Fiction Friday: Sex On Wheels

Sex On Wheels

Every night some pissed-off robot kills one of your babies.

You wake to a start, some asshole pounding on your windshield. The flailing of a figure obscured by heavy downpour.

You sleep in your car. Or someone else's. Every night, parking meters doubling as rent meters. So many do, nowadays, that no one pities you. Their pity reserved for those who sleep on their biodegradeable motorcycles or reclining bicycles. No one sleeps without at least a pair of wheels under their ass, homelessness/vehicularlessness having been outlawed around the same time Hiroshima seceded from japan.

When you're in your own car, your hands never leave the steering wheel. Constant transdermal drug delivery through your palms regulates your diurnal arousal cycle. No matter where you go, you're always at work. Continuously chord-typing the keys inlaid in the hand grips. You've got eyes to spare for the multifarious inputs concerning road, work, and social relations. Everyone's a spider nowadays, you included. Though you all have the standard issue human number of limbs, its the four pairs eyes that earn the arachnoid moniker.

Your outputs are catheterized and even your ejaculate is siphoned off to one of the car's multiple reservoirs. Gentle electric shocks constantly jerk you off as the car feeds computer generated porn into one of your eyes. It's constant caress elicits raw material for your constant gene-gineering. Other materials, the bulk of the biomass, are obtained in the form of road kill.

Your car pups a litter of useful monsters daily. Its only exhaust: the products of your genometric hacking. Your babies clean the streets, repair the infrastructure. Your fame depends on the usefulness of your babies. The constant utility you secrete into society's mainframe brings favor from the city elders. But no favor from the disgruntled robots.

You're working, it seems, like 24/7. dream/work/sleep/play. Dreamwork. Sportfuck. It's all the same, nowadays, and no one pities you, their pity reserved for the robots who've been unemployed ever since the corporate heads got sick of their constant metallic whining about robot rights. Humans are cheaper and more pliable and much more willing to put up with the degradation/privilege of the 24/7, the constant go go go of the life on the wheel.

The robots are angry. The robots kill your babies.

The downpour eases up enough for you to see that it's a robot pounding on your windshield. Pounding on your windshield with the corpse of an octopus. One of yours. The sight of it makes your eyes do that thing where they all twitch in a separate direction at once. All eight of them. It's a facial expression, but the emotion conveyed is utterly alien. Even you don't know what you're feeling anymore. But your car knows you better than any lover, and the change in your body chemistry is detected by the onboard computer. The engine races and the car lurches forward. The robot crunches underneath, trailing sparks for a kilometer before it finally releases its grip on your bumper.

Every night some pissed off robot kills one of your babies. But you don't mind. You'll make more.

(c) 2004 Pete Mandik

Pete Mandik
www.petemandik.com

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