I need a breath of fresh air. I feel this science fiction might make that happen.
Image Source: Wikipedia, Marcel Duchamp, Public Domain Licensed - Nude painting
Now, Sia is losing hope. She had lost everything else a while ago, but she had still kept a lick of fickle hope that tainted her dark, wired mind with a quick breeze of light. But even that hope is draining out, getting flushed alongside the the decay and rot that ran through the sewers of New York. Naked and snuggled up in wet cold, she stepped out of her bathroom. It wasn't like there was any bathroom to step out from. What passed for a bathhouse was a a cluster of thin, transparent synthetic tissues that walled a person and leaked water unto the skin as soon as a voice command was given, and slid into some invisible cocoon as soon as the shower was turned off, or upon a voice command .
Sia barely knew a thing about how these tech things work. Never mind that the world was at the bridge of crossing into the 22nd century; that everyone knew she, human or bot, were technologically savvy, and could make sense of the complex web of the world. Sia did not care to know anything, not how scientists had stumbled upon how to remove the interstellar on Venus, thus making it a second haven for humans; she didn't care about the mechanics of using living human tissues to cause stimuli in trees, make them walking groots that silently grew and put their produce up for sale. She didn't care for the alleged rumour that yet another breed of dinosaurs are being created at the Institute of Artificial Human and Animal Research Center (IAHARC) situated in Shanghai, China. All her life, She had not cared to know anything else, except one thing: WHO WAS SHE?
Anytime she asked, Olana, the guy who had taken her in, had nothing but one thing to say - that she was special, one of a kind. But for Sia, it wasn't enough to be special. It wasn't enough to wear a beautiful body that caused men and beast alike to stare with their mouth open; it wasn't enough to be a runway model sharing the stage with exquisite AI built models and human-animal hybrid ladies with the horns of gazelles, but still managing to draw the gaze of people across the room. It wasn't enough to be the only person capable of making Olana groan, grip the bedspreads and spit out rhymes from his own lyrics. Nothing, including knowing you were special, came close to having an identity.
Still stark naked, Sia stared hard and long at the mirror on the wall even as she combed her hair. She wasn't exactly looking at her face, at the oval shaped, high cheeked bone olive toned face that stared back at her or admiring the gloss that spread through her pointed big breasts, curvy shaped stricture, neatly shaved vagina and long legs. She was looking inward, remembering how she had come to know who she was by a constant glare in the mirror.
At first, all the mirror brought were snatches of her past before Olana. She would stare into mirror while applying a neat make up while getting g ready to attend a business dinner with Olana, and suddenly, she would come face to face with flashes of noises, hums, whispers, white coats, stacks of chips, red, fiery chandeliers, a blurry wet glass, a handshake and finally darkness. Sia didn't know what to make of this, at first. If nothing else, what she saw on the mirror was a far cry from the reality she knew. Or rather, the one Olana had found her in.
Image Source: Wikimedia, Angrylambie, Public Domain Licensed
According to Olana, he had found her lying near a human heart warehouse, totally unconscious. Upon taking her to the hospital suspended above his building, she had been treated for malicious sting by a Cucalam (some failed hybrid experiment between the cat family and humans). True enough, Sia had opened her eyes to the world only to feel a numbness in her brain; everything around her was blurry and unintentionally positioned to make her stumble. According to Olana, the hospital had indicated that she might experience a temporary amnesia which they could only hope would not be permanent. True enough, Sia could not remember anything that wasn't Olana's clean translucent apartment house or his neat white bedsheets.
It took everything in her not to stumble when Olana led her to the station the next day upon her insistence to find her identity. The police had matched her fingerprint with their record only to find a name, Sia Shaw. Nothing more. She remembered how she had gone on to insult the policemen for their tardiness despite the technological advantages at their disposal. They looked at her calmly and told her they would get back to her when they got some concrete fact about her. They did not get back to her, neither did they attend to her any better when she knocked at their desk every other day.
Resignedly, she gave up on her 21st visit, shunned the eccentric gaze that greeted her as slugged all the way back to Olana's clean apartment and ordered a cup of hot latte from the expresso robot that came alive upon the recognition of a familiar voice. After downing the coffee, she threw herself on the bed, and pressed her face into the pillow. She was willing herself to cry, to let out the emptiness she really felt inside. But sad as she was, there was no tears. Olana came to find her in this state. She was touched by the sincere hurt she found on his face. He stopped down, placed his hands upon hers and told her like he had always did that she should stop looking for something that was right in front of her. He wanted her to know that she had found a home in him.
Upon a prolonged silence, Olana began to rub her palms and then like an afterthought, he ran his hands through her arms, felt her pink lips against his brisk palms before kissing her. It was a long, desperate kiss that told of sexual hunger. As if by impulse, Sia felt the sudden urge to fill up on the hunger, and make it go away. It was this feeling more than anything that made Sia open her legs as if by impulse, take off his shirt, and watch him tremble as he took off her own aqua T-shirt and white pant. Not long after, they were making love like dogs and Olana was gushing about how he had made the right choice by picking her up.
Sia found it queasy that she knew just what to do to please him even on a first attempt. She knew his pleasure spots, she knew that by tickling his full black beards, she could get him to moan; she knew that all it took to make his penis hard against her was feed her breasts to him. He was a slow and detailed lover; the kind that noticed the tautness of her nipples when it brushed his hair pores, took off her panties only when he was ready to go in, groped for her butts in utter darkness and gave a good scrub to her belly button all the way down to her vagina with his hands because he said they felt like his a cascade of running water.
It didn't make sense too that everyone around him was so accepting of her, as if they had known her for ages, as if she wasn't the girl he picked up by a warehouse. Even when he took her to the modeling agency she now worked for, no one turned to ask her for a bit how they came to be. They had been expecting her, they even said. Sia particularly remembered how Inyane, a saucy gazelle, had, upon her arrival, looked her up, only to roll her eyes and say, "my, my, he did pay a good sum for you. You gonna have to make up for it."
Sia had been too tired to make sense of everything. She just wanted to keep living and working to save up enough money with Olana, as she didn't have any identification means to open one of those blockchain based bank account. And she did keep living and saving up money for two years. But the mirror, it wouldn't stop flashing memories in her head.
Image Souce: Wikipedia by Jean Metzinger Public Domain Licensed
One night in June, Olana had taken her to a birthday party of some friend of his in the financial world. She, dressed in a turquoise silk body hug that revealed her backside, was lounging close to Olana, trying hard to understand the jokes he was festively rendering, when a lady posed next to Olana and the boys. She, with her sunken in blue eyes, pale, chubby cheeks and a curvy, slender body that hugged a white mini gown, was beautiful, but not in the way every girl in the room was. She wore a smile as soon as Olana managed to notice her,
"Hi Olly."
"Hi Sandy." The look on his face was clearly one of astonishment.
"I thought you were ... I mean, when did you arrive in the country?", Olana went on to ask.
"A couple of days back. Venus is fun and all, but damn, I miss the parties and fun here. The rules up there are so stringent? Would you believe that the stellar security agents shut down a krak party because we allowed our booze touch dry ground? I think I have had enough. So, here I am."
"Yeah, here you are." Olana grinned and touched the hinderpart of his ear. He invited her to the table, and then they went on to talk about everything, his musical career, how they met in a Communicating-with-Dolphins boot camp, about the successful hybridization of fishes and humans, about the telltale comet that had been detected by an installed satellite in one of the highly populated Super Earths and what it meant for earth. They even talked about the man who had bit himself to death after injecting himself with serum from a boa constrictor with the hope of having infrared vision. Then all at once, Sandra turned to Sia and gawked,
"I see you got yourself a Torch brand."
Olana flushed when she said this, "Well yeah, I thought I should try them out."
Sandy nodded agreeably, "So she better than that whanko you got from Lanterns Inc?"
Olana took a moment to look at Sia, "Uhn, she sure is more human, more feisty, less agreeable, less bedroom manners. Just how I like it."
"But I hear those from Torch don't even know what they are up for. Doesn't that make things difficult?", Sandra pushed.
Olana briskly looked at Sia, and shrugged his shoulders, "She can't put up too much of a struggle. She's got no life without me. But jeez, look at you. You left me for a minute, and here you are, looking all sexy. Your skin glows like the globe."
Sandra blushed, "I got some quality help from Weapons. Those guys do a woman some good with their painless, natural silicones."
Olana licked his lips, "That's precious. Why not let's make out at some place, away from all this noise? I know some nice place at LHS 1140B. We will go through the Emirates Teleport station. First class. Nice and easy. What do you say?"
Sandra gave Olana one of those smiles, "That isn't a problem. You just say when. But hope you do know that you can't have me side by side with your toy."
Olana laughed loud, "No worries MiLady, she will plugged out soon. I got her on a lease."
Sandra was taken aback, "You didn't buy her?"
"I told ya I just wanted to try Torch out. And I have had enough already, especially with the whole Who-am-I drama she stages all the time. She is going back to the show room next week."
Sia didn't feel anything when she heard all these, only the same numbness she felt when she had first opened her eyes to the world. She wanted to be angry at Olana, but all she could maage to muster up was a cynical indifference to him. This indifference lasted all through their journey back to the clean apartment. Olana, drunk from all the whiskey he had taken at the birthday party. This gave Sia the opportunity to ransack his tablet until she found what she was l, looking for, the receipt of payment:
Torch Robotic Inc.
Light up your passion
Depositor's name: Olana Inks
Deposited the sum of: 0.5BTC for the lease of Torch 3.0
Purchase Details
Sex Doll
Pro-Human
Living Tissues
New Memory implant
Good has served five times earlier
Customer wishes to name her Sia Shaw.
Sia saw some other purchase invoices, one for some Selena Selden, another for Sarah Stewart. Sia skimmed through these receipts over and over again. At first, all she could think was that Olana had a proclivity for the alphabet S.
Then she thought of the many other things - the lies, the low esteem, the lack of identity. There and then, she made up her mind, made a strong, almost impossible attempt to shed a tear. When the teardrop did not come, she sat up on the clean bed sheet and waited for him.
Sia was still naked. She was still combing her hair, still staring at the mirror. But this time, she was not thinking about a past that was never hers, in the first place. She was staring at the cold body sprawled out in the reflection of the mirror, the body that had one of her machine finger stuck into its abdomen, the body once housed Olana Inks. She was also staring at the nearest tomorrow, at how a team from Torch would come to get a contract annulled, and how all they would find is a dead corpse, and a sex doll with her hair totally pulled out of her dark, wired skull. Because she had combed so hard till all the work put into her is pulled out of the very foundation, because she had scarred herself so deeply in the bathroom, she will be irreparable. They will ignore her, and rush to the man she had killed with a finger. But it would be too late.
Sia pushed the thought behind her. For now, all she had to worry about was combing her hair thoroughly, looking beautiful. She had lost so much hope, so much identity, so what did it matter if she lost a few strands of hair?
