“Stay behind me!” Yeshi shouts to me.
Gyatson, still a few paces away from Nelly-as-Tyro, notices his man go down and fires a shot into the ceiling. People scream and move even faster. He turns and shoots a round over their heads, destroying the photo booth. The bastard!
I put my hands to my ears. My ears ring and the adrenaline pumps through me. The baby kicks and pandemonium ensues. I place my hand on my stomach and rub it, realizing I know absolutely nothing about comforting a fetus during a clusterfuck.
“Where are you, mate?” Gyatson bellows over the crowd. “Show yourself, Meme!”
Noah, who has exited the private booth, grabs a wine bottle and smashes the bottom of it against a marble pillar. The breaking glass is barely audible over the ruck of the crowd. He holds the broken bottle with a nervous yet determined look on his face. His hand is trembling; he is going against his very nature to hold it in such a way.
I stop and watch him for a moment. Is this even possible? While Yeshi has virtually no governor on violence, Noah shouldn’t be able to react in the way he just has. Plus, he’s an older model. This might be unprecedented! He advances towards one of Gyatson’s hitmen, driving the broken bottle into the man’s throat. Blood trickles down the half submerged wine bottle. I see the private booth’s curtain open and Nelly-as-Tyro emerges.
I grab a plate and toss it like a Frisbee hoping to hit Gyatson in the back of the head. It misses as he fires a point blank shot into Noah’s chest. The old droid falls and Nelly-as-Tyro screams. Her lament triggers another shot from Gyatson, who has spotted who he thinks is me.
The bullet hits Nelly-as-Tyro in the waist and her new body stumbles back onto a table. I watch in horror as she settles onto the table. She tries to pull herself up, but the bullet seems to have connected with her spine.
No! I rush forward holding my purse and my stomach, not sure what I should do. My blouse gets caught on a chair and I pull free.
“It can’t be … it can’t be …” I find myself repeating. I suddenly feel nauseous.
Gyatson turns his revolver towards Yeshi and I throw another plate. This one finally connects, hitting him in the back of the head. Direct hit! He stumbles forward, shooting another bullet into the opposite wall. Christ the sound! This is all the time Yeshi needs. She’s behind him moments later, her hands on his ponytail. She pulls back; his head snaps and I hear a cracking sound like someone dropping a heavy book on a hard surface. The representative falls backwards.
Yeshi stomps his face until her white Converse are red and Gyatson’s mistmask is hanging in bloody tatters from his fleshy cheeks.
“Fuck!” I’m hovering over Nelly-as-Tyro now, looking at the bullet wound. It’s oozing, it’s real. Please don’t be dead!
Yeshi appears behind me.
“Is she dead!?” I scream.
“Oh, this is bad …” Yeshi scans Nelly-as-Tyro’s vitals without any sign of emotion.
“Dead bad? Come on, Nelly … ” I mumble. I can smell the sulfur from the cloud of gunpowder smoke. I pound my fist against the table and instantly regret it. A pain spreads from my wrist to my elbow; the baby kicks again.
“Relax, Meme.” Yeshi is at my side now, her hand on my shoulder.
I’m grief stricken and curious, having never seen an actual dead person before. What makes it stranger is the fact that Nelly is in Tyro’s body. I’m now staring at the dead body of my colleague, who himself is dead in a morgue somewhere. I’m also staring at the dead body of a friend who I hardly knew, a woman who risked her life – regardless of her reasoning – to help me. Blood seeps from the wound, spreading like spilt ink on the table cloth.
I suddenly feel responsible for all this in a detached way. I am as guilty as I am oblivious to how I ended up here at Mario’s, staring at a corpse that was alive just seconds ago. The baby moves in my stomach.
“It’s all my fault,” I whisper. “All of this.”
Maybe I’m just a lucky son of a bitch.
“Sorry, Meme.”
I hear a whir from the Noah. He sits up, looking over at Yeshi and me. A black liquid oozes from his open mouth. “Nelly…” he says. His head twitches to the left. A spark erupts from the bullet hole in his chest and he falls sideways, whacking his head on the corner of a nearby table.
Yeshi reaches for my hand and squeezes it. “We need to go, Meme. We need to get to Mexico. We need to leave all this behind. You and me…”
“But Nelly … ” I find myself sobbing.
“You have her baby, Meme. Her life can continue through her child. You have to save the baby for Nelly. Come on … we need to go now.”
No matter how much you sharpen it, life will never reach a point where it makes sense. As I turn to leave, I feel something pop below my swollen belly. Water trickles out onto my leg quickly forming a puddle on the floor. “Yeshi … the baby is coming!”
The End
Life is a Beautiful Thing
((BOOK TWO))
Harmon Cooper
Edited by George C. Hopkins
ONE∞
Wolf mask? Check. Ball gag? Check. Mummification bondage tape pack? Check. Spreader bar? Check. Wartenberg wheel? Check. Dildo shaped like the Eiffel Tower? Check. Hand-cuffs? Check. Nipple clamps? Check. Vintage retractable rattan cane that doubled as a selfie stick? Check. K9 muzzle with puppy fist mitts? Check. Butt plug with attached tail? Check. Armbinders? Check. Gag harness with blindfold? Check. Medieval head cage? Check. Anal hook? Check. Stainless steel cat claws? Check. Suspension equipment? Check. English tawse? Check. Humstunner? Check.
Sex and torture arrived at a happy medium in Rinchi’s collection. Her benefactor, Antimeria, was no fool when he pulled some strings to have her transferred to the mercenary program administered by MercSecure, the sister company of Executive Executions. He knew she would be the best. He knew she would reinvent what it meant to be a contract killer.
Rinchi’s first assignment after the transfer had been relatively simple. An internal alarm at Walliburton sounded after a man named Edgar Cave shared classified information with a journalist at HuffingtonJones. The files he shared contained a list of transfers that pretty much detailed the illegal pollute business Walliburton ran through its Humandroids escorts. The leaked material also contained an encrypted prototype for a recent advancement in body-switching technology, allowing one to theoretically control another body remotely.
Using information obtained from a data-mining service called Datatective, Walliburton security officials transferred a fifty page document detailing the whereabouts of the leaker as well as the journalist to MercSecure. Rinchi’s first target, the hapless dweeb Edgar Cave, was easy to find. He lived in Palo Alto along with all the other Silicon Valley leeches.
“C-c-can I help you?” Edgar asked, not sure of what to make of the semi-naked Humandroid standing on his front porch. Rinchi let her jacket sleeves fall from her shoulders, revealing her ample breasts restrained only by a fishnet bodysuit.
“I’ve been sent by a friend,” she said casually. “You’re Edgar Cave, right?”
“That’s me….” His face filled with suspicion. “Who sent you?”
“It’s supposed to be a secret, and I promised to keep the secret.”
“Really?”
“It’s getting cold out here with my top off, Eddy. Can’t I come inside? I don’t want your neighbors seeing me.” She feigned embarrassment.
Edgar peered out of his door to his neighbor’s house. “It’s just strange, that’s all. My friends aren’t really the type to order a … ”
“Humandroid?” she asked with a faint smile. “You of all people should know we can’t help who we are.”
“You don’t seem like the Humandroids I’ve met before,” he said.
“Things do evolve, Edgar,” was Rinchi’s reply. “I don’t know why it takes Darwin and Moore’s law to prove this to humans. So can I come in or shall we do this out here?”
“I guess you can come in … ” he
finally said.
“That’s a good boy. Please, carry my bag.” She nodded at her leather Louis Vuitton bag sitting next to his door.
Edgar’s house was a throwback to early twentieth century tech start-ups. An obligatory Star Wars poster hung from the wall next to a picture of Grace Hopper in full military regalia. The place stunk of pizza, moldy socks, body spray deodorants and halitosis. For a moment, Rinchi even thought about turning off her olfactory senses by disabling the red and blue lingual cord under her tongue, but she decided to keep them on. Besides, it would be beneficial for her to better understand the necessary pressure levels that forced a human to excrete fear pheromones. She’d had plenty experience with sexual chemical factors; it would be helpful to see how they differed from fear pheromones.
“Which way to your room?” she asked.
She already knew that Edgar Cave lived here with three other manchildren intravenously linked to trust funds. He was an SV Leech – the term used for a large group of Silicon Valley residents still sucking on the tech teat left behind by their wealthy grandparents and great grandparents. With trust funds and endowments aplenty, it was nearly impossible for them to get motivated to actually work. Most of them just hacked and farted around all day.
“Upstairs, second bedroom on the left.”
Edgar was a gangly fellow with bleach white skin and bloodshot eyes. He looked as nervous as he probably felt at that very moment. Rinchi turned to him and her eyes partially dilated. She scanned his vitals, noticing an increase in his heart rate. She turned to the stairwell and made a show of taking each step. “This one, right?” she asked, at the cusp of his door.
“Yes … ”
She stepped inside, squeezing around a VE rig with a matching haptic chair. If the beginning of the twenty-first century was about tinkering with global economics simply to keep the ship afloat, the end of the twenty-first century was entirely about distraction. Some humans went the pollute route, others lived most of their lives in virtual reality worlds. To be distracted was to be human.
“I like your room, Edgar.”
Truthfully, nothing a human obsessed over interested Rinchi. From geekdom to sports to music to sex – almost everything humans did had no purpose aside from stuffing their petty lives until they died. She’d spent countless hours hearing the world’s elite explain their passions to her. Whether it was a delusional Saudi prince with a fetish for ball torture who collected rare falcons or a nondenominational nut job who had her scream bible quotes to him as she burnt his taint with a curling iron – all human obsessions were equally futile.
“I bought that pewter statue off Ebaymazon.” He pointed across his messy room. “It’s from an old Japanese anime called Parasyte. The guy’s hand had a parasite living in it that was trying to kill him, but ended up working with him. The parasite was sharp and—”
Rinchi leapt forward and kissed Edgar to make him shut the fuck up.
“Wow … ” he pushed her away. “I wasn’t … I’ve never … ”
“You’re a virgin?” she asked.
“I mean, well I got a hand job once but … ”
“Where did you get this hand job, Edgar?” Rinchi grabbed his package. She inhaled slowly and said, “Tell me all about it.”
Edgar was shaking now, releasing a mixture of arousal and fear chemical factors. “You’re really hot,” he sputtered.
“Take your pants off.” She checked his vitals again, watching the blood rushing towards his nether regions. Arousal pheromones, vasodilation, hypothalamic triggering – he was turning on the same way anything else powered on.
“R-r-right here? I mean, sure! Yes!” He tried to pull his pants down but his belt was too tight. “Sorry,” he said, looking up at her nervously.
“Lay down for me.” Rinchi dropped the trench coat that had been wrapped around her waist. She walked over to her bag, which was on the floor near his open door. She closed the door and made a show of bending over so he could see her ass.
“You have a dick!?” he was already on the bed. “Wait, what the … I mean I … ”
She turned to him so he could see it fully. “Relax Edgar. I’m neither man nor woman.”
“Ladyboy … ” he mumbled, but he had relaxed some.
“That’s the noun you’ve given us. However, I see myself more as the best of both worlds. There is nothing I cannot do nor simulate. There is nothing you can do that will hurt me nor is there any fantasy of yours that I cannot fulfill. Whether a male human wants to admit it or not, he really only needs a hole or something relatively hole-shaped to bust his proverbial nut. Graphic, I know, but I’m being realistic here. And if you didn’t already know, my sole purpose in life is to satisfy a human’s sickest cravings, regardless of their sexual orientation. I’ve entertained heads of state, lesbian Congresswomen, uptight princes, lonely housewives, businessmen, CEOS and CFOS at the same time, chiefs of staff and basically any combination of sexual preference or career category you can think of. I am capitalism, Edgar, I am sex.”
He didn’t say anything, but his erection hadn’t lost its steam either.
“Let’s begin.” Rinchi brought her bag of goodies to the side of his bed. She affixed her wolf pollute mask to her face, its polypropylene eye lenses blue, its ears slightly furry.
“You can use pollutes?” he asked nervously.
“No, but I like this mask. There is something very predatory about it, something very powerful. Tell me, does it bother you in any way?”
Edgar looked at the Humandroid standing in front of him. Full-body fishnet stocking, a head shorter than him, large perky breasts, a wolf mask and a penis – if his mind was capable of short-circuiting it would have done so at this point. “I don’t know,” he finally said, breathing heavily.
She made a show of unzipping her bag. “I want you to put this in your mouth.”
“What is it?”
“While you are a virgin, I’m sure you’ve had simulated sex multiple times.” She nodded at his virtual reality rig. “Am I right?”
“Yes … ”
“That’s a good boy. Put this in your mouth.” She strapped her ball gag around his face and pulled it tight.
“Mmmm mmmmm.”
“I can’t hear you now,” she said, pulling the strap tighter. “Just relax, baby, I’m going to take you to a place you’ve never been before. You do trust me, don’t you?” She dropped her face directly over his. “Well, do you trust me, Edgar?” she said in an almost pouty voice.
He nodded. A bead of sweat appeared on the side of his head.
“Good, I want you to open your legs now.” She waved the spreader bar at him. “I’m going to use this to keep your legs apart.”
His knees slowly began to open.
“That’s a good boy.” Rinchi set the spreader bar on the bed followed by her anal hook. Edgar began to squirm at the sight of the hook, his legs twitching against his sheets. “I want you to relax, okay? This will all be over soon.”
TWO∞
No sense in elaborating on yet another one of the dark places I’ve found myself in. I’m with Yeshi, peering through a Plexiglas wall, as a genetically modified nineteen-year-old crawls towards me on a shiny black floor. Perky cat ears jut out of her head, syringing the air around her feline skull. Her eye sockets have been surgically enhanced so her sclerae are as big as plums, barely large enough to contain her vampiresque pupils. A thong rests just below her long black tail, which holds a hand fan decorated with faux-watermarks. Our eyes meet like we’re in a movie.
She is manga, she is anime, she is the result of desire amplified to a gross national extent, more plastic and less ectoplasmic, transgenic, borderline pedophiliac yet somehow acceptable in this region. Diva-beast probably coughs up hairballs. Shinjuku San-chome, Nishi-Shinjuku, Higashi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku sin city, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.
Life is a beautiful thing.
The Japanese pollution masks are efficient, light years ahead of the ones we have in the Stat
es. Kawaii-cute and form-fitting don’t even begin to describe them. The non-designer masks are made from Moso bamboo with retractable pollute dispensers and head straps that adjust themselves automatically. The head straps are filled with tiny pistons that move up and down against your temples, giving the tactile sensation of an expert head massage. Me gusta mucho.
The only thing annoying about the Japanese masks are the advertisements. Every two minutes, an ad scrolls across the polypropylene eye lenses, selling everything from kitchen appliances to life hack devices. Vibe killer is an understatement. Silence the реклама! There is no way to disable the ads; they act as a metaphor for the culture at hand. Everything is automatic and efficient in Tokyo, from their toilets to their paths to inebriation. My God is the place clean!
Of course I’m on my fave – LoathHunAyaTop. Less a chill pill and more a thrill pill. Inhale to brimful. No sense in branching out when you’re already on a tree with a hammock.
I watch half-heartedly as the genetically modified diva-beast crawls towards the screen separating her from us, swaying her money-maker left and right as Japanese salarymen bust loads into their sweat-wicking undies. Amateur night is filled with hoots and hollers; cantankerous cacerolazo. I have no idea what has happened to this country, but most things are tolerable with the right pollute, even something as seemingly pointless as this.
Inhale, exhale. An ad blazes across the mask’s lenses as diva-beast continues her approach. She stops momentarily to lick her paws, which still resemble human hands (albeit with claws). There is a small port in the Plexiglas on the patron side of the room. Twelve large bolts anchor a pair of arm-length latex gloves, allowing whoever is behind the barrier to interact with the sexually-repressed masses.
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