“One of my band,
our youngest man, Elpenor—not too brave,
nor too alert—had lain alone, stretched out
along the roof of Circe’s house to find
some cooler air: he’d taken too much wine."
-Homer, The Odyssey, verse 553, Book Ten
Siren
Kissing her was like embracing True Night.
The luscious lips covered his as they, like pouting quest organs, expanded over his chin and nose, and her serpentine tongue licked down his throat, ever slower, ever deeper, as if looking for the soul that Mankind, in its infancy, had once assumed to reside in a man’s breast.
I am Adam and Eve, trysting with the Serpent in God’s own garden.
He penetrated her with the compliance feed and she lurched, as the electrocuted lover is wont to do. Her tongue withdrew like a slick of dread as her suction-unit of a mouth recoiled and shrank to a pouty ‘Oh’ of pain, and she writhed on the gel-pad beneath him.
Siren was the best—and most importantly, the last—of her kind. Her mouth screamed but no sound came, rendering her a soundlessly tormented soul, that one could well pity, if he did not know her, had not often sat in the autodidact matrix while she ended life upon life upon sniveling-pleading-life in just this fashion.
Her mind though screamed into his, “Kill me, Hyman, kill me! Never again hurt me, Hyman, or hurt me terminally.”
His thoughts could not be known to her. He was blocked out to the gens, his pets, after all, for these past 600 years. Siren had not been the last, or the best, but had remained his favorite. In 2345, with the coming of the Eugenicide Scan he had been forced into global euthanasia. Even that had not worked, so he powered down the Hyman Shield—the one thing that was his. The Eugenic Matrix he had co-opted would not serve him, so the basis for his fame and fortune—the buoys that had staved off ecological disaster, otherwise known as nature—powered down, and then, ominously, as the world looked on breathlessly, reversed their function. Rather than preserve the interglacial, the sentinel’s of humanity turned on the unruly livestock who had so spitefully rejected their farmer/master. The ice caps returned, glaciers sprung from their mountain roots, and marched on Mankind.
God, yes, there is a God, deep in the Cosmos, deaf and dumb in his remoteness. I grow tired of serving as his high priest at this bloody altar; of dancing with this murderess across the carnal house of our demeaning lusts. Come to me, Father, for I am Sin! Cleanse me, Father, for I so sin! Reforge me in your image, in your crucible of light!
He then re-engaged the soniseizure, maximized the compliance feed—and finally she screamed!
Her mindlessly exquisite scream brought about his orgasm, that primordial reptilian convulsion within his brain being the totality of this woman’s reason for being, at least so he liked to think. The sweat was shed from his lithe naked body like rain from a habitat membrane, as not a hair defiled his perfect form.
Hyman Maxim, last organic human, last true Son of ugly little Lucy, stood above his moaning erotigen, Siren, the pick of her pod, and nudged her with the soniseizure tendril playfully, “Time to view Moonfall, My Dear.”
Siren stood in one sinuous motion, in a manner that should have eluded a simple primate, but came to her naturally. She looked into his empty blue eyes with her hate-filled black almonds of menace and twitched her lips playfully. Her voice was unsettlingly feline. “I could eat you alive, Hyman.”
“But you don’t dare, vile crevice of mine. Please, serenade me with you Omega Protocol again, my Wicked Dear.”
She slunk with sinewy grace from side to side, her muscular hips and weeping breasts contrasting sharply with her elegant waist and long serpentine limbs. Her unblemished golden skin once again radiated its solar hue, even where he had scourged her. Her long void-black hair grew only from the top of her shapely head, bound in a braded topknot that bobbed like a mammalian tail high above her supple shoulders. Her voice took on a sultry tone, as if all the sluts in some mythic hell had come to reside in the same woman. Her black almond pupils, surrounded by the ivory white of her broad iris, beguiled him as she chanted, “Hyman Maxim, Master of The Division Core, Architect of the Solar Shroud and the Humanity Endeavor, is inviolate, Last of Lucy’s Line—my cruel master, my everything.”
Siren then simpered, which evoked in Hyman’s primordial ape’s brain the dread of leopards. “But, My Dear, the androgynies are so bland, the gens are gone, and you have yet to feed me a tasty replicant!”
Her voice then hummed in a seething crescendo as she slithered across the deck more serpent than woman, “He was so handsome, reclining there in defiance of the Relief Engine. His mind towering and his body yet hungering—a real man, tasty and goodz foer me!”
She was becoming unmanageable, so he flashed the palm of his open left hand, to which she had been conditioned in utero. She recoiled as if struck, with a little girl frown on her face, a flash of menace in her eyes, and bared teeth behind luxurious lips. He was done with fun for today and adopted an appropriate tone, “Mister Burton is too important to Second Genesis and the Humanity Endeavor. You are what you are, Siren. But I, for all my foibles, remain humanity’s oncologist. I have no wish to become its hospice manager to satisfy your vicious proclivities. I do promise you though, that should an unsought replicant by washed up here at the End of Time that you might—my wicked dear—dine here.
A fine predicament I am in, adrift on Life Raft Earth, with naught but andys, bots, Old Know-it-all, and this sick, overdesigned bitch!
