"Do you want the good news or the bad news?" she asked.
I'd been waiting for this moment for a long time. After all, there's only so many times the doctors can mutter, "You should be dead," and not be proved correct. And Erzabet was the expert. Or, at least, the closest thing to an expert out in the cold dark reaches of space - by which I mean
Sol Station
, Humanity's outpost beyond the heliosphere. "Your ten years are up, and you're going home to Earth," I said sadly, adding melodramatically, "Leaving me behind - and we never even kissed!"
"Behave, Sam," she said, her studied indifference betrayed by the slight flush to her cheeks. Erzabet had always insisted on keeping our relationship professional. After all, it was unethical for a doctor to sleep with her patient, even if that patient was a ship's whore.
"It just seems unjustly cruel," I said. "No one knows my body as well as you, yet you've never had the pleasure of it. But if you're no longer going to be my doctor..."
"Stop it, Sam." The blush intensified. "This is serious."
"Yes," I agreed, standing and moving closer to her. "Pleasure is a serious business."
Erzabet was twice my age, but in fine shape. She'd been monitoring my health ever since the surgery, ensuring that the prostheses integrated without complication. I'd quickly guessed that the distance she maintained between us was more about the lingering effects of a regressive Earth morality than cold ethical calculation.
"Deny me now," I whispered in her ear, "and you will regret it forever."
I pirouetted away, an action made easier by the low gravity and harder by my magnetic soles, and let my chameleon skin drift to fiery oranges and reds. "The good news."
She composed herself swiftly, although the mask fooled only my human eye. The other saw the shifting patterns of heat that told of an increased heart rate and a slight but definite increase in genital temperature. Erzabet was, quite literally, hot for me. "The good news is that you are - physically, at least - perfect."
"I know that," I said, my voice sultry, and abruptly the blush was back, brightening her cheeks with visible heat.
"Yes," she said, determined to forge ahead with the sentence she, judge of my fate, was about to deliver. "But you shouldn't be. Given the nature of your accident, the long delay in receiving the prosthetics, and the sheer invasiveness of the surgery, we would have considered fifty percent integration to be a success. Seventy percent would have been miraculous."
She turned her screen to show me an array of tables and graphs. In the bottom right of the screen the final result stated: "Integration: 87%".
"Eighty-seven," she echoed. "And it's not just your prostheses. Even state-of-the-art ESRPs don't provide perfect protection against cosmic radiation. It's the reason why
Sol Station
isn't a colony, and why no one stays here longer than they need to. It's the reason why I'm going home after ten years. But you?"
Erzabet tapped and scrolled her way through a number of screens, bringing up the radiation stats. "Not even a hint of damage. You've been out here for two whole years now. We ought to see something!"
She shook her head, obviously baffled, and switched to a different page. "And then there's the concentration of nanites in your blood. General medical advice is to limit patients to four optionals, although it's not uncommon to find space workers pushing this to six. There have been a number of recorded cases of patients with seven or even eight, but not without severe complications. The human body is simply not designed to cope with so much technological junk."
Her earlier arousal was completely gone. She was in full scientist mode, barely aware of me as anything other than a medical experiment. Which I certainly was. I'd got to eight optionals even before the accident, and had had two more since. "And it is junk," she continued. "Millions of microscopic robots breaking down or getting corrupted, sometimes even fighting each other, making the body into a battlefield. Especially if you're idiotic enough to use unregulated optionals."
Erzabet glowered at me meaningfully. I responded with a shrug and pulled my top off over my head, baring my flame-coloured breasts. She had, of course, seen me naked many times, but they still had the power to distract her. Especially at twice their usual size, my swollen nipples inviting the touch of her lips.
"Sam," she pleaded, the heat back in her cheeks as she tried not to stare at my chest. And that wasn't the only part of me that excited her. As her gaze lingered for a moment too long on my prosthetic arm, I turned the shell completely transparent to reveal the robotic mechanism within. With a guilty flinch, she tore her attention away from my body and what she so clearly yearned to do with it.
"And the bad news?" I prompted.
She sighed. "For the past year I've been worrying about the decay rate. About the insane amount of junk littering your veins. I've been waiting and waiting for the inevitable moment when I would have no choice except to filter your blood and start from scratch. According to my latest scans, we're there. One hundred percent junk."
"And yet," I said, peering down at my over-large breasts for confirmation, "my skin still changes colour, my breasts still expand on command, and -"
I pinched my nipples experimentally, and the mood enhancer punched my arousal to the maximum. "Fuck," I moaned, massaging my breasts as I struggled to calm down again. "That certainly still works."
Erzabet nodded absently, her attention riveted on my synthetic hand as it cupped and squeezed my human flesh. I had long grown used to the different sensations offered by my two hands, one warm and intimate, the other cold and mechanical. Lifting my skirt, I tugged my red lace thong to the side to expose my shaven pussy, and she watched, rapt, as I penetrated myself with my hard, smooth, artificial fingers that soon gleamed with the product of my heightened arousal.
"Would you like a taste?" I asked, offering my hand to her lips.
She barely hesitated before taking my index finger into her mouth and sucking on it. Despite the limited sensation in the prosthesis, I could feel her tongue swirling hungrily about my finger; and then to the next, and the next, and the next.
Watching the doctor suck on my pussy-flavoured fingers, it suddenly clicked, what she had been trying to tell me. "My nanites are still working," I mused, "and better than they should. They're not junk; they've evolved..."
My childhood was full of stories about monsters born of nanite evolution. Very often it was spacers fallen to Earth, their flesh corrupted by cosmic rays and too much technology. Sometimes it was aliens, horrifying visions spun from true accounts of life from other worlds. It suited the Government to encourage the belief that nothing good could come from beyond the orbits of Earth.
Not that nanotechnology wasn't used on Earth. It was, but the regulated optionals and targetted tech-meds were rare and expensive, the preserve of the wealthier classes and major corporations. The rest of us had to make do with the unregulated stuff that would shorten your life if it didn't kill you outright. It killed my brother: suicide by reckless experimentation. Better, he had said, than the alternative.
And, of course, anything unregulated was a freedom to be eradicated by our oppressive masters, the Government and the corporations. Thus all the funding for entertainments that emphasised the dangers of technology: the robots that took over the world; the mood enhancers that turned people's brains to mush, leaving women sex-crazed and men impotent; the nano-meds that healed only to kill in excruciating pain.
Most sinister of all was the threat of evolution, all that AI machinery in the blood achieving self-awareness and taking control of the human mind, making monsters in human form. And like the vampires of old, the malevolent blood of the evolved was forever seeking new victims to control.
They were just stories told to frighten and control us. It wasn't something that ever actually happened. The idea that it was happening to me... was preposterous.
And yet?
"Of course not," Erzabet said dismissively. "Something's corrupted the programming. A glitch. A virus. Something. Fortunately for you, it hasn't affected the functioning of the nanites, just their diagnostic interface, but you can be sure that this remarkably good health you're enjoying is temporary, a happy coincidence."
Working myself back into my shirt, I shifted my skin to the grey of steel. The look of disappointment on Erzabet's face was priceless. "I have clients to see," I explained. "I
am
free this evening - if you'd like to make an appointment?"
I raised an enquiring eyebrow, and the good doctor sighed with frustration. "Why are you so cruel to me, Sam?"
"I have been patient for a year, Doctor. Can't you be client for a night?"
*
It was a lie, though. I had no clients awaiting me. No doubt I could have rustled some up, made a few calls, sashayed through the main canteen, but instead I returned to my quarters and stood naked in front of my mirror, examining the body that was both human and not.
I had never felt more like an illusion. It wasn't just the cybernetics and the nanites, or the skin whose natural colour felt no more real anymore than the myriad of tones and patterns I had mastered over the years. In part it was the familiar conflict between my non-binary nature and the voluptuous femininity I embodied. In my youth on Earth I had fought against society's insistence that I was a woman - indeed, I had run away into Space to escape it - but as a ship's whore I had grown adept at portraying myself as a hundred fantasies of womanhood.
But there was more to this sense of disassociation. A sense that the intelligence looking back at me from the mirror wasn't entirely myself. And Erzabet's insistence that my misbehaving nanites were merely glitching... had seemed more like a desperate attempt to convince herself.
Was it possible? Had they evolved? How long before the last remnants of my humanity were lost to that emerging life form?
"Who are you?" I demanded in a whisper.
The answer, written in bright glyphs at the periphery of my vision, made perfect sense.
Three years had passed since I had walked into the Gnafr's embrace and shared its consciousness, its memories, and although my mind had been unable to retain more than a few scattered fragments of that alien knowledge, it had haunted my dreams ever since. But the Gnafr had clearly done more than bond with my mind. It had infected my body with a technological virus that had slowly taken control of my nanites - and evolved.
Like the monsters of my childhood, I was possessed by an alien soul.
*
My morbid introspection was interrupted by a call. It was my occasional pimp - or Consul, to give him his formal title. "Thomas!" I said, glad for the distraction if nothing else. "Have you finally succumbed to my charms?"
His abrupt blush was a delight. I'd neglected to block video, so he was seeing me in all my naked glory, my breasts still enlarged, my skin still as grey as the steel walls of the station. "No," he said hastily. "I - I have a, ah, client for you."
"Oh, dear." I gave an exaggerated sigh. "I hope it's not tentacles. If it's the Zharwei again, it's your turn." Actually, I wouldn't have minded. It was fun swimming with the Zharwei, but teasing Thomas was also fun.
