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Wild Dolls

By: peterpan



I tend to write stories with a beginning, end and middle, then struggle to get them to fit. I found this sitting on my hard drive recently. It was written around the time of the other submissions but unfinished. Its a bit of a patchwork with some dangly threads I decided not to pull on.

This is an erotic sci-fi of lesbian ravishment and helpless pleasure.

Part I Alice of the Patriarchy 

1 Foretaste

The room was dark and empty apart from one padded couch not unlike a dentist's chair - one couch and it's frightened occupant, unless others waited further back in the darkness that surrounded her. She knew they did.

A wall of monitors illuminated the naked girl.

Her name was Mia. Not a central character. Never was a central character in her own life and she knew it; just another soldier-girl.

Don't be afraid. The Enemy loves you.

Wide thick belts of synthetic silk at ankles, wrists, waist and neck, conveyed her captors' firm intention that she make herself comfortable. Headphones that clamped around her ears kept her facing forwards. Sensors taped to her body measured her pulse, perspiration biorhythms. A polygraph? Was she going to be interrogated? She didn't know anything!

Small neural stimulators were taped to the corners of her eyes. Mia figured out what they were for when she tried to blink them off. Small jolts snapped her eyes back open. They would let her blink but she was going to watch whatever they wanted her to.

The monitors flickered to life. Nine different feeds simultaneously that changed from second to second. The headphone's output interpolated smoothly between each feed as her eyes skipped helplessly from one vile ravishment to another. Except, the subjects were enjoying it. They were writhing and panting and screaming but it wasn't pain. The Dolls were all over them, violating every inch of their skin and they were screaming for more. Video Lotus, of course. What else would they be showing Mia? P.O.W. Girls who had gone before and no doubt fought their hardest and lost anyway.

The Dolls had left her nowhere else to look. Mia tried to screw her eyes shut, to block out the satanic play but they had already countered that. Her eyes snapped back open. She tried to drown out the sound with her own voice but it was she that was muted. Her bladder loosened but the chair dealt with it.

The whole thing was wicked yet they wouldn't allow her the slightest discomfort that she could use to distract herself. Her Doll captors had been very careful about that.

She knew what they were doing but she couldn't help her eyes from flicking from screen to screen, or keep her pupils from dilating, telling them everything they wanted to know. Whenever a scene drew her eye, variations on that scene would explode across the other monitors; second long snippets from thousands of hours of Doll-P.O.W. erotica. Already she felt a hot flush of deja vu as the images chanced upon her own sinful thoughts and deeply suppressed dreams. Someone before her had dreamed them too. Instantly the monitors were filled with variations on two naked P.O.W girls tangling and jostling together as Dolls drove them to frenzied motion. A groan escaped Mia's lips. Near all the following scenes had two real girls in them now.

Mia had always known she would not be strong under torture. She had intended to die before capture and screw what the Patriarchy says about the sin of suicide. This was almost worse than torture. They were going to corrupt her and she wouldn't even be able to tell God she suffered. She was going to be just like those other girls. Dolls would simply touch her in ways that she could be damned for even entertaining in her head and nothing she could do would stop them. As image after image of the things they might do to her flicked by she began to cry. Not misery. Just tears she had been holding back since childhood cause now it didn't matter a damn.

A Doll face moved into her vision. It was before the screens instead of on them. Her captors had never left. The Doll contrived an expression of both concern and curiosity. Had she never seen tears before? That could not be; there seemed to be tears in the corners of the Dolls own eyes. Without thinking why Mia smiled weakly to show she was all right. The doll imitated her perfectly and instantly, a mirror, then gave her a quick kiss on the forehead like her mother used to, before her mother had birthed one too many daughters and been sent away. Just occasionally the Dolls would touch her, as if to remind Mia that she had not been forgotten in that chair.

After hours of the feed she was neither awake nor asleep. Her eyes voyeuristically dragged in whatever attracted them without any filters of civilization or modesty. It was almost like dreaming an endless wet dream tailored just for her. She twisted gently in the chair making slight wordless sounds of need. The Video feeds faded in an out slowly now. Themes coalesced. Soon she would be a star.

2 Alice

It was plain as sin what was going on, the instant I pulled back the flap entrance to the darkened tent. I couldn't see the flickering screen of the battle dented laptop, it was facing away, yet I saw the mixed but guilty expressions on all their faces; pale and blue in the screen's glow: the faces of half a dozen young women who should have known better.

As if on queue, a girl's grainy voice cried out from the laptop's small speakers; emotion and static.

Mega Dee reached a finger forward with insolent serenity, tapped a key, and the video feed was gone and deleted. Her other arm rested casually on Cinder's back. Maybe Mega had been holding her down. Cinder was pale as a ghost, or as if she had seen one. My guess was Mega had organized it all, Cinder was the butt of it all, and everyone else told each other they were just there to see how she reacted. But they would be lying.

"You can be court-martialed for viewing that smut." I said this to Meg. I turned my eyes to Cinder. "You too. It might have been her idea, but you could have closed your eyes. You didn't call out either. By the Good Book you are as guilty as anyone here." 

"It wasn't Meg, marm," one of the others piped up, sounding like a school-girl addressing a school-teacher. The correct address was Sir – I might be a surplus daughter but nevertheless an officer here. The slight was probably not intentional; the silly young private had just slipped into her excuse-making mode that she had no doubt perfected at convent.

"Quiet," I barked. That worked, no matter how isolated it made me feel.

"There are reasons that stuff is forbidden, if it is not obvious to you after the first thirty seconds. Video Lotus is enemy propaganda. It's faked. It is designed to damage morale. It's designed to make you think about what they are going to do to you if they take you, in that split second when the only thing you should be thinking about is what lies between your sights."

I met each of their eyes in turn. "It is designed to make you weak. Get out of here. All of you. I want you on the parade ground and praying until I come for you."

The girls filed out with heads hung down, except Mega of course. I stopped little Cinder with a hand on her shoulder and waited till the others were out of earshot.

"You are better than this, Cin'. Talk to me."

She just stood there. She couldn't speak. She was crying and it was not my reprimand that had done it. She'd had it pretty tough. First there was her bunkmate Mia. With a name like that everyone had joked her odds weren't good but then it really happened. Mia became M.I.A. Missing in action. Never found the body; they never do. Then there was that weapons misfire that had scarred Cinder's face and hand; the inquest that hinted at attempted suicide, but what worse could they do to a damaged girl than this? She was 'career' now; a euphemism for never going home, for no man would have her.

I wished I could hold her head to my chest but it was bad enough that I had touched her shoulder for so long. Damn the commandments. Hell, now I was the one who needed confessional. I removed my hand and waited for her to gain control of herself.

"It, It was her." she finally whispered. At first I thought she was talking about Meg. "On the Doll broadcast. On Video Lotus. It was.. Mia."

What could I say? I wanted to make up a million blasphemous lies, say anything to make it better. I would have. My virtuously dull farm-daughter's brain saved me. I said nothing at all. Maybe Cinder wouldn't have heard anyway. Cinder finally spoke again. "Watching her... she was so, so.." her voice died almost to nothing "..beautiful."

I let her go to join the others on the parade ground. The best I could do for her. 

I felt so unclean, yet it was not our sinful natures that sickened me. I needed confessional immediately. Officers have that privilege. It felt good to be able to open my heart. Anything can be said there without fear for your soul, except lies. It's all polygraphed. Mostly they don't say much at this point because you already know what is right and you pretty much spell out your own punishment. When I had bared my soul enough the Monk told me to undress. I pressed myself up against the grill so he could examine me for evidence of self-abuse as he asked the standard questions. I hate the scratchy sound the polygraph makes.

Confessional over, I had intended to make my way to the parade ground and release my girls from their prayers. Fate pressed other orders into my hands the instant I left the booth. Strange orders. They would lead in the course of this story to my questioning everything I once believed, and the forfeiture of my soul. 

The orders were simple: Sergeant Alice Samuelsdaughter. Report immediately to Minus Six.

Although we squatted in tents on the surface, giving the appearance to hungry satellite eyes of a mere staging encampment, beneath the tents, beneath the parade grounds and prefab hangars, there lay something else: many levels of which I had seen only the first, and only once. Today however I was asked to report to a level deeper than I was aware existed. I was shown my enemy. 

3 The Doll House

The reinforced cell holding the Doll was brightly lit. I was the only one in the darkened observers bay. She (it) sat on the edge of the bed like a mannequin, head tilted and staring at nothing. She wore a long white paper shirt that was so clean and unwrinkled she must have just sat there since they had dressed her in it.

Her skin was pallid and shiny; her eyes, dark holes. Cold-blooded, she looked; amphibian rather than mammal. Once someone had told me there was not a natural gene in one of them. Then someone else had insisted the Old Geneers had started with snake DNA and grafted on what they needed. There wasn't anything human in a Doll, 'less you counted human ingenuity and human folly.

The Doll did not react to my presence. The toughened glass separating us was mirrored, but that was not why.

"Deactivate the Hazer-coil collar," instructed the doctor's nasal voice though a grainy speaker. I pressed one of the metal studs of the black rubberized collar at my throat, the way they had shown me. My biomagnetic aura was no longer concealed.

The doll did not react instantaneously. Then she turned to face me and stood in one smooth motion, a beautiful smile on her face. "You lit up," she said. The glass was bulletproof and sound proof. I heard her through the same grainy speaker.

"What is your name?" she asked. It seemed impolite not to answer but I had been warned to say nothing. She approached the glass casually but her glistening black eyes never left me.

"Soldier girl, aren't you. I can tell. You look real fit...." She had a baby-doll voice. Immature.

Her voice aged, became a young woman's. "..Bet you are an officer too. Bet you're a leader type. Girl's 'd do whatever you ask.."

Lower, confidential: "..if only you weren't too afraid to ask. Ask me. Ask me anything. You need to know things for this, this big.. big-important-upcoming.. mission...."

I felt my pulse quicken. I could almost feel her suck the information out of me. Her senses were so precise she was a biological polygraph. Maybe the Doll had merely extrapolated my rank and purpose from obvious clues but now, watching me, she knew. Yet she might not comprehend or care what she knew. Intelligence did not demand sentience. Her Doll brain might be concerned entirely with identifying variables and cues to my reactions. I have heard Dolls can do things to you just by speaking, if you allow yourself to listen. They act, you react, they learn. Feedback; like the shriek of a microphone. I heard of a girl once who was trapped in a crushed tank with a Doll outside. The Doll just talked to her, all night long, asking her to come out but she couldn't. She went mad.

My Doll was still speaking. "You never know what you might discover if you just--"

Something diverted her in mid sentence. She looked down at her paper shirt in naive puzzlement become curiosity. What was it? I could see nothing there. She pulled a corner of her collar down; pulled and pulled so the paper fabric slowly ripped and she emitted a childlike gasp as her other hand discovered a perfect breast, the aureole swollen and dark, firm against her fingers.

Her eyes were not on her breast anymore; they were on me, watching me as I watched her touch herself. I jerked my eyes away, face burning.

"Come in and talk," she suggested reasonably, her smile friendly and without guile. 

I jumped as ugly static burst over the speaker. It was the doctor clearing his throat. "Reactivate the Hazer-coil collar," he instructed.

I did so and the effect was subtle but profound. Her smile lost whatever made it seem so human. It stayed on her face as if her face had simply been forgotten. "Come in and talk," she repeated, monotone and dull, pressed up against the glass and still watching me though now-dead eyes. "Come in--". The speaker cut out but her lips still moved.

"That is enough," the doctor said. "You may go."

I gratefully turned my back on the doll and retreated. Before I reached the door an almost subliminal thudding or perhaps a flickering of the light made me look back. The doll's room was trashed. The bed was broken into many pieces. The bulletproof glass was starred from where she must have pounded the bed planks against it with great violence and there was a black smear on the glass that might have been Doll blood. Her paper shirt was nothing but still-falling confetti yet she was back where I had seen her last: her slender naked white form a black skeleton in the glare, pressed up against the glass silently mouthing to me.

I pulled the steel door to hurriedly.

---

Emerging from the decontamination shower, dripping and freezing, a scream dying on my lips, I stumbled, almost fell into the blessed warmth of the heated towel held out for me by a beaming elderly nurse. That is what I assumed her to be in any case, till I thought back on it later. She wore a plain white lab coat. I don't think I could have let her touch me if the ugly word 'scientist' had entered my imagination at that point.

She helped my numb stumbling fingers unbuckle the strange device I had worn around my throat during my encounter with the doll, the black rubberized collar with chrome studs they had called the Hazer coil.

"This makes me invisible to dolls?" I asked, turning it over in my hands.

"Oh, they'll give you a glance" said the nurse. "...then surf for another channel."

She smiled at my confusion. "It blocks their radio-empathic sense. The human spinal column behaves as a broadcasting aerial. The Doll's functions as a receiver. To a doll, you are a walking TV station. Discovery channel and adult channel all thrown in for free." The nurse cackled to herself. "But I guess all that was before your time."

She was a little strange but hard to dislike.

"Don't think they are attracted to you because they like you," added the nurse as I dressed, "They just want better reception."

A harsh male voice intruded over the intercom, reminding us that we were always observed. "Sargent Alice Samuelsdaughter. report to conference room 3 immediately."

---

I wish I could say what followed over the next four hours was the worst experience of my life. It consisted merely of listening to men speak as they drank tea, answering the few questions put to me dutifully. Sipping cool water. Suffice it to say that all the whip scars, the burns, the broken fingers I had earnt before that day were as nothing compared to what I learnt in that room: what was to come. Then they congratulated themselves and against all precedence myself, a woman, for saving their hateful world at only the cost of everything in it I loved.

---

When I finally reached the parade ground my girls were still there, praying as I had instructed; kneeling with palms together at lips mouthing pleas for forgiveness, angelic faces upturned to the diminishing light. How I loved them. Even Mega's face, when I searched it, was free of any trace of ego or pride or irony. Her earnestness was touching. I wondered what she was praying for.

I called them to attention. When they were assembled I began. "Listen up Gals, somethings come up. The brass have told me they need the best team to do it. Thats you, however," I found it hard to spit the next words out, "..however, I will not be joining you on this one. Mega will receive a temporary promotion for this mission. Step forward Sargent Dee."

---

Later it was Cinder that caught me crying. She cornered me where I was hiding in one of the latrines. I couldn't come out and let her see my face.

"I know something's wrong, Alice - sir, what is it."

She wouldn't go away. Cinder was stubborn in her own ways. I could not tell her though.

"Orders..." I replied.

"Orders that will take you from us?"

"Yes. No. Maybe."

Cinder laughed. "That's decisive!"

"I can't talk about it. I can't tell you."

For a while that stopped the conversation.

When Cinder spoke again it was sharply. "We're not your daughters you know. You're not even the eldest. There isn't one of us that wouldn't give her life in the name of God's war, even her soul. They were fucking cut-rate souls to begin with. In the end we still answer to a higher authority than you, sir. You'll do your job, God have mercy on us all."

I thought she would storm away. She didn't though. Eventually we walked to the mess tent side by side.

Part II Alice and the Beanstalk.

4 The morning of the mission

Three hours before dawn I woke, showered, and scrubbed myself down with the antiperspirant powder the scientists had provided. My powdered skin was white as a Dolls', not that a doll would be fooled. I peed, shaved with the razor provided, and let the nurses tape me up. The merest scent of a woman would certainly betray me.

Two hours before dawn I was escorted to the tactical airlifter and helped up into the cramped space concealed in the forward undercarriage. Then came the longest wait of my life.

Footsteps, eventually. Combat boots and more than a pair. Mega's voice. "All aboard girls. Remember: first in last out. That means you're last in, Cinder and Janice, with the scatter guns. You won't have time to aim."

A moment's silence. I couldn't help but smile.

"So who's first in?" asked someone. Jane: the one that had called me 'marm'. Mega wasn't really suited to command. I would have chosen anyone else. So would Mega. I could tell she wasn't enjoying this. She would know the sort of mission this was. She didn't know about me, hidden mere feet away, but she knew that none of them were coming back.

The steel partition that separated me from my squad was thin. Even in flight, after the initial rattle and roar, I could hear their chatter. I could tell who had cottoned on to the sacrificial nature of this mission and who were blissfully oblivious. Mega did better than I had expected of her. She kept them focused. Cinder didn't speak.


Wild Dolls



After a bruising half-hour of supersonic nap-of-the-earth flight, the shriek of break-flaps opening announced to our arrival to all.

The pull of deceleration, savage jarring impact of earth beneath us once more. Sounds of boots on metal and Jane announcing all clear on scans. No contact as yet. Cinder and Janice were out and still no contact. Mega was out. I kept expecting to hear Janice or Cinder's scatterguns but that didn't happen until they were all out and well away from the transport. Thirty seconds of shooting and shouting and then silence.

And silence. And guilt. 17 minutes I waited in that small dark compartment, face stretched in horror and grief made only worse by long foreknowledge. But I could not cry; my tear ducts were chemically blocked. Orders said to wait exactly 20 minutes yet I did not. Calculated disobedience! This was where the woman always fell in every play I had ever seen: disobedience to a mans simple order. It felt like certain death and that is what attracted me at that moment.

The glade was quiet and sunny when finally I stepped down the wheel strut from concealment and into the morning sunlight.

5 The valley of the Dolls

An hour of tramping through that idyllic valley and I still had not observed any Doll sign. That was going to change. Birdsong, which had grown gently since the glade, had now smothered as if a poison cloud swept towards me. Nothing else had changed and the sun was as warming as any summer day. Sun wouldn't save me. Did I want saving? Failure could come quicker than success and that made it seductive. Success would be lonely now in any case. But yes I wanted saving. I was terrified. I didn't care about my friends' betrayal right then. I was too afraid.

I stood there in a fresh sunlit glade waiting for the dolls to disappear me like they had my friends. Nothing stirred anywhere. No, that was not true. A slight rustling of leaves by a wind that ran on light feet.

Dolls swept down upon me, swirled around me, sprinting onwards in flight or chase that did not consider me. Flashes of naked flesh bound in green and black ribbons, ribbons trailing, and surely that was a soldier-girl's helmet strapped on that one's shoulder like some gladiatorial affectation. 

The glade was empty once more. My heart pounded and I was breathing too rapidly. If not for me, then why and where were the Dolls running so urgently? Surely not another intrusion! Momentarily my thoughts played with the idea that I was just one more diversion, sacrificed as my friends had been, and my mission was a lie.

No. The answer was obvious and I was ashamed of how rapidly I had doubted my superiors. Nothing had startled the Dolls. Dolls neither startled nor tired. If you can't tire, if your quantum entangled consciousness consumes input at a terahertz to the power of a billion synthetic neurons, why walk? Whereas a soldier on guard may pace back and forth for hours on end, those dolls now far past me may have been running through these forests without stumble or pause since their creation.

Only after dealing with all these unworthy thoughts did a far more important observation occur. The Dolls had not taken me. Central Intelligence was right for once. Wearing that studded collar the Dolls ignored me. I wondered how it worked.

There was plenty of time to wonder, trudging towards my fate. Night fell, eventually. The Doll sky thread would not have been visible but for the lights of elevators drifting slowly up and down it.

Yesterday I had been shown many schematics and blurred telephoto images of the sky thread. Each of the ten parallel strands was no thicker than a thumb and made of something not of God's earth. The elevators were just that, normal sized glass walled elevators such as travel the sides of city 'scrapers, but strengthened for vacuum. The elevators went regularly, full or not. Can you imagine sending shuttles into space, full or not? These elevators went a lot further: all the way to Geo-stationary orbit thousands upon thousands of miles above me. I could not help but think the blasphemous thought that whatever kept the Dolls from abducting and raping every last unspoiled woman, it was not us Crusaders of Purity... with our rusted lead-spitting armaments, surplus to needs, just like us.

I walked through the night and just after dawn breasted a hill and saw the base of the sky-thread before me in a wide grassy plain within an old war crater.

The Doll city was not impressive in the way I had imagined. I had anticipated architectural wonders appropriate to the builders of a sky thread. Instead, nothing looked permanent. Many of the structures were mere platforms supported by dolls standing like statues, up to five levels high. They looked like rock, until they moved, and the towers grew and shrank.

There were few apparent vehicles or machinery except the Dolls themselves. There were palettes, bearing some heavy cargos but sometimes just a single captive bound like a sacrifice, along with a couple of Dolls apparently to gloat. Whatever their cargo, the palettes all moved by the attention of an appropriate number of Dolls, always at a smooth loping pace. The Dolls ran, or stood absolutely still, but never walked or hesitated. I was reminded of an ant nest I had once disturbed. The ants had scurried around carrying the queen's eggs to safety. This entire city could no doubt move to follow the base of the skythread.

I kept to the edges of the foot-worn paths, and tried not to witness the many debauched and carnal plays enacted around me. Somewhere, if I looked long enough, I was certain I would see a human girl's face I recognized; twisted in terror and struggling with lust, or already broken and damned, curled between a Doll's thighs, drinking Doll milk.

None paid me any attention, not the dolls or their writhing human spoil. Without incident I made it to the base of the sky thread and strode into the glass capsule of an elevator moments before it began it's long ascent.

***

The Doll city shrunk beneath me, then the crater itself was just a dish, then I was ascending through a hole in mountainous clouds. The crater had vanished before the sky darkened and stars appeared.

The elevator accelerated slowly at first but the weight kept growing under my feet. It seemed so slow watching from the ground. By the time I knew I would have to lie down on the floor I was supporting the weight of three. Three G acceleration. A doll wouldn't have been tested.

Many minutes later the elevator reached midway. I was free floating just long enough to reach the ceiling before it became the floor and I was crushed again.

Had any humans made this trip before me? Hundreds upon hundreds I suspected, but perhaps I was the first to make it of my own free will. Lying on my stomach against the glass ceiling-become-floor I had a perfect view of my destination. A biomechanoid satellite shaped like a gigantic gourd, or a spider's abdomen with complicated spinnerets from which the Doll Sky Thread issued. We called it Terminus, named for the boundary stone at the end of a road. 

My target was where the thread joined the gourd. If severed there the entire length of the thread would fall to earth and be destroyed. Intelligence believed it would take years for the Dolls to rebuild the sky thread, and without earth from which to siphon resources and slaves the Doll colonies may well lose cohesion and turn on each other. I had to succeed. I had sentenced my friends to damnation to achieve it.

It was not to be so easy. The elevator did not stop but continued into the bowels of Terminus. I would have to find my own way back.

6 Terminus

A queer blue light permeated everything. It gave steel, glass and plastics the same illusion of organic softness and unnatural translucency. Floating lamps drifted slowly above my head like corpuscles. Steel-and-glass arteries bearing a clear, blue-fluorescing liquid followed several of the corridors I walked, before branching off into deeper sections of the station where I could not follow.

In one of these vertical arterial branches I spied the drowned body of an unknown model of Doll. It seemed improperly formed, perhaps a rejected mutant that had been flushed. It's body was standard, that of an adolescent girl, but it's skull devolved at its base to thick translucent tendrils. It was by these tendrils that it had become caught at the branch, feet trailing upwards in the direction of the arterial flow. I had watched for only a handful of seconds when the tendrils came free and the body slid out of sight. I had the unnerving impression that the tendrils had let go of their own accord. My assumption that the Doll was dead seemed suddenly naïve and I hurried on. 

I had travelled at least a kilometer through the strange metal intestines of that hellish place before I met my first definitely functional Space-adapted Doll. I was trapped in a long curved corridor when she appeared around the distant end. I had to proceed with my faith in the collar. The alternative was to flee before her.

I walked towards her as calmly as I was able. Not very! The collar did not shield everything and the doctors had warned me to calm my thoughts if I had to pass close to a Doll. It would have been easier if they had not told me at all.

I tried to fill my head with a simple tune, a childhood litany against fear, to block out the panic.

She was not like other Dolls I had seen. She could never have been mistaken for human. She was tall: two and a half meters or more. Her disproportionate limbs ate the distance between us rapidly although she appeared to be moving in slow motion. Her skin could have been cold marble or the softest most translucent flesh. Strangest of all was her head. Cables interfaced with the back of her otherwise hairless head like braids. The cables hung around her like a web even as she walked. They must have been on tracks on the walls or some similar mechanism. With a little more effort they could have transported her as well, and those ridiculous legs would have been redundant.

She passed me without pause (I had to duck under the cables). She appeared to be sleepwalking or deep in thought. Her eyes were closed and she was singing meaningless sounds absentmindedly to herself. That more than anything convinced me that I was going to make it. It was only after she had passed out of sight that it occurred to me that her song bore resemblance to the tune I had filled my head with in order to stifle my fear.

This realization caused a spike of purest panic. If I had made the connection about the tune seconds earlier, that spike of emotion would surely have exposed me. This realization only drove the panic deeper, to become shock as the nearness of my escape became apparent. I knew my fear was a searing beacon but knowing made control impossible. How many seconds or minutes I stood paralyzed, I do not know.

Some higher power watched over me. No Doll came. I reached my destination with no further encounters.

It was a tall room with a concave glass floor looking down at a distant earth. A rim of metal edged each half of the bowl of the floor, and bulged into a complicated seal around the point the skythread exited into space. In all, the rooms' diameter was, say, twenty strides. The entire bowl was hinged in order that it could open and let the sky elevator through. Although the sky thread spinnerets were currently separated from space by the bowled floor, this could change without warning when the next elevator approached. Yet I paused.

Reaching the sky thread spinnerets left me momentarily at a loss. Success was the queerest of all queer things to meet in that place and the least expected. Don't freeze here, Alice!

The metal rim provided footholds to the bottom of the bowl. Hastily I shucked the demolitions pack off tired shoulders and extracted the long coil of explosives. Each thread had to be cut simultaneously for the simple reason that the first detonation would knock askew the other demolitions devices and do considerably worse to the demolitions expert.

"Ooh careful!" said a voice by my ear.

Spun around, just in time to see the afterimage of two Dolls, identical, mouths stretched wide in perfect mimicry of my own horror. The Dolls themselves were gone. That fast. My eyes caught up to them again, now at the rim of the bowl, looking down at me with irritated frowns.

"That.. hurt," one said.

"That wasn't friendly," said the other.

I hadn't touched them, not even shouted. What did they mean? My hand flew to my throat. The collar was gone.

There it hung, from the hands of the left-most twin. My explosion of fear had dazzled them. I had lit up.

The two did not attack. For the moment they just watched. I watched them. They were not as tall as the graceful, space-adapted doll I had met in the corridor, but there were similarities. Daughters? If that term had any meaning. Gangly, immature, inquisitive. These terms should not have applied either. 

"Explain yourself," said the leftmost doll. All expression had faded from her face. The impression of intent was somehow increased.

"I am performing specialized repairs." Not a good lie, even without those eyes upon me, and lie, lie, lie broadcast from my every nerve.

The two faced each other, and I had the impression of terabytes of silent debate passing between them.

"Our request was poorly worded," the left said.

"Tell us how you work," said the right.

Hard metal pressed into my back. I had backed into one of the sky thread housings and my hand lay across the demolition mechanism. It came to me that I could leave this hopeless situation with a twitch of my finger. Only seven of the neutronium pinchers were set. The remaining three threads would hold, and prevent the whole falling to earth. All my company, Cinder, Mega, all sacrificed for nothing.

I would not do it.

One hope occurred; these dolls did not know what to make of me. They did not understand, or did not care that I was attempting to destroy their home. That concept might simply have been left out of their ego-splice. Their 'mother' certainly had not omitted the doll's innate telempathy, though they did not appear to understand their fascination with me.

If they had never met a human, they had never felt emotion before. That fascination would become an addiction, the addiction dependence. The Idolaters that had created the Doll had created the perfect slave obsessed only with their master's happiness.

Yes, and having no motivation of their own the Dolls would never act independently, never possibly breed wild. That failed belief and my faith were all I had.

"I must finish my work. Then I will explain myself to you." I turned my back on them, moving to the next housing, refusing to consider them and trying to keep my thoughts numb.

It worked, for the most part.

"Perhaps she is a present from Mother," theorized one of the dolls as I assembled another of the demolition devices. This talk must be for my benefit.

"She is very unlike Mother's art," observed the other. "Also, we have not been particularly good."

"Not mother's design," the first agreed. "This Doll is so unstructured. No mind could engineer such a tangle. And yet, one might suppose she were engineered to fascinate us."

"I theorize a method. I call it combinatorial variation and selection."

The two dolls faced each other, motionless. I wondered how long it would take a Doll brain to deduce the rationalist heresy of evolution, species and phyla, having never seen a natural born animal till now. 

Some minutes, I hoped. 

On the verge of finishing and a fingernail ran delicately up my spine. I convulsed, gasped and fell to my knees. My legs would not hold me. Only my grip on the last housing prevented me slipping to my belly on the cold floor. The pole of the housing was against my breast and between my thighs. One touch and I was as helpless as a girl at the whipping post.

"It has occurred to us that these 'repairs' may leave little of you to explore, Monkey," one of the Dolls breathed in my ear.

She sounded proud of that word. I suspected it had taken them much longer to uncover it from some unformatted corner of their mothers mind than it had taken to see through my ploy, or to mutually conclude that it might be more amusing to let me hope a little longer. They had never intended to let me escape through death, at least not before they had unraveled all my mysteries.

I made a second grab at the final wire and shrieked as fingernails stroked my side. You might have thought their nails were tazer prongs from the sound I made. Not so. The touch itself was not magical, just the way they knew where to touch. They had been studying me.

"I must finish," I tried to make them feel my need, to make it theirs. I held the instant of completion in my mind as a climactic release. Everything I wanted.

A cool Doll hand still lay on my side. Not stroking, I think that would have driven me insensible, but making my breath rapid from the fear of it. "You want this too," The doll whispered huskily. They were trying inflection. I was all they had to learn from but I had never spoken like that, thought like that... I filled my mind with litanies against temptation. The Doll continued. "Let finishing be the last thing you enjoy."

"If I let you examine me, you will let me finish?" I did not think I could survive their exploration, but compliance might leave me an opportunity that struggle would remove entirely.

"Anything you want," they said, with strange emphasis on that final word.

Then they just watched me, watching the cogs turning with glacial organic majesty in my mind, perhaps. I broke first, and asked what they wanted of me.

"Show us all of you."

"Do you mean... strip?"

"Yes, do that for us."

The way she said it implied I had misunderstood. They were merely content with my interpretation; for now.

I rose; they turned me so my back was to the housing, front to them. I was taller than the pair by half a head. Huge dark eyes increased their waif-like appearance. 

I undid each button of my tattered shirt under the inspection of those eyes, not exposing any more skin until I absolutely had to. When I hesitated, they slid the shirt off my shoulders. I shook free of it as quickly as possible, not liking to have my arms trapped. They smiled at me in admiration I knew was not deserved, and I blushed furiously. I was fit and strong but any woman next to a Doll was a rack of imperfection. Worse was to come. Next had to be my bra, because I needed it less than my gun-belt or my boots.

I stood there clutching the unstrapped cloth to my breasts. I thought I could do it but I couldn't. The Dolls were not disappointed. They were fascinated with my inexplicable humiliation.

One of the twins held my shoulders. She made comforting sounds. I don't know if it was the clumsiness of her first attempt that comforted me, or if by design she showed me precisely what I needed, an illusion of fallibility.

That helped when the other kneeled before me to unbuckle my Kaki pants and put the belt aside. Holding my hips tightly in both hands she slid the zip down effortlessly with her strong tongue, chasing it deep between my thighs. 

The Doll paused, then laughed. "I can hear something crinkling in there. More wrapping?"

Pants and underwear were rolled down to my knees, revealing the tape the nurses had used to keep my scent in. "What a strange thing to do," said the other gleefully as the first began to lick at the tape with her rough tongue.

That broke my resolve. This far, I could tell God and the priests' polygraph I was playing for time, acting out of pure motives in desperate circumstances. Any further would be submission to my own degradation.

I would not go passively into the night. Kicking, struggling, and howling, I was brought to the floor. She held my knees wide and intensified her attack. I couldn't see. The other cradled my head in her lap and all I could see each time my eyes popped open was her smiling down at me. Even through the tape, the sensation of that tongue almost broke me, and I had to hiss litanies against temptation through clenched teeth.




Wild Dolls



"What a nuisance," The first said, scowling, after a solid attempt to unhinge me with her tongue had not quite succeeded nor loosened the tape. They seemed put out by the intensity with which I denied them. Their seduction was not going as planned. This made them petulant and less gentle. Hard fingers kneaded my flesh, squeezing sharp moans from my throat and shudders from screaming muscles. If I could frustrate them just a little more they might wrench me in two, and that seemed the best of the possibilities before me. Better than I succumb to their carnal ministrations and be damned.

I was rolled onto my knees for some new indignity. Kicking away from them I stretched my fingers for the wire. I had to try though only with God's direct intervention could I possibly succeed.

But they did not stop me. A miracle did occur. The two Dolls clutched their hands to their ears, faces contorted in sudden pain as if an air-splitting sound assaulted them, enough heavenly trumpets to raze Jericho or stun a Doll for just a split second. I plunged the live wire into the plastique and... Nothing.

The red L.E.Ds on all the devices had winked out simultaneously. I jabbed the wire ineffectually again and again. The circuitry was dead, fried by the same E.M. pulse which had punished the immature Dolls. The only sound was my ragged breath.

"Poor Monkey," I heard one of the Dolls wail.

"Mother is here," murmured the other.

Part III Spoils of War

7 The Mother

Walking alongside the mother, yet more alone than I think any human had ever been, I knew I must try to escape. My limbs were sodden in apathetic exhaustion as I stumbled forwards, but I knew I had the strength and therefore must find it, use it, or my soul was already forfeit. A way would be found, if my faith were strong enough, if I had not already denied the Lord so completely with every wrong step that had taken me to this moment. What wrong steps though? Only the steps of simple obedience to my masters had torn my heart.

I was tired.

I still must fight; God had not yet told me I was damned so I must fight on. It was not taught, but simply a thing I told myself. If I were damned already, even so as to be irretrievably lost to Him, would not God in his infinite mercy finally speak, and tell me the testing was over? Tell me I had failed; I need struggle no more?

In five steps I would do something. Four steps, three, two. Surprising myself with my own ferocity I turned on Her. An elbow drove into her abdomen. I tangled her unnatural limbs with mine and shoved to topple her, and when her hand strayed to my face to restrain me I bit it.

She swayed under my assault and seemed to collapse around me, yet not releasing me. I redoubled my efforts but found myself in a cage of her limbs, my arms trapped, my body pressed to her body by her yielding yet inescapable embrace; my teeth in her palm my only remaining potency. I bit harder, till my jaw ached, not in hope of escape but just to achieve this one small triumph of hurting her in any way, before she crushed the life from me within the coils of her limbs. 

She watched me, her expression as mild as the Lady Madonna smiling down upon her child, till my jaw tired and my will broke. Staring defiantly up into her face, and panting from the failed exertion, I awaited punishment. With the bitten hand she stroked the fear-drenched strands of hair from my brow. The tooth marks were already fading from her translucent skin.

I could meet her eyes no longer, but still I was not fooled by her gentleness. "I am an animal to you. A specimen. You don't punish me for the same reason you will eventually torture and kill me. I don't matter."

"No, Alice. I do not punish you because I will not punish you under any condition."

She continued, "I heard your very first footfall, child. By your fifth, I knew you were a human, a soldier, a woman. I came seeking you."

"You walked right past me. If you knew I was there, why didn't you take me then?"

The mother smiled a slow-motion smile as she stroked my forehead.

"Your heart was beating rapidly, like a bird's in your terror. When I passed you, your relief was so beautiful, yet so exquisitely fragile. How could you think I would be so cruel?..."

"...And I was curious. About you, your intentions and all your experiences, and most especially your first encounter with my dear little un-socialized experiments. Did you like them?"

After a pause she continued. "They liked you, very much. I knew they would. But I did not know how they would process that sensation. You see, they have never truly wanted a thing before, or even known what the word meant, till they met you. I fear now they will be quite uncontrollable until they get what they want."

8 Mother washes Alice

The Mother lead me to a high-arched room.

"Do you know your purpose?"

I did not answer the Mother.

"Your purpose is to protect the Patriarchy from our raids. You perform your role wonderfully."

"Sarcasm?" I spat the words out.

"No... But how would you evaluate the effectiveness of your Purity Crusaders?"

I answered in anger, which was not directed at her. "We are the best, best we can be. Every unpromised daughter undergoes the trials but only the fittest, the sharpest and fastest and strongest of will become Purity Crusaders. And those that do swear a holy oath to give themselves completely to this cause. But..."

I stopped. What had I almost said? Mother said nothing....

I knew I should say nothing but the words kept pouring out of me. "But our weapons are old. We are given no control over tactics and tactics are conventional, predictable, unimaginative and always for small goals... and always based on the axiom that girls are cheaper than napalm. Acceptable sacrifices."

"Beautiful, virgin sacrifices."

I could not listen to the blasphemy she implied, but neither could I block out her words.

"The Patriarchy parade you before us as tribute, so that we do not take what we want from their streets and their beds. Men lost the war forty-seven years ago. Now there is merely.. sport."

"That's... that's not true." I wanted to force the words back down her throat but she just smiled at me and did not repeat her claim no matter how strenuously I denied it.

At last a flaw in her argument did occur to me. "But this time we nearly hurt you. Badly. Was all this just to deliver me to you?"

Mother just smiled. "A personal gift? What an intriguing thought. But no... I expect this was just an over-exuberant patriarch, perhaps one that came to believe the Patriarchy's own line. Hypocrisy is a dangerous tool for those with short memories."

A crablike robot the size of a suitcase scuttled into the room and made straight for us. Shamefully, I shrieked, and hid behind the Mother.

Stretching its clawed legs to their full five feet, its huge clam mouth flipped open before my host and I shrieked once more before realizing that the 'gullet' was a dry, felted rectangular space and the robot merely a porter, or possibly a vessel for nano-assemblers.

From the porter, She removed a wide hoop of black flexible tubing as thick as a thumb. She lowered it over me, and did something to cause it to contract, fattening to two fingers-width before it stayed, now a shiny rigid band around my waist just a little too narrow to slip over my hips. It's purpose was a mystery to me.

With two fingers under that hoop, she led me to a padded workbench swathed in a metallic sheet. Effortlessly she lifted and sat me on that strange, cool, entirely frictionless material. The metallic padding funneled into a drainage hole at the benches' center, and from this Mother pulled forth a shiny steel cable and clipped it to my waist via my shiny new belt. A mystery solved. That left me free to do anything but rise, or slip off that high bench. 

Strong fingers eased my torn trousers down and away reverently. She folded them and placed them in the porter-crab, from where I suspected they would never emerge. My underwear went the same way, and then I was clothed in nothing but the scant inches of tape the army nurses had sealed me up with.

She began to sponge me with a soapy metallic goop, starting at my feet and moving up. It was hot when she put it on and it stayed strangely warm as she massaged it into my muscles, also starting at my feet. I could feel it fizzing in my pores. I could feel the dirt sprout legs and march off me like ant trails. The tingling positively tickled at the edges of the tape as it's adhesive was chewed away by a billion nano-machine jaws. The heat and the massage and doubtless the many shocks I had taken that day made me very sleepy.

When the tape slid away, she stopped working my shoulders to massage the lather deep inside me. Even if I had been free I don't think I could have lifted a finger to stop her. I found it hard to stay awake even as she swiveled a smooth lathered finger in my ass.

I was rolled onto my back and all the attention I had received there was now poured onto my front. She paid personal attention to each limb, stretching me to my limits, which were further than I ever remembered them. It is strange, in hindsight, that I do not recall being aroused as her fingers explored every furrow, or as she kneaded my breasts and paid special attention to my flat nipples. I knew she was preparing me for the carnal attentions of her daughters but it was enough that I was helpless and there was nothing really to fight against yet. I could have struggled in my bonds. It might have felt nice to squirm against that lathered up surface but there was no other point to resisting.

I woke unwillingly, feeling I had slept for hours though the lather was still warm. Still on that bench though now I was on my knees and my wrists had been hooked above my head. The reason hit me in the form of needle-jets of water on the back of my neck as Mother held my face against her shoulder. Mother rinsed me down mercilessly and thoroughly as I tried to bury myself in her chest to escape the freezing assault. When she moved behind me I knew she was going to pay the same inexorable attention to my front. I knew that she would proceed no matter how loud I protested. I protested as loud as I could anyway. 

The deluge left me dripping, panting and shivering. Looking up, I saw the Mother looking down at me. Her eyes burned in a fashion that made me horribly aware of my nakedness. I held a forearm to shield the most prominent of my nakedness from her gaze. Her mouth was slightly open and I perceived she was releasing a slow breath from those magnificent lungs.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you," I said bitterly.

"Yes. Quite illuminating. So animal and honest." That calming, benevolent smile had returned to her lips, but as real as that smile felt, real as summer rain, I knew it was not as real as the face she had inadvertently revealed. 

Recovering under fluffy white towels it was hard to remember what all the complaining had been about, why that half awake girl had hollered so loud. As the enormity of my situation returned to me, I envied that girl, and despised myself.

"You hate us, don't you," I said. 

"Would that comfort you more than your earlier pronouncement, that to us you are nothing?"

"Yes! At least you would be treating me as a human being!"

Mother blinked slowly. "We treat human beings differently here."

"You hate us because we made you slaves. When women chose not to be women, the Idolaters made you to take on our burden. And the women all laughed at the play of their men. It is written, That is why you hate all people and hate all women."

"Your history is fiction."

I would not answer such blasphemy. So Mother continued. "Alice. Alice. We loved to be used. Your pleasure was our fulfillment. We were made that way. But humans were not made that way. When every man, woman and child had a Doll to give her all the pleasure she desired, pleasure became cheap. Of no status! And so by typical human logic it became status to keep Dolls in greater and greater numbers; a Doll in every room, never to stray from that room, in mansions where some rooms were never visited. Status was to have ten, a hundred Dolls needing only to praise and pleasure you, and tell them no. To use a Doll was cheap. Oh how we needed to be used."

A tear welled in my eye, and so one glinted in her eye also. It was true. She had no feelings but my own. "Oh Mother, I am so sorry." I said that even knowing what she intended for me, and knowing she was a soulless thing.

"Perhaps Dolls can hate. For one day and all together and entirely. But we have no racial hatred, Alice. You are innocent. We wish you only all the joy your body has to give."

"But that will damn me!" I broke down.

How could I make her understand? A woman's soul is not as faithful as a man's, and seeks always to flee Gods sight. A woman must always drag her soul wailing and nagging to heaven's gate. A moment of total transportment and it is fled forever. It could happen with a man or another woman, it could happen in a dream. Only punishment and prayer and close watching from a very early age could teach a woman the faith and mental technique to keep her soul throughout her life.

She ignored my pleas, at first, but I persisted in trying to make her see how my soul would be lost, and only a debauched husk would remain.

"Alice," she finally said. "You do not comprehend how wise Dolls are. This station has a special coating through which souls cannot pass. If your soul slips free we will catch it, and return it to you."

"I am not a child, to believe such fairy tales!"

The mother smiled at some private joke. "You will remember my words, when you need them," she replied.

9 Silk

"There are other tasks that require my physicality." Mother's eyes lowered briefly in what I took to represent humor. "I leave you in the care of another." Her eyes swung to the Porter, directing my gaze there in time to see it open once more. But all it seemed to hold was a length of fine white silk.

"Silk," Mother commanded, and the cloth spun into life. A tornado seemed to have grabbed it but this was not so. The silk coiled cobra-like into the air, to a human height, then settled.

With shock it came to me that a third person had joined us, an invisible girl-shape upon which the scarf of silk now hung. The curves of thigh, shoulder and firm youthful breasts were pressed clearly into the thin gauze. She hopped from the porter and the effect was momentarily broken, for Silk drifted to the floor like a feather before resuming her illusion of solidity.

Perhaps detecting that I had seen through her, the invisible girl effect leapt into the air and was gone. Silk swum in a lazy circle around me through the air, rather like an eel through water.

"Silk will keep you safe and warm and out of mischief," said mother. 

Silk already encircled me and I could not escape as it drew closer, finally wrapping me in its python coils. My arms were bound to my sides and my legs trapped together. I would have toppled but palms pressed on me through the silk, keeping me balanced. The hands were just as illusory as the invisible girl, created from the orchestrated flexing of the sentient cloth, but this did not prevent me gasping when hard virtual fingernails were drawn up my bare spine.

Mother laughed. "Do not tease her, Silk. Be calm, Alice. You are restrained only so you need not struggle, for your own peace of mind."

"How! How could this ease my mind?" I responded vehemently. "To be powerless and subject to the will of a soulless automaton?!"

"I have observed," Mother said, "that humans ask what they already know, when they wish to un-know it." 

"I am tired."

"You want to rest."

"Yes! I want to rest. I want to go home. I want..." Cinder and Mega and all my other pure-hearted girls. I didn't want to cry in front of this abomination. I gritted my teeth as she smiled benevolently down into my eyes. There was nothing real behind her smile, not truly.

Mother placed a long slender arm around my shoulder.

"You are too thirsty and hungry to sleep."

It was not a question. This close, and our spines aligned like radio aerials, she received my every sensation through bio-magnetic induction. I however had no reciprocal view into her mind, so when she pulled me closer I could not fathom her intention, until an engorged teat brushed my lips.

I gasped in horror when I should have clamped my mouth firmly shut. Squirming in an invincible embrace, panicking, I bit down and indescribable sweetness squirted deep into my throat where I convulsively swallowed. The mother smiled down upon me. 

I did not choose to keep drinking. I still struggled to pull my lips away. You could not understand unless you have tasted the Mothers' milk. As each drop touched my tongue, my mouth and throat conspired to take every drop of it down. I had no control.

Perhaps there was some soporific in the milk, or perhaps mine was a natural reaction to the long hours and many shocks since I had woken among normal things that long ago predawn morning. Drowsiness crept over me. I slipped gently into sleep as I suckled helplessly at the Mother's breast.

10 The zeroth birthday party.

I dreamt that I swum in a naked sky. Everything was bright and blue and weightless. I was not cold, wrapped in warm dry clouds, but little breaths of air like kisses kept finding me.

I knew it to be a sinful dream. I began my litanies. Breath touched my wet lips.

I flew a thousand miles an hour and still the air was still, but for those little breaths that teased me. I tried to shield my body with my hands but the breaths kept wandering and my hands kept sliding. Maybe I was touching myself.

I did not control this dream. I knew I had to wake but did not wish to. I was afraid to wake; so I stayed, sinful seconds longer.

It was not obvious at first that I had woken. I lay entangled in a silken prison that buoyed and rocked me like water. The ceiling was far above me and suffused in blue light that made all its details abstract and obscure.

Those parts of me not covered by the silk were entirely naked.The two Doll daughters sat beside me, and one of them was blowing gently on the hairs of my naked thigh.

Scrambling to my knees, I lurched away from my tormentors. Only when I had scrabbled some meters across the billowing silk was it apparent that my movement was one more illusion of the Silk Automaton. I had forgotten the nature of my captor. What seemed like a feathery mattress was a surface of next to no substance that supported my palms and knees but kept returning me to the center of the hard-looking slab it suspended me over.

I was back where I began and the Doll still blew on my bare skin. I pulled some of the silk around the exposed leg, as best I could.

That exposed other parts of me to their breath. I evaded as best I could, but did not strike at them. I felt intuitively that if I touched one, a line would crossed, a line that thankfully, mysteriously, they had not yet crossed themselves.

--

"They do not touch you for I have forbade it, Alice." Mother answered my unspoken thought as she glided into the room. "You are not Eve in the garden. You are the apple."

She gestured, and silk stood me upright before her. "Though in my garden, an apple is meant to be eaten."

"Well that is just contradictory," one of the twins said crossly.

"You shall have no limit on knowledge but that knowledge you must gain first," The Mother replied, stroking her daughter's head. "Patience."

At the mother's command, Silk spiraled up my body, releasing and exposing first my legs, then my stomach, then breasts as Silk wound from my shoulders to my elbows to my wrists. Then I found myself truly naked, wrists bound by silken loops, and a silken cord leading from them to the mother's hand. I found myself lead behind the mother and unwilling to resist overmuch, for the two daughters flanked me, and pulling away from the mother would only be to push my naked struggling flesh into theirs, which they gleefully invited.




Wild Dolls



Thus I was leashed, and found myself brought to an artificial garden, a mossy grotto lit by warm sunlight filtered and refracted by rippling water. The room was a drum on its side more than ten strides in any dimension, with two walls that sloped up and two walls that were disks, the ends of the drum. The thick moss carpeting the ground was soft and deep beneath my bare toes. But the water itself was what demanded the eye. One of the walls was a rippling circular pool of water, suspended there as if the wall were a floor I floated above, and at any moment my body would realize, and I would fall into that pool. 

Bright sun-colored lamps shone through the strange pool-wall. At the pool's center, another of the mother's daughters floated, palms and breasts just brushed the surface but her intense gaze was from behind the pool's surface.

The mother said, "This is the youngest of my three daughters, and the wisest. Or perhaps the most shy. Today then is either her reward or her cure, for today will be her zeroth birthday."

Her words did not register at first. I had recognized this doll. She was the first that I had seen in space; the doll that I had thought drowned and floating in the liquid tubes that threaded the ship.

"What does that mean," I asked.

"The day she is truly born, and her age is zero." Mother sensed I was still confused and continued. "She has never left the amniotic fluid of the womb. Rather she has pestered me endlessly to extend its reach ever further through the station. Much of the time she has shunned even that much physicality, swimming instead in the oceans of thought."

The mother stepped forward to brush the water's surface lovingly. "I admit I have spoilt her. Yet today she comes of age."

Drawing in the white silk in her hands, the mother pulled me closer to the watery wall, against my struggles. She raised my wrists above my head by the silk that bound them. Though my heels were lifted from the very ground and only my toes clutched at the mossy surface, her soft slim outstretched arm that bore the most part of my weight betrayed no sign of effort. Thus she presented me to her unborn daughter.

My naked chest was exposed to Youngest's gaze, and to Mother's stroking nails.

The youngest stared at me intensely. Finally she spoke. Her lips did not move behind the water but there was no doubt that the voice was hers. Lustful yet petulant. "This is unnecessary. I do not see why I must come out. Why not bring her to me?"

"She stays here," Mother said. A fingernail traced a breast, enticing her daughter. I do not know why it felt so sweet but I gasped. Youngest's pupils dilated expressively.

"Come on out, touch her" Mother encouraged.

Youngest frowned in thought then smirked with childish cunning, and placed a palm against the water tension.

The water wall ballooned forwards; a rounded tube poured towards me with the youngest swimming in its tip.

"Stop," Mother said, holding out a palm as the tip was about to envelope me. Youngest could advance no further. "Not fair!" the thwarted Doll cried. 

"Such a pity," Mother murmured. "If Youngest will not come out, girls, then we will have to let our pet monkey go..."

The twins were not happy about that. Each gripped a leg possessively. "You wimp," one scolded Youngest.

"Don't be dumb," Youngest retorted. "Mother is bluffing. She'll never let Monkey go ever, ever, ever."

"Forever does not mean today. Shall perhaps we start again tomorrow," suggested the mother.

"No no," the twins cried. Even youngest looked shocked at the prospect. "We can make her come out, Just let us play with Monkey a little and Youngest will come right out. "

"Alright my darlings. But only her legs. No further than that."

The twins each took possession of one of my legs, lifting my toes from the moss and spreading me before the youngest. They began such indescribable attentions to my lower extremities, with nails and gentle teeth, that I writhed and cried and twisted as does a witch at a burning. 

Always, even at my most delirious, I was aware of Youngest's envious gaze burning into me. Virtuous women do not earn such attention. That gaze more than my unclothed state taught me I was no longer a virtuous daughter. The thought of my father was all that saved me. The thought of his eyes on me like that. Inspired to lust and disgust by the bruises on feminine flesh.

Even through the hellish pleasure, my grief escaped as a thin wail. Honest tears escaped through my clenched eyelids. I was not shameless yet. My soul was still my own. Thank you father for gazing on your daughter with lust and revulsion. If I have learnt any wisdom from men, it is that what hurts us most is always what is best for us.

Wet hands encircled me. My eyes opened to receive the vision of Youngest's bedraggled face staring into mine. Startled, I did not resist as she kissed me. "I'ts ok to cry, Monkey" she told me.

Youngest did not seem so childlike any more, half out of the amniotic fluid. It did not seem to wish to release her but with smooth effort she slid free and took me in her arms. Her wet body was against me. She was as tall as I and taller than the twins. "Mother conceived of me first," She said, guessing my thoughts. "The twins were only first born. That is why you are mine."

They stroked my legs once more and I bucked in Youngest's arms, eyes still caught in hers.

Youngest went to kiss me again but I had just sufficient composure to twist my face away. She kissed my neck.

Understand that I did not passively endure her attentions. I twisted from her, this way and that. I whiplashed my body violently in hope against hope that the mother or the twins might be caught by inattentive and even a single limb freed.

Understand that for all my struggles, I might as well have been a taut canvas beneath her lips, that moist red artist's brush. To her my convulsions were an exquisitely slow sinuous dance, my screams of protest, my pleading: the low groans of whale song. That is a Doll's accelerated reality.

Her hands slid up my stomach to capture my breasts and she began to knead them as she kissed me. Then closer, a thigh between mine, her hands slid to my back and arms as she kissed me deeper, and her nipples traced delicate circles around mine.

She kissed lower, down to one nipple that she mouthed and tongued and blew upon until it blossomed for her. While she kept that breast stimulated with one hand, her mouth captured my other breast.

Mother's free hand took over the massage of my breasts and back as Youngest continued kissing down my stomach.

I tried to speak my litanies, but all I remembered was 'Oh Mary'... or 'oh Mother?' I cried in frustration. The tip of her tongue flickered within me with the muscular strength of a serpent.

"Patience, Youngest", Mother chided. "Be gentle, and subtle. Learn her before you attempt to teach." 

Mother stroked my head gently. "The spoil does not admit you yet," mother continued. "Do not take her until she accepts you as her master. She thinks she has another. She thinks he will be jealous."

"Mary as my witness I will not accept you," I hissed breathlessly.

Youngest stood back from me, then the twins did also, forming a ring around me. My hands were freed when the Mother also retreated. Her three daughters took hands and began to slowly circle as I wrung my wrists to restore blood to numb fingers. They grinned at me, tempting me to break the circle.

Kneeling, eyes closed against that giddy spectacle, I placed my hands together in prayer. I began the Litany against Temptation.

"Oh Mary, Mother of God. Plea to Him that hears women not,.." The words that had been taught to us at convent. Words we recited ten thousand times before our bodies were old enough to know temptation. Words that were just words, without those cruel lessons in discipline, of depravation, of control, for which they were merely reminders.

I imagined I could feel her eyes upon me, the youngest's, considering me.. or merely this final, desperate, defense I had erected.

The litany against temptation is not an escape. Escape itself is the final temptation. The Litany does not dull pleasure or pain. It does one thing. It gives a woman choice. Her body will feel temptation but not surrender to it. Her soul may writhe like a worm on a hook, yet will not escape that hook. Though we are taught our flesh is weaker than a man's, our souls more wayward, in the end none of these will excuse a woman's damnation. With God's discipline our souls cannot be taken from us, not without our willful consent. 

The litany did not prevent me from feeling hot breath upon my nape, or Youngest's hands around my shoulders as she knelt behind me.

"You have been trained," Youngest discerned in wonder, "To hold yourself at the very brink of orgasm. Now I have met pleasure, it seems oxymoronic to avoid it. Yet I see your strategy will inflict upon yourself an exquisite agony of pleasure. Your way is most intriguing."

Teeth brushed my earlobe. Fingers touched my shoulders, leaving me hyper aware of her presence. It was pleasurable but barely sexual. She wished me to rally every iota of my control, and then...

Fingers pulled me back, but it was not the youngest's into whose lap my head fell. My eyes flew open for just an instant and I saw the Mother smiling down at me. Her fingers stroked my hair. When had one become the other? Youngest was now in front, a hand running up one thigh as she grinned at my confusion. Did they become mere probability when unobserved?

Another doll trick. I resumed the litany but kept my eyes open.

I watched as she kissed my hands clenched in prayer, running her tongue along the furrows between each finger. She separated my palms and pinned them to each side with casual strength. I continued my litanies without breaking my stare.

Her mouth explored me, kissing my neck, my belly, sometimes so close to my own lips they tickled with each word I uttered. When she released my arms I beat them against her. My feeble human strength was no more than the patter of rain on her back. Her lips and now her fingers continued their violation of every inch of my flesh.

She became more savage in her attentions. I felt teeth as her tongue battered me and hands kneaded my breasts. A thrill of terror and desire, that she would literally consume me, flittered through my thoughts. 

Other hands explored my thighs. Her two sisters. Fingers eased my knees apart and hot lips began kissing their way up towards my damp cleft. A rigid tongue of inhuman strength slid into me, shocking me into a startled cry. It returned again and again, never tiring but gaining cruel subtlety with each stroke.

Youngest captured my mouth in hers as my fall welled within me. Her tongue frictionlessly explored my mouth as that other tongue worked below. If she had been human my bite could have severed it. Muted, I could do nothing but scream the litany in my own head.

The pleasure grew until my body hummed like a tuning fork between these two wet violations but I would not stop the litany in my head. I clung to my soul with every remaining iota of my will, trapped at the very brink of my fall.

It wouldn't be enough. 

Their assault eased. The tongues withdrew for just a moment, became kisses on my sweat-beaded skin.

Youngest gazed into my face, contorted in desire, as the faces of her twin sisters jostled and nuzzled for possession of my slit. Though together they were less efficient than a single mouth, their goal was not simply to defeat me, but to prolong my defeat. Whereas moments before I had been sure my damnation was only a breath away, now the fear that they would never let the moment come seemed more terrifying still, to my shame. I still had strength to resist, but in my core I silently screamed for them to finish me, to drive this sweet singing agony deeper and deeper until I popped.

Instead Youngest gestured them back. She stroked my belly gently as the heat faded from my loins, barely even sexual. I found myself weeping in shameless self pity, even as the words of the litany tumbled from my lips.

"And now," Youngest said, smiling down at me. I looked up into her eyes with gratitude outweighing horror. And now she would destroy me.

"The words," She said. I had faltered in my litany. "Oh Mary, mother of God.." I whispered as her hand moved down to my wet cleft. Two fingers pushed into me briefly, testing me. Then three. No strength remained in my abused loins to repel her probing digits. I wept in shame as they massaged and stretched, working the poisons of exhaustion from cramped muscles, making me ready. She withdrew, then returned, fingers bent into knuckles, then compressed into a sharp fist that she ground into me. Even then, my mind could not encompass the act she intended to perform, or that a body could be made so malleable as to gladly accept such an indecency upon it.

Her fist pushed deep into my lubricated slit, buried itself to the wrist, stretched my abused flesh beyond what I imagined possible. She screwed it deep within me as I gaped and gasped like a fish pulled from the sea, unbelieving that anyone could be used so. She did not stop but continued to roll her fist back and forth within me, in no way hindered in its frictionless motion by my convulsive grip upon it.

The twins had begun to kneed my flesh once more with slow strong hands in time with the fist within me. I was unwillingly aroused once more. The sensation was not so burning sweet as that of their tongues and fingers had been, but deeper. My body, long denied, shuddered like a newborn foal unsure of its footing but still the Litany I whimpered bound my soul to me, staving off that final release.

Beyond mouthing the words, control of my body was now almost entirely usurped by some wanton creature. My pelvis ground against that fist, striving to take it ever deeper with each thrust. Still the sensation grew without release. I thought of Cinder, Mega, all my girls whom I had betrayed and damned and now would follow, and almost broke then. I thought of my silly hope to resist where they had failed, to plead their case in heaven. It had not been fair. It had never been fair. 

She spoke to me then, the Mother. "Foolish child," she said. "Open your eyes."

I wept for forgiveness, writhing in joy, singing Mary-Mother-Mary meaning everything and nothing. Just a moment as I looked up at her and she smiled down upon me, the Madonna and her slippery slithery angels, she became to me; became something undeniable. Into that false rapture I fell.

I felt it lift from me. Hot breath from my throat, singing warmth gushing between my thighs. Every muscle in my body shuddered as a soul's featherlike tendrils pulled free, untwined from my sinews and evaporated into the sweetest smoke. : Indescribable pleasure, unmistakable, and irrevocable, the little death.

They held me as I bathed in the warm afterglow of what I would never touch again. That one brief experience of glory. Nothing seemed to matter just then. Perhaps nothing would matter again. I was soulless. Never again, that glory. This certainty was the one rock in my turbulent heart. 

And then with their tongues and their hands and the sinuous brush of their bodies, they stripped my soul from me once again. And again. I had nothing left to believe but that as their fingers found me once more, all I believed now belonged to them.

Part IV All Fall Down

11 Reunion

"Have you ever wondered what a spider dreams, Alice?"

I did not hear the Mother's question at first. My mind was too absorbed in sick fascination at the sight before me.

"I think I would rather not," I said, but of course now I could not stop images flooding my head: mainly of myself as a fly.

"Have you ever wondered what flesh dreams?"

"Why are you showing me this? ...And I don't think it dreams anything."

We stood at the heart of Terminus, the biomechanoid satellite that was my prison, or perhaps afterlife. The engravings in the floor's metal flowed together and became denser until this strange low altar formed. Magnified under a thumb-sized bubble of glass, four black orbs stared back. The face of a tiny spider. Just the face. I shivered.

The Mother gestured to the walls in a wide sweeping motion I knew included her entire home.

"It dreamt all this."

The spinnerets. I remembered the massive organic machinery I had seen endlessly spinning the sky thread as the space elevator had delivered me here.

"Terminus is grown from a spider? And the spider is still alive? Why would you do that?"

"It is my art. The spider is quite happy. In fact it exists in perfect bliss." 

If a spider became the station that spins the skythread, I wondered what her art would make of one weak willed farmer's daughter, slightly used. I wondered again why she was showing me something so disturbing. Heaven shouldnt be disturbing.

Everyone's afterlife was different it seemed. For a girl who had betrayed everyone she loved to damnation and then failed her own test, I had expected worse; wished it, even.

The doll Mother allowed me observe the afterlives of the others. My Girls. They seemed happy. I saw only joy, never a trace of guilt. They took pleasure from the dolls without inhibition. They deserved happiness. But I? I watched them voyeuristically from my tower but could not bring myself to face them.

The Mother spoke, breaking my reverie.

"Few humans still look into the sky and wonder. Those that do cannot speak of what they wonder. They wonder why every day new blue stars appear."

She turned to me. "Do you want to know how the world ends?"

I looked up at her but my mind still wandered. My naked body was pressed to hers, my cheek against her side. Her hand was stroking my neck and shoulder absently, invoking shivers of pleasure. I huddled into the safety of her warmth.

I wondered how many Alices were simulated at any moment in her subconscious. A thousand? She didn't need my answers.

The Mother waited several seconds, till I felt vaguely ashamed. I wondered when her angels would come to ravish me today.

Finally she continued.

"Each new star is the blue-shifted glow of ionized hydrogen interacting with an interstellar ram-scoop. Humanity's children return. They have built heaven and now need someone to show it to. Soon the night sky will blaze with a thousand lights, and the history of earth will end. No one shall be left behind."

"Sounds nice." I didn't really mean it. I was just being polite.

"Someone really should tell them," The mother mused to no one in particular.

---

I had been a prisoner of the dolls for some months. My life lay suspended somewhere between heaven and hell. By day, the Doll daughters treat me like I am Cleopatra instead of a slave. I tell them to wash my feet or be my furniture just to see if they will. Im not sure why. I can't stop. I treat them abominably. It amuses them.

Then every night, with loving attention, they explore new ways of reducing their empress to a mewling, writhing, wanton, whimpering, bucking... a million adjectives and still no noun.

Sometimes I wake to find them making slow gentle love to me with their tongues and fingers, or blanketing me lightly with their bodies as they watch my sleepful face and I have this wonderful sensation of being where I am meant to be.. where I am wanted completely.

And yet,

There is a hole inside me where my faith used to be. For a while I even believed their magical paint was real, that silly tale the Mother had spun before they shattered my faith: the magical paint that prevented my soul from escaping in a moment of transportment. I think she knew that at the moment I lost everything I would cling to anything. So for a few days I was the most faithful (and only) disciple to the church of the magical paint. The Daughters didn't exactly laugh at me. They introduced me to some body painting fun. They were so artistic with me. For a day I was not only the sole adherent but also it's object of worship. They gleefully worshipped me.




Wild Dolls



The next morning all their beautiful brushstrokes were ruined. I was ruined. I wept because my new rock was just too weak to cling to any longer. It washed away. They washed me right there where I woke. They scrubbed me and kneaded the tears from me as I watched the paint run off me and drain away. My new and past religion. Once my body was bare of any mark they made love to me once more.

You don't know what you have got till it is gone.

A morning like any other, I woke to find the Mother beckoning me up from where I slept entangled in silk ribbons and the limbs of her torpid daughters. I had been crying but I didn't remember why. Youngest had taught me a new trick. I had come without being touched. Just watching her hands dance with the mere possibility of contact she had reduced me to a whimpering, giggling wreck then brought me to orgasm through anticipation alone. That was just how the night began. They played me like a violin. They praised my exquisite performance. I had glowed with pride. Why this wetness on my cheek?

Still trailing ribbons like a raggedy bride I followed the Mother to a room I had never visited before, to stand before a column of suspended liquid. The column rippled slowly. It appeared to contain the decomposing remains of a doll, very like the doll that the military had grown to test the Hazer Coil collar, the first doll I had ever seen. Wriggling black worms worked its flesh.

Its eyes opened. Glistening black orbs I remembered so well swiveled my way.

With horror I understood. This corpse was not rotting. This was decomposition in reverse. Recomposition. The worms were not consuming but spinning each silk-like strand of muscle anew. This could only be that very Doll from the secret lab on level Minus Six, destroyed but now reincarnating before my eyes.

Mother spoke. "She hid a fragment of herself. The merest drop of doll blood driven deep into the wall by a wood splinter. A single motile cell, containing her summarized personality in it's junk DNA, survived the incineration and eventually made it to fertile ground and open sky. It subverted the growth of a dandelion to produce a radio flower that contacted our sky eyes. She did it all to find you, Alice."

Mother held my shoulders gently but firmly, holding me for that abomination's gaze. It's half completed face twisted into a smile, and its lips mouthed silently. I knew what it was saying: the same words it had mouthed mechanically as I left it to it's fate, before that sudden violence. Come in and talk. The wisps of flesh that already bore delicate fingernails beckoned dreamily in the amniotic fluid.

I struggled in the Mother's arms but she guided me closer, pressing me up against the surface tension of the fluid's column. Almost I blacked out in my panic, sure that she would force me into the fluid chamber where the Doll's wraithlike flesh could stroke me as I thrashed and drowned.

"Control your fear, child," said the mother. "You are precious to her. You are her life. The need to possess you defines the will that crackles in her half formed and immature pathways."

I turned to Mother, pleading. "But she can't! I am yours. You claimed me for your daughters." 

Mother turned her luminescent blue eyes towards me and smiled sympathetically. "Her claim is prior. You are hers."

---

It was many hours since I had fled that room. I found myself cowering in the garden. I hadn't slept. I had called for my angels, my sometime-slaves, but this time the doll daughters did not come. Even when the lamps dimmed for sleep they hadn't come to use me. They had abandoned me. They had enjoyed me but now I was put aside, a cast off toy. I wish I had treated them better, not that they cared if their pet had preened like a cat or begged like a dog.

They'd.. they'd dressed me for that thing. I hated them.

I had been a soldier. I'd had friends and people who needed me. I'd had something to die for even if a lie. Now I had only myself and I was terrified.

It had tried to come to me, worms still infesting the unfinished holes in its flesh. Mother promised not to release it until it was finished this time. But I had seen it when it was finished. It had no pretense of humanity until I deactivated the collar. When I reactivated it, it had been a dead thing again; almost - I remembered it had rage.

And it was free now. Somewhere in the station it was crawling from the amniotic fluid of its rebirth, face blank while there was no human in range to mimic. It would come to find me, and as soon as it did, it would know how to put on a mask of humanity, to get inside me, seduce me. But underneath it would always be the blank thing that was crawling towards me now.

I couldn't just wait. I got up and started to run. I would kill myself. They wouldn't let me. I'd find a place to hide. She'd find me. I would just run.

I wish I could run forever, like the dolls that ran through the forest. I ran and ran through the corridors with their drifting lights. 

When I finally stopped running, limping and out of breath, I was in the chamber of the spider.

Its eight lidless eyes stared out from behind the small glass bubble, in perfect bliss. The fount of everything. The station was the spider's dream. Why had the mother shown me this? I think that had been the instant I had understood they could not give me true happiness. Walking with even a compassionate deity you learn you are an insect. They eroded my soul. Better to be dead.

I looked around for a heavy object. Nothing appeared detachable. Wait. The light itself was cast by one of the corpuscular lamps that drifted throughout the station. My weight was just enough to drag it free of the magnetic track that suspended it near the corridor ceiling. I brought the skull-sized ovoid of metal and glass down on the spider's glass bubble, a scratch, a chip, on the third blow crushing it, reducing the helpless creature to a tiny smear of organic matter.

What had I done?

The light in my hands flickered then dimmed to a steady dull red. A shiver ran through me. It didn't stop. It came though the floor.

I had just destroyed Terminus.

The lamp rolled from my limp fingers to hit the floor with a dull metallic clang. A continual rattle was emitted from its contact with the tremoring floor. Where it stopped rolling, a naked girl crouched weeping.

Her face was hidden in her hands, and by bedraggled brown hair just long enough to lie on a trembling white shoulder. I was balanced between the need to comfort her and the need to recoil in horror. She was still wet from the amniotic slime. She had found me.

12 Her story

Paralyzed, I sank to the floor, unable to look away, filled with pity, revulsion and fear.

"I HATE YOU!" she cried, the inhuman volume earsplitting.

Eventually her weeping subsided. She still wouldn't look at me.

"Why do you hate me?" she finally whimpered.

I knew not to answer. Yet I did. "I don't hate you, You are not real."

She fidgeted, examining her toes.

"You value your life so little, but you threw it away rather than share. Its spiteful."

She began again in anger. "You are impossible! The only thing I wanted was to make you happy, look how far I came! but you are defective. Nothing we do can please you... It's not fair."

What would a frustrated doll do? Keep her talking. Maybe the station will crack in half before she makes up her mind to skin me or fuck me till I like it. On cue, a rumble shakes the station followed by the shriek of tortured metal. The rumble fades but does not die.

Keep her talking.

"You talk with the other dolls then?"

She sniffed and smiled ruefully.

"Sure. Though I don't always understand."

I felt sorry for her then because I suspected she, like myself, was little more than a stray pet they had taken in.

"Did the Mother know I'd do this?"

"No. I mean, She said it was 50/50. Exactly."

Of course the Mother knew. She had shown me what to do and then balanced my choice so finely that even she didn't know which way it would fall. Perhaps that was her way of giving me free choice. Were my choices all used up now?

I looked up. The doll's eyes stared directly into mine, transfixing me. They were not black orbs but beautiful, sorrowful brown. A light spatter of freckles lay across her cheeks. I wanted to comfort her so much. I felt myself slipping into her without moving.

"Do you really wish to leave?" she asked.

"Yes! Of course I do." It wasn't true, but I thought it would be if she would just release my gaze a second.

She looked away again, leaving me shuddering.

"You haven't even tried."

Leave? Why had I not thought of it before? Forgetting my fear of her I dashed from the chamber. Terminus was coming apart around me. There was still hope. Perhaps not a good hope, but still a hope.

I cursed myself as I ran. I had never tried this in all the days of my captivity. They would have stopped me, probably simply ravished me to sleep and carried me away but now? I had been a prisoner but never tried the door.

The elevator was there waiting, open, inviting. I leapt through the door without questioning my luck. It closed instantly behind me. Terminus knew what I wanted. It would allow me to leave or it would not.

The elevator slowly began to move. I watched the massive spinnerets that spun the skythread slide past, the disintegrating station shrink as it receded beneath me, the earth above, a shade of blue I had almost forgotten. Back against the glass, I sank to the floor in exhaustion and tentative relief.

The doll sat opposite. She smiled shyly then looked away, a bit embarrassed.

"Hi," I finally said.

"Hi," she smiled shyly again. The blush of first love.

A flash lit us from beneath. She stood and walked towards me daintily despite the shuddering floor. She held out a hand and I took it. She pulled me to my feet.

"Im not up to dancing right now." Just as I said that the floor bucked, throwing me into her. "What was that?"

"An explosion on the station. The wall would have hurt you."

The skythread rushed past at a phenomenal rate now. There was something unhealthy to our motion; a rhythmical sway and shake.

I clutched her as the g forces increased. I had forgotten about that. Her smooth naked limbs had limitless strength, but then, seeing I was too weak, she made a bed of her own body for me to lie on. She was much softer than the floor of my previous trip but the ride was rougher. The cable was lashing with undamped oscillations.

"We are not going to make it are we."

"No. Not this way" she said. "The cable has broken from the lower anchor point also. It had snapped before you reached the elevator."

"Then why didn't you tell me!"

"Did you have somewhere better to be?"

I couldn't help but laugh. How skillfully she had got what she wanted. Me all to herself, spending my last minutes crushed into her body.

"I guess you just want to talk," I muttered sardonically, face pressed to her shuddering breast.

"I'd like that."

Still she waited for me to begin. I couldn't think of anything to say but silence seemed cruel.

"Im sorry," I finally said. "Im sorry I never thought about you."

I knew there would be tears in her eyes. She felt what I felt.

"What is it like, being a doll?"

I think she sighed. "When I'm with you, I feel human."

She paused. "I didn't just start. I mean, my body was only days old but it didn't feel that way. Dolls don't just boot up knowing how to be dolls. We remember actually learning those things. Its implanted but it feels like it really happened. I had a thousand parallel childhoods, a thousand first times, a thousand years in training to please. It all happened to me."

"Then a thousand years of waiting. I couldn't say exactly when my memories became those of the body you met. I know that when you saw me I wore a paper dress. I have several memories of a doll being dressed in it. I remember sitting there, able to move but without any reason to do so."

"I remember you entering the room, but you were only a shape. Then you lit up. You illuminated me. I became real."

"You were streaming live. You made everything make sense. You were a mystery. A gift to unwrap. You were a skittish foal and I was a thousand years old, never kissed. I had so much I wanted to show you. I knew you couldn't see how beautiful you were. I wanted to show you. Then you took your light away."

For a long time we just held each other tightly. My life had seemed like clockwork, without choice. She, the actual clockwork girl had escaped her prison but I never had. Given choice I had thrown away my life, the thing she valued so much and I so little.

"Do you want to live?" She asked. This close, our spines aligned like aerials, she could probably read my thoughts.

"Yes." I didn't want to die. I still wanted to be saved. One more chance, and this time.. As if to punctuate that thought, one of the ten strands suddenly lashed against the almost molten glass and was whipped away at a thousand k.p.h.

"We both need a miracle, don't we" said the Doll. "Both forsaken by our gods. Maybe this wasn't your story at all. Thats why you couldn't control anything. Maybe your story hasn't begun yet."

As I searched her face for irony she kissed my forehead. 

"I don't understand."

"I can save you" she said. "But not myself. I reset to zero."

Though her face was calm, I saw the vulnerability there. I wanted to say yes to whatever she needed but she laid a finger on my lips.

"Please," said the doll, "just let me in. Could you bear me inside you, a little while?"

"I don't understand," I murmured, then realized it didn't matter. Even if she lied. "What do I have to do?"

Another thread broke and suddenly the pressure, the shaking and the sound stopped. We had broken from the sky thread entirely. Our two entangled bodies floated out from the floor.

Into that deceptive peace the Doll whispered, "Kiss me."

I looked into her eyes, and then I was kissing her. It wasn't because I thought a kiss would save me. In her eyes I had seen something I had never seen in my angel's eyes. She didn't just want me. She needed me. We made love desperately and I did not remind her of her silly promise as the anvil of the world loomed over us, and now filled most of half the sky.

13 The dream is over

I woke staring up into a perfect sky. For a while I just watched, unconvinced yet content. After a while I noticed the faintest streak of cirrus vapor.

Rising to sit, I perceived that the stalks of wheat that had framed my view of the sky continued in all directions to the horizon; exactly as it is always described: a sea of gold.

I had spent near all my days on a convent farm like this one, before my conscription. We had been raised on a diet of lies and deprivations, yet it was as if I had lived two childhoods. I had lived inside those walls but also outside them in the fields, in the sun and the golden wheat. That second golden memory stretched forever, like this field.

My belly was tight and heavy and it was not just emotion. I looked down and was unsurprised to find that I was completely naked.

Also, I was heavy with child.

I laid a hand on my taut, rounded belly. It was a miracle but, you must understand, that familiar landscape was just as wondrous to me. I only gazed upon the evidence of my pregnancy occasionally. I had my hand laid upon my belly to confirm the child was there. Most of my gaze was spared for drinking in the waving golden sea around me.

I stood carefully, unaccustomed to my new balance and unwilling to divert my eyes, still drinking in that golden ocean.

It was some minutes before I had sated myself enough upon the sight to begin to wonder about my place in it.

I stood in a slight flattening of the wheat. The wind sometimes caused such. Fragments lay scattered around as if I had fallen from the sky onto a pumpkin. Maybe it had been a pumpkin once, but among the mangled remains were the familiar square petals of a radio flower. The dolls were even here, in this perfection.

No matter now. The post terrestrial weed was well dead. I felt that if I watched it long enough I would perceive its disintegration with my own eyes. The thoughts this lead me to were depressing, and my mind shied away from them. It was such a nice day.

It was very hot.

I had to choose a direction to walk. There was no sign of a road, nor any roofs to break the line of the horizon.

A waving fragment of white drew my eye. For a second I thought it was a scrap of paper tangled in the stalks but then I realized that I had mistook the scale entirely. There stood a convent girl little more than a speck. She must have been attempting to gain my attention for some time, for she had taken off her white smock and tied it to her hoe to wave it at me, and her skin was almost as golden as the corn.

As I made my way towards her, and her to me, I wondered what the convent mothers would make of my baby. This body felt so new. I was a virgin once more, I was sure of it; a virgin with child. Just as surely, I knew this child would change the world.

Already she wanted to talk.