Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

leaning on his sword. “I drove them off,” he said. “At last.” He dropped the sword, and took his dagger to cut her down.

She lay in his arms. “You are very beautiful,” he murmured. She thought he would kiss her. His mouth plunged instead to her breast, biting and sucking at the engorged nipple. She gasped in shock, a fierce pang leapt through her virgin flesh. What did they want with kisses? They were warriors. Sonja could not restrain a moan of pleasure. He had won her. How wonderful to be overwhelmed, to surrender to the raw lust of this godlike animal.

Lessingham set her on her feet.

“Tie me up.”

He was proffering a handful of blood-slicked leather thongs.

“What?”

“Tie me to the rock, mount me. It’s what I want.”

“The evil warriors tied you —?”

“And you come and rescue me.” He made an impatient gesture. “Whatever. Trust me. It’ll be good for you too.” He tugged at his bloodstained silk breeches, releasing a huge, iron-hard erection. “See, they tore my clothes. When you see that, you go crazy, you can’t resist…and I’m at your mercy. Tie me up!”

“Sonja” had heard that eighty per cent of the submissive partners in sadomasochist sex are male; but it is still the man who dominates his “dominatrix”: who says tie me tighter, beat me harder, you can stop now… Hey, she thought. Why all the stage-directions, suddenly? What happened to my zipless fuck? But what the hell. She wasn’t going to back out now, having come so far… There was a seamless shift, and Lessingham was bound to the rock. She straddled his cock. He groaned. “Don’t do this to me.” He thrust upwards, into her, moaning. “You savage, you utter savage, uuunnnh…” Sonja grasped the man’s wrists and rode him without mercy. He was right, it was just as good this way. His eyes were half closed. In the glimmer of blue under his lashes, a spirit of mockery trembled… She heard a laugh, and found her hands were no longer gripping Lessingham’s wrists. He had broken free from her bonds, he was laughing at her in triumph. He was wrestling her to the ground.

“No!” she cried, genuinely outraged. But he was the stronger.

It was night when he was done with her. He rolled away and slept, as far as she could tell, instantly. Her chief thought was that virtual sex didn’t entirely connect. She remembered now, that was something else people told you, as well as the “zipless fuck.” It’s like coming in your sleep, they said. It doesn’t quite make it. Maybe there was nothing virtuality could do to orgasm, to match the heightened richness of the rest of the experience. She wondered if he too had felt cheated.

She lay beside her hero, wondering, Where did I go wrong? Why did he have to treat me that way? Beside her, “Lessingham” cuddled a fragment of violet silk, torn from his own breeches. He whimpered in his sleep, nuzzling the soft fabric, “Mama…”

She told Dr Hamilton that “Lessingham” had raped her.

“And wasn’t that what you wanted?”

She lay on the couch in the mirrored office. The doctor sat beside her with his smart notebook on his knee. The couch collected “Sonja’s” physical responses as if she was an astronaut umbilicaled to ground control; and Dr Jim read the telltales popping up in his reassuring hornrims. She remembered the sneaking furtive thing that she had glimpsed in “Lessingham’s” eyes, the moment before he took over their lust-scene. How could she explain the difference? “He wasn’t playing. In the fantasy, anything’s allowed. But he wasn’t playing. He was outside it, laughing at me.”

“I warned you he would want to stay in control.”

“But there was no need! I wanted him to be in control. Why did he have to steal what I wanted to give him anyway?”

“You have to understand, ‘Sonja,’ that to many men it’s women who seem powerful. You women feel dominated, and try to achieve ‘equality.’ But the men don’t perceive the situation like that. They’re mortally afraid of you: and anything, just about anything they do to keep the upper hand, can seem like justified self-defence.”

She could have wept with frustration. “I know all that! That’s exactly what I was trying to get away from. I thought we were supposed to leave the damn baggage behind. I wanted something purely physical… Something innocent.”

“Sex is not innocent, ‘Sonja.’ I know you believe it is, or ‘should be.’ But it’s time you faced the truth. Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control. Sex is no exception. Now that’s basic. You can’t escape from it in direct-cortical fantasy. It’s in our minds that relationships happen, and the mind, of course, is where virtuality happens too.” He sighed, and made an entry in her notes. “I want you to look on this as another step towards coping with the real. You’re not sick, ‘Sonja.’ You’re unhappy. Not even unusually so. Most adults are unhappy, to some degree — ”

“Or else they’re in denial.”

Her sarcasm fell flat. “Right. A good place to be, at least some of the time. What we’re trying to achieve here — if we’re trying to achieve anything at all — is to raise your pain threshold to somewhere near average. I want you to walk away from therapy with lowered expectations: I guess that would be success.”

“Great, “she said, desolate. “That’s just great.”

Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, you guys! You are so weird. It’s always the same story. Can’t live with you, can’t live without you… You can’t go on this way, you know. Its getting ridiculous. You want some real advice, ‘Sonja’? Go home. Change your attitudes, and start some hard peace talks with that husband of yours.”

“I don’t want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”

Dr Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor-act. “Listen. I’ll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: a hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. He grinned. “I’ve been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man…”

He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’ ” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”

She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn’t matter.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”

She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he’d lost a customer, that was why he’d been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she’d lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy-talk was! He’d never have dared to play the sex-change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn’t likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn’t trouble her.

So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr Hamilton’s judgment. He had the telltales: he would know. She recognised with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities, unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations… But that’s crazy, she thought. I don’t hate men, and I don’t believe