"Don't you die on me yet, you stupid machine," Engel panted, swiping the sweat from her eyes. She braced herself with her other hand on the wall beside her bed. Her hips rose and fell in a regular rhythm, her skin clapping against the hard, leather covered box between her legs.
It whirred uncertainly, the sound of gears grinding drowning out her moans. The vibrating dildo that sprouted from the top of the box was a reasonable facsimile of the real thing, if not large enough to shame most men into avoiding eye contact with it. Not that that had been an issue recently, the men. Engel hadn't had a real cock inside of four months. In that time, she had nearly worn out her "fuckbox", as she affectionately referred to the piece of machinery now slowly chugging to a stop between her thighs.
"Oh, fuck no," she groaned, coming to a shuddering halt, dildo buried to the hilt in her ass. Her throbbing cock looked painfully swollen, drooling precum heavily down the length of its shaft. Sweat poured down her face and neck, running in small rivers over the slight swell of her breasts. A drop hung a moment on the rim of her pink left nipple, shining in the low light of the cabin, before dripping with a barely noticeable splash on the bedsheets below. The bed itself was drenched in sweat and, by the smell of it, machine oil now as well. She pulled herself free with an audible pop, shivering at the sudden feeling of emptiness inside her dissatisfied ass.
With some effort she managed to hop free of the bunk, her legs shaking from the strain. She'd been riding the fuckbox for a good half-hour with nothing to show for it but some bruises on her thighs and what seemed to be a heavy incoming repair bill. She was handy enough with machines, but more in the sense of diagnostics. She was no grease monkey, whatever the spreading stain on her once-blue-now-black bedsheets had to say about it. She unplugged the fuckbox from the wall port and leaned against the cold metal of the cabin walls, taking a moment to catch her breath and her thoughts.
She looked out the porthole window at the familiar sight of the
Pound of Flesh
pleasure station. It was gaudy by any measure, lit up as it was with pink and purple logos promising everything a heart could desire. Barring a heart, it had tools to work over other choice pieces of anatomy as well. Tomorrow, though, it would be a receding memory falling rapidly out of view as she took her ship on its first trip out of Venusian orbit. Engel was already feeling homesick, and she hadn't even undocked yet. She stretched her arms over her head, cracking her back with a satisfying pop, and looked beyond the pleasure barge to the planet below.
There was something to be said of the Ashen Light all those dead men claimed to see with their bespoke scopes pointed into the endless abyss: a thrill of illumination that buoys a dark body into something resembling the face it shows the Sun. And here, above the yellowy clouds, somewhere a few hundred miles away from Aphrodite Terra, Engel clung to this notion of a silent lightning, undetectable by anyone lacking the imagination to see what the probes refused to show in their transmissions home. She was born here in this tidally locked station, one of thousands of faceless proles, a product of some banker's pen sinking home into the vault of one of a handful of megacorporations. She was sure there had to be a video of the copulation somewhere on the DarkNet. Even the most basic observer could at least see the shockwaves that went through the stocks at the time. It was the final push of colonial funding that opened the floodgates for all those fresh little babies to start cooking in the artificial wombs the corporate scientists had set up ages ago before hurling the little blastocysts of potential into the void.
On the books she was designated C3-69, but only the official entities on the station bothered with it. To everyone else she was Engel. No one from the tanks worried about family names overmuch, what with them being experiments more than anything else. Sure, there were your usual in-groups and gangs and such that took on fancy nomenclature, but for Engel, it was enough. She had been given it by a kindly enough old German ex-pat who had decided to blow his retirement out riding the interplanetary pleasure barges. She kept it a secret for the longest time, her own name, a person to aspire to be, until she had found her feet and established herself as the go-to girl for the discerning gentlefolk at the old
Pound of Flesh
.