Inheritrix

Chapter 3

Suffragette City

Emancipol, the world's last surviving city, did not suddenly crumble at its borders. The ruin came in phases, like tide marks. Remnants of how the inheritrices had withdrawn, physically and emotionally, from the planet they had been bred to rule. They remained in Emancipol's gleaming centre where they lived in luxury and practiced their dark hobbies.

Bren walked through the easing decay. He began in rubble, weeds and the top-heavy pylons of faulty construction fungus. By nightfall, he found places where entire buildings still stood. Their windows had blistered and their unnourished fleshcrete showed scabs and sores, but there was still a nobility to those diseased erections.

Within two days, he entered districts where entire city blocks survived. Here, the more successful stray masculoids lived in populous clans. The Casuals. Those who were not yet fully obsolete. Those who could still find work in the gig economy. Day labourers. Brothel drones. Biodonors. They built shantytowns between the empty buildings. Not even those desperate men could overcome their conditioning. They could not squat in property that could only rightly belong to a woman.

To masculoids, this place was called Suburbia. Inheritrices referred to it as the Game Reserve.

Women from the centre stalked those slums. Low-claim females unable to transcend their programming. Specialised, obsolete templates who performed mad parodies of their original congenital trades. Most lethal were the veteran templates who refought the Correction Wars each night.

Bren noted their silhouettes as they prowled the blackout streets. Enforcers in peaked caps and catsuits wielding cuffs and cattle prods, prosecuting gender crimes real or imagined. Governesses in capes and mortarboards, displaced from their re-education camps, schooling the vagrant menfolk with only hairpins and birch canes. Eugenicists in medical tunics seeking aberrations to castrate. Nuclear rangers in gasmasks and skin-tight hazmat. Spies in bowties and thigh highs. Oppressors in athleisurewear. Marines in neoprene. Jack-booted shock troopers. Exterminators in jodhpurs and hunting pinks riding horse-shaped men among packs of hound-shaped men in pursuit of the merely men-shaped men of Suburbia.

During his days in the hunting grounds, Bren wondered why those masculoids chose to remain in such a dangerous place. Why did they not hide in the wreckage like his own gene clan? Why did they not flee to the deep wilderness like the mythical free men? But as he braved the journey toward the Vixen's summons, Bren reminded himself that they were just like him. They could not escape the lure of their coding. They risked their safety, sanity and lives just for the chance of contact with a real woman. It was all so romantic.

Signs of female civilisation appeared so slowly that Bren struggled to note the boundary between the Game Reserve and the city proper. Streets grew neater, then cleaner, then flawless. Playgrounds and pain gardens stood free of fungus, undergrowth and litter. The males Bren encountered seemed gainfully employed or deliberately restrained for public display. He passed a meat market where men bulk-spawned from rare new templates knelt caged and ready for purchase.

The women in that fringe of the city wore stiff gowns of printed bone, the mesh patterns of the material complemented by cobweb bangles and birdcage veils. They had the lithe figures and sand-blonde hair of the Muse template. Artists and entertainers drawn to the once-abandoned city outskirts by studio space and access to cheap men. They held a modest position in the complex, volatile hierarchy of women. The waist-length cuts of those flowing hairstyles suggested genetic inheritances of low claim. The subtle social grades of his betters meant little to Bren. He recognised but did not understand them. As a masculoid, he was beneath them all. He could be commanded, contained and killed by any woman of any status. He was a worm, naked to every predator from songbird to fox.

Bren hoped his blood pact confirmation would protect him from the Muses who owned those streets. He removed the red and silver card from his pocket and held it visible as he walked. He wished that, like the men he saw around him, he had a collar round his neck to announce that he was already some woman's property.

It was not just devotion to the Vixen that drove Bren to skulk and hurry through the outskirts. His ever-present fear of women pressed him on. He had never in his life been within whipping distance of so many females. He moved through shadows and backstreets, eyes down at all times so he would not accidentally lock gaze with a woman and stun himself into courtesy. The layered, contradictory drives of his programming argued through his head, heart and cock, telling him to both yield and flee.

His desire threatened to overrule his caution every time he passed a new Muse sculpture. Programmed with creativity beyond restraint, the inheritrices of that class turned their talents to the only venture the world now valued. The Economy of Torment. They crafted men into living, suffering pieces of art.

A masculoid of the Bagworm Moth clan stood shackled to a noticeboard while darts and nails fixed concert posters and art-show flyers to his pinned wings. In the window of a gallery, someone with the Hydrant polygene struggled in a repurposed spawn pod that fed his own endless stream of semen down his throat. Across the street, a skittle-shaped man writhed in a stockade while a hydraulic battering ram drove into his vast barrel anus.

Men dangled like hanging baskets from brackets along the whole length of one avenue. Suspended by chains, their positions in sequence described man's evolutionary march of progress. Apish figures of the Amber Flea gene clan hung in crouches, slowly unfolding into upright poses. After them, hairless men resembling Bren swung from their wrists, followed by smaller and stranger templates in ever more degrading arrangements. The piece ended with the artist's prediction for the future corruption of the lesser sex. An agony engine. A braided nervous system in a flesh box that used pain neurotransmission to complete complex algorithms. An inert machine that existed only to suffer. The artist had stitched a cock and balls to the side of the computer.

Bren saw a figure with thousands of sewing needles pressed through every scrap of his flesh. Fine silk threads connected the eye of each needle to weave a cocoon around him. Shifts and pain spasms in each part of his body triggered a pull on a corresponding needle. Every flutter of a pierced eyelid dragged upon an attached nipple. He held his hands splayed like a puppeteer, trying not to disturb the doubled threads between his punctured fingertips and his pincushion genitals. With a tongue too full of metal to fit back in his mouth, his endless screams were a cycle of wet vowels.

Bren was astounded. He did not believe a man could receive so much attention from a woman that she would make art from his body. Inheritrices passing in the street paused to admire and debate the living sculptures. Bren fantasied himself in the role of those life models. He dreamed of torment worthy enough to provide a moment of distraction in the glamorous life of some exquisite woman. He tried to imagine how lucky those sculptures must feel, their worthless male bodies finally made beautiful by the care and invention of superior beings.

This was true civilisation. This was the future. This was the Big City. Bren's clan had been starved of female contact for over four centuries. All of them had spawned knowing they deserved punishment, but none of them had imagined torment to that extent. No living Lily had witnessed the wonders of modern women. The men of Bren's clan had relied upon their long, shared memories, trading stories of the adventures of former clanmates. Office tales of light spankings and necktie restraints. Legends whispered in the dark between brothers before they hurried back to their cubicles to weep and masturbate. It all seemed so tame to Bren now.

His envy of the sculpted men made him long for the Vixen. Head down and cock up, Bren hurried on, taking risks on crowded streets as he closed on his destination. He walked without rest for a night and a day.

The coordinates on the card described a premises on Theresa Berkley Boulevard. The border between the commercial district and the art colony. Perhaps his new owner was an artist herself. It seemed reasonable to assume that she was creative. She was perfect in every other way. Perhaps Bren would not only serve her but also suffer for her pleasure. After all, she had seemed to enjoy his pain when they had met in the market. Perhaps she would bind him to some novel torture that his feeble mind could never predict. Perhaps, like the sculptures, he would be the first man alive to suffer some specific new humiliation. Perhaps she would complete him.

Bren's amplified memory stores, hungry for new experiences, stole focus from the rest of his brain. He carefully catalogued both the sculptures and his resulting sexual fantasies. Diligence programming, mistaking his erotic fever dreams for actual concentration, allowed Bren's thoughts to turn inwards. A blinker graft in his pituitary gland forced a spell of tunnel vision that had been designed to keep Bren at his desk. He did not notice when the Vixen stepped in front of him.

'Handheld. There you are.'

She closed one fist around his neck and then lifted him off the ground so that his eyes met hers. Blood courtesy sent him lip in her grip. Bren did not even try to breathe through the pinhole that remained of his windpipe. He believed he would die happy.

'You're late, you little turd.'