It was impossible, of course. But she tried.
Her vision was beginning to clear when the gurney rolled to a stop. She could see blurry shapes in the fog by the time the induction field cut back in and reduced her once more to a rag doll, unable even to struggle within restraint. The view sharpened in small increments as her tormentor installed her in some kind of rigid exoskeleton that would have posed her on all fours, if any part of her had been touching the ground. It was gimbaled; a gentle push from the side and the fuzzy outlines of the room rotated lazily past her eyes, as if she were affixed to a merry-go-round.
By the time she got her motor nerves back, she could see clearly again. She was in a dungeon. There was nothing medieval about it, no torches on the walls. Indirect light glowed from recessed grooves that ran along the edges of the ceiling. The loops and restraints hanging from the wall in front of her were made of memetic polymers. The blades and coils and alligator clips on the bench to her left were stainless gleaming alloy. The floor was a spotless mosaic of Escher tiles, cerulean fish segueing into jade waterfowl. Even the cleansers and stain removers on the cart by the door were, she had no doubt, filled with the latest synthetics. The only anachronistic touch was a pile of rough wooden poles leaning up against one corner of the room. Their tips had been hand-whittled to points.
There was a collar—a pillory, actually—around her neck. It blinded her to anything behind. Perhaps realizing this, Achilles Desjardins stepped accommodatingly into view at her left side, holding a handpad.
It's only him, she thought, a bit giddily. The others didn't know. If they had, why had they been wearing body condoms? Why the pretense of a quarantine cell, why not just bring her here directly? The men who'd delivered her didn't know what was going on. They must have been told she was a vector, a danger, someone who'd try to escape the moment she knew the jig was up. They must have thought they'd been doing the right thing.
It didn't make any difference to her current predicament. But it mattered just the same: the whole world wasn't mad. Parts of it were just misinformed.
Achilles looked down at her. She looked back; the stock pushed against her head as she craned her neck.
She squirmed. The frame that held her body seemed to tighten a tiny bit. "Why are you doing this?"
He shrugged. "To get off. Thought that'd be obvious even to a fuckup like you, Alice."
Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably. She bit down on it, hard. Don't give him anything. Don't give him anything. But of course it was way too late for that.
"You look like you want to say something," Achilles remarked.
She shook her head.
"Come on, girl. Speak! Speak, girl!"
I've got nothing to say to you, you fucking asshole.
His hand was in his pocket again. Something in there made a familiar snick-snick noise.
He wants me to talk. He toldme to talk. What happens if I don't?
Snick-snick.
What if I do, and he doesn't like what I say? What if—
It didn't matter, she realized. It didn't make any difference at all. Hell was an arbitrary place. If he wanted to hurt her, he'd hurt her no matter what she said.
She was probably already as good as dead.
"You're not human," she whispered.
Achilles hmmed a moment. "Fair enough. I used to be, though. Before I was liberated. Did you know humanity can be extracted? Little bug called Spartacus sucks it right out of you." He wandered back out of sight. Taka strained to follow, but the stocks kept her facing forward. "So don't blame me, Alice. I was the victim."
"I'm…I'm sorry," Taka tried.
"I'll bet. They all are."
She swallowed, and tried not to go where that led.
The exoskeleton must have been spring-loaded; there was a click and suddenly her arms were yanked up behind her, spread back in a delta-V. The motion stretched the flesh tight across her chest; the pain that had diffused across her body collapsed back down to a sharp agonized focus in her breast. She bit back a scream. Some distant, irrelevant part of her took pride in her success.
Then something cold slapped against her ass and she cried out anyway—but Achilles was just cleaning her up with a wet rag. The wetness evaporated almost instantly, chilling her. Taka smelled alcohol.
"Excuse me? You said something?"
"Why do you want to hurt me?" The words burst from the throat of some wounded animal before she could bite them back: Stupid, stupid bitch. Whining and crying and groveling just the way he likes it. You know why he does it. Your whole life you've known people like this existed.
But of course the animal hadn't been asking why at all. The animal wouldn't have even understood the answer. The animal only wanted him to stop.
His hand ran lightly over her ass. "You know why."
She thrashed her head from side to side in frantic, violent denial. "There are other ways, easier ways! Without the risk, without anyone trying to stop you—"
"Nobody's trying to stop me now," Achilles pointed out.
"But you must know, with a good set of phones and a feedback skin you could do things that wouldn't even be physically possible in the real world, with more women than you could ever dream of having in—"
"Tried it." Footsteps, returning. "Jerking off in a hallucination."
"But they look and feel and even smell so real you'd never know—"
Suddenly his hand was knotted tightly in her hair, twisting her head around, putting her face a few scant centimeters from his. He was not smiling now, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all pretense of civility.
"It's not about the sights or the smells, okay? You can't hurt a hallucination. It's play-acting. What's the point of torturing something that can't even suffer?" He yanked her head again for good measure.
And in the next instant released it, casually cheerful once more. "Anyway, I'm really no different than any other guy. You're an educated stumpfuck, you must know that the only difference between fucking someone and flaying them is a few neurons and a whole lotta social conditioning. You're all like me. I've just lost the parts that pretend it isn't true.
"And now," he added, with a good-natured wink, "you've got an oral exam."
Taka shook her head. "Please…"
"Don't sweat it, it's mainly review. As I recall, in our last lesson we were talking about Seppuku, and you seemed surprised at the thought that it might reproduce sexually. I know, I know—never even occurred to you, did it? Even though everything has sex, even though bacteria have sex. Even though you and I are having sex, it never occurred to you that Seppuku might. Not too smart, Alice. David would be very disappointed."
Oh Dave. Thank God you can't see me now.
"But let's move past that. Today we're gonna start with the idea that sex might kick in as, say, as a density-dependent response. Population increases, sexual mode cuts in, what happens?"
He moved behind her again. She tried to focus, tried to put her mind to this absurd, humiliating game on the remote chance there might be some way to win. Sexual mode cuts in, she thought, genes shuffle, and the recessives—