Carlisle never believed the stories about Dr. Magda Boanak he’d heard around the campus. There was no way she had walked the length of the Trans-Siberian railroad as a teenager, and no way she had worked her way through grad school by appearing in bondage videos. When he ventured into her basement lab, waving a printout of cost overruns, he refused to be intimidated by her reputation.
“What the hell have you been doing down here?” he demanded. “I never authorized these expenditures.”
Magda Boanak sat in her basement lab, with a pink, hairless, buck-toothed and nearly eyeless creature perched on her shoulder. “I must admit I’ve done some creative accounting, Mr. Carlisle, but I’ve definitely achieved results.” She gave him the kind of smug smile that Carlisle had only seen on the face of his newly born again sister-in-law.
“So you actually have created a new anaesthetic?”
“Not exactly.” Boanak picked the naked mole rat off her shoulder, cooing to it. Carlisle could see other rat things crawling through the tunnels in the giant glass-walled ant farm that took up one wall. “Here, I’ll show you.”
She clicked the laptop next to her. The video it started playing showed one of the rats strapped to a lab bench, munching on greens, while Boanak lit a butane torch and held it to the animal –
Carlisle paled, and turned away from the sight. “My god, you’ve been torturing them?”
“No, I have not. If you’ll just listen, that’s precisely the point. Naked mole rats do not feel pain, remember? So logically, I could not torture them. That particular subject kept right on eating while I — ”
Carlisle slammed the laptop’s screen down. “I know, I read your grant proposal, remember?” he said, mocking her condescending tone. “They don’t produce a neurotransmitter, Substance P.”
If that bothered her, there was no sign. “I found that’s only part of it. Their brains also lack a structure found in all other mammal species. It took me a while to identify what it did, but when I figured it out, it was very, very interesting. This structure activated when animals are in pain, but also when they were hungry, deprived of companionship, or otherwise suffering. I found the neurological seat of anguish, and furthermore, it’s redundant.”
She poked her finger at the rat’s mouth and let it gnaw on her, without any reaction.
“Disable the suffering centre by the injection of one milligram of ethanol in just the right spot of the brain and there you go. Those lab mice over there — ” she pointed at another set of cages behind her, “ — after I gave them the treatment, were just as good at figuring out mazes to get to food as the controls. Better, in fact. No matter how hungry they got, they never gave up. Inspirational.
“These creatures are blessed.” She kissed the rat on its pink bare tail. “They bond, breed, seek resources, build homes, engage in territorial battles and do everything other mammals do, including us, but they do not suffer. I mean, think about that. Life not only without pain, but without suffering, without anguish. Wouldn’t a being like that, combined with human intelligence, be… better in every way?”
She lifted her hair, revealing a freshly shaved patch of her scalp with dot of red in the center. “So, I tried it out myself.”
Carlisle staggered back from her, bumping into a chair and collapsing into it. Carlisle had worked in the university for more than thirty years, and had met plenty of eccentrics, but he had never been in the presence of an actual mad scientist before.
“You’re going to freak out now,” she said, shaking her head. “Tell me I’ve lost my humanity with my capacity for suffering and other sentimental nonsense. People cling to such obsolete notions of human nature, like still believing the world is flat.”
Scenarios from bad movies flitted through Carlisle’s mind. “Now you’re going to kill me to keep your secret.”
Boanak rolled her chair forward and patted his knee. “No, no, no. When I knew you were coming, I weighed the options and realized that killing you would ultimately be counter-productive.”
“Oh, thanks.” He cringed back from her touch.
She leaned back and resumed stroking the mole rat. “However, before you arrived, I’ve emailed my work to every major neurology researcher in the world. Also to several body modification and mind expansion forums. I’ve decided to take my research open source, which violates the terms of my contract, but it’s for the greater good.” She picked up a nail file and began manicuring herself.
Carlisle buried his face in his hands, barely able to look at her, his head spinning with the thought of the university’s liability. “How could you do this to yourself?”
“Sooner or later, one way or another, something better than, more than, human is going to come. Why not now? And why not me?”
Carlisle forgot his next question when he realized it wasn’t a nail file at all.
Dr. Boanak pried the nail off the last of her fingers with the scalpel and held her hand out, fingers splayed, admiring the effect. “I’ve never felt better in my life.”
Peter Tupper is a writer and journalist in Vancouver, BC. He has a forthcoming collection of steampunk erotica stories, The Innocent’s Progress, coming soon from Circlet Press.
This story was sponsored by
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Harry sat in his easy chair by the window. The sun slid off his balding scalp and lit the silver fringe around his ears, so it shone like a fallen halo. He shuffled the pages of the daily newspaper and gave soft snorts and grunts as he read.
“Bloody government, what are they playing at? Bring back the birch, that’d stop teenage thugs. All they ever think about is violence and sex,” he muttered.
Mabel put down her knitting and lifted her eyes to the ceiling. She gave a sigh and made for the bedroom of their small bungalow. A little sex and violence wouldn’t come amiss in their relationship, she thought as she sat on the end of the bed and looked at the wide array of photos on the dresser. Photos taken forty or more years before, when she and Harry first met and married.
She lifted the nearest one and ran her finger across the newly settled dust. Harry’s eager brown eyes looked out at her from a beach scene. It was only due to her persistence they’d made love in that very spot later that night. Beyond the sand dunes waves broke over the sand in rhythm to his slow strokes. She’d worn full-sized pink rayon knickers with a little lace at the edge, and they’d turned him on. The sight of the thongs of today would probably give him a heart attack. Even when a young man he’d been reserved where sex was concerned, she thought.
That one short episode on the seashore was the only time lovemaking hadn’t occurred on the big old double bed with the feather mattress. Mabel longed for passion, to be tumbled and fumbled in a haystack, leapt upon on bath nights, taken by surprise over the kitchen table. Harry would have been shocked to have read her thoughts. She smiled and laid a wrinkled hand on the pink nylon counterpane, patted it as one would a dog, and stretched to lift her Bible from the bedside table.
Among the yellow-edged pages her eyes rested on a pressed flower. A flush rose to her cheeks; her life had not been completely without passion. There was a summer, when Harry refused to give up his bowls night and Mabel had gone to her best friend’s wedding alone. She’d danced with a tall and slim stranger — dark curls fell across his forehead, and his brown eyes were gentle. He’d touched her lightly on the shoulder.
“Can I have this dance?’ he’d said.
Blood rushed to her cheeks and she nodded acceptance. He rested his hand on the small of her back and pulled her close. He’d smelled of pine forest and peppermint, and the heat from his breath warmed her neck.
His fingers twined about hers, he whispered, ‘You’re the prettiest girl here.’
Side by side on a hotel sofa, they looked out at the setting sun, toasted the bride, and then each other. They talked, his fingertips brushed her hand and desire, like the bubbles in the champagne they drank, rushed through Mabel’s limbs and her head spun.
He leaned into her and whispered against her cheek, ‘Your hair is the colour of corn silk and your mouth, a dewy cushion waiting to be kissed.’
Later, they’d lain on the grass in the purple shadows at the bottom of the garden. His kisses had been insistent, warm, and dry, and her heart thudded beneath his hand. They made love, and Mabel gave no thought to consequence. For her it was the want to give him something in return for making her feel desirable. When they were spent, he’d rolled onto his stomach and plucked a nearby violet.
He pressed the flower into her palm. ‘This isn’t as soft as your skin, but I’ll always think of you when they’re in bloom.’
Mabel closed the book with a small sigh and replaced it on the table. Times had moved on and the modern girl would laugh at those words.
She rose stiffly. No, my life has not been without romance or passion, not quite.
She tucked a wayward, grey hair back into place and opened the bedroom door.
“Fancy a cup of tea, Harry?”
Harry didn’t look up from the newspaper. “Yes, and a biscuit, as long as they’re fresher than the ones we had yesterday, they were too soft to dunk.”
Maureen Wilkinson is a British writer, who starts with the idea of writing a moving literary piece and always seems to end up with a dead body. Ah well, maybe some day!
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My wife comes home with a new pair of arms. “What do you think?” she asks while turning to show them in the light of the kitchen window. They are smooth rubber unlike her last pair which were plastic and had seams where the two halves joined in the mold. The new arms are more attractive because they look more like skin, but I already miss her old ones. When we watch TV on the couch at night, I liked to pick the flakes of thin plastic away from her seams.
“How much were they?” I ask.
“We can afford them,” she says bending her elbows. There is a click when she does, the joint locking to maintain various poses. “Aren’t they cool?”
She is paying the bills and rent while I go to school, so I really can’t argue. I say they are nice and that she looks great in them. And she does, she looks like a different woman.
We turn out to love her arms. Men on the street check her out when she goes by and people in general seem to want to be near her. At home, she laughs more often and wants to make love in new ways and I feel closer to her. I like how my hands stick to her rubber when I sweat and the locking elbows allow her to hold me without her arms getting tired. I grow to like them so much that when she is laid off from her job, I don’t put them on the list of things we can do without until she finds work again.
Instead we get rid of the cable and the car. My wife spends her days faxing resumes and staying in her pajamas to save on laundry bills. While I study, I look up to stare at her posed beautifully at her desk. I tell her how wonderful she is, how much she means to me, and how proud she makes me. “You never said these things to me before,” she says. I don’t tell her it’s because of the arms.
Finally, she gets an interview. Since we had to give up our car, she has to walk through a bad neighborhood. Along the way, she is mugged and beaten. A witness calls the police, but by the time she gets to the hospital, the doctors say it’s too late and she’ll need a new torso.
We don’t have any health care so I have to take out a loan and opt for the cheapest torso on the market. I don’t watch the surgery, afraid to see her dismembered. In post-op, she covers herself in the hospital blanket and won’t talk to me. The doctors say it will take her a while to get over the trauma and that I need to be patient.
She won’t let me see her naked when we get home. She needs time, she says. We no longer sleep in the same bed and I miss the click of her arms before she holds me. I try to get her to tell me what happened, but she says she can’t. Then the bank starts calling three times a day because we haven’t made payments on the torso loan and they threaten to take her arms if we default. I’m sure if we keep them, everything will go back to normal. “Just let the bank take them,” she says, “I don’t want them anyway.” I tell her she doesn’t mean that and I’ll figure it out. I have a year left of school before I can find reasonable work, so I quit and take work as a laborer.
One night, I come home early and accidentally walk in on her while she’s in the shower. Her new torso is the same plastic as her old arms. The water runs off her in rivulets, beading on her shoulders. I startle her, and she turns to face me. Her new breasts have a conventional shape, but her nipples are gone. She bends her arms and covers herself, but not before I see her sex is missing too. There is nothing but bare shining plastic.
She cries. She says she is sorry she kept this from me, but she didn’t know how to explain. I get into the shower with her. I say it doesn’t matter. I hold her closely, smoothing my hands over her and she locks her arms around me.
“You’re sure it doesn’t matter?” she asks.
“I’m sure,” I say.
That night she lets me back into the bed with her. Then the night after, too. She says she is lucky to have me. I try to be happy, but I want things to be back the way they were supposed to be. I figure we can buy her a new torso in a year if she just goes back to work. I press her to go on the job hunt, and when she says she still needs time, I’m angry. I know I need to give her the time she needs if we are going to get back to normal, but I have a hard time talking to her.
I stop telling her anything, even about my day, because I’m afraid I might snap and tell her I hate her. I try to cover by saying ‘I love you’ as much as I can, but even I can see my anger under everything. Soon, I move back to the couch, every morning saying I just fell asleep in front of the TV.
It goes on like this, then one night after work I find her standing in the bedroom doorway. She is in her red nightgown, but her arms are gone. I’m going to ask, but she stops me and tells me to unbutton her. I obey. Underneath are ruby rubber nipples and a fleshy, blow-up pussy.
“Where are your arms?”
“Gone,” she says. “Now, come back to me.”
Shane Oshetski lives high and dry in Boulder, Colorado. He’s a graduate of the writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
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“This is ridiculous,” Eric sighed and studied the woman lying next to him. She was gorgeous, even in the murky darkness of the bedroom. Raven black hair, ocean blue eyes, wine red lips, alabaster skin. A real Greek God’s pin-up girl. She was perfect. What man wouldn’t love her?
One more time. Just to make sure. He slowly traced a line down her arm, from elbow to fingertip. No sizzle. No sparks. No warm, pink line appearing like a jet contrail behind his finger. He felt only her silky smooth skin. She didn’t wake up. She didn’t gasp at the shock of his touch. She rolled over and murmured something about coffee.
This wasn’t what he expected when they met at the party two weeks ago. It was love at first sight. He was sure of it, until he casually touched her elbow during a conversation about seafood restaurants. Nothing happened. Not even a zap of static electricity. She smiled at him and described a grilled salmon dinner.
Eric slipped out of bed and made his way to the bathroom. The bare light bulbs over the mirror cast jagged, gray shadows on his face. He looked and felt tired and demented.
“Father, why did you curse me like this?” he whispered.
A booming baritone voice came from the toilet, “So that you will know when you find true love.”
“Um, you’re speaking through the toilet.”
“So? I am speaking to you. Why does it matter?”
“Because I need to pee.”
“Very well.” The voice was now coming from the corroded shower head. “Is this better? Or did you need to take a shower too?”
Eric sighed, “What do you want, father?”
“You asked me a question. I answered. Now I have a question for you.”
Eric flushed the toilet, shook his head and muttered, “Here it comes.”
“Why are you wasting your time with this woman? You know she isn’t your true love. Your mother and I would like some grandchildren soon.”
“I don’t think having fun is a waste of time.” Eric dried his hands on a thread-bare towel. “Besides, why do I need to have children with my true love? Plain old lust will solve that problem.”
“Nonsense!” A spray of rusty water flew out of the shower head. “Only mortals can reproduce without love.”
“You could’ve picked a different way to let me know when I’ve found her,” Eric whined, “Do you really think a woman will want to stay with me after I give her second degree burns?”
“You said you were looking for a love burning with passion. That’s what I gave you.”
“I didn’t mean it literally.”
“Picky, picky. You know the searing heat thing will only happen the first time you touch her. Then you’ll be back to your normal, boring self.”
“Whatever, father.” Eric shifted his weight from foot to foot. He was naked and it was cold in the dingy bathroom. “Haven’t you ever heard of once bitten, twice shy?”
“No, I have not.” The voice paused for a few seconds. “You know, you don’t need to bite them. A simple touch will do.”
“I know that.” Eric ran his fingers through his hair, turning it into a spiky, wild mess. “Are we done?”
“Fine. Until next time, son.”
Eric turned off the light and stood in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust. Her bedroom was messier than expected. The closet doors couldn’t close because of the tangle of clothes and shoes spilling out of it. More clothes were draped over the back of a rocking chair near the window. A small table next to the chair was covered with precariously stacked books.
Books. He had never been able to understand the obsession some mortals had with them. What was the big deal? They were just a bunch of words printed on paper.
The portrait of a beautiful woman on one of the covers caught his attention. Why did the beautiful, real woman sleeping in the bed want to read this book? He picked it up and examined it in the pale moonlight. The book felt odd in his hands, peculiarly warm. A wisp of white smoke curled through the darkness as Eric watched charred halos forming around his fingertips. He had found true love.
“Father isn’t going to like this.”
Janel Gradowski lives and writes among the farm fields of central Michigan. She is a wife, mother and dog owner, among other things. Her fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in many print and online publications.
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“Come out!” shouted Chen, beating the bushes with his stick. “Come out, little maggot! Just wait ‘til I get you, I’ll stripe your legs! I’ll…”
He didn’t get to finish. Dai broke from the tangled growth beside the tannery and dashed for the trees. He looked like a tiny deer, his large brown eyes wide with fear as he bolted.
Chen was too quick for him. He lunged forward and thrust his foot in front of his younger brother, sending him sprawling face-first into the dust of the yard. Dai yelped and tried to jump up, but Chen was upon him straight away, picking him up and shaking him.
“What’s the matter with you? If I have to mind you, you’re coming with me. I’m not going to hang around here all day watching you playing in the dirt. We’re going fishing and that’s that.”
“No way!” shouted Dai, wriggling and squirming. “Get off!”
After a short while, Chen managed to calm Dai down and they began their walk to the river. As they passed through the fields, old Xu waved to them from behind the two tawny oxen that were pulling his plough. Dai loved seeing Xu working with the staunch, longhorned beasts. He looked like Old Father Nature from one of his Da’s woodcuts. From Xu’s, the trail wound its way through the verdant hollows at the base of White Crane Knoll, a steeply impressive outcrop of wooded rock. Lazy avian figures drifted to and fro about its higher reaches, like lost souls searching the misty heights.
The hollow led to Wixie Dell, which bordered the river on its south bank. The dell was one reason why Dai hadn’t wanted to go with Chen. Wixies were pernicious tree sprites, and the children had often heard tales of how little boys and girls had been kidnapped by the bogles, who had then imitated their forms and gone home in their stead to eat their grandparents.
Chen marched along in front of Dai, not seeming to care whether he followed or not, thrashing at flowers and undergrowth with his stick.
“Chen,” called Dai, his voice small and afraid, “wait for me, please, I’m telling if you leave me here.”
Chen turned suddenly, his face a mask of rage. “Your brother is gone!” he shouted. “I am Wai-tan-goru, King of the Legions of Wixie, and you must prepare to die,maggot.”
Dai screamed, bursting into tears. Like monsoon rain on a window the drops clouded his vision, as he stood there, sobbing helplessly. He could hear Chen guffawing to himself, could picture him telling every girl he met about how he had scared little pissy-knickers Dai.
Dai looked up in time to see Chen disappearing around a corner in the trail, brandishing his stick before him like a sword. Drying his eyes, and trying not to blubber, he ran to catch up.
“Chen,” he panted, “could you get a stick for me?”
“Ha-ha shen-ru, and why would a little maggot need a sword? You’d probably cut your leg off, and I’d have to do all your work as well. Wait ‘til you’re my age.”
They came to the bank of the river and Chen found them a peaceful spot, warning Dai to stay quiet. The river was old here, and idled past them in a copper wash, its silent depths reflecting the amber sky. Tiny cherry blossoms drifted by on the light breeze, settling themselves gently on the almost-still waters. The only sound was the faint susurrus of the breeze stirring the branches of the ancient trees that lined the bank. Chen let Dai trail his feet in the cool water as he himself luxuriated on the warm grass.
“Chen! Chen! help!”
Chen sat up, fragments of a dream fleeing before him. Dai was standing, one foot on the bank, the other in the water, battling with something on the end of his line. Not far out, the water churned sporadically. “Chen!” shouted Dai, overwrought, “Help!”
“Alright, Dai, steady… steady,” coaxed Chen as he came behind Dai and supported his arms. He could feel the pull coming through the line. It was big, whatever it was.
Twenty minutes later they sat there panting on the bank, looking at the magnificent specimen before them. The fish’s slick green sides still heaved with the effort of the struggle, and its tail still flicked every now and then.
“Well done, Dai, well done,” said Chen, tousling his hair. “He’s longer than your arm! Wait ‘til Dad sees him!” As he spoke, Chen threaded the fish on to the line so that they could carry it easily. Dai stood too, brushing the dust from the wet spots on his breeches. He was smiling fit to crack his face. Chen looked very old as he lopped the fins off the fish and threw them out onto the waters. He was muttering the San-sai or prayer of thanks.
The sun was beginning to sink as the brothers turned towards home, and its vast orange globe silhouetted the two forms; Chen with the prodigious fish slung over his shoulder and Dai, the diminutive hero of the day trailing behind. Dai was watching Chen closely as he swaggered along jubilantly. Chen had been a real big brother to him, and his expressive dark eyes were full of love and admiration for him.
“Dai!” called Chen over his shoulder, “do you want to carry my sword?”
Peter C. Loftus’s short stories have appeared in Focus Magazine, Visionary Tongue, Midnight Street, Alienskin, Byzarium and Monomyth, among others, and have been longlisted for both the Fish and Aeon short fiction competitions. He is a regular reviewer for Interzone (UK) and Imhotep (Nor). He is the main writer for the Irish Longstone Comics and Co-Editor of Albedo 1, Ireland’s leading science fiction magazine.
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