The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (39 page)

Satisfied that Pell wasn’t going to clamp, wasn’t going to stop, Arc shoved her back towards her chest, her small, hard tits, and – yes – her nipples. Again, Pell hunted
with her lips, sought with her hunger, the knotted points and started to suck, lick, nibble and even bite – as if this tit, this nipple was the source of all life, all love . . . all
desire.

“Opened it up – and there it was. But I saw something else. Man, it’s pretty – don’t you think? So strong, so clean – perfect, fuckin’ perfect. As
perfect as someone can make it – like fuckin’ art. Art, jewelry – fuckin’ jewelry.”

How many fingers? Pell didn’t care. The only thing in her world was Arc’s fingers, her asshole, Arc’s flesh-and-blood fingers on the back of her head, and Arc’s tight,
hard nipple in her mouth – and her cunt: her hungry, hungry cunt. All it took was a quick shift of her body, a tiny movement to free her hand – then, there, her fingers parted her wet
cunt-lips, scooped a bit of the slippery juice and started to work her throbbing clit. The first was a shimmer of power that raced from the pulse in her tiny, hard bead up her spine and to her lips
– which started to shake around Arc’s nipple.

“There was fucking come on the metal. Sure as shit. Ain’t that freaky? Just a little, like someone had missed cleaning it all up. Fucker that jacked off on it, thinking of them
cutting my arm off, slicing it away like fuckin’ meat and sticking that beautiful thing on me –”

There, right there. Fingers in asshole, finger on clit, mouth on tit, real skin on the back of her head, Pell broke the suction with Arc’s nipple and cried as the come tore its way out of
her, ripped through her throat in a selfless cry of beautiful release. To burst it further, make it fly faster, Arc fucked her harder – slapping her artificial fingers deep within Pell,
pounding her puckered asshole.

It lasted for moments, minutes, longer than anything before – a rolling, surging peaks-and-valley kind of cascade of orgasms. It put spots before Pell’s eyes and clamped her thighs
around the machine in her asshole.

When it finally faded, leaving behind the hammering of her heart, it also left her the sight of Arc looking down into her eyes – click, click, click – and smiling, wide, broad, and
true. “See, I knew you’d like it,” she said. Holding Pell still, they both rolled off into sleep.

Pell tried to remember everything she knew about prostheses – about the mating of flesh and machine. Looking out the window, she counted them. Five in half an hour. Some
days there seemed to be more, others she almost never saw any. They were all but invisible through their consistency. How many cars did she see in a day? How many computers? How many security
cameras? How many did she not see, but were there anyway? She didn’t understand the mechanics behind any of them but she still lived with them daily.

Her only intimate knowledge was her father’s bank account. She guessed that she really should have known more about the breakthroughs she’d heard – one item, a “polymonic
mycelin-sheath” buzzed through her mind but its context was meaningless – after all, her father had ridden the technological wave. Even though most of his claims and patents
hadn’t held up in court, he’d still managed to make enough in the boom to give his daughter a little nest in the city. Not enough. But a not a little, either.

Thinking of her father and the money was lead in her belly. Instead she thought about the more physical manifestations of artificial limbs, organs. She knew that they were cheaper than they had
been – though the ones that Arc had were more expensive: craftsmanship always cost. She knew that you could sell an arm, a leg, an eye and buy a replacement with a little cash left over. It
was common among people her age, SAC money disappearing, to sell something to keep conscription at bay – but between selling and buying, the income wasn’t all that great.

By presidential decree, first choice of donor limbs always went to returning vets. Looking out her window, she realized that some of the people she guessed were all flesh and all blood were more
than likely made up of someone else’s flesh and blood – eyes, ears, legs, arms, hands – and those that clicked, hummed and glimmered under the unexpected sunlight were veterans of
only trying to escape the war.

Get busted and the courts offered you a deal: leave something behind and you can walk free (unless you left your legs to pay your fine).

Turning away from the window, Pell went back to her sketch pad. Charcoal and fine line, she’d indulged herself in filling in some of her preliminary sketches of Arc. She didn’t
really know when the fear of capturing the woman had gone, but one day it had. Possibly because she expected the woman to reappear. Arc was a part of her life. It felt good.

But there was an ache as well. Something had altered. Like the ground shifting beneath her feet so that left wasn’t quite
left
any more – as if the whole world had subtly
changed – she saw Arc differently. Strong, yes – but there was something else. An edge that hadn’t been there since she’d seen Arc’s tears. It was a jagged edge,
something that Arc seemed to secretly delight in showing Pell.

Like her “client”. Sitting on the edge of Arc’s bed, she’d spun a long and detailed tale of him. European. Possibly Spanish. She’d even visited him at work, at one
of the posh citadels downtown. NeuroGen, Pell remembered. She described his breath, said it smelled of cloves. His skin was dark and shone as if he sweated – but his skin, Arc said, was never
damp. He had a gold tooth, far in the back of his mouth, that you could see when he laughed. It was always done, these detailed stories, without a sense of affection. Pell had the sense that Arc
was sharing with her – showing her life to her. The man wasn’t anything except a client – but one with an unusual inclination. He liked to give her gifts. What he did with
Arc’s original parts, he never said, or Arc didn’t say.

Arc also took meticulous pride in showing Pell her newest additions, giving her endless details of manufacture, limitations, degree of workmanship.

The sketch pad was bulky so she laid it out on the floor. With the first sketch, she’d tried to capture Arc as she’d first seen her. Not her eye. The woman. The sheet of slightly
off-yellow paper in fact was blank, undrawn, around that part of her face. Only her gray eye, and not her steel eye, looked out at Pell from the paper.

Lying with her soft belly on the hardwood floor, Pell flipped through the sketches. She knew that she’d failed to capture Arc as she’d walked back and forth through her life but the
memories still stirred by the sketches were strong and thrilling to her. The day they’d gone out for coffee. The night Arc had awakened Pell with a nightmare – Pell had held the woman
for hours, it’d seemed, while Arc cried from her real eye and heaved air in panic. The day they’d stayed inside and made love for hours.

The last one. Half a face. A torso hovering on an off-yellow void. Just one eye, a nose, a smile, one ear. That was all that remained of Arc.

Pell stared at the sketch for long minutes, and tried not to think of the next sketch she might make.

Days, weeks. Maybe a month. A blur of time, a cascade of events: Arc standing, naked in front of the dirty windows – long, hard body gleaming with elegant artificiality.
As Arc moved like a slow dancer, Pell at first thought the performance for her benefit, and slowly started to rub herself. Then she noticed Arc’s eyes tightly shut, the dance just a movement,
a testing, of her real, and artificial parts.

Arc and Pell in bed together. Hard darkness outside – deep night. They were masturbating together, sweet kisses – butterfly wings – breasts and nipples grazing each other,
tingles of feedback sensuality, hands between their legs, working ecstasy. It was a game with natural rules: don’t touch, save for glancing lips, and savor the pleasure of the other. Pell
lost, with three fingers deep inside the wet folds of her cunt, with her clit a hard finger nestled among them – with her other hand, she brushed Arc’s working fingers, needing to know
that she, too, was feeling pleasure.

She encountered stillness. No movement. A coolness, a hardness. Why, she wondered when next Arc left her world for a few days, a week, had she expected her to rub herself with her real, flesh
and blood, hand? Two choices: meaty reality, or cold artificiality?

Arc didn’t want to talk of her benefactor, but, still, some information leaked out . . . tiny portions of information. Pell found herself storing them, building a picture of Arc’s
time when she wasn’t with her. She imagined details, things she knew she didn’t have any knowledge of: his eyes, for instance, were jade green. His breath smelled of cilantro. He had an
accent, somewhere with palm trees, white-painted houses and a sea so blue as to appear cinematic.

She never asked, but she wanted to. She wanted to frame the words, even more than the explosive “love”, to put them out. To ask to capture her lover live, sitting still and poised
for her charcoal, her pencils. She didn’t though and, like “love” it was an invisible thing between them. But like she could think of Arc as her lover when the strong girl
wasn’t there, wasn’t really there, she could still sketch from memory.

The next sketch she did make, and the one after: fractions of her, pieces separated by blank, white paper. Lips and one gray eye. One hand. The slight rise of her smooth belly, the swell of her
mons. The slope of her breasts – the way they seemed a natural extension of her firmness, her muscles.

But the drawings she wanted to make, craved to make with an energy that scared her, was to fill in those blank areas, those sections of cool metal, state-of-the-art technology. She wanted to
sketch out the whole of her – but not what she could see.

She had no reason to be there. She didn’t belong there – cars glided past on silent induction motors, the occupants just shadows through bullet-proof glass. The few
that walked the streets of the Financial District wore suits that would have kept her off the street, away from Induction, for years. They were uniformly clean, manicured, and poised.

Walking through the cool, shadowy canyons between the black-glassed towers she never once saw a copper eye, a steel hand, a plastic leg. She saw a bald man in a shimmering black suit, his eyes
hidden behind a complexity of image-intensifying glasses. One of his hands was flesh and blood but black, a powered matt darkness: his crime hadn’t reduced him to mating metal, plastics and
“polymonic mycelin-sheaths”. Money can bring you anything – even skin and bone.

Pell walked the cold canyons for most of the morning, getting cold, suspicious stares from the men and women she passed. Arc had bragged to her, “that big place – all silver and
gold, on the corner of California and Sansome”. The office where her benefactor had seen her once. It didn’t exist. Arc had told her – it slipped out – that his name was
Guerrera and that he was some kind of corporate attorney, working for an office of NeuroGen.

Pell walked in the shadows of more money than she could ever count in her lifetime, money that would drown her if she had to swim in it. She walked past men and women who could buy her, every
limb, digit, and organ on a whim. These people didn’t have the blade of Central America hanging over their heads, the horrible sucking vacuum of the street. That woman with the sterling
silver cortical jacks on the back of her neck, that fat man in the cream-colored suit carrying a tattooed briefcase made of human skin, that young boy in the sailor’s suit – their world
was easy, malleable. With the right application of money and fear, disease, hunger, vanished. It was a comfortable insulation against the rest of the world – anything painful or
frightening.

Pell walked, looking for the silver and gold building on the corner of California and Sansome, looking for the offices of NeuroGen, for Mr Guerrera.

She didn’t know why she’d come downtown – no, she
did
know: she was well aware of her reasons, but they weren’t realistic. They were a child’s reasons,
pleads and begs: “Find someone else to buy a piece at a time.” She couldn’t offer money; she thought about offering her body – but she wasn’t Arc. She was young and
flesh and blood. If he liked the caress of steel and rubber, then she doubted that Mr Guerrera of NeuroGen would find her interesting.

Pell walked downtown till the sun peered over the tops of the highest buildings, casting a brilliant, long shadow through the heart of this people’s territory. She walked and walked but
never once found anything close to a silver and gold building on California and Sansome, an office of NeuroGen, or a Mr Guerrera who liked to buy girls one part at a time.

Later, as darkness started to fall, she wandered the rest of what Arc had told her, looking for the house, looking for the Chinese clinic. Looking until there wasn’t enough light to really
see – or, for the first time, seeing for the first time.

Arc was lying back on her bed, smoking a black cigarette. It smelled: the bite of distantly burning rubber. Her one real eye was dilated, the pupil pushed back till there was
barely anything left of her gray iris. It was a bottomless pit that was endless soaking up the details of Pell’s ceiling.

There was a company called NeuroGen. It was a big one. Worldwide. They manufactured a tailored virus that strengthened neurons, made them easier to connect to “polymonic
mycelin-sheaths”. They didn’t have an office in San Francisco, or even Los Angeles.

Pell was laying at the foot of the bed, at Arc’s feet – head on the cold strength of one of her artificial legs. Turning her head, Pell could see up between Arc’s legs: the
pinched skin around her upper thighs where technology mated with flesh. The curves where hips turned into ass. The seam of her hairless cunt, her dark folds.

Pell wanted to touch her, to put out a hand and place it, careful, on the architecture of her cunt, to feel the heat of her reality – but was unable to reach far enough past the metal to
reach what skin remained. She could see but not touch.

There was no Mr Guerrera employed by NeuroGen. There was no Mr Guerrera listed anywhere in the city that she could find. The building on the corner of California and Sansome was a black glass
tower. Had been there for twenty-five years. It was solely owned by a Japanese banking conglomerate. Had been for twenty-five years.