Sleeping was the hardest part.
Sasha laid on his back in what could be called a bed -- if one stretched the bed to include a flat, black pallet of black metal, ribbed like a human torso, and held aloft by hands that emerged from the ground, creating a grotesquely organic feeling to what otherwise felt like steel. He tossed from side to side, feeling the humid heat of the place pressing to him, and tried to let fatigue carry him away. He'd been through so much, though, over the past few hours.
Clearly, I've arrived in another dimension. A very...alien one,
he thought through the possibilities. The Quantum Tunneling Device that he had been testing before he had been stranded here had been 'tuned' to send him to a universe as similar to the one he had left as possible. The simple fact was that there was a near infinite number of universes...but only a small fraction of infinitely could be safely inhabited by human beings, or anything similar to them. The reason was a set of numbers that he had been named the Universal Constants.
These numbers were, in effect, the base rules of the cosmos. How much did gravity pull. How fast did light travel. That kind of thing. Adjusting each of the values altered the end result of any particular cosmos. Too much gravity and a Big Bang could never occur and the entire universe would be a singular point smaller than an atom, locked in an eternal stasis. Too little gravity and the Big Bang would happen -- and then the universe would never change. The vast cloud of simple subatomic particles released by the Big Bang would never clump together to form hydrogen, and that hydrogen would never clump together to form stars, and those stars would never fuse their hydrogen into more complex elements, then release those elements into the cosmos.
Similar causal barriers surrounded the other numbers and the end result was simple enough to understand. There were infinite universes where all life was a singular point, infinite universe where all of the cosmos were a massive cloud of undifferentiated particulates...and between the two were universes where the numbers were just right to form stars. And from those stars, planets. And from those planets, life.
The first few attempts to use the QTD had locked into universes that were mostly a haze of subatomic particles. Cold. Still. Vast. Terrifying, on an existential level. But they were also simultaneously deeply alien and easily understood. Clouds of gas were, at the end of the day, explicable.
This place?
This...City...
It was alien and
inexplicable
. Because it was also so very...darkly human.
Sasha rolled onto his side and his eyes opened as he looked at the furniture that made up the rest of this room. Ziak, the only other person he had met here so far, had simply snorted at him when he had asked her who the furniture had been. Because there
was
a sink in the room, like some bedrooms or bathrooms on earth. But rather than a shelf of wood or metal or plastics, the shelf was a woman's legs. Her rump thrust into the air, her thighs pressed together. The fact that she was formed out of metal and gleaming chitin and sleek tubes of metal, like a biomechanical fantasy of a woman, didn't change the distinctly human outline.
Sasha bit his lip, his cock growing harder and harder as he looked at the soft, supple, gray pussy lips that were situated between her thighs. He had thrust his fingers into her to activate the mirror above the sink...
I wonder...
Sasha thought -- his head warring between fatigue, curiosity, and a sick lust.
He rolled onto his back, forcing himself to look at the ceiling.
Back on Earth, Sasha Brett had...had a complicated relationship with women. He had only really loved one person in his life -- Mary -- but...he hadn't been very good at expressing it. That had eben the root cause of the rot that had nibbled away at their marriage, until she had sat him down and quietly explained to him that she was going to leave him unless he changed. Sasha sighed, his hand sliding along his chest. He found the slowly, throbbing beat of his heart, the memory of that anxious, knife edged discussion biting into him.
It was easier to think of impossible geometries and alien cities than it was to remember Mary.
I need more than just...math, Sasha! I need you. I need you to fucking notice me! To not just look through me like I'm a...a...a ghost!
He'd tried. He really had.
The worst thing was, Mary had even recognized that he had been trying. But...
It hadn't been enough.
Sasha frowned at the ceiling, trying to think about anything else now. But his mind was sliding along the long, lonely years after Mary, where the only real thing he had was his work and ignoring the news feeds and the occasional time with his daughter. He wondered if she even knew if he was alive, or if the destruction of the laboratory meant they all thought he was dead. He closed his eyes, then focused on breathing in. Breathing out. The only problem was that breathing in filled his nose with a subtle scent -- sweet and wafting and coming from the room. The scent of the woman in the wall.
Sasha clenched his jaw and let eternity tick by, breathing and listening to his own heart beat.
***
When he woke, it was to the sound of Ziak rapping her metallic knuckles on the yonic opening that was his chamber's door. Sasha sat up, cupping his hand over his crotch, a reflexive flare of modesty that felt almost totally laughable in this bizarre, nightmarish place. He blinked as he sat up and Ziak nodded to him -- her body glistening under the pale white light that filled the room.
"We're learning today," she said.
Sasha scrambled out of bed. He followed after her as she strode through the small home and outside -- and there, she stretched her arms above her head, her spine arching deliciously. Sasha shook his head slowly, wondering at the biggest mystery so far. Well. No, that wasn't quite true. There were
many
mysteries about this place that were as stark and gigantic, but it was still one that he was the most curious about: How did a woman made of metal and organic components both manage to look so fucking
human
. His tongue slid along his lips as Ziak turned to face him, her gleaming breasts bared and jutting and tempting. He clasped his hands behind his back as she spoke.
"The We...that is our name..." She gestures to herself. "We are born of the City and we serve it and we hate it both. The City is our master and our enemy. We depend upon Him for all, but He will take all. He will seek to make us meat." She knelt down, then patted the smooth black floor, the faint sound of hissing pipes and groaning, distant turbine noises becoming slightly louder. "The City is all. There is no escape from the City. Do you understand me?"
Sasha bit his lip and nodded. "You called it a him?"
"Yes," she said, then clicked her metal teeth. "Baphomet sits on his Throne, with one who sees the Future and one who sees the Past. The City is His flesh, the tubes are His veins and we drink of his blood to survive." She licked her lips. "His piss. His cum." She paused, then grinned, slightly. "Stealing it right from his
balls
." She chuckled.
Sasha shook his head slowly. "The...device you put in me." His hand went to his belly, remembering the feeling of her tongue sliding down his throat, the stinging
pain
of her tongue tip burrowing into his belly. "The translator?"
