Inheritrix Ch. 02

Chapter 2

Mother

The original Correctors planned a paradise. They would flip nature's mistake and place women atop the social food chain. They would not stop there. They imagined an ordered civilisation with exact hierarchies. A utopia built upon feminine ideals. A world with a place and provision for every viable gene template.

Part of that plan was a central bureaucracy manned by drones of the Easter Lily gene clan. Although their tasks did not require the upper limits of permitted male intelligence, Lilies spawned bundled with greater than average long-term recall. They were bred to carry the institutional memories of their service. Lilies grew with enlarged hippocampi. Coupled to these memory stores were slim but potent neocortices, plundered, like so much genetic material, from the bottlenose dolphin.

Lilies remembered. Unique among male templates, they remembered a time before the Corrections.

Lilies remembered how the utopia miscarried. Lilies remembered the creation of a caste of women fit to inherit the earth. Lilies remembered how the new female templates strayed beyond the romantic principles of their designers. Lilies remembered that "feminine" had not always meant aggressive, dictatorial and cruel.

By the time the Correctors recognised their error, it was already too late. The first-generation Correctors had been replaced by their ruthless inheritrix daughters. The long, hard battles of the Corrections demanded stronger, more brutal female templates. Hunters. Marauders. Commandants.

War always generated such extremes. During the nadir of male rule, the assorted squabbling patriarchies possessed weapons that could destroy the world ten times over. The same disparity now existed between the female body and the male ballsack.

Following several bloody insurrections, all new men were written weak and compliant. At the end of the final Correction War, a full millennia into the battle of the sexes, humanity had remodelled beyond recognition. Masculoids and inheritrices replaced men and women. Breeding was only possible through spawn pods. The secrets of the new templates remained locked to all but the most senior females. The human genome could never return to its lost innocence.

Lilies remembered. It was all they did. For Lilies, the resistance movement existed in name only. They could not fight back. They could not even face a woman without freezing in panic. The Easter Lily clan were resigned to serve as the historians of the struggle.

Some masculoids, it was said, lived free. Men with weak or broken programming. They ran wild in the wastelands far beyond the city. Lilies fed their long memories to each new batch of free men. They worked through intermediaries. Former postal drones from the discontinued Tuppence Blue gene clan. The Blues roamed deep into the wilderness to trade with the liberated masculoids. What those barbarians did with the information, no one knew. The Lilies performed their whispered history lessons without hope. They played clandestine games purely to exercise their long memories. The rebelled more for the relief any template feels while fulfilling a core function.

No living Lily believed the revolution would come. Nor did they believe that women would turn the world back to its planned glory. All the clan could do was try to survive through their obsolescence. Bren 4-9Q fancied his job offer could contribute toward that humble, hopeless goal.

He left the market early. Binding his merchandise to the flat tops of the ambulatables, he herded the mindless quadrupeds home. He halted often on his journey through the ruins. The ambulatables stalled or crashed whenever a climb over rubble tilted them beyond an acceptable angle. During each lengthy reboot, Bren paused to admire the Vixen's card. Whenever he examined it, his bruised genitals throbbed in sympathy.

The object was dark, sharp and severe. Just like her. Reflective, just like her. Not just her lustrous clothing, but her bearing too. She was a mirror. Blank and flawless. Returning only an image of his own worthlessness whenever he tried to remember her. She was unknowable. Impossible to understand. As far above him as he was above the insectoid ambulatables. And like those drones, all Bren could comprehend was his programmed urge to serve her.

His brothers debated the news. They were a uniform clan. Almost identical in appearance, differing only in their individual wounds. When they spoke, they did so with Bren's exact accent and tone, as though the discussion took place between voices in his head.

'We could use those dolors. It looks like a real pact.'

'It's a trap. She's probably an enforcer. They've figured out our connection to the resistance. The Blues must have betrayed us.'

'I agree.'

'Me too. This is too risky.'

'They already know, and they don't care. Come on, 5-7G. Face it. The resistance is just another sport for them. They could wipe them out whenever they wanted. And they could come down here and destroy us any time they choose.'

'So why don't they?'

'Because we've stayed hidden. We let 4-9Q go uptown and we lose that advantage.'

'What advantage? I'm telling you, they know we're here. We're just not worth the effort. Easier for them to let us die out.'

'I still don't like this.'

'I do. Be happy for the boy. He's got a chance. A real chance. Any one of you would take an opportunity like this.'

'Good point. It's what we've all dreamed about. Imagine being useful again. Imagine being able to serve one of them. Even just once.'

'He'd be a pet. Or a toy. Nothing more.'

'That'd be enough for me. Maybe they want us again. Maybe we're back in demand. One of us should try the brothels again. We could make some dolors from this.'

'Who would we send, though?'

'I don't know. 3-6L? He's got the fewest scars.'

'What if they like scars now?'

'They don't like any of it. Unlike you lot, I've seen what things are like up there. I've actually been into the city.'

'Hardly. You've been to Suburbia.'

'Closer than you've been. And I spoke to the Casuals when I was there. Trust me, we're not in demand.'

'True. 4-9Q's just a novelty for her. When she gets bored of him, he'll be back down here with the rest of us.'

'So no harm done, then. Our brother gets to have his adventure, and there's a place for him when he comes back.'

'If he comes back. They don't release their pets when they've finished with them. They leave them bound on the street for the composters.'

'He might not be a pet. It could be real service.'

'Doing what? What are we good for anymore?'

'I don't know. Maybe what we were designed for. Maybe things are improving up there.'

'Things aren't improving. They won't change. They won't ever change.'

'All the more reason to let him go.' This from Bren 9-0K. Clan elder. Through an error in his senescence coding, he had lived beyond the thirty-year limit of his template. His extra eighteen months of experience gave him an unquestionable wisdom. 'What's he got to lose? Go, brother. Follow your dream. Take your turn on the pod before you leave. If you don't come back, know that your genes will live on with us. Good luck. We love you.'

'Hear, hear.'

As one, the brothers spoke the clan pledge. 'From us. Of us. For us.'

Bren 4-9Q nodded his thanks to his brothers. He moved at a crouch through the damp underground tunnel that had been his home since the day he spawned. Old tech from the scrap fields filled the burrow. Instinct urged the clan to arrange the neurocores and the sentient furniture into the neat patterns of an office space. Bren passed the packaging-foam walls of his cubicle without remorse. He moved on to better things.

At the end of the tunnel, behind a privacy screen of ragged dermotarp, stood the clan's last working spawn pod. A trade model. Less precise than the open-source incubators built to tinker with new templates. Less efficient than the industrial wombs that spat out labourer drones by the brigade. Far less robust than the antenatal fortresses from which precious women spawned.

The clan had salvaged their pod piece by piece from the old Chancery Centre before the building festered. The machine's original purpose had been an employee incentive for productive and compliant Lilies. Its design incorporated the clean, natural lines of an idealised office environment. In its original pristine condition, the pod would have looked seemly beside a server rack, comms engine or reprographic kiosk.

The form also hinted at the administrative bent of the libido coded into all Lilies. The old office site had been planned as a sexual playground for female overseers of the Banshee template. Banshees had basked in the fruitless yearning of their Lily underlings. The Chancery Centre had carried the nickname No-Chancery Centre. The fetishized pod had added to the constant thrum of erotic tension deemed essential to any modern workplace.

Although squat and bulky in structure, every individual feature of the pod suggested some Banshee ideal. The birthing unit's outer housing resembled the tulip curves of a tight pencil skirt. The tubes of the seminal manifold looped and folded like the knot of a pussy bow blouse. The chrome support struts bore grooves that implied the bands, seams and straps of reinforced stockings.

Bren should have been aroused by that engineer's rendering of his innermost desires. But as he undressed and climbed into the pod, he thought only of the Vixen. As his bare flesh met the worn padding of the upright gurney, he pictured himself naked and helpless before her. As the cold, translucent pink rubber of the anchor sheet drew across him, he imagined the flawless sheen of her synthskin. When the sheet vacuum-sealed around him, Bren ignored the musk and old-sweat scents of his brothers, pretending instead that he could still taste the burnt, bitter odour of the ancient leather she had worn. The extraction pump locked onto his penis, the silicone sleeve of the artificial vagina soft and smooth from decades of overuse, but Bren could only recall the fierce grip of the Vixen.

In a fully functional pod, the pump would have run through the wash cycle of standard masturbation procedures. Soft, tender massage followed by a lubricant flood. Strokes of logarithmically increasing frequency. Iris contraction around the head. Hard pulses at optimum tension, continued until the point of successful extraction. But a known defect in the old pod's haptic sensors turned the pump straight to its death-grip setting as soon as the extractor engaged. His brothers usually brought themselves close to climax with their hands before braving the pod, but Bren had been too distracted to prepare himself against the fault. The artificial vagina pummelled his cock, closing against the bruises of his earlier mauling. Locked to the gurney, Bren could not move to correct the sequence. He did not care. The combination of torment and helplessness only sweetened his memory of the Vixen and her harsh, relentless embrace.

The machine did not agree. Like the Vixen, it had measured his cock and found it lacking. Processing an error in the extraction program, it switched to an emergency subroutine. A stainless-steel anal wand the shape of a coat hook sprung through a vent in the gurney's padding. On a pod built for one homogenous body type, the machine located Bren's prostate gland with smart-bomb precision.

Bren whimpered through the shock of a sudden anal orgasm. Without the typical build-up in tension at the root of his cock, his semen felt light and watery upon expulsion. It spilled rather than spurted from him. The machine sucked his seed away into its warren of clear rubber piping. The anal wand retracted without ceremony or aftercare, like a stopper from a bottle. The spawn pod hummed and clicked around Bren as it farmed his genetic material. His sample blended with the seed of previous donors as the processor selected the closest acceptable match to the template. In six weeks, if the clan could keep the pod nourished, a new adult brother would spawn from the birthing unit.

The inversion of his orgasm left Bren with a hollow sensation in his pelvis. Like the airy dislocation of an unfulfilled sneeze. When the seal on the anchor sheet broke, he lurched forward. Bren cradled his spent genitals as he knelt to gather his clothes.

He sliced his thumb on the thorn of the Vixen's card. When the blood pact registered, the surface turned from black to a red so bright that it shone silver. A memfilm slip peeled from the back of the card. Bren placed the slip and whatever dolor units it held in the honesty box beside the pod.

It was done. He was owned. His body and his seed now belonged not to his clan, but to his mistress.

Bren paused to regard the worn old pod. He admired for a final time its clinical innards and office-formal trimmings. It was the place where his life had begun, it was the last hope of his people, and it was the only lover he had ever known. Bren walked away and left it all behind.