She wasn't bothering anyone; just relaxing, taking in what pale winter
sunlight there was and watching the fountains, all of it free. She was in
a mental state on the outer fringes of meditation, seventy-five percent of
her mind still in Mundane Reality, so she didn't miss a couple of
skate-punks over near the Statue Dedicated To Progress In Commerce
pointing her out to a pair of Suits.
She felt a frisson of alarm; she hadn't done anything overtly illegal in
the recent past, but if they wanted to get technical they could probably
do her on something like Loitering (she'd been here for over half an hour
without buying anything from the souvenir stands) or Indecent Exposure
(the lower hem of her T-shirt came down a mere two inches below her
breasts, and there were several large, ragged, strategically placed holes
in her jeans) or Unauthorised Pigeon Observing or something stupid like
that. Not enough to have her Incarcerated for more than forty-eight hours,
but it was the principle of the thing more than the inconvenience. Like
most SubGenii she was routinely Incarcerated at least once a month under
one pretext or another (probably so They could recharge the batteries in
her tracking implants), but it had been less than a week since the last
time; too soon. She briefly considered trying to force her brain into
Dealing With Pinks mode and then dismissed it as too much bother.
Soon their shadows were blocking the sun as they stood over her; she
didn't open her eyes, didn't turn or acknowledge their presence. They
waited for precisely as long as she expected they would, then one of them
cleared his throat. She leaned back, palms flat against the concrete and
slowly raised her eyes to theirs, as if the effort was almost too much.
She cocked one eyebrow at them sardonically.
"Aren't you a little short for a storm-trooper?" she quipped. Neither of
them recognised the quote. She sighed. "You're blocking the sun."
The Suit who'd cleared his throat assumed the Bad Cop role: "There's
plenty of sun to go around." By way of answer she held one hand up to the
sky and twisted her fingers as if tugging on a bell-pull; within seconds,
the sky had clouded over and it had started to rain. A minor miracle; a
Bob-given coincidence, surfing the Luck Plane, but they weren't to know
that.
As the rain began to soak into their clothing ñ making them feel more
uncomfortable, while she just tilted her head back a little further and
enjoyed the way drops of water beaded on her glasses ñ Good Cop consulted
a palm-sized notepad computer (for the psychological effect, she noticed ñ
his eyes didn't actually read it) and asked, "Are you Citizen
43659943276432E, Therese Giñ"
"SAINT Therese to you, buddy."
Bad Cop spoke: "You're one of them Sub-Guys, aren'cha?"
She giggled, thrust her breasts out more prominently, nipples protruding
through the rain-soaked "Frantic DogPaddle Tour '97" T-shirt: "Now, what
makes you think I'm a guy?" It had precisely the effect she knew it'd
have. She could sense their stunted and blocked Flunads trying to free
themselves. Saint Therese was a past master at Pink-Taunting.
Bad Cop leered and was about to make a nasty comment when Good Cop took
off his shades; Therese could see that he was concerned about something.
Like, maybe his mortgage payments had gone up, or he was way over the
limit on the credit card that he used to pay for his sexbots. There was a
definite quaver in his voice, something a Pink wouldn't have been
competent to fake: "We need your help."
Intrigued, she went with them, stomping heavily in the puddles as she
went, splashing rainwater on their polyester suit pants. Letting them
kidnap her was probably a bad idea; she couldn't imagine what the
Conspiracy wanted with her apart from the usual dislike of anything they
didn't control utterly and couldn't plot on a graph.
On the way back to their tower-block, Good Cop took the trouble to explain
while Bad Cop swore at the other Conspiracy dupes caught in the traffic
jam: "Recently we came into the possession of a fragment of SubGenius
literature. Most of it didn't make sense, and some of it was out-and-out
fantasy ñ"
She couldn't let this go past without a retort: "Fantasy is the ultimate
reality, to which we all retreat at some stage."
Good Cop looked slightly irritated at the interruption, but continued. "We
now have physical evidence for the existence of the `Elder Gods' as you
call them. They contacted us through our computer network and provided
irrefutable proof of their powers and capabilities."
Therese smirked at him, nodding slowly. "You finally caught on, didja?
WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?"
Neither of them recognised this quote, either; she thought that maybe she
would have to start putting annotated footnotes in her speech.
"This is no laughing matter," replied Good Cop sternly. "These... these
BEINGS intend to wipe out human civilisation as we know it! We've tried
bargaining with them... but, it's just... they..."
Therese sighed. "You don't have anything they want, right?"
Bad Cop laughed nastily. "Until now." That thrill of fear ran through her
again.
Good Cop consulted his notebook said, "There was a passage in that
SubGenius book we found that said, and I quote:
The Elder Gods still hunger for Yeti ecstasy, their favourite gateway to
the world. They much prefer to manifest by "riding" an aware being at the
moment of OoZquirt rather than being summoned by a bunch of dopey
Satanists doing blood sacrifices."
Therese nodded. "Revelation X, chapter six. Yeah, so?"
Good Cop blushed. "We haven't been able to replicate this `OoZquirt' in
our research facilities. We've run out of other ideas. We've tried
everything we know to please these Things, and it's not working. That's
why we need your help. You have a reputation as a..." here, he consulted
his notepad again, "A... an `Adept Mistress of the Rising Fl,nads'."
She grinned, hooked her thumbs through her braces. "Tha's me."
Good Cop nodded enthusiastically. "That's what I mean! You understand
these things... `Exogasm', `Sexhurt', `orgozmonic radiation', `Big Red
Straps'... this is an area in which we're completely at sea. Not a lot of
official research."
"Yeah, I heard what you guys did to Wilhelm Reich and Frank Dashwood. And
Orton Nenslo."
The limo pulled into a heavily armoured entrance to an underground
car-park, tyres squeaking on the metal rails and echoing oddly off the
concrete walls. It was dark under here, the kind of darkness that the
Conspiracy preferred; the shadow of a tower-block punctuated by the
ghastly, intermittent corpse-glow of neon tubes. Even the air smelled
dead; it was more like a mausoleum than an office block. Therese longed to
set off a stink-bomb, or even just to burn some incense. Maybe set fire to
a stack of inner tubes. Or fart. Anything to relieve the sense of
sterility.
On the way up in the elevator, Good Cop filled her in on what little
progress they'd made. "It wasn't easy to get funding for this project, but
the desperation of the upper echelons... well, you know."
Therese snorted. "Yeah. Unusually far-sighted of them. What, did these
Things say they were going to start at the top and chew their way down to
ground level?" Good Cop's suddenly stiff posture told her that she'd hit
close to the mark.
The elevator doors opened on a brightly-lit glass-walled laboratory, white
walls, benches cluttered with racks of test-tubes and beakers over Bunsen
burners, cathode-ray oscilloscopes making "boop" noises and, in general,
the kind of messy set-up needed to give the impression that serious
research was going on here.
On the far side of the laboratory, however, things took on a nightmarish
perspective; the racks of test-tubes gave way to rows of dildos, the
beakers to bottles of water-soluble lubricant, the CROs to banks of video
tape machines, one of which was playing some blurry, garishly-coloured
cheap porn.
Good Cop introduced her to Franklin, their Male Subject. He was aged in
his late twenties and despite a slightly receding hairline, reasonably
attractive; built like a circus strong-man, even down to the ridiculous
leopard-spot pattern jock-strap. One of the anonymous female lab
assistants was smearing oil over his rippling pectoral muscles in a
business-like manner. She couldn't help giggling at the sight of him, at
the overblown macho bullshit male-polarity of it all. Her giggles died
down quickly when she met Judith, their Female Subject.
This was, for Therese, the real horror of the Conspiracy; how it could
take a normal female, Heir to the Uberfemme's Pansexual Slack, one of
Connie's Own Abominatrixes, and turn her into ñ this ñ
She was attractive, in a sharp, smoothly plastic mechanical way; the same
way you might consider a department store dummy attractive if it was
dressed up as a leather Domina. She was wearing a black PVC teddy,
fish-net stockings and high heels; all her femininity was planed down to
fit the abstract perfectionist formula that Western Society demanded;
rules which said a woman wasn't attractive unless her eyes were thus far
apart, the incline of her nose so many degrees, her breasts exactly
such-and-such a shape. Therese was torn between the desire to scoot around
the back to check for a power-cord dangling out of her ass and the need to
tear the woman's clothes off, grab one of those industrial-strength
clitoral stimulators and fuck some sense into her. In the end she settled
for shaking her head sadly.
Judith examined Therese with disdain. The SubGenius female was in her
early twenties and comely in a sort of wind-swept way but her hair was all
over the place, her eyebrows were unplucked, she didn't have any make-up
on and her breasts appeared droopy because they weren't constrained by a
brassiere (although they were rather nicely framed by her rainbow-striped
braces). She was wearing purple-tinted wire-framed glasses instead of
contact lenses; her belly-button ñ exposed between the hem of her
chopped-down T-shirt and the ragged, worn denim jeans ñ had a ring in it,
and she stood with her thumbs hooked in her pockets and her pelvis angled
forward in a most unladylike and provocative way.
Therese examined the assembled equipment with a practiced eye. Phallic
lumps of plastic, the same ugly pink colour as Barbie dolls; vibrators,
vibrators and more vibrators. The Conspiracy had denied originality in
sexual expression for so long ñ had reduced it to a "healthy release",
just like Orwell had predicted ñ that they had no idea what it was really
for. It was sad, like cargo cult natives trying to summon back those nice
shiny planes with runways and control towers made out of bamboo and palm
leaves. This was going to be like explaining advanced data encryption
algorithms to four-year-olds.
They'd seen the disdainful looks she'd been giving their equipment; Good
Cop was moved to defend what progress they'd made: "Under ideal
conditions, our subjects can reach orgasm in under thirty seconds, from a
cold start."
Therese turned to stare at him. "And? You say that like it's some kind of
achievement." Good Cop took off his mirror-shades and openly displayed
confusion. "It's not how quick you can get there ñ it's how many detours
you can make on the way, how much scenery you can take in on the trip."
She racked her brains for a metaphor they could understand. "How many
greasy truck-stop burger dives you get to steal napkins from. In fact, in
terms of getting there, it's better if you don't get there at all." They
all stared at her as if she were insane. "Haven't you people even heard of
Karezza? Tantra? Maybe I should just get a whiteboard marker and write
`SEX != ORGASM' on it. Make you write it out a hundred times."
Not knowing quite where to start, she suggested they give a demonstration.
Bad Cop leered until he realised that he was going to be kicked out of the
lab. Therese was glad to see him go; he looked like the kind of asshole
who beat up his sexual partners whenever he could afford them. She sat
cross-legged on a bench and watched Judith and Franklin undress and lie
down on a kind of reinforced hospital gurney.
It was appalling. She was certain that Judith faked her orgasm, and
Franklin's may as well have been; she was glad the whole sorry performance
was over so quickly. They turned to her afterwards, seeking approval;
being careful not to laugh at them, wanting to hold up a score-card with
"0.0" on it, she said carefully, "Why don't you try for duration rather
than expediency? See how long both of you can go."
Good Cop waved his hand dismissively. "We don't have time for that."
Therese shrugged and sat back on the table. "Fine. I don't have anything
better to do than sit around waiting for some disembodied Xist energy
demon to crawl up your asshole and eat its way up your spine into your
brain. I've seen that happen before. I wish I had a video-camera here; I'd
tape it and send it to that Funniest Home Videos show." She thrust her
thumbs through her braces and started humming "Elvis Has Just Left The
Building".
She didn't need to continue; Good Cop had turned pale. He must be closer
to the top than she'd first thought, close enough to make him a target.
Therese took Judith aside and cautioned her, "Look ñ this process is the
result of the interaction of two people. Two, you know? You can't fake
this any more than you can fake being bullet-proof. I know he's not
exactly Mr. Right, but try to lie back and think of a St Bernard or
something. Anything. Otherwise none of us will get out of here alive."
They started again, this time with the intention of coming as close as
possible to orgasm without actually reaching it. Franklin had some trouble
with this until Therese suggested wrapping a length of chain around his
testicles and attaching it to a power outlet; the implied threat in this
seemed to help. After that, it rapidly became boring, almost like one of
those pumps you saw attached to oil-wells. Up, down, up, down.
Yawn-o-rama. Good Cop was too concerned with the details of their
performance to do more than occasionally glance up from his monitoring
instruments. She whispered to him, "Where's the toilet?"; after a
suspicious glance, he told her. He didn't need to stress that the building
was heavily guarded; she knew, and he knew that she knew.
The corridors of the building were all deserted; dark, dimly lit by fluoro
tubes set along the lushly carpeted floor. She knelt and ran her hand
through the pile; it felt like animal fur. Knowing Them, it probably was.
As she searched for the toilets she felt the remote, disinterested stare
of the security cameras mounted at the intersections. Almost
unconsciously, she added an exaggerated, sensual hip-sway to her walk. Pat
Benatar's song "Stop Using Sex As A Weapon" came to her mind; Patty, you
were never up against the Con, she thought.
Like the laboratory, the toilet was lined with white tile and brightly,
almost blindingly lit. Inhumanly clean. She imagined that most Pinks
wouldn't dare crap in the toilets for fear of making a mess. Security
cameras set in each corner constantly scanned every square inch of the
room; it was common knowledge that the Con believed people were more
likely to commit ThoughtCrime in the toilets.
She went over to the paper towel dispenser and yanked on the end of the
roll, pulling great lengths of paper out to fall at her feet.
Methodically, she went from one toilet to the next, wadding paper into the
bowl and flushing it until all but the last were blocked. She performed
this sabotage almost automatically; a matter of habit.
She crumpled up the cardboard roll from the towel dispenser and wedged it
into the door of the last stall to keep it open, then sat down on the lid
of the bowl, rested her chin on her fist and thought.
The test subjects were Pinks through and through. With a few years of
intense Tantric training or some good weed (or something ñ anything ñ to
loosen them up), they might be capable of raising enough Kundalini to roll
a ping-pong ball off a table. For the moment she doubted that they'd be
able to overcome their Pink self-consciousness. This meant that
inevitably, Good Cop would ask her to step in.
"It's not that I don't find Mr. Leopard-Pattern Underpants attractive...
it's the principle of the thing," she muttered to herself. As she spoke,
one of the security cameras turned to watch her. She grinned and spoke
aloud in mock-seriousness, "Oh goody, alone at last. Now I can indulge my
most secret fantasies and desires." There must have been someone listening
at the security station; another camera swung to watch her.
The light was too bright; it was starting to hurt her eyes. She took a few
spare yards of paper towel, soaked them under a tap and then wrapped it
around her eyes. Much better. She went back into the toilet stall, slowly
stripped off her jeans, sat back on the toilet and idly caressed her
nipples for a few minutes until she felt the temperature of her G,nads
rising. She opened her mouth in a half-smile, half-gasp, spread her legs
and stroked the insides of her thighs. "This is for Saint Moxie," she
whisperedÖ
After her fifth and sixth orgasms ñ which had run together and made her so
dizzy that she almost fell off the seat and the paper towelling had fallen
from one eye ñ she glanced up and saw that three more cameras had appeared
through panels in the ceiling and were pointed at her. She grinned evilly
and kept at it, masturbating furiously and building up an image in her
mind: the Ark of the Covenant from Spielberg's film "Raiders of the Lost
Ark". When opened, however, this one was filled with metal-studded
motorcycle boots and bright purple Nerf sex-toys and jars full of mouldy
peanut butter and rainbow slinkys and trashy DC comics and Freddy Blassie
picture-discs and vibrating studded rubber balls that played "Fur Elise"
and bowls of lime jello with trowels and Robert Williams T-shirts and
Things with BIG RED STRAPS attached at strategic points. As her focus
contracted down to a point just below her navel, the lid exploded off the
Ark; beams of bright purple light shot from her crotch, weaving around her
frantic fingers, arcing off the metal fittings in the cubicle and smashing
the lenses of the security cameras. For a few moments, she was one with
the White Light, the Ocean of Being, the Endless Void of Slack; when she
came back to conventional reality she found that she'd blown the door off
the cubicle and there were odd scorch marks on the walls. She knew then
that she'd have to do this; but it was going to end her way. As she left
the toilets, she grinned at the dead, smoking cameras, dangling forlornly
on the ends of their cables. She was wearing damp Doc Martens with bright
green laces, but as she walked, she could hear spurs ringing.
"Okay," she said to Good Cop as she entered the laboratory again, "I'm
going to save your asses. No offence, you two, but you just don't have
what it takes. See if you can get Bad Cop back in here."
Good Cop showed a combination of relief and curiosity. "Why not Franklin?"
"He's got the wrong idea about this. Your training program has pushed him
further away from what you've been trying to achieve. Repellent as he is,
Bad Cop is an unmarked slate, and if we're going to reach OoZquirt at all,
It's gonna be with him."
She got Bad Cop to take all his clothes off and shower thoroughly before
they coated him in baby oil and cuffed him to the test-table. "Relax,
honey, this is all part of the trip," she cooed, adjusting the
ankle-restraints so that he had less than a hand's-span of freedom. She
insisted that they put three condoms on him; "Bob" alone knew what kind of
icky retroviruses he had floating around inside him. The simple act of
putting them on got him hard; she got up on the table, knelt over him and
slowly guided him inside her.
She didn't move, just sat there, giving him an occasional squeeze. She
could sense the Flunads rising within him; she kept him right on the edge
of actual stimulation, occasionally giving her clitoris a gentle rub to
keep her energies at a similar level to his, although diametrically
opposed; sort of like a tug-of-war but in reverse. After a few minutes of
this, Bad Cop's Flunad levels were oscillating out of control; she sat
perfectly still until the amplitude of the cycles evened off. She knew she
had to be careful, here; it was a delicate balancing act.
Eventually, he'd reached the level where he was actually emitting brief
bursts of Orgozmonic radiation; feeling these feeble sparks glance off her
nineteen-sided G,nad field, she knew it wouldn't be long before one of the
Xists came a-sniffing to see what was going on. It wasn't real sex, but
she knew it would have just enough of the characteristics of real sex to
attract something. She was counting on it.
Sure enough, just as Bad Cop was beginning to get into it, she vaguely
sensed Their presence; the sheer weirdness of what she was doing had
attracted a small group of Them, and They were shuffling about for the
best position to take advantage of it, which ñ for any Thing which had had
dealings with the Conspiracy ñ meant that They would try to enter through
the Male terminal. It was only then that she realised that her being here
had been pre-determined; not by the Conspiracy (which only thought it
controlled everything), but by her group, the people she worked for
undercover. They couldn't work out in the open without being recorded by
the Conspiracy's monitoring equipment, so every mission their operatives
undertook was guided by the hand of chance; seemingly at random. As
William S Burroughs had once put it, their instructions were conveyed
through a series of real situations.
She gently nudged Bad Cop along, drawing his Flunads higher until she
sensed that one particular Xist had bullied the others out of the way and
was positioned within the body of the male polarity tethered beneath her.
With slow movements of her hands, trailing faint purple auras, she coaxed
it into position and felt it slide into Bad Cop with a snap, like a
proctologist putting on a rubber glove. "Whoo, you're a big one, aren't
you," she cooed to it, feeling its aetherical shape bending Bad Cop's body
slightly out of true.
At that point, Saint Therese let go, squeezing on Bad Cop's hard-on and
rocking back and forth; Bad Cop moaned and thrust his hips forward. His
balls gave off a crimson glow as the Xist writhed within him and pushed
him towards Exogasm. Just as Bad Cop was about to come, she drew back
slightly and projected a spherical G,nad shield, mentally crossing her
legs; his energy hit the shield and rebounded back into his body.
The Xist howled with frustration, a subsonic roar which caused glassware
in the lab to fracture. Saint Therese rode it out, obstinately refusing to
complete the circuit which would give the Xist what it so desperately
craved; It pushed harder against her shield to no effect. There was a
brief pause, a few seconds of quiet while the psychic combatants eyed each
other off; then the Xist made one last desperate thrust forward through
Bad Cop's genitals. The energy simply rebounded off her shield and Bad
Cop's body exploded, his legs twisting out from underneath her, his torso
flipping back over the end of the test-table, intestines and gore flying
out in all directions. Therese knelt there, eyes closed, shield intact,
waiting until the energy ricochets had died away and the subsonic rumbling
had faded.
Then she got off the table, stepped past Good Cop and Franklin and Judith
ñ who were all simply standing there, eyes blank, in catatonia ñ washed
herself down, got dressed and left the building, mentally notching up
another hit for the SubGenius Sexual Assassin's Group.
Original file name: SEXHURT
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