“Nowhere. There is none.”
“She wasn’t built for that!” Wendy said, going back to the sexdoll’s diagnostic panel.
It was Jack’s time to cross his arms and hug his chest. “Well, I’m the customer, right? Make her be able to handle it.”
Wendy stepped close to him and spoke as if to an idiot. “You bought the most heavy-duty sexdoll in existence, basically a crash dummy with boobs and fuckholes, build from space-age material that can withstand any and all abuse, so you could just have sweet-sweet love with her?”
“Yeah,” Jack apologised again. “I liked her eyes. You know, on the website.”
“Ay ay ay,” Wendy huffed out and went back to the sexdoll.
“Can you do it?” Jack said hopefully.
She sighed. “I guess. Why the hell not? It will void your guarantee as it is an illegal mod, but it’s not like you’re ever gonna need it with your touching and caressing,” she said, making fun of his voice.
“Thank you!” Jack said, excited.
Wendy clicked her tongue. “You better, ‘cause this will take too long and my wife will be pissed. But who am I to get in the way of mechanophilia?”
“Mechano-what?”
“It’s a kink,” she nodded slowly, looking sure of herself. “Look it up. I honestly wasn’t expecting that one, it’s a first. I give you that. But I’m always right.”
The End
Come and Get It
Robo Muffin walked out of the field covered head to toe in pink blood. Only a tiny bit was hers, just some spittle from a kick she took to the face. The rest was from the opposing team, the losing team.
She got back to the locker room and the others made way for her. Conversations ended and eyes followed her as she passed them by.
Heading to the showers, she tore her armour and clothes off and went straight in the spray. The girl who was getting a shower at that moment yelped, “Hey!”
Robo Muffin simply shoved her out. The girl fell on the floor, wet and stunned, but Muffin didn’t care.
She let the scalding water wash her sins away. One more match. Just one more bloody match, and the sword was hers.
Muffin didn’t enjoy hurting people. Sure, she’d protect herself if someone took a swing at her, but she wouldn’t go out and deliberately hurt someone.
At least not outside the Cyberpink field.
It had been ten years. Ten bloody years, and she was promised she’d be out six years ago. The contract was simple, play jugger, earn cash, pay off your debt, earn your freedom.
Such an easy concept, isn’t it?
But the fine print was what truly fucked you over.
She had fought tooth and nail to get into a good, winning team to get the cash early. She had waded through opponents with her sword, had torn ligaments, had crushed bones and ended careers.
A million euro, was the end total.
It wasn’t that high in the beginning. Buuut… accumulated interest here, a tiny bit of delayed payment there, and it added up to a ton of money. Nobody explained the fine print to you. Nobody. Not your owner, not your fans, not your next owner who your paramone contract was sold off to.
And then it was the injuries. Jugger was a fast game, a brutal game. Injuries were a daily thing. You got injured, and then you got medical care. But, in this time and age, you couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to also augment yourself. Why let the arm heal when you can just augment it and become stronger? Why live with that neck problem with silly brittle bones, when you can augment it and fortify the entire neck area against incoming blows? Why settle for human reaction times, when you can supercharge your nerves and get superhuman ones?
It added up. A toe here, an aug there, you ended up trading pieces of your soul. Bit by bit you got replaced until you looked in the mirror and couldn’t recognise yourself any more.
Daisy was gone. Robo Muffin stared you back.
Covered in pink blood, washing over you, its spectrum shifted to avoid the streaming laws but the smell remained the same. Blood.
Muffin pushed the wall of the shower and let her head hang under the water. The water trickled around her short hair and somewhat covered her nose and mouth, making her drown a bit. She liked that, simulated drowning.
A waterboarding of your own.
Hundreds of opponents would have liked to see her go through with it.
Muffin was feared, envied, cursed upon. She had the guts to actually claim freedom, to fight for it and get close enough that it nearly burned her.
The precious Spatha sword. It was what you won along with the cyberpink tournament trophy, but it came along with something more important: Freedom.
You won the tournament, you won the sword. You could trade it in for enough money to buy out any paramone contract.
Or, you could keep it, and keep on fighting. Why anyone would want to choose the latter was beyond her.
Muffin walked out of the shower, dripping water. She didn’t bother to get dry. The girl who was there before was gone now. She put on her clothes and armour back, clipped her current padded sword on her belt and headed out of the locker room.
On her final match, she didn’t hold back. At some point during the final few seconds, her opponent got in a lucky hit and paralysed her. Muffin happened to be in an awkward angle as the implant kicked in and made her freeze. Her head was slumped down, her hair doused in pink blood. It trickled down, rimming her nose, filling her lungs with every panting breath.
One stone. She felt she would drown, so close to reaching the end.
Two stone. She surrendered to the blood’s thick delight.
Three stone. Dammit! Not like this.
Four stone. She braced herself, coughing and chocking. No. She would simply not lose now.
Five stone. She looked around, deciding her next strike.
As soon as Robo Muffin got free, she charged the opposing enforcer. She went down in an instant, clutching her torn off cyberarm, pink blood and blue hydraulic fluids spraying in the air. Then she tore through the other one.
With the opposing team disabled, her qwik picked up the skull and scored a point.
They won.
The fans screamed their lungs out, but all she could do was cough and cough and cough. The blood was inside her, stuck there, infecting her. She coughed to get it out, but she couldn’t.
Journalists and cameras and microphones got shoved in her face, but all she could do was barely contain her coughing.
Someone gave her the Spatha sword. She held it. It was heavy and felt great in her grip. It had a corporate logo on it, and came with a holographic surface that made it shoot out rainbows from the beams of light that hit it.
She stared at it, mesmerised.
“So, what will be your choice, Robo Muffin?” some man asked her.
“Uh? What?” she stuttered.
“The sword. Do you keep it and defend the championship next year, or do you trade it for your freedom?”
Everybody went silent, waiting for her reply.
She looked down at her hand. It was alien, augmented, powerful. It held the coveted sword. With it, came power. Fame. Glory. It shone back a rainbow as an errant light hit it, like a naughty wink at her.
What was she doing? Was she really considering it, carrying on? She had one goal all these years, one single goal: to earn her freedom. Why was she even hesitating?
Raising her chin, she gripped it tight. She knew what her reply would be.
Robo Muffin raised it in the air, took in a big breath, and shouted, “Molon labe!”
The End
You can read the Cyberpink books here: https://mythographystudios.com/books/cyberpink/
Hewoo
Cooky smiled at the hitmen that had come tonight to kill her. It was her birthday, after all. There were two of them, and they were properly armed. All she had was her trusty dagger.
Not that she needed anything more.
“Hewoo!” she cooed as she charged the one on th
e right. Only idiots waited, the correct action was to catch them flat-footed. Nobody ever expect a head-on attack when they were the ones getting the jump on someone.
They both raised their guns at her.
“Too laaate!” she giggled as she drove her dagger between the man’s armour plates and straight into his neck. He had barely managed to raise his gun half-way before she had closed the distance and had daggered him. Another rookie mistake, people think that a gun draw is quicker, when in fact, a knifed attacker can do-
Well, exactly what Cooky just did.
She twisted the knife to make sure she got the jugular. She had aimed from five meters away and straight between his protection, but getting through it and actually delivering a killing blow were two different things. She was good, but she wasn’t that good.
Thick, warm blood spurted into her face. “Jackpot!” she smiled, then turned to her next attacker. He had lost precious seconds being stunned by her attack, but his training seemed to kick in and he had raised his pistol at her.
She smiled at him eerily, her face sprayed with red.
He fired at her.
Cooky pulled the dying hitman in time between them. The bullets struck the guy’s Kevlar.
The hitman with the pistol froze in place, waiting to see the result. After a few endless seconds passed, Cooky poked her head from the side. “Peek a boo!”
The hitman yelled, “Aaah! Die you crazy bitch!” and emptied his clip.
Cooky poked her head out once more, her mouth in an ‘o’ shape. “Your peepee doesn’t work,” she said like a little girl.
Then she thrust her dagger under the man’s jaw and into his skull. Something crunched. She put her palm to the handle of her dagger and punched upwards, driving it further in. She saw the glint through the man’s teeth.
Then she put her knee to his chest and grunted, and pulled, and huffed, “Nyehhh!” and the dagger came loose, sending her tumbling down on the street and landing on her butt.
Cooky tilted her head. She heard some muffled sounds. She walked close to the first hitman’s face. She slapped him, then pushed his lips together. “Hah! You’re a fishy now. Are you talking?”
She could still hear something. She reached in with her fingers inside his ear and pulled the comms. “Ear wax, yucky…”
“I thought you said her name was Cookie! How fucking hard could it be to kill a girl named like that?” a man squealed through the comms, terrified. “I don’t- No, I don’t care. We’re done. Contract is off, I just lost two men in five seconds. Never call me again, I will fucking gut you.”
Cooky stood tall, as tall as a featherweight like her could possibly be. She looked down the alleys. There it was, a van. The lights just came on and the driver revved up the engine.
Now, what would the best course of action be in this situation?
She tapped the bloody dagger on her chin. Huh.
Oh, right.
Charge it headlong.
She ran up to the incoming van. The driver actually tried to swerve out of the way to avoid hitting her, but she sidestepped and jumped right into its path.
Slamming on the front with a hollow thud, she drove her dagger inside the metal. She barely had any footholds and held onto the dagger with both hands.
The driver cursed at her and turned the wheel, driving the van scratching into the sides of the parked cars. He was frantic, spitting and cursing. “Just fucking die, already!”
Cooky held herself from one hand on the dagger and swung around like a pendulum. “Weeee!” she squealed in delight.
The van revved and went into the main road, forcing other cars to stop and honk at him in anger.
Cooky could feel the wind hitting her, it made the various cuts on her body sting. They were going too fast, they really needed to stop. So she dug out her dagger, held herself with the other hand, leaned to the side, arched her body aaaand…
Sliced the tire.
The van came tumbling in the air and landed on it’s top. Rending metal was all she could hear for many dizzying seconds that adrenaline stretched to feel like entire minutes.
Bam. Crunch.
“Wha- Nonono…” the third hitman said, shuffling away, pulling himself by his arms.
There was fire all around them. Oil slicks. Bits of metal. And in the middle, Cooky, coming at him with her dagger and a big smile.
She cut his arm carefully. He screamed all the way until he passed out.
Oh well. He was gonna bleed out anyway, no way an ambulance would come so fast in this neighbourhood, and she doubted that second-rate hitmen like these bozos could afford Apollo Tripods.
She lifted the man’s severed arm and checked his implants. They weren’t exactly military-grade, but they were black-market ones with encryptions she didn’t have the patience to crack otherwise. She fiddled with the severed arm until it popped up an augmented reality display. There it was, her location and an exact time for the hit.
Only one man had that information.
Cooky stepped inside her house, waving the severed arm around, staining the hallway. She faced her husband in the study, who was drinking expensive whiskey while watching the flames crackling in the fireplace. His eyes met hers, then he gulped and frozen, he waited for her reaction.
A long moment passed. Then she squealed, opening her arms wide, “My hubby!” She ran up to him and gave him a big hug. “Best birthday present, ever, muah, muah, moo-waah!”
The End
Berenice's Hair
Since she was little, Berenice had one goal in mind: To be become like one of the models she saw on the AR billboards.
It was what she desired. She kept letting her hair long, despite her mother’s protests of wanting to keep them manageable. It was her big issue, that her hair was thin and whispy and frail, just like her mother’s, just like her grandmother’s.
She fixed that as soon as she turned 15, with a black-market CRISPR modification of her genes that hurt like a motherfucker.
After that, her hair became thick and long and soft, becoming the envy of every woman she ever encountered. Even before her next birthday at sixteen, she had learnt a valuable lesson in life: fuck genetics. You make your own fate.
She ran out of patience at seventeen and left her small town to get to Athens. She traded a handjob to an overweight man for a lift in his car.
On the very first day, she met her best frenemy in a sleazy bar, getting drinks by horny middle-aged men. Arsinoe was the exact same as her, ambitious, pretty, they both wanted the same things. Before success was even a whiff in the horizon, they didn’t really have anything much to separate them. They went to the same model auditions, to the same photographer calls, to the same porn castings. Yeah, that last one they pushed off, but as the expenses ate away at what little pittance of euro they had scrounged around, it only took a couple of months before they caved.
Honestly, Berenice was shocked at what passed as porn these days. She thought she would get hammered by two studs, or at least she wished she had. In reality, someone paid her 300 euro for her to sit on her perky butt while a man sniffed and licked her feet. He did some other weird things too, but she had tuned out after about twenty minutes or so.
And that was it. She had earned her rent.
“What did they have you do?” Arsinoe asked with a frown.
“It was silly, actually. Foot worship, he called it? And you?” Berenice said, bending her wrist.
“I got tickled. Not-a-euphemism,” Sophia scoffed at the situation.
They both giggled and left, their paycards feeling heavier.
They moved in together, it was inevitable. Athens was hella expensive. Arsinoe got less gigs in general, but she seemed to manage to save a bit more, so it all worked out in the end. Berenice liked to party a bit too much and she always ended up in the red despite her frequent paydays. At some point, someone told them about sugar daddies and they both were extremely interested in the concept.
They found a few
which they kept in rotation, who paid their bills and their drugs and their expensive clothes.
For a while, it was perfect.
Then Arsinoe got the job Berenice was angling for her entire life. “I’m so happy for you,” she squealed in the highest pitch possible.
Arsinoe hopped up and down, grabbing her by the arms and twirling her around like a dance routine. Berenice smiled, she had practised a lot of fake ones, and her magnificent mane waved as they both spun in joy.
All she could think of was that Arsinoe’s hair wasn’t prettier than hers. They had both auditioned for that contract at Aphrodite Cosmetics, and the executive was staring at her ass, not her friend’s, she was sure of it. She had worn the tiniest skirt imaginable, and it was sheer too.
How could they have given the job to Arsinoe of all people, who kept her hair short and in knots?
They stopped spinning and fell on their couch with an excited, “Whee!”
Then Arsinoe climbed on top of her and started kissing her on the neck. Yeah, that was a recent development, after one of their sugar daddies wanted them both at the same time one night. Berenice didn’t mind, and she felt safer with Arsinoe, so she accepted. The problem was that after that day, Arsinoe had started behaving weird. Some nights she’d make a bother when Berenice wanted her to get the fuck out of the apartment so she could screw her sugar daddy, other times she’d badmouth them constantly, even being rude in front of them when they groped Berenice. Arsinoe had also managed in the last month to get her stoned a couple of times and then went down on her.
Berenice didn’t mind, she was good at it, and her tongue felt like a small doggy who was way too excited to see you. As Arsinoe’s head bobbed between Berenice’s legs, she ran her fingers through her hair, examining them again thoroughly.
Cropped, tangled, she even had a hint of dandruff.
Terrible, really.
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 99
