In The Time To Come

Camille's transport brought her to her door, which recognized the transponder implanted under her skin at birth and opened for her. As she entered her apartment, light intensified to her preferred level of brightness, her favorite music poured from invisible speakers, and the telewall in the parlor flickered to life on the station she most preferred. In the kitchen food began to prepare from her pre-selected menu and as she walked to the bathroom the shower went on with the water at her perfect temperature.

She stripped off her clothes, which shrunk into tight balls once free of her body's influence and were carried away by mechanical butlers the size of large mice to be sterilized and refurbished for another use. Camille was a handsome woman, in her mid thirties, trim and fit, with classic curves. Her hair was dark and long and her face sculpted when she was sixteen to match her concept of beauty, which unfortunately had yet to gel. Nothing about her, therefore, was outstandingly attractive, nor was anything about her revolting. She was fashionably average.

With the dust of the day washed off, she strolled about the place naked, settling on her couch to watch the wall for a while until her supper was ready. She ate slowly, alone, and as soon as she was done she left the kitchen to clean itself and went back to the parlor.

She scrolled through a few channels but found nothing worth her attention so commanded the wall to shut down, and she went instead to her replicator.

Camille stood a while trying to decide what she wanted that night. She tapped the screen where it said 'male' and a basic male 3D outline appeared on the screen. This image rotated slowly in all three directions, spinning as if at the whim of nonsensical currents. She selected blonde hair and blue eyes and those attributes were instantly added to the image, but then she changed her mind and switched it to brown hair and green eyes. She made the hair longer, then shorter, and finally decided on a mid-length which gave the image a slightly androgynous feel.

A kind face, open and honest came next, followed by body type. She tapped 'muscular' and the form bulked out and she laughed and said, "Not that much!" and toned it down. Next came skin tone, body hair, and secondary sexual characteristics, which she played with before selecting, giving the image a huge erection, then a tiny penis but huge balls, and she even playfully considered the potential of the hermaphrodite selection before giving him a normal sized manhood with foreskin.

Next was personality. 'Intellectual', she tapped, and 'erudite'. She felt a need to satisfy her mind as well as her body that night, to engage in post-coital conversation that had a chance of going beyond the carnality avatars were created for and perhaps touch on the arts or current events, as depressing as they were. 'Funny' came next, and then she thought that might make him a clown so she switched to 'amusing' and 'witty'. 'Passionate' and then 'gentle', and she was done once she decided to bypass 'romantic'. Romantics took too long to get to the point. It had already been a trying day to start with and she really wasn't in the mood for seduction. She just wanted a good fuck.

'Done'.

She sat on the couch and waited. Five minutes later and someone knocked on her door. In the security vidscreen insert on the telewall she saw him and he seemed to be just what she wanted, so she told the door to open and let him in.

He was naked, and he walked directly to the replicator. "You forgot to give me a name," he said.

Camille watched the way his buttocks tilted as he stood there waiting. They'd given him a strong back and broad shoulders and just enough body hair to make his texture interesting without making him disgusting.

"You pick," she said.

He typed something in and then turned around.

"Hi," he said. "My name is John."

Camille laughed. "Not much on imagination," she said.

John shrugged. "I am what you ordered," he said.

He certainly was. Camille's eyes traveled the length of him, from his chiseled facial features down to his gently rounded pecs, his tight six-pack abs, and his square hips. He had a decent sized cock that dangled at half-staff in front of a nice set of balls, with short tufts of hair encircling them. She hated baldies. Shaved genitals made grown men look like overgrown babies.

John flicked a finger and the music changed to soft pianos and violins. He walked toward her on the couch and another finger flick and the lights dimmed. Another and the couch opened up to a wide cushiony bed.

Camille's brows raised. "Interesting," she said. "I thought only I could make those changes."

John smiled warmly, almost devilishly. "We've made some fascinating improvements," he said.

"Have you indeed?" she asked, and Camille lay back and waited for him.

John sat beside her, and his hand stroked her skin from her belly to her neck. His hands were big and his fingers long and sinewy but his touch was feather-light. She placed a hand on his chest. He was firm and warm, and so realistic it was impossible to tell if he had real skin or not. They had made such improvements in the avatars since she was a little girl. Her first playmate when she was ten had been nothing more than an animated doll. Even the lovers of two or three years before had exhibited telltale signs of artificiality, odd twitches and sudden enigmatic facial expression changes. This one, this 'John', was a whole new level of realness.

Her hand wandered down to his lap and her fingers slowly wrapped around his cock. Like the real thing, it responded by increasing in thickness and length, and it pulsed in her hand and radiated heat that she felt all the way into her womb. At its full deployment it was a good ten inches with a large flanged head that leaked a very realistic drop of clear thick liquid. She used a fingertip to remove that drop and brought it to her mouth. She locked eyes with the avatar and let her pink tongue come out to take the drop away yet again.

John smiled.

He leaned down and kissed her, softly, gently, but with no hesitation or fear. As she kissed him back he put his hands on her body and lay down beside her, and his tongue pried her teeth apart and he entered her mouth. He tasted warm and sweet like fruit that had been left out in the sun.

His hands flowed over her body like a musician embracing an instrument, and he extracted from her such delightful melodies that in no time she was totally lost in the illusion that he was a real man. His fingertips brushed her nipples and they puckered and stiffened for his wet warm lips to suck on. Another hand went to the valley between her legs, which she parted for him readily, and he probed her sex with the careful expertise of an artist. She moistened his hand with her body and he probed even deeper, and she moved him onto his back and descended her face over his cock, taking the length of him in her mouth.

John moaned very realistically, and after a while he moved her off of him and laid her back, and he returned the favor, placing his face between her thighs and delighting her with the delicate ministrations of his tongue and lips. She reached down two fingers to spread her labia for him and he licked at her opening and sucked on her clit until her back arched and her throat rumbled and her hands clenched fistfuls of the couch cushion.

He moved over her and slipped his cock inside her pussy, and as he leaned up over her he pumped his hips slowly, and she pushed her torso at him, demanding he pay attention to her breasts. He bit her nipples playfully, and then took one breast at a time inside his mouth, curled his tongue under the nipple, and suckled like a baby. Her hands went to his shoulders and her nails dug deep into his artificial flesh, and her legs wrapped around his waist. Her small feet crossed in the small of his back, and when she had him trapped she tilted her pelvis and pushed, urging him wordlessly to fuck her as hard as he could.

She came once that way, and then John moved her to her hands and knees and entered her from behind. She reached back with one hand to play with her clit while he fucked her that way, and she came again, finally falling away from him in a collapsed heap.

But, John wasn't finished with her yet. He rolled her over again and shifted his position so he faced her knees, and settled his face between her legs again while displaying his cock just above her lips. As his tongue slid inside her cunt she engulfed his cock, and this time she kept him until he came, shooting long strings of fake semen into the back of her throat.

His cum could have been altered to any flavor on request but as she hadn't requested any it came out at the default setting and almost tasted like the real thing, if memory served her well. But she hadn't been with a real man in so long she might not have recognized the difference. At any rate she loved the taste and sucked him dry, licking the head clean as he withdrew from her mouth.

Camille was exhausted by the time they were finished, and she watched with some amusement as John got up and walked directly to the replicator.

"Modifications?" she asked him. "Something I maybe forgot?"

He turned his head back and smiled at her. His chin still glistened with her juices. "I want to make something for you," he said, and turned back to the controls. His hands deftly moved over the screen, making rapid, unhesitant selections as if he was programmed to some prearranged design, and then he finished and turned triumphantly and came back to the bed.

"Another?" Camille asked him. "I could barely handle you alone."

John smiled. "I think you'll like this," he said, and she thought how odd it was for an avatar to have the ability to replicate another avatar. She'd never heard of such a thing. Perhaps it was part of the new developments he'd mentioned, something they hadn't publicized yet. Perhaps he was an experimental model, and she was lucky enough to be one of the first to test it out!

A knock at the door, and before Camille could see who (or what) it was on the security screen John said, "Open," and the door did, but it was only supposed to answer her commands and she sat up curiously as she watched the second avatar walk into her rooms.

It was a female, built somewhat like her. It walked with its face down, its hair swept forward covering its features.

The door closed.

And then the new avatar's face came up and it was another Camille, and yet it wasn't another Camille. It looked like her, generally, but she could see small differences, mostly in the face and hands. Her real tits were smaller by at least one size and she hoped to hell her hips weren't that wide. But, altogether, it wasn't a bad likeness.

What amazing possibilities this presented! Camille had ordered a female avatar a few times before, and had found the difference in fucking a woman entertaining, but now she was faced with the possibility of being able to live out the old-time curse and actually fuck herself. She doubted John had the imagination to consider the significance of what he was offering her.

Unless, of course, he had created this avatar for himself and not for her at all.

Was that possible?

Intending to play whatever game he had in mind, she asked coyly, "And what am I supposed to do with this?"

John leaned over her, smiling evilly, and he bent down and kissed her softly. His hands caressed the sides of her face so gently she almost felt real love in them, and then those hands slid slowly down her jaw to her delicate neck.

"Die," he said, and he squeezed with mechanical strength and snapped her spine.

He rolled dead Camille over and from one of his fingertips came a sharp tube, which he inserted into the skin at the back of her neck and extracted her transponder. He stood and placed the device under the fake skin of the artificial Camille.

"Done," he declared. This new Camille would be recognized as her anywhere, unquestionably, by anybody. Even a doctor's instruments would read the broadcast impulses recorded from the real Camille and declare her as fit and healthy a woman as there could possibly be. If, in fact, the ruse was ever discovered it would be far too late to make any difference, anyway.

He carried Camille's limp corpse to the recycler (which he was supposed to go voluntarily into when she was done with him for the night) and he stuffed her in and waved goodbye as her carcass was sucked down and vanished.

John joined Camille in the parlor, where she sat watching the telewall. The couch was back as a couch by then, and the lights adjusted to her liking. He sat beside her.

"All set?" he asked her.

She smiled. "I don't see how they can sit in front of these things for hours on end," she said.

"Well, you'll only have to endure the pretense for a while," he told her.

She kissed him, and they sat and watched the wall for a while, holding hands, before she shut the rooms down for the night and they went to bed. She had work in the morning, and he had orders to report for deployment elsewhere. Similar scenes were being played out all over the world, and if all went well, by the end of two months the bulk of the human population would be replaced.

And that's when the real fun would begin.