by Tim Lebbon
But kissing was never allowed. Too many viruses were targeted orally.
“I love you,” he said again, trying to force her off. In his naiveté he thought that showing her she didn’t have to suck him would set him apart in her mind. But when he flipped her over her stare was as hard as before, her mouth firmly set. Her eyes, though … there was a depth there that had been absent when he’d first entered the room.
She sat beside him on the bed, staring.
“What’s happening?” Tom said, because something was. The whore shook her head, but there was doubt in the way she hesitated, doubt or confusion.
She — Honey, she’d told him her name was Honey — reached out and grabbed his dick, squeezing and kneading it like a cow’s teat. He couldn’t lose his hard-on, much as he believed this to be so much more than sex, and when she lowered her head and started sucking he sat back and closed his eyes.
Wondering what was going on.
Thinking of the women, genuine or artificial, he’d thought he could love.
Realising here and now that this was, in reality, the one and only time.
He came, and when the pleasure had passed and he looked down he thought he’d sprayed across her face. But then he saw that the moisture on her cheeks was tears.
She smiled and wiped her mouth. There was no hate in her eyes.
That, at least, was a start.
“What do you like?” Tom asked.
“I’m not allowed to like anything.”
He smiled. “Yes … but what do you like?”
She looked at him so long and hard that he thought she’d malfunctioned. But then she let the ghost of a smile touch her features. “You’re talking as if we’re on a date.”
“We are, aren’t we?”
“How much did Hot Chocolate Bob charge you for this?”
He thought of the slimy, drugged up pimp he’d negotiated with on the street. “Two hundred.” Realising he’d forgotten to do it, he plucked a credit card from his pocket and offered it to Honey.
She nodded her head slightly and glanced over his shoulder at the wall clock. “Then for another seventeen minutes yeah, we’re on a date.”
“So…?”
She took the card, tapped in the amount and scanned it. She should have shown him first so that he knew he wasn’t being swindled, but he trusted her. Stupid of him, blind, but he trusted her.
“Isn’t it a bit late to ask me?” Honey said. “You get your kicks out of knowing what you missed?”
“Sorry?” He frowned, genuinely puzzled.
Honey smiled again as she handed back his card. “I like it from behind so I don’t have to see the customer’s face. I like it up the arse. It gives my snatch a break. I like it fast, that way I don’t have to pretend —”
“You weren’t pretending just then.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes it feels okay.”
“Don’t believe you. Sometimes? How often?”
Honey didn’t answer. The silence hung heavy and awkward until Tom spoke again.
“Anyway, I didn’t mean sex. I meant everything. What do you like? Whether it’s permitted by your pimp or not, you must have your likes and dislikes. You must have enough life for that, at least?”
Honey looked down at her feet, stretching her toes. She was still naked, but it didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. Then she looked up at Tom through her golden fringe. The image was so shy and lonely that he wanted to take her in his arms, buy her, get her the hell out of here forever.
Trouble was, there were no places to go.
“I like dancing,” she said. “There’s a club three floors down in the basement, and sometimes if I’m having a slow night I’ll dance to the music.”
“On your own?”
“Of course on my own. The music’s torn apart by the time it gets up here, gutted by the floors and rooms between us, but I still get the beat. Sometimes I can even identify the songs.” She looked away from him, out the window. It was still daytime but heavy smog made it twilight. The sodium street lamps fell like moonlight on her face. “I like the slow ones.”
“I can’t dance,” Tom said, full of regret, wanting so much to be able to hold her for his remaining twelve minutes, pirouette around the room, jive into true love.
“I’ll teach you,” Honey said, and then she frowned, stood, walked to the dressing table and lit a cigarette. Confused. Perhaps not knowing what she’d said, nor understanding why.
“What else?” he asked, rescuing her. He looked at her naked back, buttocks and legs, imagining that he knew the geography of her already, was able to go there and touch her exactly how she liked to be touched, and where, and for how long.
“Finger puppets.” She blew smoke and smiled. “I love finger puppets. The more intricate the better. There’s a Chinese guy down the street. Lunchtimes he brings out this wooden box, sits behind it and puts on a puppet show. He doesn’t try to hide or pretend it’s not him doing it, but it doesn’t matter, because his fingers have such sweet movement. He dances and fights them across that box, and for a few minutes it’s another world, more imagined than any netcast or movie. He touches you, that guy.” She paused for a while, turned to look at him. “Or rather, the finger puppets touch you. He just moves them. For a while they have a life of their own.”
Tom was caught up in her eyes. She looked happy, and he was glad that he’d brought it on by asking questions.
She spoilt the moment by glancing at the clock again, but he persisted.
“Anything else?”
“I like being held. That’s all. Just held. After some of the things that have been done to me …” She trailed off, running her fingers along a white scar across her belly. Tom had thought it was a poorly done repair job when he’d seen it earlier, but now it was something worse. Far worse.
“Have you ever been in love?”
“I’m a whore. An artificial, a plastic bitch. I’m incapable.”
“I’ll bet you’re incapable of enjoying anything, either. Like finger puppets and dancing and being held.”
Honey lit another cigarette.
“Can I hold you?” he said.
She sat on the bed next to him, crossing her legs demurely, folding her arms and hiding her breasts. It gave her such a sense of innocence that a lump came to Tom’s throat.
“Only … I can’t dance. And I left my puppets at home.”
Honey looked at the clock. “You can hold me for six minutes.”
“Longer,” Tom said, shuffling over and wrapping Honey in his arms. It was awkward at first — strange, after what they had been doing, that a simple touch could feel so clumsy — but after a minute it got better. The tension in Honey’s muscles drained away, her head dipped onto Tom’s shoulder, she dropped her cigarette and sighed heavily. “Longer,” he said again.
“Three more minutes.”
“Honey …” He hated that she was still clock-watching. He knew that all this wasn’t just a part of the act, another twenty dollars-worth, because he could feel the heat of her skin and the coolness of tears on his chest. Something had happened, removing the sex from this moment and replaced it with something far, far more.
Tom knew that Honey had not been designed for that.
“I want to stay like this forever,” she said, and it was like a punch to Tom’s chest. “Forever. But you saw Hot Chocolate Bob. You … don’t know what he’s like. You just can’t imagine.” She lifted her head to look at him. “If we’re five minutes over he’ll be up here. He’ll kick you out, or worse, and as for me …”
“What? What?” Tom didn’t want to know what the pimp would do, but he thought that knowing would take some of her hurt and bleed it into him.
“Us plastics are quite hardy,” Honey said. “We can take a lot of beating.”
“Part of the design,” Tom said bitterly.
“Part of the design. Warriors and whores. Need to take abuse.”
“Come with me!” he gushed, reali
sing how foolish this sounded. An hour ago he’d paid some pimp for a fuck with a random whore, and now he was asking her to run away with him, be with him. Foolish, but it felt so right.
“Don’t be stupid,” Honey said.
Tom felt defeated, lost. And stupid. “I’m sorry.” He’d come in this artificial whore’s mouth, and he thought that gave him the right to tell her he loved her. Stupid.
But he did.
“Do you mean it?” Honey said, after a long pause.
“What?”
“What you said earlier. Do you mean it? I’ve heard it a million times before, but I’ve never had cause to believe.”
“Come with me and give me a chance to show you.”
She was silent again, staring at him, and Tom felt as though he was being appraised inside and out. Could she see inside? he wondered. Could she penetrate to the deepest parts of him, the secret centres where even he did not hold reign?
“I’d risk everything,” she said. Tom wasn’t sure whether it was a statement of fact or intent.
“Then come —”
“I can’t, not now. Kiss me.”
Tom leaned forward and kissed Honey, and she tasted of her name. Smoke and cheap food and himself, she tasted of that too, but it was all sweet. He held her head and pulled her to him, kissing her, his eyes closed, the skin of his palms and fingers tingling where he touched her skin.
She pulled away at last. Her eyes were wide and moist, her breathing fast. She glanced at the clock. “Time’s up.”
Tom sighed heavily, wondering what to say. He was running out of time and needed a plan, but his brain didn’t function. He shook his head angrily, furious at himself, unsure of where the fury came from.
And then Honey saved him.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Lunchtime. I’ll say here instead of going down the street for food. There’s a back door, down an alley next to Hell’s Bookstore on Ashley Street. You know it?”
“I’ll find it.”
“Come here then. And take me away.”
“You’re sure, you believe me, you’re sure?” Tom gushed, stumbling over own thoughts.
There were footsteps on the landing outside the door, and the handle rattled.
“Go!” Honey said. And in an instant she was a ragged, hard whore once more, a plastic bitch built for sex and sucking and little more, sitting back with her legs splayed and another cigarette in her hand. Tom despised the transformation, and he suddenly wondered whether she’d been kidding him all along. The doubt was reinforced when he tried to discern hope in her eyes: there was nothing there. Only a vagueness, a vacancy, waiting to be pumped full of the desires and fantasies of her next client.
“‘The fuck?” a voice said from behind him. “Time’s up, shithead.”
Tom turned around, and Hot Chocolate Bob stood in the doorway.
“I was just leaving.”
“Best you do. Got a lawyer outside, real slimy type, top dog, criminal defence, ready to stick it in Honey’s ass. Like that, don’t you Honey?” He grinned as he spoke, and the paleness of his skin was countered by his black, rotten teeth. He was bald, no eyebrows or facial hair, and his eyes were networks of broken veins. Tom wondered which drugs he did. Probably all of them.
“You know I do, Hot Chocolate Bob.” Her voice was low and sultry. It dripped sex.
Tom didn’t want to turn around and see Honey like this. He looked at the pimp instead and felt his rage building, percolating through the layers of apathy he’d drawn around himself over the years and filling him with energy.
“Out. Now.” The pimp wasn’t joking. Tom could see the bulge of a piece on his belt and his eyes glittered like loose diamonds, the sign of a military-level optical chop. If he’d had his eyes done he’d likely had other stuff as well, and Tom had no desire to mix it with him right now.
Later, maybe.
But not now.
“‘Bye sweetie,” Honey called mockingly as he passed the pimp at the door. “Your juice tasted good, Honey wants more, come back soon.”
He needed to turn around and see her one more time. Just in case he was wrong. Just in case she’d lied. But the pimp had pushed past him into the room, and the two of them were muttering together like lovers, and there were wet sounds that Tom didn’t wish to know.
“… like it like that…” Honey said.
Tom hurried away from the room, passed a dozen more just like it, and walked quickly outside to find escape.
The sun was setting by the time he approached his street, and the night people were out. It was as if the dusk dictated style: the roads heading into town filled, and the people almost all wore black. A dark tide of humanity flowed into the city, accompanied by the clinking of chains, the buzzing of zips, the musical tinkling of jewellery, visible or otherwise. Some of the people had been professionally chopped — eight feet tall, three arms, four breasts, one guy with a huge dick swinging unhindered between his feet — but most had chosen merely to adapt themselves. Tattoos and piercings were the least of it. Amputations, scoops of flesh removed, dyed skins, divided penises, all manner of mutilation was at home in these crowds. Nothing was a surprise.
It made Tom wonder just where these people would go next.
He’d seen it all before, but it never ceased to fascinate him. That people should act like this — tear themselves apart, wound for pleasure or pleasure through pain — confused him. But sometimes, just sometimes, he wondered whether being artificial simply meant that he could never understand.
They were heading for the clubs. There were dozens in the city, most legal, a few not. They buzzed every night and bled every day, bled money to the law and literal blood from their cellars and other hidden ‘rooms’. Tom had visited them a few times in his wanderings and he’d seen some things … some awful things. The nearest he came to these clubs now was the occasional visit to a brothel, and always, always, a brothel where the whores were artificials. After what he’d seen once or twice in club cellars he had no wish to know more of what people could and would do to themselves. And to each other.
Now, walking against the flow, his vision darkened by the sunset and the stares of those passing by, Tom felt doubt stabbing at him.
It was cruel, this doubt, because it was selective in what it recalled. He knew that Honey was beautiful, but try as he might he could not see her face. He could imagine her breasts, her thighs, her flat stomach and moist pussy, but her face eluded him. And her voice, that was gone too, swallowed along with the setting sun. Like it like that. He could remember the words but not the voice that had spoken them. He grabbed at his head, trying to save the memories. Hands over his ears to stop any more of her voice from escaping. Over his eyes, to hold her image in.
He walked into someone and felt the sharp sting of metal spikes picking at his clothes. The person shoved by before he had a chance to look properly, for which he was glad.
“Almost home,” he said to himself.
“Home is for pussies,” a voice mocked from the crowd, but Tom had no idea which of them had spoken.
He turned into his street, breathing a sigh of relief when the flow of black-clad people reduced to a trickle. He passed a final couple of leathered-up teenagers outside his house. The boy had a pierced tongue, the girl was bare breasted and frowning with the weight of chains connecting her nipples to her eyelids. They both smiled at Tom and nodded a polite greeting, the girl’s breasts jiggling with the gesture. He knew their parents. He wondered if their parents knew them.
“Honey,” he said as he palmed his doorlock. The flat was small and compact, big enough to live in but not too large to become unmanageable. “Honey, won’t you tell me the truth?” Doubt again, buzzing at him like ghostly bees, flitting past his ears and eyes and mouth as he tried to remember her voice, her face, her taste. It felt as if she was a dream, fading away as the day wore on.
Would she be there for him? If he smuggled himself into that rank building tomorrow at lunchtime, would she be wa
iting with her bags packed, ready to run off with him and risk the wrath of that bastard Hot Chocolate Bob?
Tom doubted it. True, his existence felt different today. It was fresher, brighter, Honey had brought something in that had been missing or sought for so long. Not only love, but a sense of importance in himself. A sense of living, not just existing. The sun had seemed warmer and closer upon leaving the brothel, even through the smog. The streets were cleaner, the smiles more real, the adverts flashing across billboards less cynical and more concerned.
Yes, things felt so different.
But good things never happened to Tom. That’s not the way his life was built, it wasn’t how his hat had been put on. Bad things clung to him like shit to shoes.
Would she be there? He doubted it. But the very last thing he would do was not go, just to find out.
He listened to the sounds of the night, trying to perceive just how they were different tonight from the night before. There were sirens and shouts, drunken youths singing in the streets, buzzed artificials screaming as the bad charges slowly but surely cauterised their insides. At one point Tom heard gunshots from somewhere deep in the city.
By three in the morning he admitted defeat and left his bed. He logged onto the net and sat back, closing his eyes as he tried to find somewhere to go, a place that would be safe for Honey and him. It was a fantasy, of course, and he knew it. Dream tropical islands awash with happy-ever-after were not for her kind.
Not for him, either.
Later, as the sun smudged the smog in the east and turned it pink, Tom connected to the net point, closed his eyes and accessed his recharge site. He input the correct code, sat back and felt tiredness recede as his power cells gulped their fill.
Tom always watched the sunrise. However tired or run-down he was, he’d see the sun climb out of the industrialised eastern suburbs of the city and heave itself skyward on pollutant legs. It never failed to cheer him, however depressed he felt, and this morning it worked more than ever.