Inheritrix Ch 06

Chapter 6

Bric-a-brac

Crawling, Bren explored his knew world.

His mistress was a collector. Bundles, crates and pyramid piles filled the room. Pre-Correction items, judging by their age and the unprogrammed nature of the materials used. Those artifacts had not grown into their final forms. They had been crafted by folk of the original human template. Women, presumably. Bren struggled to imagine even primitive men with the creativity to make tools, toys and art from the world around them. Malekind had been a pestilence, capable only of carnage and destruction. So great were their sins that, millennia later, Bren and all other masculoids still suffered as penance.

It did not surprise Bren that the Vixen gathered antiques. The woman was a hunter by design. Spawned to seek and capture. She had redirected her predatory nature toward her interest in the ancient world. Now she hunted history. A prey so elusive it no longer existed.

As a high-claim inheritrix, she had the ability to steer and amend her programmed instincts. She could unravel the codes her gene mothers had locked. Bren, like all men, like most women, lacked the capacity to defy his template. But for elite females, organic impulses were mere guidelines. Bren's mistress possessed such willpower that she could not only override her own modifications, but those of people around her. Bren had seen it happen. He had felt it happen. She had toyed without effort with the ruleset that defined his body and mind. She was not just his sexual superior. Not only stronger, smarter and worthier than him. She was a god above him.

Bren worked with care. He dusted her hoard, treasure by treasure. Kneeling, arms bound tight behind his back, Bren used the muscles in his neck, straining against the tight collar as he wiped each item clean with the feathers of his gag. The work required delicacy and respect. His owner had chosen and rescued each individual relic, just as she had done with him. He was neither higher nor lower than those other possessions.

Previously unlit corners of Bren's shuttered basal ganglia activated for the first time in his life, rewarding him for finally locating his proper place in the world. The uncommon taste of dopamine turned the work sensual. Bren's cock would have tensed and grown were it not consumed by the synthskin parasite.

The nature of the treasures added to the eroticism of Bren's duties. Anything of hers was sacred. Any castoff was a prize. Any crumb a delicacy. Slithering among artifacts the Vixen valued enough to preserve was another level entirely for Bren. It elevated his kneecap quest from sexual to spiritual. He was the first Easter Lily in fourteen generations to find a purpose in life. He felt like a prophet.

Bren imagined he could taste the personality of his goddess as he worked his gagged mouth against her belongings. The Vixen expressed her preferences in the items she gathered. As if Bren did not already know, his mistress had a taste for torture.

Ancient weapons filled the room. Whips, crops, paddles and flails sprouted like weeds from brazier barrels and wicker guillotine baskets. Bren chased soot from clamps designed for every morsel of the body. Shackles and chains hung in garlands from the ceiling, shattering light from the foxfire lanterns into a starfield that covered every surface of the dusty old room.

Larger items defined their purpose by the man-shaped negative space around and within them. Bren cleaned racks, stockades, crosses and frames. Without permission to stand, he could only rub his muzzle against the lower portions of the restraint machines, usually brushing the dangling straps and manacles before he shuffled on.

Much of the equipment had begun life in the noble institutions of the old world. Schoolroom canes. Military zip cuffs. Prison spit hoods and belly chains. Straps and straightjackets in clinical shades of white and sky blue. Bren found cuffs, batons, blinding aerosols and electroshock weapons still holstered in police duty belts.

Other parts of the collection seemed cultural in nature. Bren passed a series of paintings, their faces cryptic with dust. Every time he wiped a canvas clean, Bren saw the same early man undergoing a series of bizarre iron-age torments. Bren dug through dirt as the slim, hairy figure was whipped, capped with brambles, hung from a wooden frame and then stabbed in the flank. Judging by the orgasmic look on the man's face in every image, Bren assumed he was some forefather of the modern masochist templates.

Viewed as a whole, the entire stockpile was a single artwork. An installation superior to the sculptures Bren had seen in his journey through the Muse part of town. Superior in composition, superior in medium and superior in message.

Superior in composition. The street sculptures had used male agony as their subject. Bren's high-born mistress knew that no man deserved such focus. Bren crawled through the collection as a footnote. A component. The dangerous toys towered over him, the chaos of their placement emphasising the unpredictable beauty of violence.

Superior in medium. The local artists had carved their figurines from male flesh. Masculoids were cheap, plentiful and, by definition, inferior. In contrast, the Vixen had scoured the ruins beyond Emancipol for her materials. Some of those objects must have been the last of their kind. Over sixty centuries old if they predated the Corrections. Preserved only by the great microbial reshuffles of the postwar era, when inheritrices had emasculated even entropy, that most male of mechanisms. But six thousand years was still a long time, and the planet had long since been picked clean. Bren hailed from a pack of scavengers. He knew how difficult it was to find anything of value among the ashes of the old world. He could not fathom how far and how deep his mistress must have searched to furnish her museum of pain.

Superior also in message. The Muse works were mere spectacle. Tortures of competing cruelty and complexity. Notable only for the novelty of their abuse. They shocked but did not challenge their audience. The boys in those sculptures suffered, but all modern men were bred to suffer. The Vixen's work said something more. Something profound.

It built upon an old argument, forgotten to most. Bren recalled it from his clan's oral history. The Principle of Axiomatic Dimorphism. The Correctors, when first improving on evolution, had claimed to refine but not subvert natural law. Men, even in their primal form, were built for punishment. Thicker skulls. Higher bone density. Defenceless genitalia. Nervous systems generous with painkilling beta-endorphins. Females, by contrast, possessed the only human organ with pleasure as its sole function. The natural roles of men and women were self-evident. Women were meant to bask, men to toil and suffer. In any other species with such strong sexual disparity, the female would eat her mate.

The Vixen expanded the genetic destiny of the sexes to include the societies of the old world. By gathering all that ancient technology of subjection, she showed that widespread punishment of men predated the Corrections. She proved that the idea of civilisation had always been a love affair between tyrant and victim. The world had always run on the Economy of Torment.

To emphasise the message, Bren's mistress ran her exhibit as a business. Bren knelt in an antiques shop. While dusting near the bay window, he read the name in letters printed backwards on the glass.

INTRUSIVE MEMORIES

VINTAGE BOUTIQUE

Was that why she had chosen him? She had plucked him from his junk stall in the wasteland market to have him grovel in the premium version of the same enterprise. Bren knew his place. He understood that nothing from his previous occupation qualified him to serve in Intrusive Memories. But his mistress valued style. She appreciated symmetry. The presence of a forager like Bren at her feet matched her grand business venture, just as her shoes complemented her red tuxedo jacket, just as Bren's outmoded body dovetailed with those man-sized weapons and restraints.

She ignored him as he worked. He had fallen below her regard, and she was the axis of everything he thought and did. Everything was as it should be.

Bren dared to glance at his owner as he crept across the floor. She spent most of the day at a desk in the rear of the boutique, growling to herself as she stabbed the cornea screen of an agony engine remote. It was a privilege to watch her relax in her own environment. Bren felt like a house pet.

He noted with delight that she had kept the Babalon Working XLIX model from Bren's old market stall. Removing the plunger from a scrotox syringe, she had driven the needle into a corner of her desk. The glass sheath now served as a vase for the slim, floral manipulator plugin.

The Vixen was terrifying, even in repose. She rested like a predator between pounces. Her long, crossed legs bounced and stirred. Calf muscles shaped like chef knives held tense and keen. A red shoe slipped to hang from her toes, exposing the matt flayon heel of a fortified stocking. Her whole foot arched into a comma, firm and powerful as she kicked the air.

Bren flinched whenever she rose and stalked past him. Although she twice stepped on his neck to guide his face toward a missed spot of dust, Bren learned that he was neither the cause nor the cure for her restlessness. She treated him as an afterthought. At several points she left him alone in the showroom. Bren heard the war-drum pounds of her steps in an upper storey of the building. She returned each time in a different outfit, displaying a wardrobe that blended modern skins with vintage garments. Bren became a fitting accessory as the synthskin hatched across his old-code body.

Black tar now covered his flesh. Bren sweltered through the bristly, burning pain of the infestation. The parasite drank his sweat along with his blood. Bren's senses dulled in the covered areas of his body. His skin compensated with a heightened delicacy on the few remaining naked patches. The fabric felt thick. It swaddled him and it creaked when he moved. But when he looked down at his bound, doubled body, Bren saw the skin cling close to his starved frame. The polish highlighted every crater and prominent bone. It grew fine enough to slide below his tight cuffs on its path to enclose his fingers. It crept under his collar and the straps of his gag as it slithered up to form first a hood, then a mask and then finally a skin-tight sack around his entire head.

Smells, sights and sounds vanished. Bren's breath, hobbled all day by the gag, stopped entirely when the synthskin shut tight. When he collapsed, he seemed to exist for hours in a dark void.

The Pearl Fisher gene clan were bred for queening. They could live for hours on a single held breath while smothered beneath a mistress. Bren was not so lucky. He did not carry that gift nor that glorious purpose. It must have only been seconds before the Vixen saved him from suffocation.

The synthskin was genlocked to her command. She used a fingertip to trace circles round his nostrils. The skin opened two holes in response. Bren writhed as he sucked in air through his nose. In his panic, he gasped out into the gag and then fell into a coughing fit. The Vixen drew openings around his eyes and ears so that he could hear her sharp laugh and he could see her acid smile.

'Wonderful. That was worth waiting all day for. I was tempted to let it snuff you out, but then I'd need to go to the bother of replacing you. This is another important lesson for you. I even decide whether or not you breathe. Now get back to work.'

Bren moved slower now that the synthskin coated his entire body. It drained his remaining strength. He slipped often on the smooth osteotile. The weakness in his limbs and the anatomy of his binds made it difficult to right himself. He focussed less on his task and more on drawing air through his nose. If his mistress noticed, she did not care.

A stillness settled on the shop. No customers had entered all day. Bren thought this changed when the Vixen stepped over him to answer the door, but it was only a courier drone. A masculoid of the Draft Mule clan, the model that had replaced the Tuppence Blue. The Vixen accepted a brown paper bag from the Mule and then spat in his mouth to genelock the charge to her account. Bren watched his owner as she set the bag on a nearby counter to examine her delivery. She drew out a bottle of wine and a disposable dildo. Both items were of comparable length and girth. Under his hood, Bren scowled with envy at whatever masculoid that phallus had been harvested from. At least it was no longer attached to his body.

'Well, that's my evening sorted,' said the Vixen when she saw Bren looking up at her. She seemed amused rather than annoyed by his attention. Bren shivered on instinct. He had already learned that she was far more dangerous when her tone switched to a mocking cheerfulness.

'What have you got planned for tonight?' she said. 'Oh, that's right, of course.'

She stepped on the feathers of his duster gag, pinning Bren's face to the floor.

'You're due a punishment, aren't you?'