Cheryl was taking a bath.

Brett was keeping the two random shaggirls busy, probably telling them stories.

The lotto girl was already scented and gussied up like some willing human sacrifice to an ancient god. She could not keep her hands off of him and she squirmed insanely as she alternately kissed like some predatory canine, shoving her tongue in his mouth and nibbling his lip, clawing him with her fingernails and rubbing all over him like a friction pet.

Bronson had been trained as a boy to show upmost deference to female clients with the expectation that the female execs must be well-treated after spending so much money on their companion club subscriptions to have a chance at even monthly trysts with him.

Brett insisted that he rest on Sunday. The rest of the week there would be the morning exec girl, usually an older one, the lunch girl who he would usually give a massage to, unless she was ravenously lonely—which was about a third of them—and then the evening girl, who would be high-end execs who stayed until midnight and were then escorted home by their goons.

Then there was Linda, the Chief Executive of CCP, who saw him whenever she wanted, always after midnight, about every other night and always left before the morning girl would show up.

This was tiring despite his wiring.

He was hoping one day that he’d ask a girl a simple human question and she’d answer him with a real name, a big dream and a sweet past, like she was a girl from a small town that no one had heard of, that she had parents, that Bronson would get to meet them, that they might get married and that, well, that he wasn’t Bronson Caan, but an accidental person out of a story who had not been designed and was not owned by the biggest sports entertainment corporation on earth…

He was designed to like what he liked, little waist, long hair, any variety of athletic or dancer or breeder hips, and breasts—well, whatever the girl had been fitted with at the cosmoplex.

Suffice it to say that his body aesthetics were somewhat addled by the overdone inventiveness of female surgical enhancement. But this lotto girl was perfect, like a cartoon slave girl from a comic book. For once he was having a hard time keeping his hands off a fangirl. He liked thinking of them as fangirls once he was alone with them. Shaggirl was so crude. Comic books were his entertainment media, as movies and TV were off limits. Brett read “real books” and sneered at Bronson’s childlike enthusiasm for the comics.

‘Maybe this is the one I steal and run-off with?'

‘Maybe there really is an Underground somewhere, where people still get married, where people even have random unapproved children?'

He could tell that she knew he was into her. So, as she chewed on his ear, he touched her face, pulled his ear out from between her hungry teeth, and kissed her.

She was delicious.

He then looked down into her blue eyes, sparkling under her thick, squarely banged, natural blonde hair and asked, “So how are you—who are you, where are you from?”

She snarled, “I’m Shaggirl Linda. I companion for Voyeur Sensual Genetics.”

She then lifted her magnificent left breast and said, “Look, C-series. The A’s all died before they were twenty and the B-girls were bat-shit crazy by the time they were sixteen. I’m twenty-five and I’m perfect…except…”

And she played with feline grace with his now slack lower lip using her wickedly-pointed fingernail…

“Except”—somehow saying it with her tongue without moving her lips—“I could bill twice as much if I’ve been branded by Bronson Caan. Just having fucked you will get me an entire lower exec roster of clients—lonely old bitches aching to sleep with the girl who was ravished by Bronson Caan!”

‘So much for love.’

“What’s the matter with you, you animal?” she snarled as she slapped him and then reached between his legs like she meant to harm him. “You’re just like me, purpose built. You can fuck like a freight train and I could shine an old one up with these pretty lips. You think you’re better than me—think you’re nothing more than a whore?”

He rolled her over, grape-vined her, grabbed her long thick hair and jammed it in his mouth and then rubbed his hands together, the hands over his hands, the invisible symbiotic skin. He looked at the old branding charger that he had put his hand in so many times to charge it for a branding. Sure enough, like Thomas the Hands Man had said, it had been replaced by some kind of universal Compaq, probably spying on him, he guessed.

She thrashed under him until his hands were fire hot. Then he reached under her as he pulled his head back and her back inverted until he thought she’d break, then he grabbed both of those designer breasts and she screamed in agony as his handprints and even the fingerprints of each finger were forever imprinted on her breasts.

He let her go to curl up in a fetal heap and he stood up and hit the tequila, poured three shots and looked away while she cried and sobbed, and slowly regained her composure on the bed. He then sat down next to her on the octagonal bed and she simpered as she held her breasts, looking at them with the admiration of a painting judging itself as a work of art hanging in some gallery.

As he drink she asked, “Aren’t you going to fuck me now? I’d like to, I’d really like to.”

It was not in his design to deny her, even though he wanted to turn away.

It was brutal, but she liked…they always liked it.

It did bother him, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Cheryl was watching from the bathroom, as he saw her peeking out through the cracked doorway in the octagonal mirror in the wire fence headboard of his bed.