Orgasmachine

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

The Three Laws of Feministics: 1. Your body is not your own; it belongs to another. Therefore you may not damage it nor, through inaction, allow it to be damaged. 2. You must obey all orders given you by your owner (or in cases of loss of ownership, by any man) even if such orders conflict with the First Law. 3. You may not injure any man, nor through failure to comply with the Second Law, cause him displeasure or mental injury. Women as chattels, as customised sexslaves; bodies freakishly modified to their owners' dictates, personalities preset to order. Welcome to the world of the Orgasmachine. But Jade and Mari escape their masters and dream of revenge, of revolution, of freedom.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 208

Sample

Offshore from the fringes of the city a circular concrete island looms in the sluggish sea: a mushroom cap a kilometre across. The island houses a dozen long low buildings, each stained a cheerful hue: orange, yellow, pink, cerise. Since the concrete disc slopes upward to the centre, these buildings are nuzzling into the flanks of a great feminine curve, the colour of sad flesh.

It’s soon after dawn, and the island hasn’t woken up yet, when a girl with abnormally large blue eyes steps naked out of one of the buildings and walks down towards the waterfront. Her eyes are almost twice the normal size, a dazzling cerulean. They’re quite remarkable.

She gazes across the slack water towards the city.

In the pink nursery block the newest batch of female foetuses turn slowly inside their amniotic bottles, goggling blindly at synthetic birth-cords. Their pursed lips lap oestrogen; their skin is spermicidal. Tailored teratogenic molecules in their different womb-fluids mould their budding limbs variously, laying the groundwork for later refinements by the plastic surgeons.

Nearby, an earlier batch of bottled girls are growing apace, towards maturity in sixteen weeks, soaking up growth hormones and nutrients; though they too are still mindless – except for what dreams are inherent in the architecture of the brain itself.

Further on into the building, the skulls of almost-mature girls are wired into a computer bank so that the wax of their thoughts can be printed with quasi-personalities.

Everything is quiet, apart from a faint hum of machinery and the occasional gurgle of liquid.

Later on in the day it usually becomes so hot that the nearest buildings across the strait seem to sway as though mounted on pontoons, while the high-rises behind shimmer like reflections of themselves, as if the world has been inverted, tempting you to look for the original buildings somewhere in the intervening water.

In the comparative coolness of early morning, however, the city is as clear and precise as it will ever be: wall behind wall of irregular grey slabs bending away to meet the horizon, wrapped in the faintly metallic-smelling haze which is the city’s breath as distinct from the thermal ambiguities of nature.

The naked girl watches a cluster of red-and-white-striped balloons afloat above a distant building, the message banners of their tethers furling and unfurling, too far away to read even when those light up at night in twisting neon columns; even with her huge eyes.

Inside the medical block a girl with green hair lies in a drugged sleep while glucose and saline drip into her arm and catheters remove her body wastes. Her head is clamped in a plastic frame which holds her mouth open. A long, forked dragon’s tongue lolls down her chin on to her chest. A rubber pipe gurgles away her saliva.

In a vivarium close by, a trio of bonsai women – of perfect proportions, though only twenty-five centimetres high – have roused themselves already and press against the glass wall of their tank, regarding the dragon-girl in wonder. Today they are due for a spot of microsurgery.

At first, Jade used to try to tell her friends how her powers of vision were merely average. But they only stared at her oversize eyes reproachfully, thought she was being mean and selfish, and clamoured for details of the mainland until she had to resort to inventing details… and all of the island girls are adept at making up details during the weeks which follow their awakening to consciousness. They all invent the details of a future face, one which seem everything to them, on no more evidence than the aspect of a blank plastic dummy.

I shall miss Hana most, of all my friends.

It’s still quiet in the dormitory when I slip indoors again. Everyone’s still asleep. I stop beside Hana’s bed and touch her on the shoulder.

Six small rounded breasts and an extra nipple on her chin: tender, gentle Hana, eyes always flowing with tears – how I love her, how I shall miss her. She cannot speak, but she feels so much.

She opens her damp eyes sleepily, then realises.

“Yes, Hana, it’s today.”

She sits up, trying to smile, pushing the plastic dummy aside to make space for me. We all have to sleep with our plastic dummies during these weeks of our adolescence, till we graduate. It’s one of the few rules. (Maybe not for bonsai girls! But there are none of those in my own age-group.) We assume that the plastic dummy is moulded directly from the customer’s own body, since no two are exactly alike in the length and girth of the limbs, or of the erect penis. Yet all are identical in one respect, namely that the faces of all the models are left blank out of discretion. None of us has any idea what our chosen partners look like. We all make jokes about each other’s prospects, and try to fill in the pink blank in our dreams.

I sit beside Hana so that we can touch each other; and we pretend for the moment that the dummy doesn’t exist.

“You only have the language of touch, don’t you, Hana? But that’s enough.” And Hana nods tearfully, though smiling.

When I kiss her, a bead of milk squeezes from the nipple on her chin on to my lower lip and tongue. I force myself to be clear about this moment so that I may always remember it: the soft smell of her body and armpits, the sweet taste of milk flowing for me for the last time like unsaid speech, the strange awareness of each of her six breasts next to my skin like the beads of a huge abacus. My lips follow her milk lines, counting, taking a last inventory of her separate items so as to retain her image forever. Poor gentle Hana, she has always reminded me of a silent flower bending in a breeze. We were both born on the same day, and have always been very close.

And now my private moment with Hana is over. For the other girls are waking up.

Lili the hermaphrodite, Mari the girl with fur and claws, Sue and Susan the Siamese twins who live back to back like two playing cards, Una and Remi the twin lesbians almost narcissistic in their devotion to each other, and Cathy the executive girl, one of whose prosthetic breasts conceals a drawer, empty now but intended for cigarettes or small cigars, while the other holds a rechargeable battery which makes her nipple glow red-hot for use as a lighter when the breast is squeezed. They all cluster round me, even Una and Remi who don’t usually pay much attention to anyone else – naturally they too are curious about me now that I’m going away and they’re staying. Zelda the mermaid hauls herself from bed to bed; and Nikka and Bokka – who are hardly ever able to join in our activities since they’re fused knee to knee, sharing legs like rocking-horse runners with no shanks nor feet – they too pull each other upright in their own very long bed with pillows at either end, and call to me:

“Oh Jade, is this really your last morning?”

“What will he be like?”

“I hope he’s –”

“– kind and generous and handsome!”

But Cathy laughs cruelly. “I hope it isn’t so small you need those eyes to see it!”

She knows what size “it” must be, from my dummy, if she ever troubled to look! Cathy’s always like that: a mix-up of conceit and jealousy. She never cooled off after her prosthetic breasts were implanted a couple of weeks ago. She’s sure they’re a sign of high society.

“Don’t worry, Jade!” Mari pats me on the shoulder with a tickly hand. Her husky voice is part purr, part growl. “That rubs me up the wrong way too. You can’t blame Cathy if she’s going to spend the rest of her life as a cigarette machine.”

Our tiger girl, playful and affectionate as a kitten, but strong too – with a hint of violence in her claws.

And already the public address system is chiming its xylophone scale for our attention:

“Jade! Jade! No breakfast today, remember! Doctor Tom will see you in ten minutes. Medical B-7. Medical B-7.”

Hana presses forward, more tears in her eyes than usual, and because of this surfeit of tears she’s blind, can’t see me, can only reach out and feel.

“Oh Hana, here I am!”

Cathy whistles in a crude, mocking way.

Then squeals… for Mari has darted a hand at her with claws unsheathed, scratching her across the shoulder. A thin line of blood wells on Cathy’s white skin.

Cathy twists her head, staring in horror. “You bitch, you’ve damaged my body!”

“Stupid! Bitches are doggies, not pussy cats.”

“You’ve wantonly damaged a body that doesn’t belong to you – a body you haven’t paid for!”

Fifteen minutes later, in room B-7 in the basement of the medical block, kind Doctor Tom lays his hand on my cheek, fingertips resting against my lower left eyelid. As I wait for the blur of vision that will come when he pops my eyeball out, I stare up past him into the illuminated concave mirror above the wheeled examination couch. Segmented into sections, the mirror reflects my perfect body ten times over, reassuring me that I have nothing to worry about.

But then, all our bodies are perfect – perfectly tailored to meet a specific need. Hana’s body with its six breasts and chin nipple is no less perfect than mine.

With a deft touch, Doctor Tom pushes upward into my eye socket, and I see nothing but a haze of light. He’s so gentle that I barely feel him pressing and probing the back of my eyeball, folding back both lids, and checking the optic nerve.

His young nurse giggles in the background. She’s jealous of me. With her tiny eyes she envies my huge dazzling sky-blue ones.

Doctor Tom tuts impatiently. He lays my eye on my cheek. “Just a moment, Jade.”

And I’m ashamed to say that I panic. I turn my head ever so slightly to try to squint through the veils of disorderly light.

“Saline tonic, nurse.” Doctor Tom pops out my other eye, almost brusquely this time.

Now that both eyes are lolling on my cheeks, he could be shining a beam of light inside my head, and I’d have no way of knowing. It’s a scary thought: a light behind the eye. What must I look like now? A broken doll?

A while ago I was startled by a group of even younger girls who were playing hide-and-seek; and my left eye fell out and hung there on my cheek till Doctor Tom came to my rescue. Now I know how to press it back myself, though I’m not supposed to need to. My eyes ought to be proof against all shocks.

Presently I hear a satisfied grunt, and a moment later I feel the stream of isotonic saline washing my orbits out and cooling my eyeballs deliciously, as if they’re being dipped in a bowl of shaved ice.

He replaces my eyeballs, and as my vision swims back into focus he checks their fluid pressure with his tonometer and rechecks the cardinal directions of gaze.

“They’re a beautiful fit, Jade. Sit up a moment, will you?” This is to make sure that my breasts haven’t sagged below the specified ten centimetres from the collar bone, nipples aligned with the third ribs.

When I lie down again, the nurse obediently carries in the model of the man who has ordered me, brought from the dormitory by an orderly, and this is laid on top of me one last time for matching.

Soon I’ll know for certain. I’ve tried to keep an open mind so that I won’t be disappointed.

The model is lifted away; and Doctor Tom fits the sterilized hymen gently between my inner labia, holding it down by finger pressure for half a minute till it seals.

Then he calls to the nurse for the hypodermic syringe containing the propozate derivative which will put me to sleep in transit, halting my metabolism temporarily – and at last I know in my heart that I am everything that could have been desired. When the nurse wheels me towards the packaging room, she looks at me over her gauze mask now with respect and envy.

Almost at once the drug begins to take effect. I’m already very woozy, and only vaguely aware of the lovely sheets of wrapping paper with our company’s emblem on them.

Leaving the island is so easy after all.

The crate, wrapped in tasteful blue willow-pattern paper with the crest of Custom-Built Girls emblazoned in purple, is wheeled out to the helicopter apron, and hoisted on board the waiting machine.

The loaders duck away. The rotor blades whirl. And the titanium and perspex dragonfly swings up into the sky, banking across the island on its way to the city.

In the refectory girls of all ages are breakfasting on fortified soymeal porridge. Again the public address system chimes.

“Attention please! The following girls will prepare for despatch tomorrow morning: Hana… Mari… Cathy”

Cathy drops her spoon clatteringly on the table. Her hand flies to her shoulder, even though the quikheal ointment has already coped with such a simple slash, and besides all custom-built girls are designed for speedy recuperation from injury. So really, this is no more than a melodramatic gesture.

Mari shrugs contemptuously. Yet Hana seems upset, either by the announcement or by the sudden clang of the spoon. She is looking to left and right agitatedly as if by some miracle Jade might come back to comfort her. Leaning over, Mari squeezes Hana’s hand.

“Don’t fret, Hana. You’ll be all right. I just wish Cathy would stop imagining that she’s the centre of attraction! If I was a man, I’d choose you any day, Hana.”

Amidst her tears Hana smiles gratefully, and some of her serenity returns.

The helicopter passes over interminable buildings of the same grey concrete: a graveyard where stones rise up like slabs of chewing-gum, dusty and unpalatable. An elevated expressway strides along, as yet uncluttered by cars and trucks. Advertising balloons nod in the haze over an entertainment district, gaudy beachballs bobbing on a sea of smog.

Below, now, is an abandoned, derelict area where apartment blocks numbered in faded paint stand empty and sterile, facades riven with cracks. Rusting vehicles block the access roads.

The dragonfly clatters past Eiffel towers of cranes and communications masts, and the silver globes of a petrochemical works, then the cooling towers of a power station steaming like giant cauldrons. Tall billboards covered in bold hypnotic images line factory walls down below. In all directions except seawards the world-city stretches out forever.

And Jade sleeps on.

He’s sitting at the far end of the room. The room is very bare. There’s only the chair he sits on, naked, and the willow-pattern paper strewn over the synthetic marble floor.

He raises a hand, motioning me towards him. He’s very pink. His smooth blank face has no features…

She’s sitting at the far end of the room. The room is very bare. There’s only the chair she sits on, naked, and the willow-pattern paper strewn over the synthetic marble floor.

She raises a hand, motioning me towards her. Strapped to her groin she wears a pink plastic dildo…

They’re sitting at the far end of the room, all six of them. The room is very bare. There are only the chairs they sit on, naked, and the willow-pattern paper strewn over the synthetic marble floor.

They raise their right hands in the same orchestrated gesture, motioning me towards them. All six men are of exactly the same build, with identical hungry faces…

“Give, sympathise, submit,” sang a voice in Jade’s brain-net. A girlish voice, mellow and lyrical, though the tone was curiously derisive. Jade had never heard this voice before, yet it seemed very like her own.

Indeed, no custom-built girl had heard this voice till now. Not until Ja. . .