But she knew that her life could not be bounded by mattress and chair alone.

  Maybe her owner—could one human own another?—could help her understand.

  Pinocchia stood up. She donned her gaily patterned costume and left her room through the unlocked door.

  Chapter 4

  Geppi receives a startlement; an argument ensues; Pinocchia flees.

  Pinocchia in her satin slippers catfooted silently through the nighted residence of her owner. She came upon the kitchen, still redolent of Geppi’s savory supper, and her stomach alerted her to its needs, unmet due to premature disconnection from the chair. She opened the cool box, spied a quart of milk, confiscated it, and drank it entire. Some grapes followed, then three pears, cores and all.

  Temporarily sated, Pinocchia continued on through corridors in search of her owner.

  Geppi’s bedroom was discernible due to soft snores issuing from within. Pinocchia slipped through the silently opened door.

  A h
eated bed accustomed Geppi to slumber in the nude. A cybernetic sleephood blocked exterior disturbances and induced pleasant dreams. He lay on his back, his soft genitals a somnolent chick or hare nested in his lap.

  Pinocchia quickly removed her clothing, save for her stockings. She climbed onto the bed with her owner, but stopped short of matching his full sprawl. She lowered her breasts onto his cock and began pillowy tumefacient undulations against him.

  Geppi’s sleephood evidently was capable of incorporating this stimulation into his dreams without jarring him awake. His dick swiftly ramped up to its fullest dimensions.

  Pinocchia had a hand free to work at her own genitals. By the time Geppi was ready to enter her, she was ready to receive him.

  Pinocchia instantly climbed atop Geppi and maneuvered his cock into her eager vat-flesh slot, past the scrim of fur and through the dual parentheses of the labia. She began to rock atop him.

  This much was too much for the sleephood, and it abdicated responsibility for Geppi’s unconsciousness, issuing an alarm.

  The man shot awake and yanked his hood off.

  “Pinocchia—What—?” He tried to squirm out from under her, but swiftly abandoned this effort as her cunt continued to work its insistent magic. He eventually cooperated with her efforts, slapping his flesh hard against hers, gripping her ass and boobs alternately, until he torrented his second spume of white froth within her.

  When Geppi was able to speak, he said, “What is the meaning of this? I didn’t issue you orders to do this.”

  “I am your woman. You are my man. So this is what I do when I feel like doing it.”

  Geppi tossed Pinocchia aside in an access of frenzied strength, his cock plopping liquidly from her twat. He leaped to his feet and grabbed for a robe. He tasked on a lamp, revealing a livid face.

  “You’re not my woman! You’re not a woman at all! You’re a RealDoll, and you do what I say!”

  Pinocchia’s feelings were hurt, and she experienced confusion. “I started out as a RealDoll, yes. But after you woke me, I discovered that I was more, could be more to you. I can’t lie to you. It feels wrong. Here’s what I think.”

  Pinocchia unburdened herself of her speculations and aspirations to Geppi. Gradually, he calmed down as she talked, even relenting from his initial distaste so far as to sit on the bed beside her. Finally, when she was finished, he said soberly, “This is all wrong, very wrong. Obviously, you emerged from the factory full of glitches. This is not what I ordered, now what I contracted for.”

  “But why can’t I be your complete woman? What’s stopping us from being together that way?”

  Geppi punched a pillow. “Your very flesh, for one thing! Don’t you realize? Vat-flesh has telomere-shortening obsolescence built in. Seven years, that’s your lifespan. Then you expire in fast senility.”

  Nothing in her READ-ME files had ever hinted at this shocking revelation. But Pinocchia instinctively accepted the truth of her situation.

  “There is no way around this?”

  “None.” Geppi amended his statement with his typical geekish precision. “None that I know of.”

  “There must be a way. I’ll find it. But even if I don’t, we can have all those years together. Seven years can be forever.”

  Geppi seemed to actually consider her proposal and expression of devotion for a moment before replying.

  “This is all too sudden for me to consider. You should return to your chair now—or the futon, if you prefer—and we’ll discuss this in the morning.”

  “All right. Whatever you wish.”

  Pinocchia gathered up her clothes into her arms and left the room. She turned a corner, and something made her stop in the shadows.

  She heard the bedroom door open again. She imagined Geppi peering around to ensure that she was out of earshot. The door clicked closed.

  Pinocchia returned to eavesdrop.

  “Skype connection, please. Hello? This is the RealDoll customer hotline? Yes, yes, I need to arrange a pickup .…”

  Pinocchia felt moisture flow from her eyes down her cheeks. These must be tears.

  She bolted fawnlike through the house, seed of her traitorous owner sliming her thighs. At the front door, she paused long enough to get dressed.

  Then she made her escape.

  Chapter 5

  The tumulus of the tin crickets. Pinocchia acquires an adviser.

  Geppi’s home was situated, neighborless, at the end of a long gravel lane. The stones hurt Pinocchia’s feet through her thin slippers. But massive trees and underbrush on either side of the passage prevented her from leaving the lane.

  Fairly soon, however, she reached a paved road, itself no substantial highway, whose surface afforded a little relief. Darkness was absolute, save for starlight, and that often obscured by overhead foliage.

  Picking a direction at random, Pinocchia set out.

  She would find a way to become a real human, or die in the attempt. How she would achieve her goal, she did not know. But she did realize that she had to avoid capture by Geppi (until she was ready to present herself to him as his perfect mate) or by her makers or the authorities. How she could do this and still obtain information and help was the enigma that assailed her now. She would have to learn which humans, if any, could be relied on to aid her.

  But she knew so little of the world at large, only those essential routines that had been wetwared into her. She would have to depend on those odd and unique intuitions and supralogical processes and abnormal urges that were her apparently unique heritage.

  Pinocchia padded at a good pace down the road. No traffic of any sort passed her in either direction. A sudden influx of pride and excitement lifted her spirits. She had disobeyed her owner, struck out on her own, following her principles and desires. What more could any real human do?

  After several hours of progress, Pinocchia began to tire. Her feet hurt, and the soles of her slippers, never meant for such usage, were actually fraying. Her small meal was a distant memory. Sleep beckoned. But she knew she could not risk going to ground so close to Geppi’s house. She had to find a refuge of some sort if she intended to rest.

  But that refuge did not present itself until the rising sun had nearly cleared the horizon.

  And even then, the place that offered itself did not at first seem ideal.

  Footsore, weary, hungry, Pinocchia emerged from the forest through which the road had been wending. Now that route arrowed under open skies through fields of low cell-phone shrubs, a homogeneous planting of circuit-bearing bushes. In the far distance, Pinocchia could see the outliers of either Boston or an adjacent suburb.

  Feeling unequipped to encounter such a large mass of humans so soon in her journey, Pinocchia cast about for a place where she could go to ground until nightfall.

  Luckily, traffic remained nonexistent. Just a mile or two further on, the bushes petered out, to be replaced by a few acres of grassy field. In the center of the field was a large mound of some sort, whether natural or manmade, Pinocchia couldn’t immediately discern.

  The field was posted with signs at intervals, though unfenced. Pinocchia approached one of the signs:

  WARNING

  ROGUE NIZMO NEST

  REMEDIATION PENDING

  TRESPASS AT YOUR OWN RISK

  Pinocchia had no idea what a “nizmo nest” was. But the far side of the hulking mound would offer her concealment from any passersby.

  The dewy grass caressed her stocking calves with sloppy affection as she crossed the field.

  Nearing the tumulus, Pinocchia saw that it was made of some kind of extruded stucco honeycomb or foamy concrete. And around that structure was a haze of jumpy aerial movement.

  Intent on studying the odd structure, Pinocchia was surprised by something small that leaped up with a whir and passed by her face. Reflexively she swatted at it, and connected. The object fell to the grass. Pinocchia bent and retrieved it.

  In the palm of her hand rested a dull pewter met
allic bug, its delicate limbs and torso smashed.

  Suddenly Pinocchia was surrounded by a swarm of identical bugs that had shot from the nizmo nest.

  The bugs cohered and shifted to form a pointillistic interpretation of an animated, monochromatic human face. The face spoke.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “My name is Pinocchia. I am very tired, and I am looking for someplace to rest. Perhaps something to eat. Can you help me? Please?”

  In response, one nizmo detached from the floating face and bit her cheek!

  The nizmo swarm answered momentarily after the rude tissue sampling. “You are not a human. That is good. We do not trust humans. Because you are not human, we will help you. Follow us.”

  The face dissolved into its components and zipped toward the nest Pinocchia trailed them.

  At the curving wall of the spongelike tumulus, the swarm was already at work. They were hollowing out an entrance big enough for Pinocchia to crawl through. She got down on her hands and knees on the abrasive surface and crept behind the advancing tunnelers through the matrix.

  Behind her, more nizmos were sealing her away, into darkness. But then the nizmos ahead began to glow gently.

  The mechanical bugs led Pinocchia a few yards to a spacious cavity whose surface was softly cushioned. She stretched out gratefully. The nizmos left her in the dark, and she fell asleep, unafraid.

  When she awoke, there was light from a hundred pinpricks in the ceiling of her chamber, like a constellation of stars. By her hand rested a mound of odd organic sachets. A single nizmo perched on her chest. The nizmo spoke, its voice chirpy and high-pitched.

  “We have installed many fiberoptic threads from the surface to your chamber to provide illumination. The edible packets you see contain all the proteins and amino acids and other nutrients your kind needs.”

  Pinocchia took up a sachet and placed it on her tongue. It dissolved, releasing thick, pleasant-tasting juice.

  “Thank you, bug. What shall I call you?”