* * *
“My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That’s how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin’ replicate
But brain’s got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.”
First-person sex — real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it — was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we’d done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch.
Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else’s, I had always selected the contrast and the rez, the texture and the attitude. The bodily functions, the resistance of competing desires, the endless foreplay that wears your tongue to the root and leaves your face sticky and glistening — just kinks, today. Options for the masochistic.
But there were no options with Chelsea. With her, everything came standard.
I indulged her. I guess I was no more patient with her perversions than she was with my ineptitude at them. Other things made it worth the effort. Chelsea would argue about anything under the sun, wry and insightful and curious as a cat. She would pounce without warning. Retired to the redundant majority, she still took such simple joy in the very act of being alive. She was impulsive and impetuous. She cared about people. Pag. Me. She wanted to know me. She wanted in.
That was proving to be a problem.
“We could try it again,” she said once in an aftermath of sweat and pheromones. “And you won’t even remember what you were so upset about. You won’t even remember you were upset, if you don’t want to.”
I smiled and looked away; suddenly the planes of her face were coarse and unappealing. “How many times is that now? Eight? Nine?”
“I just want you to be happy, Cyg. True happiness is one hell of a gift, and I can give it to you if you’ll let me.”
“You don’t want me happy,” I said pleasantly. “You want me customized.”
She mmm’d into the hollow of my throat for a moment. Then: “What?”
“You just want to change me into something more, more accommodating.”
Chelsea lifted her head. “Look at me.”
I turned my head. She’d shut down the chromatophores in her cheek; the tattoo, transplanted, fluttered now on her shoulder.
“Look at my eyes,” Chelsea said.
I looked at the imperfect skin around them, at the capillaries wriggling across the whites. I felt a distant bemusement that such flawed, decaying organs were still able to hypnotize me on occasion.
“Now,” Chelsea said. “What do you mean by that?”
I shrugged. “You keep pretending this is a partnership. We both know it’s a competition.”
“A competition.”
“You’re trying to manipulate me into playing by your rules.”
“What rules?”
“The way you want the relationship run. I don’t blame you, Chelse, not in the least. We’ve been trying to manipulate each other for as long as — hell, it’s not even Human nature. It’s mammalian.”
“I don’t believe it.” She shook her head. Ropy tendrils of hair swung across her face. “It’s the middle of the twenty-first Century and you’re hitting me with this war of the sexes bullshit?”
“Granted, your tweaks are a pretty radical iteration. Get right in there and reprogram your mate for optimum servility.”
“You actually think I’m trying to, to housebreak you? You think I’m trying to train you like a puppy?”
“You’re just doing what comes naturally.”
“I can’t believe you’d pull this shit on me.”
“I thought you valued honesty in relationships.”
“What relationship? According to you there’s no such thing. This is just — mutual rape, or something.”
“That’s what relationships are.”
“Don’t pull that shit on me.” She sat up, swung her feet over the edge of the bed. Putting her back to me. “I know how I feel. If I know anything I know that much. And I only wanted to make you happy.”
“I know you believe that,” I said gently. “I know it doesn’t feel like a strategy. Nothing does when it’s wired that deeply. It just feels right, it feels natural. It’s nature’s trick.”
“It’s someone’s fucking trick.”
I sat up next to her, let my shoulder brush hers. She leaned away.
“I know this stuff,” I said after a while. “I know how people work. It’s my job.”
It was hers too, for that matter. Nobody who spliced brains for a living could possibly be unaware of all that basic wiring in the sub-basement. Chelsea had simply chosen to ignore it; to have admitted anything would have compromised her righteous anger.
I could have pointed that out too, I suppose, but I knew how much stress the system could take and I wasn’t ready to test it to destruction. I didn’t want to lose her. I didn’t want to lose that feeling of safety, that sense that it made a difference whether I lived or died. I only wanted her to back off a bit. I only wanted room to breathe.
“You can be such a reptile sometimes,” she said.
Mission accomplished.