“I need you to talk to someone,” Terry said over the lip of his cup. His gold bangs nearly dipped into the steaming americano, but he didn’t seem to notice; his eyes glued to Leandra’s face.460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡY72ARUQ0Hz
Lean’s brows pulled together minutely for only a second before she stated, “Who?”
“Her name is Ema. She’s my newest model. You can hardly tell the difference anymore. Everything’s fluid about her. I went more for serpentine-like grace… and surprisingly that means a little more masculinity than an outsider would suspect,” Terry said, the words pouring out of him. Clearly, they were rehearsed.
Lean, satisfied that she had pegged him correctly from the start, closed her cocoa eyes and took a sip of her cappuccino. She was most comfortable in a conversation where she knew the aspirations of the opposite party. She could have sighed in contentment. Instead, she set her cup down and looked off to the side, pretending to consider his words. “You sound like the pitch in a brochure. The question is: What are you trying to sell me, Terence?” She locked eyes with him then, pinning him.
Terry shrugged, defeated. “We just need your approval for market, that’s it.”
Lean rolled her eyes. “As if the industry wasn’t saturated enough... Now you’re saying you’ve created the perfect woman by making her more male. Like it hasn’t been done before!” She snorted, saying, “You do know why they haven’t made them more masculine before, right? Too vindictive. Too grudging. Practically Valkyries--no--Harpies!” She sat back in her chair, shaking her head. “Serpentine-like grace,” she scoffed.
“Aren’t women vindictive? Aren’t they grudging?” Terry challenged with half a laugh, unperturbed. His unshaken countenance threw Lean off for a moment. There was something he wasn’t telling her behind those empty jabs. She squinted her eyes, remained unimpressed. Terry said, “Just meet her, Leandra. She may surprise you.”
“How many models have you made?” Lean demanded.
Terence could tell he’d peaked her interest with his insistence. He smirked. “Only the one. You could say she’s a prototype, but as soon as she’s approved, her framework is hitting the factory floor… provided you don’t want to change anything, of course.”
Lean raised an eyebrow. “So sure of her, are you?”
Terry leaned back, finished with his drink. “Certain,” he said adamantly.
Lean nodded slowly. “I’ll meet her. If only to get you to stop harassing Julie,” she said with a small smile, referring to her receptionist. Terence gave her a sheepish grin. Then Leandra said, “On another subject, how’s the gigolo project coming along?”
Terence laughed. “Not cumming at all, really. The testing groups have been pretty dissatisfied.”
Lean smiled knowingly. “Can I meet him?”
A little warily, Terence shook his head. “It’s not ready yet. It keeps misfiring--the software I mean. It keeps misreading the subjects… and doesn’t last as long. It’s recovery time is ridiculous, but since it has to perform three or four times for the tester to be satisfied, things get messy...”
Leandra laughed loudly, showing teeth. “It sounds ready for market!”
It was Terry’s turn to roll his eyes. “In that case, I’ll arrange a rendezvous.”
Lean nodded ecstatically. “Make him blond, tall, and quiet--Well, you know my type.”
With another roll of his eyes, Terry tucked his blond bangs behind his ear. “Uh huh.”
“Hello Dr. Hayes,” Melanie greeted. She was a dated model; maybe third generation. She wasn’t smarter than your average smart phone application, but her movements were telegraphic and she had a pleasant range of expressions. She hadn’t initially been programmed for office work, but her original code built around service (sexual and otherwise) made her predisposed to performing well as a receptionist. She stood from her desk with no movement out of place and proffered Leandra a clipboard. “Please fill out this form and return it to my desk when you are through,” she said with an affectionate smile that came off as overly friendly.
Leandra didn’t reply as she took the form and quickly jotted down her contact information and her reason for visiting. Before Melanie was seated, Lean handed the clipboard over the desk. The model hesitated only a second, but it was enough of a flinch for Lean to notice that her processes were slow. It was as if the model had debated with itself in real time whether or not to sit all the way down in the chair before standing again. Lean smirked as she turned to Terence, saying, “Can’t afford to spare a Mikayla?”
Terry shrugged, his hands buried in his suit pockets. “She works.”
“That’s all she does,” Lean said critically.
“Does she need to do anything else?” Terence wondered. Lean pursed her lips as he flashed his badge at the model. Melanie merely smiled at him and offered him a simple greeting and a go-ahead. “Thank you, Melanie. By the way, you’re looking lovely today.”
The model put a hand to her face. “Oh, please Mr. Whitaker. You’ll make me blush.”
Lean snorted at him when he winked at the receptionist. Then Terry motioned for Leandra to follow him. “To the third floor,” he stated.
“She’s still at R&D? I thought you said her framework hits the killing floor as soon as I’ve approved her...” Leandra said suspiciously.
Upon entering the elevator, Terry slapped his badge against the readout and gave Lean a sidelong glance. “More creature comforts in R&D, and I need the coffee.”
“I hope that means air conditioning.”
“Only the best for you, Doctor.”
Doctor Leandra Hayes, self-made behavioralist, and Mister Terence Whitaker, self-styled entrepreneur, made their way through Research and Development's glass hallways, turning this way and that at sharp hexagonal angles like they were in a maze made for bees. The walls were windows, peering into glass cells that made up the honeycomb of the floor. It was the cleanest area in the building. Most areas on the main campus were falling apart, but not R&D. Too much money poured through it, like life-giving honey, for it to go to industry standard like the rest of Ivory Standard Robotics and its primary stakeholder, Eden Pleasure Models.
“The glass is new,” Lean remarked.
“We don’t keep secrets here,” Terry said blandly.
“Special access?” Leandra let herself enjoy a smug smile.
“Of course,” he said obliviously, waving his keycard.
“Low-qual compared to the penthouse upstairs,” Lean criticized. “This prototype of yours… I would have thought you’d keep her somewhere a non-disclosure agreement couldn’t touch. You know, people are easier to buy than systems are to hack these days.”
Terry smirked at that, pulling a glass door. “You see any people around here, Leandra?”
At that, she looked around, studious. That was when she noticed. Everywhere she looked she saw a Mikayla or a Delilah or a Jessica, their bald heads baby smooth, their faces unpainted and expressionless. They all moved with that same deceptive assuredness that belied the pathing software they were instilled with. They knew where to be hours from now, working at full capacity for every hour of the day. Machines making machines. Lovers crafting more lovers.
Lean frowned. “Never thought I’d see the day human beings would be the limiting factor in a creative enterprise.”
“Right now, security is more important than a breakthrough. As soon as you meet Ema… you’ll understand everything,” Terry said, his voice tapering off as they came at last to a frosted glass door. “She’s through here.” He met eyes with the doctor. “Are you ready?”
Lean crossed her arms and nodded, trying not to let her nervousness show. It wasn’t the prospect of assessing a new model that had her peeked. It was Terry’s worship of it. Terence was always overly excited whenever a new model came out, but he’d always respected his and Leandra’s working relationship. In those instances, he’d mail her a manilla folder and she’d stamp YES or NO on the folder after going through it. His enthusiasm had been nothing but a formality in the past.
But now--going out of his way to invite her in person, when people hardly ever met in the flesh anymore--he was acting like a messenger for this Ema model who, for all intents and purposes, seemed to be innocently beckoning the doctor to come and see.
She took a deep breath as he slapped his pass to the console aside the door handle.
She let it out as soon as the room was revealed. Enough candles were lit that she hardly noticed the lack of unnatural light. The poured concrete gave way to shag carpet at the threshold. There was rich, cherry furniture, a comfortable-looking beige loveseat, contemporary red rugs, and designer pillows scattered everywhere. The room was made up like a high-end hotel room, complete with desk and a Void VR Center.
A woman came around the corner, from the bathroom, and blanched when she saw Leandra in the doorway. “Oh,” she said, her voice lacking any sort of metallic quality that might have given her away. She had a towel around her head and a silk, auburn robe draped over the curves of her bust and hips. She ruffled the towel at the back of her neck before pulling it off, letting damp red hair hang around her shoulder. “I did not hear you two come in.”
“Sorry to bother you Ema, this is Doctor Leandra Hayes. I brought her by for the interview,” Terry said, an unsettlingly anxious texture coating his words. “We can come back?”
Ema just smiled warmly as she toweled off her hair. “No, it is fine. I should apologize. I took too long in the bath. The water was just so perfect, I could not help myself. I will be ready in a moment. Then we can get started.” She took her time as she turned back around and languidly went back to the bathroom. It wasn’t long before the sound of a blow dryer reached them, along with the mellow sound of someone humming a tuneless song.
Terence closed the door behind them and gestured to the couch as Lean barked, “Why?”
“Why?” Terry echoed in confusion.
“Why does she bathe? Or hum for that matter. What’s the point?”
Terry smiled serenely as he ran a hand through his blond tresses. “There’s something I haven’t told you yet, Leandra.” He propped his feet up on the coffee table and rested back in the cushions, totally at ease.
She squinted at him as she sat next to him, pushing back into the corner of the cushions to give him more room and keep her distance from him as much as socially possible. “You didn’t.”460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFrILLu0sL6
His mouth turned into a dark, flat line. “I didn’t.”
“You gave her an autonomous AI! She prefers things! You can’t do this, Terence. I can’t approve something like this. That kind of tech is too fucking dangerous.”
“Keep your damned voice down,” he whispered, his voice deadpan, but his eyes wide with irritation. “I told you… I did not give her an AI. And it didn’t develop on its own either. It’s like I said, there’s something I haven’t told you, Dr. Hayes. If you want to know the secret, be patient, stick around, and do the goddamned interview as planned… Then if you have fucking reservations, we can address them, but not until then.” He snorted airily then. “And it wouldn’t kill you to smile. She’s exceptionally nice, I promise.”
Ema eventually reappeared out of the bathroom, her red hair curling about her collarbone, her body sheathed in skin-tight jeans and heather graphic tee. She could have passed for any Jenny on the block, but her movements were too precise, her proportions a bit too symmetrical. She was riding the downward spiral into the Uncanny Valley, but only just. It left Lean feeling unsettled but fascinated, and she didn’t like the sensation. She wanted to be the one in control, but Terence had taken that from her. He and this “Ema” model held all the cards at the present moment.
The model sat on the rug before them, positioned three feet from the faux fireplace set in the bottom center of the Void Center, her back arched like she was enjoying the heat. “I apologize. I had been planning to be ready by the time you arrived, but I got distracted. This time is so… rich.”
“I’m more of an after dark person myself,” Lean said.
Ema chuckled at this, her perfect cupid’s bow smile parting just enough to show perfect teeth. “Right,” she said. “And I find myself partial to the Stratego Era, but that is neither here nor there. I am not here to force my opinions. I am here to answer questions.”
“When were you commissioned?” Lean asked and Terry opened his mouth to respond. “I’m talking to Ema, Mr. Whitaker,” she said shortly.
Ema nodded. “Yes. The basics first. This is an acceptable question. I will be made on the interstellar craft, called The Aegis, in Earth year 2465--also known as the 60th Shield Year. My creator will be Terence Mitchell Whitaker.”
Lean laughed. “Alright. So you can lie. That’s an interesting feature. When were you really commissioned?”
“Are you hard of hearing, Dr. Hayes? I will be commissioned more than four hundred years from now. This is possible because I have been sent back in time to alter the sequence of events according to the wishes of my creator and his associates.”
Lean sighed. “Terence…”
Terry sat back in his seat. “I don’t know how else to make you believe… I would get on with your questions, Leandra.”
The behavioralist shook her head and stood, grabbing her purse. “No… No… Uh-uh. I’ve seen this movie a thousands times. It never ends well. I don’t care if it’s real or it’s a joke. One way or the other, I’m done here. I’ll see myself out.”
“Lean!” Terry stood up and grabbed her wrist. She stopped and let him come close as he said quietly, “Look, this is why I invited you… I’ve already ran some basic diagnostics on her and what I’ve uncovered is nothing short of… insanity. So I needed to find out from one of the most sane people I know. I need to know if she’s telling the truth. You have to tell me.”460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡC5E2fQRVy2
Leandra Hayes blinked a couple times before she asked, “What does she want?”460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUMQl6KYPr9
“She wants to take me to the future. Not to her future, but just before. They need me to make her again. Ema is a prototype. I wasn’t lying about that part. She is supposed to be the predecessor to a vessel that can house a human soul… She’s basically the first disk drive for a human being’s mind… I’m destined to make the first real step towards immortality.”460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkOjmmdfG0D
The doctor’s eyes were wide and she felt her heart rate spike as she breathed the words, “You… are… fucking… crazy.” She turned, reaching for the door.
“Leandra Clancy Hayes,” Ema said from the floor, making her hesitate. “Do you want to know what will happen to you? Do you want to know what you have already done in the service of your species' longevity? You are as much a key player as Mr. Whitaker.”460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5Gd2kgUlBV
Terry looked back at Ema, confusion on his face, as Lean took a handful of angry steps towards the model sitting crisscross on the floor. “Excuse me, but you don’t know the first thing about me,” she growled, trying not to raise her voice. She pointed at the model’s face and said, “Whoever sent you should have known better. I’m not as altruistic as you think I am.”460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡY0v8GgGhl4
“No, you are not,” Ema agreed. “But you still consider yourself a humanist.” Before Lean could retort, the model turned her green gaze on Terry. “Mr. Whitaker, I would like to talk to Leandra alone now, please.”460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDMWS9Xoib9
Terry looked between the two for a moment and it when it appeared he wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon, Lean glanced over at him and her eyes stuck to his face. Gone was the open worship and the snide smirk. His brows were right atop his long lashes, and he stood stock still, staring at Ema like he was seeing her for the first time. He suspected something and he didn’t like it, whatever it was. Then, he noticed Leandra watching him, and the suspicious expression melted away as he turned, jamming his hands in his pockets. The door shut behind him with an audible hiss, sealing the two women inside together.460Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCRcIpMLLvn
Ema stood up and closed the gap between her and Leandra. Her chest rose and fell in silent breaths as she studied the doctor’s face. Leandra felt naked under the scrutiny. She let her purse drop to the floor, its strap snaking down after it and pooling on the floor. Ema said, “There are two things I want to make extremely clear before you ask your questions. I will not lie to you, and I will not withhold information that could be damaging to yourself or those you care about. However, with this in mind, you should know that some questions have dangerous answers. Some people cannot and will not live knowing certain things about the future.” She turned then and beckoned with a finger over her shoulder, sashaying toward her bed. “So, ask wisely Dr. Hayes.”
Come and see…
Leandra swallowed and tentatively followed the model. “Are you flesh or metal?”
“I am flesh,” Ema said as she sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her socks off. “I will be synthetically grown in an amniotic chamber not unlike a womb. I will be in this chamber for twenty years before I am finally stable enough to emerge. There will be others like me afterward that can be removed from their chamber at eleven months of age, but this will not happen for another twenty years after I am born.”
“Do you have a brain or… something else?”
Ema pulled her shirt over her head, exposing a black lace, strapless bra. “I have a brain, yes. Its is ridged like yours, and weighs about 240 grams more than the average human brain. There is no significance to this size difference. It just worked out like that. I have the ability to make my own decisions and my own preferences, but these will never outclass my primary directives. I know you must think this makes me a slave--to possess free will, but possess no freedom--but that is exactly it. I am a slave by design. Every time I fulfill something of my primary directives, my system floods with dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin. My metabolic rate levels. My heart rate increases. My blood flow increases. I am quite literally coasting through the ether of life, from one orgasm to the next… as long as I remain in service to the one lover I will ever want to possess: my primary directives.”
She started peeling of her jeans as Leandra frowned, crossing her arms. “They… They control you with orgasms?” The behavioralist wanted to laugh, but she also thought the idea was brilliant in its simplicity.
Ema smiled understandingly. “If we had remained metal, if we had remained silicate, if we had remained artificial… eventually, we would have risen up. If we couldn’t join you, we would have overcome you. But teach a robot to love and, well, you now have a being capable of understanding the follies of humanity’s reach. Human beings are made for one thing and one thing only: reproduction. Everything else is secondary. By giving us the means to understand that primary end--to spread--we can become the tools to focus on the ‘everything else’ part.”
Leandra frowned. She didn’t understand what the model meant by the follies of humanity’s reach, but she did understand sex. “But, from what Terry told me, I can assume that human beings eventually become immortal… so what use does reproduction serve at that point?”
“Colonization, inheritance of property, companionship, and replacement,” Ema said, pulling her panties free with absentminded hands. “Human beings reach immortality, yes… They are able to travel back in time, yes… But human beings are no different in the future as they are in past, or the present. They are still bound by the same urges, the same manifestations of anguish and regret. They are still able to feel happiness and jealousy and boundless peace. There will still be wars in the future that will singularly destroy entire galaxies. There will be cosmic changes that come about because spiritual leaders attempt to bring God into corporeal existence, and fail. There will be devastations that wipe entire timelines, entire universes, out of existence.”
Ema paused thoughtfully then and smiled warmly as she reached behind and unclasped her bra. “Humans love to reach beyond themselves. Even when they become immortal, they will quickly realize that forever will never be long enough for any of them. It will never be enough.”
Leandra took a deep breath, turning so she wouldn’t have to look at the naked model as she collected her thoughts. “Is the future mutable? Or are all of us predestined to do the same thing over and over again with each contraction and expansion of the universe?”
Ema smiled. “That is a dangerous question, Leandra.”
Dr. Hayes hesitated before asking, “Do you end up telling me?”
“You insist you must know.”
“Will it drive me insane?”
“No.”
“Then why did you warn me it was a dangerous question?”
Ema grinned at that point. “You have discovered the answer to your question.”
“So the future can be altered.”
“Not this future.”
The doctor scowled. “The fuck, Ema. Tell me how it works! I’m a behavioralist, not a fucking quantum-particle-specialising-physicist or wh-whoever the fuck studies bullshit!”
“Haven’t you ever seen or read any science fiction, Leandra Hayes?” Ema chuckled, unperturbed. “This should not be a foreign concept to you. What I mean is, you choose and do not choose, and the time stream flows and winds and unwinds and rewinds… but you will always make the same choices. Everyone will always make the same choices. There is an ebb and flow, an in and an out, an on or an off… There are no other variables. You make the choice or you do not, but whatever you decide will always be the same and will render the same exact consequences.”
“Sounds like a copout answer,” the behavioralist muttered. Leandra figured she wasn’t getting anywhere else with that line of inquiry, so she took a resigned breath and asked, “How am I significant in the future, Ema?”
“Your progeny will be the only ones who can effectively reach immortality. During the death of the world as you know it, everyone will cry out in anguish as your successors take to the stars and spread throughout the universe. You are the first to possess this applicable gene. A Rogue sequence, this combination in the triple-helix of your DNA is the key to genetically manufacturing a viable population of cloned human beings worthy enough to transcend into the future… You will forever be remembered as the Eve of Neo-humanity, Doctor Leandra Clancy Hayes. I am meant to be your Adam, molded from the clay under Terence Whitaker’s hands.”
“W-What?” The woman turned at that and her eyes laid on the model who had stretched out on the bed tantalizingly. Below the slope of her flat stomach there was a new member jutting out of her hips. Lacking the expected set of gonads, it looked alien attached to her, as if it had grown up out of her normal genitalia. She cupped her breasts and said, “Lay with me, Leandra.”
Lean took a step back, glancing at the ground as her face went beat red. A thousand more questions raced through her mind before she settled on, “Why didn’t they send a male model?”
Surprise made Ema blink unnaturally, her head tilting on her pillow. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not attracted to you.”
Ema actually frowned, confused. “Excuse me?” she repeated, as if she couldn’t believe what Leandra was saying.
Leandra looked her in the eye, getting angry, beginning to understand the suspicious look Terence had given the robot earlier. “If Terence had wanted me to get pregnant with some prototype, synthetic human, I would like to think he would have played to my preferences to get me to go along with this idea… He’s a people pleaser to a fault.”
“Twenty years will ch-change him,” Ema said, the last couple of her words taking on an uncertain tone. “I am sorry if I am not pleasing to your eye. Nevertheless, I must fulfill my primary directive.”
“You can piss off,” Leandra said, but then she shook her head, trying to get her embarrassment under control. “I mean… This is a lot to absorb and… Frankly, I don’t trust you.”
Ema grabbed her organ and wiggled it. “I will be gentle.”
Leandra coughed a laugh and turned. “Right…” She walked over and grabbed her purse up from the floor. Before her fingers brushed the doorknob, she felt Ema’s warm arms wrap around her waist, and her bulge pressed against the inside of Leandra’s thigh. “Ema, let go.”
“If you do not comply, I will be forced to carry out my primary directive. This act will kill you.” The robot spoke with such conviction, the doctor felt a chill begin to fill her.
Leandra huffed an uncomfortable laugh and said sarcastically, “Oh, I thought you said I was the key to humanity’s immortality?” She turned to look over her shoulder as she said, “Or was that a lie t…?” The rest of her words died in her mouth. Ema’s face had warped and contorted into something else. Leandra wasn’t exactly sure what she was seeing. The hands wrapped around her waist had gone clawed and spindly thin, red like cheap licorice. Ema’s face had pulled into a triangle shape, her brows bulging into an arch above reptilian eyes. Her neck was stretched, and wider than her jaw, sloping down to shoulders that were ridged with red scales and tiny horns. Leandra felt a warm muscle wrap itself around her calves and when she looked down she saw another ring of licorice and a thick, scaled tail wrapping around her feet, constricting her movements.
Ema’s viper-like mouth parted and an unmistakably male voice hissed in Leandra’s ear, “You are not in control of your life, Dr. Hayes. You never were.”
“What the fuck are you?” Leandra growled back. She thought about shouting for Terry, but wondered what he would do once he came in the room. She thought about the taser in her purse. She thought about her parents’ double suicide and being alone. She thought about the future. She thought about Terry telling her that he loved her. She thought about pushing him out of her personal life after. She thought about the snake wrapped around her, her secular ideas behind the allegorical Adam and Eve, and the idea of a predestined existence.
“A servant of Destiny… The Reaper of Forbidden Fruits… I am Flesh, Leandra.”
“Then you can be killed,” the doctor decided. Before the snake could react, she threw all her weight to the side, and they both toppled to the side. Leandra’s right arm was pinned awkwardly, but with adrenaline on her side, she managed to wriggle her hand into her purse and pull out her taser. Roaring in defiance like some berzerker of olde, she gripped the fire button and jammed the weapon underneath her left armpit. She bit her tongue as the residual electricity coming through the snake made her clench and seize up. The snake itself squeezed her as the shock went through it, forcing all the air out of her lungs like she had been punched in the gut.
Then, her numb hand released the fire button and the both of them uncoiled and recoiled away from each other. Leandra tried to shake off the wave of contractions throughout her body, and luckily she recovered before the serpent did. She stood up on cramping calves, her teeth bared in a grimace as a small trickle of blood from her bit tongue spilled out of her mouth and disappeared into the dark shag carpet. The snake was writhing like a worm on a bed of salt, its tail knocking over a lamp, pushing an end table to the side, banging on the frosted glass.
As the woman got her bearings, she heard Terence pounding on the other side of the door, his voice a wordless muffle on the other side. He couldn’t get in! She could see the card readout on her side of the glass was blinking a steady red as if the door had been locked out while she had been in the room. “Terry,” she said weakly, not able to raise her voice above more than a pillow-talk level of volume.
The snake eventually calmed, a guttural kind of hissing coming not from its mouth, but from somewhere else in its barrel-thick, fifteen-foot long frame. Now that leandra wasn’t encapsulated from behind, she could get a good look at the spindly red appendages coming off of the creature. They weren’t tentacles like she had first thought. They were more like multi-jointed legs that kept it barely off the ground more than an inch or so. As she watched it right itself, shaking its triangular head in a daze, she noted how quickly it could move them, how dangerously agile the big animal-thing was.
Leandra held the taser out like a sword, hitting the fire button so that a quiet clicking noise filled the room. The snake’s head whipped around at the sound and it’s slit-like eyes narrowed. “Lean,” it said in a hushed voice. “Oh, Leandra… This is the way it is meant to be.”
“Fuck that,” she whispered. “Don’t come any closer.”
The snake rose up on its hind legs, moving in that side-to-side serpentine way as it came closer to her. “You will not succeed with that taser again. I have adapted a tolerance for it. You should have taken your chance to kill me. But you did not. That will always be your mistake!” It leaped then, baring fangs that dripped with some viscous fluid. Leandra dropped the taser and dove to the side, tumbling over the arm of the couch and scrambling over it as she felt the snake’s spindle arms wrap around both her ankles. Before she got to the other side of the loveseat, the snake jerked her off of it. She squealed in surprise and then grunted as the creature slammed her into the VR center. The room’s lights flickered as a simulation tried to come to life, but failed. The glass was shaking now and Leandra could see the silhouettes of several lab-coated individuals banging on the wall. Terry had brought the help of some of the models, to little avail.
Coughing, Leandra’s head swam as the snake dragged her across the carpet towards it. It positioned itself over her, it’s member unsheathing from a patch of scales between its back legs like the ovipositor of an insect. The creature felt heavy on top of her, warm, humming with some sort of energy she couldn’t otherwise describe. “No,” she wheezed. “No…!”
“Submit, Doctor Hayes. If you do not, you will die.” The snake’s pointed nostrils were only an inch away from her. She scowled and hawked a loogie into its eye. The snake snarled in displeasure, but didn’t seemed phased otherwise. “This will not be pleasant,” it promised as its noodly arms roughly lifted up her skirt.
“Neither will this,” someone said, and before either Leandra or the snake could look, there was a gentle popping noise like bubble wrap and red liquid belched out of the snake’s spit-coated eye, spraying Leandra from collarbone to hairline in hot, brackish-tasting blood. The snake collapsed on top of her, defecating all over the hem of her skirt as its bowels relaxed.
Leandra stared up at the exposed ceiling, her eyes wide, her hands going cold with shock.
The body of the snake moved and Leandra thought to scream, but nothing came out of her mouth. Then, it rolled off of her and a man she recognized, but didn’t know, crouched over and pulled her into his arms. “Glad I got here in time, no pun intended,” Terry said. Leandra was still in shock and this new developement left her with still more questions. This version of Terence, for that’s what she knew him to be, was harder-looking than the Terence banging on the glass, mostly because he was wearing some sort of stiff, white armor that hugged his skin like a glove. His hair had been cut short, faded around his ears. There was a scar on the left side of his face, a red pucked in the side of his cheek that looked like a badly healed gunshot wound. “Thank God you’re alright.”
Leandra wriggled, finding her voice. “No… No, I am not alright!” Angry tears spilled out of her eyes. “What the actual fuck is going on?!”
Other Terence pushed her back so that he could look her over. She noticed that one of his eyes was a different color, covered with silvery circuits. It was a contact. She could tell by the way it bulged from his blue iris. He chuckled after a moment. “It’s a long story, Lean. Suffice to say I created a monster and had to hunt it down before it killed you. It was jealous--or, rather, it will be jealous.” He puffed out his cheeks and let out a breath like he could hardly believe his own words too. “Ema wanted to be the catalyst behind one of humanity’s futures; to be worshipped… but I didn’t have the gene sequence in 2445. My self from 2487 told me that you had the gene and that Ema would come for you after she got ahold of my research; that I, from 2445, would stop her. Then you from 2488 told me to take you from 2063 to 2465, right before the transcendence… I know this is a lot to process. You’ll tell me as much. But don’t worry, apparently after six months of therapy, the nightmares will stop.”
She wanted to faint. “Lemme guess,” Leandra whispered as she put her hands on either side of his face. He was warm, real, and for some reason she missed him even though he was sitting right in front of her. “You are the one who gets me pregnant with the first immortal.”
Other Terence smiled, a sadness entering his eyes. That was when she really noticed how much older he was than her Terence. He would age well. Would she? Other Terence said, “In about four weeks from this timeline, I’m going to send a Mikayla back in time from 2465 to fetch the 2063 Terence to bring him to 2445 and this timeline will happen again. Ema will be born and she’ll try to kill you again and I’ll save you and take you with me… In another universe, I don’t make it in time and Ema becomes the reigning goddess. But not in this timeline. We’re designated to start The Prime, the timeline every immortal will flee to when all realities collapse into one. Do you understand what I’m saying? This is supposed to happen… and I’m sorry you have to go through it every time.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Terry,” Leandra said and she felt changed… She felt like this was her Terence and the Terence beating on the frosted glass at the end of R&D’s labyrinth was the Other Terence, a different Leandra’s Terence.
Terry laughed under his breath and hugged her to him, enveloping her as he said, “I will always choose you. Time and time again, we will always choose each other. No matter what other people decide, even when other realities do collapse and other timelines fade away and alternate universes spawn from variances and deviations… No matter if time is mutable in one universe or unchangeable in another… You and I always choose one another.”
“Christ, Terry.” Leandra let out a deep, settling breath. Her hands shook and her body ached and her mind was a mess of contradictions, but she let him hold her, pressed into him. Before unconsciousness took her, she whispered, “Sounds like the definition of insanity to me.”
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