Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:25:51 +0000 From: Java Biscuit Subject: Free to Good Home, chapter one This is a futuristic fantasy involving inter generational male/male graphic sex and it's not intended for reading by minors. If you are underage, or this type of material is illegal where you live, please stop now, and go read something else! Feedback, always appreciated, to: javabiscuit@hotmail.com Free to Good Home ~ chapter one by Biscuit December 15 - 3 AM I'm not a brave person. Among the many things that make me nervous are androids, bots. I don't wet my pants or burst into tears at the sight of them like I did when I was young -- I just feel uneasy. Then again, I don't see many in the city as scary as the man shaped things without faces that worked in the fields of my dad's farm. The thing I found tonight is a boybot. Not faceless. God no. Its face is terrifyingly real. He looks like my brother Sam. Sam at thirteen, a beautiful kid on the verge of becoming a handsome guy; still innocent looking but giving off the heat of sex. Sam as he was when his tackling and grabbing games were suddenly aimed at getting me between his legs. I was ten and I worshipped him. I would squeal and try to run away from him, but I loved it when he caught me, his thighs clamping around me. He'd hug me to his chest and poke at my butt with his boner. I used to wiggle around like I wanted to get away but I was praying he'd never let go. Sam was my champion, the one I loved best in a family where I seemed as out of place as if they used some other guy's sperm at the breed house, not my dad's. My brothers and I all came from the same house; certified sons of our father. As much contempt as my dad had for me, he never denied I was his. How could he? I looked like him. More than Sam or Joseph did, really. We all got his blond hair, but mine's the most like his, stick straight and thick with the same annoying cowlicks and swirls. Oh God. Why am I sitting here rambling about my family in the middle of the night. I must still be drunk. I've got to do something, get rid of this thing, put it back where I found it. Fuck. A broken bot that looks like my brother, stuffed in a cracked recycling crate with a stick jammed up it's ass. I almost died when I saw it. It's snowing hard now. Even if I could make myself go back out I couldn't put him back in that alley. There has to be a way people dispose of bots, surely it's not right to put something that looks so human in a recycling bin. Kids must have found it and done that stuff to it, they thought they were being funny. So sick. Free Bot to Good Home, scrawled on its chest. There's something wrong with me. There has to be. No one in their right mind, even drunk, would do what I did; wrap their coat around a thing like that and carry it home, crying like a baby the whole way. My arms and back are feeling it now. What does it weigh? Can't be a hundred pounds but my arms are aching. If I hadn't blown up and run out on Ted I would never have walked down that alley. If he'd come after me I'd never have seen it. The thing looks like he's sleeping. I should never have put it on my bed, put its head on the pillow. ------------------- I never wrote more in that journal. I think I was too freaked out to record what I was doing. Ashamed of myself. Scared, like always It was a raw time for me, a lonely time; my second winter on my own in Boston. I loved the city. The old part where I lived, protected by charter, seemed a thousand times more alive than the world I grew up in. At the farm every blade of grass, even the insects were planned and cultivated, endless acres of regulated earth. In the city I had a view of the Charles River from my one room condo. A small place, but mine. It was the mark of my success, modest as it was. I hadn't become a great writer. I didn't write literature -- I wrote what amounted to propaganda for a pharmaceutical company; they'd taken me straight from trade school. But at twenty-two I felt like I'd accomplished a lot -- at least I'd gotten away from home. More than my older brothers had done, not that they wanted to leave. They shared my dad's opinion that I was throwing my life away. I'd made up my mind that I wasn't going back to the farm for Christmas that winter. I couldn't stand to see my brother Joseph gloat over his new wife, to see Sam reaching for our old closeness and failing to grasp it. My dad said, "Suit yourself, you always do," when I told him. He wanted me there because I should be there. There's a correct way to do things and once again I wasn't doing my part. He wanted me at home, he wanted to rub my face in the things I'd given up by leaving. My father hadn't always had money. The farm barely survived until he bred the fiber tomato and patented it. Now it was like harvesting gold and he hated the way I'd turned my back on the things his money could buy me. A wife was something my father couldn't afford for himself when he was young. He was proud to offer it to his sons. Sam was next in line for a marriage contract. Like me, Sam had no desire for a woman. It meant nothing to our father who believed it was a moral and civic responsibility. If you had the genes and the money you married and bred children. Sometimes I think the population of women dwindled because they couldn't stand to be born in a world where they were treasured but not treated much better than bots. I hope some man who desired one, who could love one, got the woman who might have ended up being my unhappy wife. The city was my haven. I could walk along the river and see wild things growing, flowers and weeds. There were squirrels and geese in the park along the water, a swath of untamed greenery. There were ancient trees in the streets of the district. I loved it. But I was lonely. The first flush of joy in solitude had begun to wear off. I had friends from work and the writing group I'd joined. I had lovers but no one steady. I didn't like to bring guys home. I was nervous about sleeping with a stranger, waking up with someone I didn't really know in my bed. I'd go out, get drunk and I'd go home with someone -- easy to escape -- or fuck them in the back room of whatever club I met them in. Ted was a man I'd seen a couple of times who wanted to get more serious with me. That was the fight that sent me fleeing for home on foot in the snow, cutting through an alley with the restless pace of drunkenness. Only drunk and in a panic could I have gotten that limp body home and up my stairs. Ty63. Tiny letters printed behind a perfect seashell of an ear. A boybot like Ty63 would have cost as much to buy as a marriage contract. How could someone spend so much money and then toss him in the garbage like trash? It had hurt so bad to see it. I took it straight to the bathroom when I finally reached home, desperate to wash off the words, the reek of the alley. I lost my grip as I was lowering the body into the tub, banging its lolling head on the edge in my hurry to put it down. I cringed at the sound of impact. I knew it couldn't be hurt, couldn't feel, but my hands were shaking when I turned the head to look for an injury. That's when I discovered its name, etched so small behind the ear. I kept most of my toys on my bed as a kid. A lot of them were handed down from my brothers, broken but finally mine. Things that I'd coveted so long that I didn't care if parts were missing by the time I owned them. There's a word for it, for the habit of investing inanimate objects with life. I did it with toy starships, with tiny cargo transports. A family of horses was my favorite; tail broken off one, ear chipped off another, the third one I'd gnawed on before it belonged to me. Sam had told me to keep it. He didn't want some dumb chewed up horse. My babies I called my toys. The day came that my dad lost his patience at the sight of the pile on my bed and announced, "It's time for these babies to go to the orphanage." Even Sam laughed at his joke. I must have been close to twelve myself by then. Old enough to know better, to let go. But I hid and cried, I couldn't stand the sight of my babies being thrown away. Sam, the traitor, came looking for me. "Toby," he said, "they're not real. There's nothing to cry about." So much like the times he tried to talk me out of my fear of the bots. Not real! He's not real, not hurt, I told myself, pulling the stick out of Ty63's violated ass. Wet flakes of bark stuck to its skin; skin so pink and tender it was breaking my heart. My stomach heaved and I willed my dinner and drinks to stay down. The owner couldn't have done it, I couldn't believe that. Only boys, like the ones I'd been scared of in school, could have done something so horrible. Even if it wasn't alive, even if it couldn't feel, the image alone was monstrous. I had to make it not be. I hardly remember washing it, only the flood of relief when the words disappeared in the soapy water. Part drink, part whatever the mess was I'd worked myself into -- I talked to it. I remember saying, "It's okay, you're okay now," over and over as I got a towel wrapped around it and carried it out to my bed. For a couple of hours I sat at my work table, trying to write, to think, drinking coffee to sober myself up. At some point I dimmed the lights to half. It was a small place, that condo. The size was a secret comfort to me. When I showed it to someone for the first time I always said something like, "It's not much," or "It's very small." But I really liked being able to look around and see everything, like the compact corner of the kitchen in back. The bathroom door was always open so I could see in there; the gleaming white edge of the old fashioned tub and the toilet seat set in the tiled wall. There was a little table between the kitchen and my bed, a pair of stools. At the other end of the room, the best part, the bay window that faced the river. I didn't need a big screen for entertainment. I had a small one and rarely looked at the thing. Both my bed, and my comfy chair with its footrest faced the window. That night, though there were lights to see out on the water, I swiveled my work table toward the bed. Toward Ty63. Finally, I had to go to bed myself. I was exhausted beyond the reach of coffee and calm enough to lie down next to the thing. I took off my suit in the bathroom. It seemed like years since I'd put it on, standing in front of the mirror to look at myself every which way. It was a lot like my other ones, the one piece things that were popular then. This one was shiny and thin as silk, black. It was loose but revealing in its own way. Tight things, I thought, made me look too thin. Why had I even bothered trying to look good to Ted? He was so angry at me. I'd seen his eyes absorb every inch of me through the thin fabric, like I belonged to him, and I'd panicked. My own face looked pathetic to me in the mirror, my eyes red, features all puffy from crying. Guys told me I was pretty. No one ever said that about my dad. Not that I'd ever heard anyway. Our features were much the same but our lives had given us different faces. His was weathered and creased by exposure to sun; his mouth a hard line as if he'd managed to compress the softness of his lips by an effort of will. I had to force myself away from the mirror and thoughts about my father. Time for bed, I thought, an odd whisper of excitement touched me at the memory of Ty63 out there waiting for me. "Low lights," I whispered in the quiet as I made my way to the bed. The room dimmed. A fresh wave of nerves, muted but strong enough to make my heart beat harder, washed over me as I carefully got under the covers. Ty63 was on top of them, a spare blanket over him. I stared at his profile, not a foot away from me. Long dark lashes fanned his high cheekbone. Dark for how blond he was. His nose wasn't small, wasn't big, it was perfect. Like Sam's. The lips though, were his own. Fuller than my brother's. I could almost imagine the motion of breathing. Seen close up he wasn't scary. Far from it. I liked looking at him like that, not thinking about where he'd come from or what I was going to do with him. As long as I could see him and not bump into him in the dark I was sure I would be okay. I fell asleep like that, mindlessly studying his face.