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Shelley (part 1)This story may contain adult content. |
| Written by George Saracen | |
| Friday, 28 March 2008 | |
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Shelley
Chapter 1
Heart-beat, Heart-beat,
Doe eyes helpless in the dark, Ironically full of life's spark,
Thump-ing, Thump-ing,
Tragic tears and adrenaline, Pain sears and darkness takes you in,
Tearing, Tearing, Crying, Crying,
You say you love me yet, Confused by the fate you met,
Panting, Panting,
Fear and squirming panic, Squealing bitter and manic,
You begin to realize and suck a quick breath, My warm darkness, bad luck and slow death,
Thumping, Thumping,
Nails digging into my shoulders, Sweet pain, lightning and boulders,
Heartbeat, Heartbeat,
In my warm nest of eternal sleep, Your soul will be mine to keep,
Slash-shing, Pant-ting, Not yet,
My child-like blossoming bride, I will remember the night you died,
Thank-you, Love you, You hide your bitter excited face, In my warm chest, erotic solace,
Rip-ping, Heart-beat, Thump-ping, Scream-ming,
The blood of roses from torn lilly petal spills, Yet your writhing and humping never stills,
Intruding blackness and numb devoid, Death intrudes, a substance not a void,
Coughing, Clinging,
You love me yet and you ask why, Shhh darling, yours is to do and die,
You cough out your orgiastic blood-spray pants, Violent, shaking bliss, deny you can't, Vision constricts and you say you love me, Ripping moan, calm your breath for me,
Rut-ting, Heart-beat, Thump-ping, Fal-ling,
My angel sheds a tear, Beautiful tragic and clear, Her face is resigned with love, Her soul is my dove,
Hit-ting, Slap-ping, Bleed-ding
She can see herself, she's aware, Death strangles her breath and darkens her stare, She's aware, She is here, In doom's loving lair,
Sigh-ing, Die-ing,
She who sought safety in my dark arms, She who was born to love my stark charms,
Smitten of me beyond reason, Not knowing how or why, Against herself committing treason, Helping me help her die,
So pure and sweet as I deliver her, I, her mid-wife to the Hither-After,
Sud-den, Spasming, Shuddering, Moaning,
Be still, slipping in your own warm blood, I am red with your passionate flood, Fast she falls into her eternal climax, Death or orgasm, I can feel her relax.
Panting, Grunting, Savour, Shiver,
The menacing darkness fades, is diminished, A spent potential now stale and finished,
The poem of dream begins to die; prosaic and tortuous reality starts. The electric buzzing of fantasy hurts my head, threatening a grand-mal seizure, as I recover and her bed-room fades into static, and the harsh plasma lights of my quarter scream into my eyes.
******* intense, disgusting... good, *******, God.
I'd better to change.
* * *
Shelley woke up on Friday morning, 14th March, 2007, to a bad headache and utter emotional exhaustion. She could not open her eyes; the dream was still there. She grimaced in her sleep, feeling the balmy sweat she was bathed in. Her temples burned and she was torn between hate and fear of her dream, and the need to remember it. It was another one of those.
She could still feel it, the cutting cruel pain and the screaming and the .... Exultation. The beautiful emotion of realizing, when push comes to shove, of what you really feel, and the sensual pleasure of resignation. She remembered the love and innocence, and the searing pain, and gladly dying in his arms.
She mashed her eyelids tighter together, trying to put things together, chasing the nightmare, trying to make sense of it so that she could remember it in her waking hours. She wanted to know how something that would later feel so monstrous, silly and misplaced, could feel so powerful now. She picked up what pieces she could and tried to memorize for a few long moments.
She did not want to get out of bed, but she would have to, soon. She stretched and rolled over onto her belly, feeling the sheets wet with her sweat, flowing around her naked contours, her belly and breasts, like some soft omnipotent lover. She kept her eyes shut, trying to parse the visions and feelings that grew more vague, so annoyingly, with each passing moment.
Finally she opened her eyes and sighed. What a goddamn silly dream. What utter and complete perverted bullshit. She loved Max, but, for heaven's sakes, what kind of twisted visions were those? It was time for her to shake her head free of the cobwebs of ache and ambiguity, and to get some coffee.
Maybe it was because of the strangeness of how she felt, or because she needed to do something to shake off her strange sleep, but she had her coffee naked. She didn't even bother to pull the curtains. She just needed some kind of break, some kind of freshness, anything but the heavy-handed puzzle the night had inflicted upon her. She smiled to herself, slowly sipping her coffee, sitting at her breakfast table, a beautiful site for an invisible observer, she fancied.
She shook her head, poor dear Max, stuck with a mental case like her. But she was a beautiful mental case and she knew it. She was ashamed that she took pleasure in looking down at herself, even without a mirror. Even her eyes needed indulging now and then, as did her sensations, and her passionate heart. That was where lovely, dear, blessed Max came in; her owner... no, of course not! Her man, her undeclared husband. The one who's crudest lust, and every glance, was a source of erotic pleasure for her.
She closed her eyes in a private smile and shivered, feeling a gentle twinge below. Twinge turned to curl, and gently rolled over, and then softly disappeared, leaving butterflies in a vacuum in its wake, sigh... She had to be careful not to spill the hot coffee onto her (beautiful) breasts.
She wondered sometimes, how it was, and why it was, that she was what she was. It had been a strange and difficult journey through adolescence and adulthood for her, teased, the target of jealous plots, the snobbery (both straight and reversed) of other girls and women. The unwanted attentions of presumptuous men, the tension between the need to feel beautiful and not be harassed by the drooling wolves of the opposite sex, the confusion between arrogant complacence and the sheer victim-hood that her existence had made her feel. The offence she took at the sexualization, visualization and objectification of her sex, and the way she could use it and revel in it when Max's eyes were upon her. There had been bitter lessons of humility she had had to learn, and she had faced the loss of her buttresses in life: her patient, kind parents, to a senseless accident. And then of course, there was the guilt that came with having something so fundamental and potent as her physical loveliness, that many others did not have, and that she had never actually earned. It all led to her final realization of compassion, fairness and love, in spite of the different forces that threatened to pull her younger self into either bitterness or arrogance.
It had been a measure of humility, talent and hard work, and goodness, that had made things come together in the end.
She could still be vain now and then, but she knew that, in theory, it was wrong. And while her difficulties as an underestimated sexual object had induced self-pity and rage occasionally, she had to admit that many other women would sell their souls to experience her travails. She sipped her coffee rudely, sensually, feeling and tasting it in equal measure, the colours of its flavour shining into her morning mind.
And then there was that special gift, that had even saved her life once. She did not know if her nightmares were a side-effect of that gift, but she was glad she had it. It was right about a lot, even if not everything. She had seen her attacker somehow, the day before that day, last winter, as she had foreseen so many other things on occasion before. And she knew where he would be, and how he was going to murder her. That was why she had been ready when he had attacked, right on cue, only to be shot dead by the most beautiful victim he had ever seen. There had been others times, many others; the only nightmares that were guaranteed to never come true were the ones that had Max in them. He was infallible, her Max. She was lucky. She suspected others had the gift too, but they dismissed it as mere tricks of the mind, and hence lost it. She had not, and as a result she had a phone-call to make.
"Olive?", she was in her robe now; only Max merited a nudy-call. They exchanged pleasantries, and laughed at a joke, "Olive, I saw something. It's about you." Olive knew better than to discount what Shelley saw. "Was it something bad? What's your muse telling you this time?" Olive was barely able to mask her tension. She'd been saved by Shelley before, from a dog-bite and a bank robbery, and even getting fired. "It's a bit vague this time. I'm not sure it'll happen, but, I saw that someone would break into your place, and take some stuff. I think... they're going to be caught if they do it, but they'll trash your place up quite nicely," "...and?" "The cops are going to find David's pot and bong, and you get minor possession." "Holy **** Shelley, sounds like a... shitty day, so the question is, can I make it suck less?" "I dunno what you should do. Why do the kids choose you? I have no idea. I guess the best thing to do is leave the stereo running and the lights on, and the shower, and get rid of David's stuff, and maybe get a few snaps of them if they come anyway?" Olive grimaced over her phone. She had a job. She was a paralegal, and today was her boss' day in court. There was no way she could stick around and snap pictures of hooligans. And what if they saw her? She wasn't one to live out espionage fantasies, that was for the boys as far as she was concerned. "I'm not sure what I should do more than leaving stuff on and dumping David's stuff Shelley, but thanks anyway. Maybe I'll leave my web-cam on or something..." "You do that Olive" She hung up, her concern eased. Now she just had to wait and see what happened. She almost wished that Olive wouldn't take any precautions, just so that she could see if it actually happened the way she had seen it, but of course, that was not going to happen now, and she should be glad of it.
Olive was a good friend after all. She may have been a bit strange, skeletal yet adamant that she was no anorexic, merely hyper-metabolic. And she had hated Shelley to begin with, and later thought she was psychotic, and then a witch, before finally warming to her. Shelley told herself Olive, who was buck-toothed, flat-chested and wild-eyed, not to mention shrill, was not a guilt friend. They were genuine best friends, even if Olive persisted in her general dislike of beautiful women and most men, even if Olive was a terrible cynic and pathologically suspicious, and even if her loser boy-friend was always trying to use Olive as a stepping stone to her. Even then. Olive was fiercely loyal and truly sincere, and that was all that mattered.
But now it was time to get ready and leave for work. Max was coming that evening and promises of a hot-date, a surprise gift and "something different" were making Shelley swoon. She had her own ideas about how to prepare, and to outdo him if necessary. He was the man, he should need her more than she needed him, and she felt supreme power and eagerness in her quest to put him in his place tonight. She smiled to herself through showering and dressing, thinking of what she had in store. Even the hurry and vigour of a cold shower had its own kind of athletic, masochistic sensuality for her.
Work passed like a haze for Shelley. Being the editor of high-brow current affairs and literary magazine meant that Shelley had her own office, and that meant fidgeting, working on her next book and checking up on Olive were all forgivable, as long as she was ahead of the game. Before she knew it, and perhaps too soon considering that she was not able to finish more than the next twenty pages of "Sabres Of The Saracens", 4 pm arrived and she was eligible to take early leave.
The day had not turned out so badly for Olive either. The young punks had broken in after all, in spite of the aural effect of occupancy, but Olive had left her web-cam on a direct feed to her web-log, and had even called the police as soon as she saw the predicted future begin to unfold. Shelley had been the first to receive the good news of the capture of the criminals. They had been intercepted mid-rampage and Shelley had been vindicated, yet again. Since the situation called for celebration with her best friend, and that prior to the evening's other promises, it seemed that for once the day would be an unmitigated success. She feared things going too well to be true. Something might still happen; did she dare to be unconditionally glad?
Shelley went home for wine and revelry with her good friend Olive. There would be some serious girl-only time before Max came; she just had to make sure not to get too tipsy by then; indulging in some ice-cream would help with that.
* * *
Max walked the same path as last time up to Shelley's apartment. Things were a little different to last time. He didn't see the same cat on his way up the stairs, even though it was the same time. The neighbours weren't playing loud rock either. But the clouds were the same, exactly. The new mattress was there by the dumpster, and the aeroplane flew overhead right on schedule. It bothered him a bit when things didn't proceed as he expected. The world was deterministic wasn't it? And that break-in had gone tits-up as well. That was interesting.
He jogged up the steps, whistling to himself, genuinely looking forward to the evening. He could hardly wait to see his Shelley. Maybe he loved her; such a sad, sad man he was. He shook his head at himself, grinning. If he really did love her, then God save any woman from his affections! The door bounced nearer to him, the ground running away under him, every detail perfect, and then he stood at the entrance of the budget apartment that the editor of The Realist inexplicably lived in. There was giggling inside; that was new too, which meant she didn't know. Of course she didn't know, that was expected! He'd gotten away with murder.
When he knocked on the door and she let him in, Shelley was with Olive, celebrating and in good spirits, only mildly drunken. He was glad to see them happy; it was contagious. Shelley was glad to see him too. He was impossibly handsome and virile, but she told herself that it was his soul that she really loved. His improbable physical self was just icing on the cake.
He joked and talked the way a good and socially adept boy-friend should; first teasing them and then becoming the butt of the joke due to his ignorance of the day's events. He was genuinely curious. Of course, after some playful repartee, with the requisite touchés and even some harmless, completely non-serious, insinuation of a ménage-a-trois, the ladies explained to him how they had defeated the villains of the day.
Neither of them mentioned Shelley's gift. That was a girls' secret. Men didn't believe in such things, and Shelley could not afford to have her Max think her mad. He was far too precious for that, this she knew deep in her heart, more than anything else. They told him simply that Olive had left her web-cam on by accident, and Max thought it quite possible, considering how clumsy he knew her to be.
Finally, after much socializing, it was time for Shelley's man to take her out on a white-horse, for the night of her dreams, and for Olive to cheerfully excuse herself. Except that Max could not stop thinking about a ménage-a-trois. He bit his lip, trying to think of some way to prolong Olive's presence. He found her striking in her own strange way. After all, a connoisseur loves the bitter spirits as well as the fine wines.
Max remembered how Shelley had been their first time. Doe-eyed, confused and eventually powerless to resist, afraid yet compelled. She had been mesmerized. Even her protests and resistances, whenever they were offered, were of the kind where she would have felt empty and disappointed if he had relented to them. He knew also that Olive secretly coveted him. The prospect of the awkwardness that might arise, should he try his luck, repulsed him, but he knew that he could make it happen. Hence, he had to try.
So he smiled and offered to take them both out, discretely squeezing Shelley's hand. Her eyes widened, and Olive's came alive with good natured cheer, caused by a man, for the first time in a very long time. Shelley may have thought about protesting, but Max's meaningful and deep stare melted her. She told herself it was just some good fun, sure some things would not be as good, but... it would be alright.
That evening Max had two women, both tipsy and fawning over only him, one at each shoulder, both making him feel important. That night Shelley was surprised to discover her latent bisexuality, and the extent of Olive's true force and intensity of spirit, and that she still bitterly resented sharing her man in spite of these things. That night she cried, not solely for pleasure, and Max ascended further up the mountain of Godhood. Both of the ladies were surprised by the perversions they discovered, and by the strange mix of extreme closeness, affection, and emotional confusion they shared. Both were exhausted and in awe of Max by the end. Olive had not thought that such a perfect male body existed outside of Men's Health covers and pornography, or that such stamina existed outside of fictional erotica. Shelley was bitter that her secret blessings had been experienced by another, and excited at having shared her planned perversions with another woman.
Max felt some pity for Shelley, but he dismissed it as foolishness. Tonight had been very successful. It had been a sensory extreme; he had sampled both Beauty and the Beast, as it were. He had seen sensual and conflicted emotions, tears and lust and intimacy. He thought about the shrill and needy shrew juxtaposed with the elegant vigour and fire of the goddess, and how they both eventually became soft, and exhausted, and then unconscious. Tonight had been much more fulfilling than his last time with Shelley.
The transition back was also not harsh and electric. The bedroom and the sleeping naked bodies, dependently clinging to him, faded gently. He kept his eyes closed to prevent the light from flooding in. He sighed, feeling only mild guilt.
* * *
Shelley woke up on Friday morning, 14th March, 2007, to a bad headache and utter emotional exhaustion. She was still in the moment of her dream, and she cried, confused and lost. She opened her eyes so that she would forget the dream, or at least see it for the silly random thing that it was. She tried to forget the forbidden lust she had experienced, or at least to realize that it was alien and not really hers, in the waking world at least. She wept, covering her face with her hands, cursing her gift. It had to be outrageous, it had to be impossible; she didn't really feel like that.
Still, there was something to look forward to today: Max. She remembered how vulnerable her confident, masterful man had been at times in their past. How she had nurtured him through pain. How, in a beautifully clichéd meadow, he had spent long moments just counting her heart-beats with his fingertips between her breasts. She didn't want to doubt, but she liked that Max better, just a bit, than the man he was these days.
Shelley sniffled, clinging to her sheets like a child bonded to her favourite blanket, and finally sighed, sorting through some other elements of her experience. She had a phone-call to make.
She wondered if she would feel any misplaced twinge while she spoke to Olive. Poor Olive; she was best friends with a nutcase.
Chapter 2:
Nero watched the screen of his terminal fill up with diagnostics. There was a cryogenic failure in core-5 of Dreamer. He grimaced, anticipating the explosion of klaxons. Dreamer, the world's only quantum hypercomputer, had been a real nightmare of late. He was sick of the Japanese cryo-units failing at least once every week. Coordinator Suzuki appeared before him, projected into his optic nerve so that he was face to face with the crazy obsessive disciplinarian, with unwelcome intimacy.
"Nero, I don't think Butler's analysis is correct. I want you to toothcomb through the diagnostics manually, and find out what the real cause of these failures is, and then report to me."
Butler, as the name suggested, was the servant computer that helped look after the spoilt ***** that was Dreamer. Butler was a plain vanilla digital computer, and Suzuki, being a A-grade luddite, simply didn't trust its conclusions. Being Japanese, he also didn't want to face the fact that his country's contribution to the DreamStation-1 project, the cooling machinery, was substandard.
"Anything else Mr. Suzuki?" "I want you to consider the possibility of physical refurbishment with humanoid drones, and I want you to go out with them."
Just then Dreamer's fifth core shut down and the klaxons went off. Nero made an even uglier face while politely addressing Suzuki, "You want me to do a zero-g walk? I'm sure the bird-men can fix it..." "No Nero, you are going to supervise." "Can you shut off the klaxons? Sir?"
Suzuki disappeared and the klaxons went on wailing. Suzuki, a real piece of work, and a **** accent to boot. Nero waited a full five minutes for the klaxons to stop. Nero hated being the greasy wrench on DreamStation-1, a lonely titanium-composite tomb orbiting the sun between the Earth and Mars. Ironically it was shaped like a ferris-wheel, spinning merrily in the blackness to produce cheap and reliable artificial gravity.
They should have gone back to Earth when the economies collapsed twenty years ago, but this project was too important, for some reason. The United States and Japan both had a quarter of their populations living below the poverty line and they threw their money on this under-manned titanic hulk. Nero couldn't understand it. But it was good pay, and his wife had left him, and his son had disappeared, possibly to join the Red Demon neo-socialists, so there wasn't much he had left behind on Earth, besides the wide open sky, beaches, clouds, real earth under his feet, and his sanity.
The station had once had a crew of five hundred, now they made do with fifty men and a small army of humanoid drones: the bird-men.
At least he could get his normalcy fix now and then through Dreamer, though even that, of late, had deteriorated into an increasingly disturbing obsession. If Suzuki knew he was using the world's most powerful machine for mere recreation, even stealing processing time, he would be court-martialed and sent to some dungeon normally reserved for the Red Demons.
He looked at the screen casually, and then with dismay. Core-5's memory was being dumped. Shit. They were going to reset Core-5, sending his program to hell with it. He swore and hit the screen with his fist, leaving a shallow blunt dent in it. The screen kept on dumping status information; he looked closely. Something was being saved, but he didn't know what. **** again. They'd find his program; he was screwed. He gulped. Not only had he lost a whole year's worth of built up simulation, but his buttocks would shortly belong to some love-sick Demon. Nero thought, thought with the speed and futility of last minute panic, and then it occurred to him.
Nero did not exactly know how Dreamer worked, as far as he knew it was a super-parallel computer with some shallow-analogue processing capability. It was about one hundred thousand times faster than any computer on Earth, and on some problems, with time, scaled to less than a millionth of the time a digital computer would take. But, the heart was digital, just a really big Cray that scaled abnormally on some problems, he fancied. He knew enough as far as he was concerned. He could disrupt the memory dump, make it look like a software glitch. That was the ticket. He wasn't going to be any romantic rebel's wife; that was not an option. He bashed in the script, without Butler's help, as fast as he could. The dump was nearly done, he had to disrupt the transaction, corrupt it. He looked at his code through his nausea and panic: good enough, at worst it wouldn't work, at best it'd save his ass.
"Execute this script Butler." That was when the lights flickered. Butler's cool voice informed him, "Dreamer power usage climbing, linear, will exceed maximum normal in five seconds." "What the **** Butler, what do you mean?" The lights flickered again and his screen dimmed, Butler's voice came again, now slurred, "Dreamer stabilizing on illegal state, power failure imminent, shut down Dreamer?" "No you dumb ****, there has to be some other way! Do something!" Butler replied with slurred calmness: "Dreamer is now in quantum power sink. Shut-down imminent in three... two...." Then the lights went out and Butler was dead, killed by the unpredictability of the eccentric Dreamer. Suzuki appeared before him, his accent worse for his anxiety, "Nirlo! What, iz...hah-phenningguh??" he looked angry, and afraid. "Nirlo....you ikhompetentth...." Suzuki flickered and then disappeared.
The last thing his screen printed was "dump failed... Dreamer thermal failure.... Irrecoverable decoherence....Dreamer shut-down.... 1 out of 200 replicants currently non-corrupt"
Nero was silent, his mouth gaping. He blinked repeatedly, torn between the extremes that raged within him. Yes, he had been incompetent. Yes he had been corrupt. He had damaged what was supposedly man-kind's best hope for the future, or so they said, politicians. But the dump had failed, and Dreamer had shut-down instead of doing something worse. He was sure Butler could be revived now that Dreamer was down. He had been saved. Trillions of dollars had just evapourated and nearly ten years worth of damage had been done, but he was saved.
Nero slapped himself, hard. His right eye shed a tear of blood, and Nero laughed like a maniac, shaking for joy. He slapped himself again, this time making sure to miss his eye, but his laughter grew even more unstable. He shook his head slowly, crying though his hilarity, overcome with the feeling of irony that now took him. Apparently only one "replicant" had survived out of 200, whatever they were. He hoped they were expensive.
" **** you Suzuki. **** you." The emergency back-up lights flickered on. " **** you Suzuki." He looked around his office, more spacious but just as barren as the inside of a nuclear submarine. " **** you too. And **** me." He thought for a moment, contemplating what he personally had lost, and then decided he was being sentimental, next thing he knew he'd be crying for his dead goldfish.
"So... what happened? We can make it look like Suzuki's fault. Put down to his ‘strategically flawed' luddite management.... We can engineer that. The script was gone, it was designed to eat itself out of memory as it executed, instruction by instruction. The fault occurred because.... Because... Suzuki was such ravenous cock-gobbler!"
He chuckled at his thought. But that would not do. He thought seriously for a moment, and then it occurred to him: the fault had occurred because of the Japanese cryo-unit failing and Suzuki refusing to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem repeatedly, because of pressure to make Japan look good in the whole project. Yes, it was Japanese bureaucratic idiocy and the "save face" complex. That was it: a likely story. The Generals would want to buy that one.
* * * Copyright 2008 George Saracen |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 28 March 2008 ) |
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