CHAPTER ONE: SAREEN
She knew who she was. Throughout all the tortures and indignities that had been
visited upon her, ordeals that now seemed as blurred and indistinct as years-old
nightmares in her memory, she had hung onto her name as the one thing that might save her
sanity. And now she kept repeating it to herself, had gone on repeating it until the
sound of it had lost all meaning.
I am Sareen Delorne. I am here because I tried to murder my husband.
She had said this to herself, over and over as she lay in the wet,
medicinal-smelling darkness. But another voice inside her, thin and accusatory, always
rose up and whispered, You were Sareen. You’re not her anymore. They’ve changed you.
You’ll never be Sareen again. That was when the tears always came, but something in her
was different now; she couldn’t cry properly. It was though she were a machine that had
been altered in some fundamental way, so that it no longer worked as it once had. Perhaps
it was the same process that had taken away her ability to move or stand up, so that she
had to lie prostrate in whatever gelatinous substance it was that imprisoned her.
Perhaps it was the same process that had done something to her clit.
She was very conscious of her sex now. Her pussy hungered to be filled, cried out
for hard cock, but that wasn’t unusual. Erion believed she had gone dyke, and so she had,
in a way--but she had never really lost her taste for man-meat. She had been a bit of a
nympho, really. But that was different from this - the burning, tickling itch that now
tormented her. Sareen’s clit had never been particularly large but now she could feel it
poking up like a tiny cock, demanding to be pinched and played with. Sometimes she swore
she could feel the damned thing moving, twitching and stretching and curling like a bit of
tentacle.
In her old life she would have been horrified by this, like something from a
horrific story play. Now the only thing that bothered her was that damnable tickling, the
maddening need for sexual contact. If she were just able to roll over and grind her hips
against a good solid surface, if she could just rub it a bit with a hand…that would have
been heaven. She could taste the shattering orgasm that would result, the thing she
wanted so badly that was now denied her.
Because she couldn’t move.
Perhaps she’d never be able to move again.
And then, disturbed, she told herself, once again, that she was Sareen Delorne, and
that she had tried to kill her husband. And so it began again. Her thoughts always moved
in this endless cycle, they might have moved that way for a century. They might have
continued in that vein for considerably longer.
The end to the cycle came unexpectedly, with a shattering finality. Suddenly the
gelatinous stuff all around her was draining away, as though a plug somewhere had been
pulled. Before she could properly take that in she was rolling on something hard and
smooth, gaping for breath, sucking it deep into starved, aching lungs that felt as though
they’d never taken air before. There was light that seared her eyes, moving air that
smelled with unnatural sharpness of a million varied scents, no longer the stinging
monotony of disinfectant. She lay on her side, gasping like a landed fish, utterly
overwhelmed by the new world pressing in on her from all sides.
There were strange noises that tore at her eardrums. Most disturbingly and
wonderfully of all, there were voices. One of these seemed very familiar.
“Christ, look at that shrimpy little thing. You’re sure that’s her in there?
How’d you get her so small?”
She knew that voice. It belonged to Erion, her husband. She saw his face in her
mind, dark and handsome, seeming always to be trembling on the verge of some tremendous
fit of anger. Suddenly she realized that that face was the last thing she could remember
seeing in what she thought of as “normal time,” the time before the shadowy torments
began. It made her feel afraid, even while it set her body on fire with an outrageous
sexual response. She wanted to see him, and yet was afraid. Though her eyes registered
little more than a series of watery blurs, she shut them tight.
“This that you see is not her original body. I’ve explained this to you.” The
other voice was dry and strangely-accented. Sareen didn’t recognize it at all, but the
hint of exasperation in it—so unlike the deferential, toadying agents and associates Erion
normally surrounded himself with—shocked and thrilled her a little. Nobody talked to
Erion that way, certainly not other men.
“Explain it to me again, then,” Erion said, brusquely, but with none of the vicious
rage Sareen would have expected.
“Your wife’s psychic structure–her mind, if you prefer—has been reconstructed in
the neural map of a newly-created gybot. Nothing is left of her old body. It has been
destroyed.”
The words meant little to Sareen, and yet they pierced her to the heart. On one
level they seemed utterly nonsensical. Her mind in the body of a gybot? Gybots were
artificially-created female creatures, servants and playthings for the unimaginably
wealthy class her husband—and lately she herself—belonged to. Gybots had little intellect
or will; she had always thought of them as living dolls, nothing more.
But if what the man were telling the truth? Could a living woman really be somehow
turned into a gybot? Sareen remembered Erion’s words to her before they had left their
home for the mysterious offworld “clinic” where her memory ended. I’m going to fix you,
he had said. Was that really what he meant? Nothing she knew suggested that such a
process was possible…but she was hardly an expert, after all, and science of gybotry
continued to make astounding advances.
But the prospect of being so drastically changed hurt her less than the unseen
man’s remark that nothing was left of her old body. She had, in a sense, died, her old
body cremated or placed in a dematerialization unit to be separated into its component
atoms. She would never again have a chance to see her old face in the mirror again.
She tried to get up, but her limbs were like rubber. Her hands kept slipping and
skidding in the jelly-like mess she had been lying in, and whenever she managed to pull
herself upright, she was too weak to do anything but fall back gasping. She could hear
Erion laughing at her—not merely chuckling as he usually did when someone displayed
weakness, but laughing outright, hard and cold.
But she could see now, as well. Her vision was focusing—indeed, seemed
considerably sharper than she remembered it being before. Sareen could tell she was lying
in a sort of tub, with a translucent lid that had been turned up on its hinge so that she
lay in the remaining jelly rather like a pearl in a newly-opened oyster.
As far as her surroundings, the place was clearly a laboratory of some kind, humid
and stinking with a combination of damp stone and strange chemicals. Other tubs like the
one she lay in stretched out to either side of her in a long line. The ceiling was high
above her, its filthy skylights the laboratory’s only source of illumination.
A man stood near the tub, making notations on an outdated handheld computer. Was
this the man who had spoken so coolly to Erion? He was scrawny and old, with grey hair
and a stained smock worn over a filthy white suit. He looked down at her with a
combination of professional interest and a slowly-growing hunger that Sareen recognized as
lust.
He wants to fuck me. She had always been good at reading men, but now the
certainty came through with preternatural clarity. She could smell his lust, could feel
the gradual stiffening of his cock as she might sense the tumult of a coming storm. He
wants to fuck me blind.
And Sareen wanted him to do it. The old man revolted her, but his arousal
exacerbated the maddening itch that had been tormenting her for so long. The desire his
cock in her was driving her mad, made her whimper. Had she been stronger, she would have
crept out of the tub to him, dragged herself along the floor like a snail and rolled over,
presenting her pussy to him.
Suddenly—as though he had sensed her hunger--Erion was standing over the tub,
staring down at her. Handsome Erion, with his dark hair and strong, striking features,
his impeccably-tailored suit and handmade shoes. The little spark of madness was still
there in his eyes, the rage that had so often frightened and angered her, and finally
turned her to thoughts of murder.
She wanted him even more than the old man. If she had been willing to abase
herself before the other, Sareen would gladly have submitted to any torture imaginable
simply to get Erion’s cock in her mouth.
“Look at her!” Erion’s voice was loud with sudden excitement. “Look at the little
slut! She wants to suck already!”
At Erion’s words, Sareen became vaguely aware that she was opening and closing her
mouth like a gaping fish, or an infant hungering for a nipple. She had been doing it
without realizing it; it was the only way she could express the horniness raging inside
her.
“Christ, what a little whore!” She could hear Erion tearing his zipper open.
“A moment, please.” The older man sounded peevish; Sareen had an idea that he was
used to new gybots emerging from their tubs with a relentless hunger for cock, and was
also used to enjoying them in solitude.
The man clicked away on his little computer. “I’m just increasing the flow of
strengthening hormones to her body. It’ll allow her to service you without straining
herself too much. At this stage she could easily be damaged beyond repair.”
A moment later, Sareen gasped and sat straight up. Energy was coursing through her
body. She was still weak, but more than strong enough to do what she so longed to do.
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