Inheritrix

Inheritrix

A Love Story

Chapter 1

Magic Beans

Bren 4-9Q spawned from the Easter Lily gene clan. Like his brothers, Bren was obsolete. Bred for basic clerical tasks, the Lily template grew redundant following advances in agony engine computing.

The Lily template's resemblance to the vintage human male model magnified its irrelevance. Bren and his brothers were boyish, bipedal and as pale as their namesake blooms. Metabolic programming carved them unfashionably dainty. Although the Lily genitals carried the Evergreen polygene for added sensitivity and elasticity, the basic primate structure of the organ fell well behind current trends.

But Bren's small, quaint mono-phallus earned him the attention of an inheritrix.

She was above average female height, rising well beyond the standard two metres in her heels. She stood a full head taller than the masculoids around her. Those men scattered as she cut through the market, like small fish round the shark that informed her gene template. Vixen class, Bren guessed, noting her sharp features, warship curves and searchlight amber eyes. She wore her thick auburn hair in the short blunt bob of a high-claim female.

Women rarely moved so deep in the ruins. Inheritrices of such wealthy stock were a fable in those parts. Vixens were an old template. Older than Lilies. Grown as hunters during the early Correction Wars. Now they worked as enforcers. Bren panicked as he questioned if any of his wares were stolen.

Bren worked the market each day expecting to trade with other masculoids from other castoff clans. He swapped scrap that his Lily brothers foraged from the broken fringes of the city. The rotting tech on the faulty ambulatables of Bren's stall were of little use to other men, let alone the female elite. Bren had never even seen a woman at such close proximity. But his body recalled the protocol.

It was no longer called compliance programming. It was called blood courtesy.

Eye contact with the Vixen triggered Bren's automated acute stress response. Fine-tuned amygdalae flooded his system with adrenaline and blood-boiling cortisol. A hack in his hypothalamus released the neuro-cocktail responsible for sleep paralysis. Bren felt overwhelming physical terror but could perform neither the fight nor flight his instincts demanded.

A more extreme reaction than the other men in the market. A relic of Bren's template. His gene clan had been designed to work beneath low-claim, high-affinity female overseers. Anything less than total courtesy would have bred insubordination in the Lily drones.

Bren stood frozen. He hoped the Vixen would ignore him, but she seemed to sense his fear. It was possible she could smell it. She had moved without obvious purpose as she browsed the stalls. Now, she spun on her heels to face Bren. The crowd, thinning since her entrance to the clearing, vanished entirely into the tall weeds when the Vixen picked her prey. Bren could only watch as she stalked through the empty space between him and her.

A full-body, form-fitting synthskin varnished her frame. The fabric was oil-slick black. Dark and sleek enough to reflect light. Bren fell hypnotised by the streaks and glints that shifted across her body as she moved. White strips of sunlight along the ridges of her muscles. Golden patches where light from the tall grass coloured her stately physique. Constellations spun across the upper hemispheres of her breasts.

Below the starlit bust, a shift to a duller but no less dark material. Leather, Bren assumed. He had never encountered real leather, but the cracks and branches in the substance suggested natural hide. Coded flesh was less variable. Bren's flesh was less variable. Up close, the grain of his skin resembled the ridges in cardboard.

The leather corset, worn above the synthskin, enclosed the Vixen from hip to chest. It resembled the keratin girdles that masculoids of the Stag Beetle clan grew to support their spines during their endless labours. On her, it was more ornament than armour. The garment fortified her breasts and shifted the arch of her torso. It wrung an hourglass figure from her muscular frame.

Blood courtesy forced Bren to lower his eyes in her presence. He had deduced her high heels from the clock ticks of her steps across the rubble. The enforcer's boots surpassed his earlier mental image. More weapons than shoes. Blade-keen points at heel and toe. Shafts bound tight to the shins of her synthskin and flared like rifle butts round her broad thighs. Black garotte laced the front of each boot, crowned by reef knots with dangling lynch-mob loops. Bren sensed his death in those boots. His old-fashioned penis suffered an old-fashioned response to the coming execution. His cock swelled. It was the only part of his body currently able to move.

'Look at me,' she said.

Three small words, but her tone told more. Pride. Confidence. Mockery. Aggression. Curiosity clashing with boredom. Complete certainty that Bren would break his program to obey her command.

He did.

He did not know why.

Perhaps relief at an excuse to tear his gaze from the annihilation footwear. Perhaps something in her rich, steady voice made her impossible to ignore, let alone defy. Perhaps it was some unknown trick in her template. Some queen-bee pheromone to which Bren was abnormally prone.

She was beautiful. It was the cold, severe beauty of a predator. Cruel eyes beneath heavy lids and barb-wire lashes. Yellow irises veined with black, the tones and pattern of a biohazard warning. Nose, cheekbones and a jaw so straight and so sharp that they seemed less like facial features and more like architecture. Bren expected a mouth as harsh and keen as the rest of her face. But it was soft, full and rounded. Bright red lips, the colour derived either from paint, gene-coding or a recent feast of fresh blood. Only when those lips twisted into a sneer did Bren realise that they were the most vicious component of her whole appearance. A single turn of that red flesh and Bren was undone.

'What's your template, boy?'

Blood courtesy did not permit Bren use of his dry tongue. His nervous system concentrated resources on his brisk heartbeat, the vice around his stomach and his shameful erection. The inheritrix overwrote his programming with only her voice. Bren responded in slow, blurred syllables, as though newly spawned and learning to speak for the first time. He gagged each painful word.

'Easter Lily, madam.'

Her lips formed a shape approaching a smile. There was pleasure beneath the contempt, but it was more a blend of amusement and pity than true delight.

'How quaint. A little secretarial drone. I thought you'd gone extinct. You're worthless these days, aren't you?'

Bren did not respond. She had asked a question, but it had been ambiguous, he felt. Rhetorical. He thought she now spoke to herself, as if pretending to address an unruly animal or a broken machine.

The inheritrix took his silence as dissent. Her look suggested venom.

'I said, you're worthless, aren't you?'

'Yes, madam,' said Bren, speaking fast to correct his earlier mistake.

'Yes, madam,' she said, imitating his breathy, panicked voice.

The Vixen seemed to tire of him. She did not move from his stall, but she turned from him to examine one of the ambulatables.

A bundle of used agony engine peripherals stood in a plastic vase. Their arrangement made the manipulator plugins appear even more floral than usual. Their fleshy pads bunched like rose petals atop stiff data spines. The newer models carried deflector thorns, added for more accurate torment when inserted into a working neurocore. Around the base of the container, blank memfilms lay like fallen leaves.

Bren briefly imagined that she admired the artistry of his display. That daydream ended when customised lesions in the salience network of his brain reminded Bren of his insignificance.

The inheritrix sniffed her amusement. 'This is how you survive? Trading parts of the machines that replaced you. That's rather sad. Isn't it, Lily?'

'Yes, madam.'

'Yes. It is. I almost feel sorry for you. Almost. If I actually pitied you, I'd put you out of your misery.'

She paused to regard Bren. Chevron brows rose as some notion struck her.

'Tell you what, show me your cock and I might buy something from your sad little display.'

She phrased it like a bargain, but Bren could only comply. Again, her voice cut through his paralysis. His hands felt numb, as though slept on. Bren fumbled at his ragged trousers. His fingers useless, he pushed the waistband down with the heels of his palms.

Bren had never felt more humiliated. All the shame of his pathetic life, all the hereditary guilt and daily disgrace climaxed in that moment, as he exposed his worthless cock to that apex of genetic composition.

The size alone was enough to embarrass. Even semi-swollen, Bren's penis appeared miniscule when presented to the towering woman. Its structure made the submission truly degrading. Modern male designs, especially the latest pleasure templates, favoured multiple phalluses. Whole bouquets of cocks, as beautiful and expansive as they were fragile. Hours of amusement for any woman, no matter her tastes. Not so for Bren. He could only suffer along that single short tube of clustered nerve endings. He could only ejaculate in one direction at a time. He could only endure so much damage before the organ failed and putrefied. He could, in his wildest pod dreams, only penetrate to roughly the length of his handspan.

He longed for the inheritrix to settle her earlier promise. He wanted her to end his misery.

Instead, she leaned in to study his cock, like a naturalist examining some lost inspect species. Bren cursed his programming as he grew harder beneath her gaze. He expected his erection to revolt her. The arch of a single pitched eyebrow was her only visible response.

'Well look at that,' she said, her tone flat and remote. 'They don't make them like that anymore. There's something to be said for the classic design. It's compact. Fits in the palm of your hand.'

To emphasise her point, the Vixen cupped him in her right hand. Bren gasped at his first ever touch from a woman. His balls settled in the web between her thumb and forefinger. The smooth underside of his engorged cock fell against the life line of her palm. The Vixen closed her hand around him, demonstrating more strength in her fingers than Bren possessed in his whole body.

Bren's stomach snapped concave as he winced through the pain. He had dreamed of a woman's embrace. His programmed instincts had always assured him that love was painful. But the reality of the experience eclipsed his naïve imaginings. There was texture to the torment. Layers. High notes of sparkling irritation as her steel fingers crushed the shaft of his cock. A low throb as his balls deflated against the bulb of her thumb. A sharp jolt, tail to the other pains, that ran up into his hips.

When he thought he could take no more, she offered more. The Vixen spun her wrist, twisting cock and balls like a door handle. She jerked the whole mess of flesh up, as though pulling a weed, roots and all. Bren sensed a strain close to tearing in the cardboard skin of his perineum. As her grip closed further, Bren felt single points of heat where her sharp nails bit the knot of meat.

The Vixen watched his face while she worked. Her own features became a ruthless mirror of his every grimace and moan. She raised her left hand to wipe a tear from his eye with the knuckle of her thumb. She released him as she raised the wet knuckle to her lips, as though that single captured teardrop was her entire goal.

While she drank his sorrow, Bren toppled back. Still unable to move, he could not correct his posture. He fell into his market stall. The dense stacks of junk took his weight. With his body still frozen into its stance, Bren leaned like a plank against a wall. Soiled merchandise rattled on the surfaces of the ambulatables.

'Not bad. Convenient. Like a handheld.'

The Vixen plucked a manipulator plugin from the vase. She chose a Babalon Working XLIX model. An antique flash drive. 4Gb of memory. Enough to store Bren's entire genome, but too small to save anything of real value. Bren suspected she picked the Babalon Working more for its appearance than its function. A tight rosette of scarlet leaves and a matt black stem lined with sickle-shaped deflector thorns. The Vixen examined it for a moment before threading it behind her ear. From an invisible pocket on the hip of the black synthskin, she drew a small card of similar colour and lustre.

'Your reward, Handheld,' she said. She did not wait for Bren to recover the strength and courage to take the card from her hand. Instead, she flicked it so that it struck his cock edge first. As if Bren required further demonstration of her skilful fingers.

Bren regained control of his body as he watched her vanish into the weeds. The gloss of her synthskin showed a storm of lightning strikes that rippled from her buttocks, speeding down the backs of her thighs to earth at the sudden dull hems of her boots. Bren slid to the ground where he shook and panted.

The market refilled while Bren recovered. Few of the men who had fled now dared look in Bren's direction. Their fear and envy separated them from him. He was no longer like them. He had been touched. Those who did look at him would not meet his eye. Instead, they stared at the glowing purple of the shattered blood vessels between his legs. Bren waited for the nerve endings in his genitals to dim. When the afterpain settled to a flutter, he slid back into his rough trousers.

Bren examined the card.

He expected some small sum of dolor credits. Something his clan could trade for food or spawn pod repairs in the more civilised inner-city markets. The figures on the card were black, engraved into more black. Bren had to turn the object like the Vixen had twisted his cock until the light caught it at the proper angle. Etched on the surface were the coordinates to an address in the outer commercial district. On the reverse, a manservant passcode to that section of the city. Sliced into the side of the card, shaped like the tooth of a bottle opener, was a finger-prick thorn to confirm a blood pact.

It looked like a job offer.