by ed. Pela Via
“When it happens . . . make me look like a star again,” Ms. Murtoil requests in a desolate tone, officially reaching that point where she’s stopped focusing on living and is now planning out the circumstances of her demise.
The “short-term will,” we call it.
“A Hollywood star . . . just like when I did the Howard Hughes film,” Ms. Murtoil says, a renewed smile emerging, waves of nostalgia flashing over milky blue eyes as she drapes the diamonds with her bumpy fingers. “Did I ever tell you about how I used to be in the pictures, Benjamin? Those were wonderful times.”
——————————
Little Deaths
by Gary Paul Libero
“Here is your cover. It must go on prior to entering the shell. This will all be explained in due time.”
The little freak speaks at me like I’m some toddler. I think there’s make-up around his narrow eyes, although he may be a she. It’s harder than ever to tell.
“Once inside, it is imperative that you move as little as possible.”
He’s not looking at me. I’m not here.
“You’ve purchased our finest module,” the freak says. “I understand your potential final release will be here with us?”
My shrug doesn’t answer his question exactly. Regardless, he keys a reply in the handheld device he’s been caressing since I walked in.
“Great then! I’ll just need your autograph here, Mister McEweeee?”
He extends the last name far too long, passes me the handheld device and a stylus.
“Terrific! We hope you enjoy your time with us, sir. One of our technicians will be out shortly to explain the details of your package and will assist you into the shell. I believe,” he looks at his computer, “Marilyn has been assigned to you. She’s a diamond!”
———
Charlie presented me with an envelope a week after we met with the doctors. Before they uttered a word I saw it in their faces and Charlie asked how long. They said three months.
The cancer spread.
“Pop, this shouldn’t be a sad time for you. For us.”
My mouth shaped the words I love you Charlie. Before I opened the envelope, he explained the contents.
“This place, it’s where people go these days, for companionship. They’re not selling call girls, nothing like that. This is high class, and high tech. The most advanced virtual intimacy a person can experience.”
I pulled the gift certificate from the envelope. He watched my eyebrow rise.
“It’s one of the larger accounts I’ve been working with. We began selling materials to them six months ago.
I don’t know about this, Charlie.
“They offer a special package for,” it pained Charlie to say, “the terminal.”
The doctors agreed to release me for one day only. They told Charlie because of my weakened state, being away from the hospital could kill me. He told them we were willing to take the risk.
As they say, go out with a bang.
———
“Mr. McEwe? May I call you Ralph?” a voice sweet as apple wine asks at my back.
I turn in my waiting chair and she’s there, just as the little freak promised.
A diamond.
“My name is Marilyn. I’ll be assisting you today.”
She flashes a smile that could put out the sun.
I slip one arm from a sleeve and she’s quick to help me out of the rest. She bends down close to me, eye to beautiful eye. My old face goes beet soup. In my ear, “There is nothing, and I mean nothing, to be embarrassed about here.”
Marilyn works each button, buckle and snap holding my clothes together. Her hands in sheer gloves bring arousal to parts that haven’t worked so well in many moons.
“Ralph, if I may ask,” careful with her question, “what is sex like in the later years?”
My sweet, have you ever shot pool with a rope?
She laughs at the childish expression on my face. “I see. You’re a quiet one. The strong silent type. I like that in a man,” selling me every step into the grave.
The diamond guides me toward an oversized egg.
“As I’m sure Singh told you at the front desk, it is very important to move as little as possible during the experience. The module will guide your actions once you are sealed inside.”
I nod.
Without asking she takes the shriveled wrapper in my hand.
“This is strictly for sanitation of the shells.”
She guides me inside the rubber cover. It fits as I remember condoms did, and warmer.
“For most terminals, the pleasure shell experience can be intense and overwhelming.” She looks down at her feet and giggles. “Do you know how Shakespeare described the orgasm?”
I shake my head.
“Little deaths,” she says.
We share a smile. She guides my rickety bones into the shell and looks right through me before the egg’s door slides between us. She blows me a kiss. A series of electronic sounds confirm the door is sealed.
It’s quiet, then, “Good morning, Ralph,” a woman says. “My name is Glo. I will be your companion during your pleasure module.”
There is no face to match the voice.
“Ralph, I will need you to relax with your back against the rear of the shell. You will feel the foam material conform to your entire body, save your head and neck regions. It is imperative that you remain still during this process.”
A cool air washes over my face
“Close your eyes and relax. We will begin momentarily.”
That smell.
Woman.
Nurses never smell like this.
“Ready?” the voice asks.
I nod.
Blinding green light falls over me. A woman’s face appears, intimately close to mine. Her body pressed against me. She’s strong and ageless.
“I’ve been waiting for you. Do you find me attractive?”
I nod again.
I understand. Your condition restricts speech. I will speak internally, while taking care of you . . . externally.
That freak said nothing about mind control.
This is not mind control, Ralph. It’s simply your pleasure module. You have nothing to fear. Just let me do the work. You don’t have to think a word.
The egg vibrates and moves. I can’t tell if I’m standing or lying. The foam adjusts and tightens. Her hands touch mine. She runs them over my body, my face, my cover.
I will do anything for you, Ralph. I am at your service. I want to make you happy.
Please, don’t stop.
I haven’t spoken in months.
I miss this connection, even if it’s with an egg.
I am not an egg, Ralph. My name is Glo. I am at your service. Now, let’s begin.
The doctors said this could kill me.
I hope they are right.
——————————
We Sing the Bawdy Electric
by Rob Parker
Her lips slide crooked across shatterproof teeth as she squishes my root between her biodegradable fingers and diddles my prosthetic perineum. Servos whir in cadence with our pelvic writhing, and they nearly obscure the hum and grind of webcams crusted to the blank white walls that squint and zoom in medical-grade fluorescent lights.
Her eyes, fresh from the far side of the uncanny valley are twin black lenses adrift in seminal globes, set apart with the hint of epicanthic folds. Her face framed by a mane of wild purple hair. Our bodies designed to exude adolescent virility: hairless groins, twenty feminine fingers between the two of us, her breasts frozen in pubescence: perky and palm-sized, my perfect porcelain teeth laden with braces, even. I register braces incising the polyurethane underside of my lips as our foreplay subroutines play through truncated abstractions of the mythical reality of copulation.
Our kisses are quiet and shy, and her smiles furtive, meant only for me—even as they were filtered through a massive processing unit and r
eproduced the world over. Simulated sweat filters to skin surface and we caress it away. Our programming a nested series of complementary subroutines such that we know exactly what the other wants. The intimacy of having no expectations, no designs, no agenda. No matter how our servos tremble, we finger force-feedback pads beneath the skin with languor, breathing slowly and shuddering.
Every time is the first time. Each new position dizzying, individual as the pattern of mass-produced fingerprints we leave all over each other. We tumble over the edge of every fetishized maw of depravity and come out the other side, wide-eyed, breathing hard. Our movements and feelings recorded, replicated, broadcast and rebroadcast in syndication. Each orgasm a flurry of pixel and data. Patterned chaos. A self-replicating archive of raw footage to be edited and recut for digital distribution.
The tender moments we keep for ourselves, light caresses that barely crease the padding of flesh over our metal and plastic infrastructure, too light to register and trigger the recording pressure plates.
Inside her, I modulate my rhythm, deep shallow, deep shallow deep-deep and her lenses widen in their globes of fluid, her mouth open slightly; the slick lump of vat-grown tongue peeking from behind her teeth as she registers my thrusts in ones and zeroes. We tingle with the thrill of having a secret, speaking a code nobody in the millions of voyeurs could catch. She digs her fingers into the interlocking plastic of my spine, twitching and kneading out a response with her fingernails. We move faster and faster with learned excitement until my programming fires a subroutine and I pull out, vocal chip procedurally emitting a configuration of grunts until I expend ropes of oily synthosperm onto her beaming, silent face.
The system operators in the next room cut power to our gyros and we drop on top of each other, feel the bottom drop out from our RAM and the cold fingers of sysops on our command prompts as they grope for sensory perceptions and scenes that would soon be edited for maximum erotic impact.
A limited awareness trickles back into us from the streaming feeds, the haptic feedback conjuring a metonymy of fleshy alien bodies: our audience. Slack jaws, gelatinous limbs attached to bulbous torsos with engorged, slavering genitals rubbed raw by technology. Eyes swiveled nervously toward the windows where atrophied forests feed upon mounds of dead and dying under the eye of a swollen sunset as they mutter obscenities in response to their simulated, our simulated sex; our love and affection camouflaged by a jungle of erections.
——————————
In Exile
by Chris Deal
It was ten years before he saw the sun clearly. For the entirety of that time he remembered those last moments, the warmth flowing down over him as he walked off the bus, wrists and ankles chained and the whole of him connected to the person in front of and behind him. He soaked it in, willing time to slow until the world between heartbeats stretched out past the horizon, memorizing that light and that warmth on his face before it was gone and he was in the dark, the quiet.
They were children together, their parents friends and they became the same. At five they were each other’s first kiss, long before they knew what came with such an act. The two ran and held hands, and they smiled, they were always smiling. The girl, her face covered with freckles, would dance and the boy would watch. He’d be quiet for a long time, just observing her. For the girl, dancing couldn’t be explained. The movement of her body in time with the music felt right. The boy, he would disappear into himself for long stretches. The days he and the little girl weren’t together were days when no words sprang from him; only she could bring them out. He was her audience when she imitated the people in the movies her mother took her to, the plays, and he didn’t understand the appeal at first. To him, dancing was just something you did, not something you cared about. Watching her, though, the way she stuck her tongue between her lips as she perfected each move, it’d bring things out from him, words that stayed sacred between them.
The boy’s mother went away when he was young and his father became given to long stretches of absence. It infected the boy, the itch for elsewhere crawling behind his eyes. He’d walk out into the woods and find a place to be alone. He smelled the ground like a beast and ate roots until his stomach retched and then he’d walk back inside. When he was older, he’d buy a ticket and show up at the bus station, the idea being he’d leave school behind, his father, the empty house, the hole in the ground, just go away and be forgotten, living on in no one’s memories. He once made it four hours away. He stood in the dull corona of a streetlight among the exiles, somewhere outside of nirvana. He bummed a cigarette because he thought it the thing to do and drank coffee that cost a quarter a cup and when it came time to move on, his feet were stuck. He closed his eyes and saw the girl. He bought one more ticket and got home as the sun breached the horizon.
Both knew friendship to be the most fragile of things, and as they moved apart through life, the girl and the boy would remember the other, running through fields and coming home covered in mud, and they would smile, a sacred motion given to no one else. The conversations grew scarce, the boy’s words even more so. The girl kept dancing. Practiced and careful, calluses ripped across the balls of her toes. Each movement meant something, the routines told a story she shared with the world. They came to see her dance, people with money and people with love.
She left before him, kissing her mother goodbye and going where she could hone her skills. She did not give him a goodbye, nor did he seek one out. He went to work and each day was the same as those that came before, on and on like an infinity mirror. His eyes grew dull and he thought only of food and shelter. He collected maps of places he had never been and made plans to vanish, but when the day would come, he’d get up early in the morning, have a breakfast of coffee and cigarettes and go to work. When he returned home, he would sit down in his apartment and turn on his television. One night as the world slept on around him, he watched the patterns of static move over the television screen, thinking there to be something important hidden in the chaos. His body went concrete stiff when the blast of virtual snow developed into the thin lines, the crooked nose of his father. The old man’s voice took a tight grip on his attention, and the son was offered a job.
The girl made friends fast in her new home, those she trained with. They danced for hours, the same moves and the same routines repeatedly until they were crisp and perfect. She was the best of them, and though some hated her for it, most smiled and asked her for help. She grew stronger in body and mind. Men watched her as she moved down the street, each step holding a world’s worth of grace. One day, it was her turn. She was the person everyone came to watch, the person her friends supported, their movements giving agency to her own, and with one last pure pirouette the audience stood and roared her name. Weary but floating, she at first resisted when her friends tried to take her out to celebrate, but because of the buzzing in her very being, she relented. At a quiet bar she met a man with a pleasant smile. She woke up in the morning with the elation of the previous night gone, in its place was pain, her face bruised and the man gone. She forgot him and the haze of the night. During the long weeks of practices for her next performance she was off. Her body did not move in the way she expected it to, her muscles were given to more ache. She could feel the dreams she’d held sacred since she was a girl being ripped apart.
He only spoke when someone asked something of him. Conversations were rare and his coworkers thought him an object, less a person, and he was fine with that. Snow came in its time and he liked the clearness of it. He began to think of the large, clean fields as his own mind. He woke one quiet day, the world stretching out like a blank canvas, and he decided on a drive. He found his father in a slovenly motel room on the outer rim of town. The father handed the son a set of keys that belonged to the car he’d last seen his father drive away in and made him promise to burn it somewhere hidden. He took that junker through the roads out to the low hills beyond town, his momentum carrying him closer to the mountains th
at loomed like sleeping giants. As the tires hummed over the ice and the slush, there came a sharp curve. Long stretches of emptiness had dulled him, and he turned his eyes to a black bird paused in the middle of a pure, white field. When he looked back to the road, the passenger side tires were veering over the shoulder. A police cruiser was stopped just ahead, the officer hunched over his open trunk. He jerked the wheel but the force of his movement caused the tires to lock up and he kept sliding forward, the weight of his car colliding with the cruiser, pinning the officer between the two vehicles. For a thin moment he thought that this was it, that he would pull back and keep driving, not even going back home for what few objects he cared about. He would empty his bank account and travel south, racing his deed to Mexico where he would tan and learn a new tongue and maybe meet a woman he could hold at night who would remind him in her quiet movements of the first girl. He got out of the car and waited beside the officer, splayed over the hood, as more police traveled fast towards them. The paramedics put the officer into an ambulance and the police, they checked the car’s plates and saw there was an alert out for it, for the driver. They asked for permission to search the vehicle and consent was given. Opening the trunk, three officers stood in silence, their eyes trapped, their faces anemic. One turned, gun drawn and finger itching ever closer to the trigger. The son was pinned to the frozen asphalt and saw as they brought a knife, a pair of brown stained jeans too small for any man, out into the open.
He kept his head down in the early days, continuing his practiced silence, and walked through each hour untouched by the informal politics of race revered by the convicted. He fell in with no group, saw no need for protection and became a target. During the slow hours the contained spent idle in the common area an initiate came at him with a straightened mattress spring filed to a harsh point. The initiate thrust and the metal speared deep into his stomach and in his blind efforts of protection he struck the offender twice in the throat. The initiate fell to his knees, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth. He kept his feet and the prisoners began to speak of him as something special. He received an additional five years onto his sentence. After one more failed attack with batteries buried in toes of a sock and another year, no man attacked him again.
