My mind received sudden sensations from a different body which appeared to be in the process of being split in two. Something hard had invaded me between my legs and was pushing upwards into my belly. I heard the blare of horns, the screams of a crowd driven insane, chants of, “Ot! To! Ot! To!” and Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’ overture.

 

“Oh, Alexi,” I cried, and longed for oblivion.

 

I had been stripped naked with my legs splayed and was being pressed hard into the board I had seen Beau secured to earlier, until I could barely breathe. Meanwhile Otto was inside me, pressing his entire, bloated body against my back and pushing his dick as far up me as it would go. My sore vagina was spasming uncontrollably around it, my muscles gripping him reflexively despite the agonising bolts of pain this was giving me. A hand gripped my chin and turned my face until I thought my neck was breaking. I saw Otto’s repellent face and spat but he merely laughed and began thrusting with greater vehemence.

 

“I see you are once more awake. Did Precious keep you entertained during your little break?” he hissed into my ear. “Thank you, my sister, you old blister!” he shouted over my head.

 

Over the top of the board I saw Precious facing us from the back of the stage, black suited men around her, and above them huge black and white images pasted on boards hanging from the lighting rig. They were of a sly-faced young man with long, black hair, wearing a dark dress. The sight of Jayden’s loathsome features added to my nausea and I felt like my body was being reduced to a boiling jelly. I screamed out for Beau, Alexi and even Mary.

 

“I’m here, Irma!” I heard Beau’s bright voice call from behind.

 

Otto pressed even deeper and began grunting with pleasure while gripping me tightly. I had not been secured to the board, presumably due to my earlier unconsciousness, but now some of the men approached us. One took my right wrist, one my left, and I was about to be manacled when I heard a muffled gun shot and a brief, deafening scream blast into my ear. The hands at my wrists were gone as the men had turned their attention to Otto. I felt his bulk sag and turned my head to see him, with a look of horror on his bulbous face, collapsing into the arms of his men while Beau smiled at me from behind them. I stepped away from the board to see blood pouring from Beau’s genitals and Otto’s buttocks.

 

Precious, back in her wheelchair, sirened and thundered in outrage but there was no one to interpret. She retreated towards a slope at the side of the stage but Beau calmly turned to her with his erection. There was a blast and Precious, with a hole in her head, slumped forward over the equally dead-looking Jay. The shock of his death in Cyberspace must have been too much for the dog.

 

“OK, that’s enough now, Beau,” I said trying to sound calm above the ongoing blare of the music and the screams from the crowd as they frantically made their way to the exit. “Let’s go home.”

 

The men approached him and Beau’s penis exploded, firing a bullet at one, then the other, felling them like tall trees. Blood fountained from where the bullets had lodged in their hearts, painting my skin with streaks of red. I froze as Beau turned his persistent, inane smile and adapted cock on me, saying nothing but looking me up and down while something twitched in his neck.

 

“Beau, sweetheart,” I said, fighting to control my voice. “Remember me? It’s Irma.”

 

His face was completely devoid of recognition as the tip of his cock rose and pointed to my chest. I had just managed to turn around and bend over before he shot me. Pain fired across my back and lodged in my left shoulder. I ran to the edge of the stage, jumped to the floor and followed the screaming remains of the audience to the door, but heard another crack and felt another stab to my side. I fell, but immediately scrambled back up, felt my wounds as I ran and found that it was only my bloodless skin that had received damage, though bits of it were hanging off me. Glancing behind I saw two security men attempting to restrain Beau. I slid through the minor build-up of men at the entrance, the sweat and blood on my body making it easy for me to shake off any attempts to grab me, passing the attractive guard who nodded at me blankly. Behind arose a series of shots and wild shrieks as I exited the building and ran onto the road.

 

My nakedness drew some whistles but I was not the only person in a state of undress and there was too much panic for one person to draw too much attention. As I began to wonder how on earth I'd find my way home, I heard more screams from the entrance and looked back to see a small, bloody-cocked, pigtailed figure pause, notice me and resume running. I sprinted hard into the thick crowd that was passing the club, realising that safety in numbers was my only hope.

 

The further I ran from Uranus the more I drew attention and I was having to fight off more grabbing hands and leap over more extended feet. A car slowed and I was accosted through its window by a slightly-built man with glasses who offered me a handsome sum to go down on him. I continued running, casting frantic glances behind me. There was no sign of Beau at the moment, but the shots were getting closer. The car drew ahead a little, turned and stopped in front of me. On either side people were crossing and pushing against each other, filling the roads with a thick scrum. I pushed the man aside, jumped up onto the car’s roof and leapt into the road on the other side, fell and twisted my ankle. Volleys and screams from behind told me that Beau was getting closer. To my left was an alley, almost completely black, which I plunged into, limping a little, my heart hammering behind my breast.

 

The building to my right with pink stuccoed walls had a side door open through which I heard music. I stopped, looked behind me at the illuminated crowd on the road from which I’d just come and, in front of them, I saw Beau, facing in my direction. I dived through the door, hoping for a hiding place to make itself immediately apparent but there was nothing except a long, dark passage down which I ran until I came to a door with a red light above it. I pulled it and, to my relief, it opened. The hammering music increased in volume and, less so, did the light.

 

Before me was a heaving inferno of naked human flesh in a strobing pink light. Everyone seemed intent on each other and I felt glad that I had found a place in which I should easily be able to pass unnoticed, the light making the blood on my skin hard to discern. I shut the door firmly and entered the throng. I noticed that many people were surfing across bodies, sliding their sweaty, lubricated way over backs, shoulders and bums, so I started to do so myself, finding it easy and that no one protested. Chairs at the sides were full of people, mostly of advancing years and also naked, sitting stock still with wires leading from their left nostrils into the walls. On balconies there were crude automatons in the forms of naked men and women, their genitals spraying a honey-scented fluid over everyone, their painted faces utterly vacant. Receiving a blast of this substance I immediately felt aroused and even began to enjoy the feeling of the flesh against me. I slipped easily from a man’s back and felt fingers start to play with my nipples and clitty. Lost in an ocean of breasts and cocks, my body was soon slicked with oil, lubricant, sweat, semen, blood and the liquid aphrodisiac. I could hardly tell where one body ended and another began. Limbs thrust and quaked all around me while I was lifted and drawn onto someone’s open mouth. I spread my legs and moaned while, above the din of the ‘You Have Placed A Thrill In My Cunt’ by the ubiquitous Trollope, I heard the door through which I had entered slam open. I looked up to see Beau enter so I remained where I was, believing that, in the mêlée of bodies, I would be hard to spot. I was wrong. His wide open eyes found mine instantly and he began crowd surfing towards me.

 

I heard a woman at the side scream my name and felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and, above the mountainous hips and barbie doll breasts, I saw the ageing face of Rosemary. She plucked the wire from her nostril and gawped at me for a few moments, uncharacteristically speechless.

 

“You’re dead!” she managed eventually and then noticed the skin hanging from my back and hip.

 

“Hi, Rosemary,” I panted, hopping between bodies to go and stand beside her. I was glad to see her but at a loss to explain my condition.

Firing from near the door told me that Beau had resumed his work. He surfed across the bodies on his cock while it loosed off the occasional bullet, until the intoxicated people in his vicinity came to their senses and he fell on the floor.

 

“Fucking hell!” yelled Rosemary. “What’s up with your mate?”

 

She stood and we both held each other as we watched the bodies between us and Beau topple over. I knew I now had to at least make an attempt to stop him, though I knew it was hopeless. I looked him right in the eyes. Only two body lengths away from where I stood with Rosemary, he stood, faced me and increased the angle of his erection. I ducked to the side but received another blow, this time to the right shoulder. When I looked down the arm was no longer there, save a few wires that sparked briefly before dying. Desperately driving the agony from me I willed myself into his mind and then was back in the old house on Cordelia, leaving, for the moment, the terror of the crowd and the pain in my body behind me.

 

I saw Beau's virtual body tower above me, all the way up to his head which, just eclipsing a ceiling fan, bore a halo of spinning blades. My avatar was, as I had feared, still corrupted by the virus. I felt my huge nose and wondered why I had bothered with this idea. At least, while we were here, Beau would be immobile in the real world.

 

“Shit!” I squeaked and backed away from Beau on my tiny feet while looking with trepidation at his cock. Fortunately, his avatar had not received the same adaption as his physical body, but it was still intimidatingly long now that I was reduced to only twenty inches or so. On this comparative scale Beau’s innocent face looked, to me, imbecilic.

 

We were in the house’s wide hallway with its sweeping staircase and, at the foot of it, the statue that so resembled Beau. I listened fearfully for noises from upstairs, then remembered the bloody fate of the dog and the holey fate of his owner.

 

“Who’s a cute little snuggums, then?” said Beau and reached down out of the sky to grab me by the arms to lift me above his head. The brief trip was like rocketing into space and my tummy lurched. I stretched out my stunted arm for his nose but was propelled high into the air. I fell back, my limbs flailing, and was caught before being swung and cast into the air again, this time to brush against the ceiling.

 

Continuing with this amusement he went to the door, opened it and stepped onto the rocky, Cordelian landscape, now in its dim daylight. With the far distant sun shining and half of Uranus’ clouds reflecting its light, I could see that the rivers of spunk and excrement were gone, revealing a stark world, very uneven, full of cliffs and valleys. Laughing, Beau tossed me high and I saw how the seismic calamity that had afflicted this site five years before had left it corrugated with flat-topped mountain ranges and a labyrinth of valleys. I remembered falling to this world and landing in a heap with my friends just on the other side of a low ridge that was no longer there. Brought from there to the house, then given baths and clean clothes, we had been so grateful. How like an angel of mercy Jayden had seemed then.

 

Each time I landed in Beau’s arms I swiped at his nose and was each time frustrated by my short arms. He giggled continuously, uncaring and unthinking.

 

“You’re not my Beau,” I told him, my fingers wiggling futilely before his nose for a second before I was hurled skywards again. He seemed not to hear but threw me higher and higher until Uranus, its convex globe before me, looked close enough to draw me into its gravitational pull.

 

From the house came the sound of crackling, then ghostly chanting, exotic percussion and electronic sounds. Why was music coming from the house? It sounded boxy and was probably playing on the old wind-up gramophone. Beau paused briefly to look back, then resumed his baby tossing. There was a flash of glittering skin at the doorway, moving in time to the music, and from the darkness of the house came Rosie, dancing her loose-hipped dance, slowly making her way past the pillars of the house’s front portico, down the steps and onto the dusty surface of the moon. Her six sisters followed, all with their hands on the hips of the one in front. With his back to the house and his eyes on me Beau seemed not to notice while the snaking line of Rosies wiggled and ground towards us. I resisted the urge to yell out her name, so relieved was I to see her here. Her tits were as huge and buoyant as ever, each pair squashed up against the back of the preceding Rosie. By the time she reached us I was thoroughly sick from my constant journeys into the air.

 

“Alright, my old mates!” one of the Rosies laughed.

 

“Hi, baby!” called another, waving at me as I reached the highest point of my trajectory. “Where’d you be without me, eh?”

 

Beau finally stopped his baby-throwing and gawped while the Rosies danced around us. When the last one came up, she reached out and grabbed his nose. In a second it had disappeared into her mouth and a nonplussed Beau and I watched while she pulled a face and her neck bulged a little.

 

“Ew!” this Rosie exclaimed, then said to me, “Remember, Irma, I’d only ever do that for you, you conkfaced cutie!”Then, all seven of them lifted their left index fingers to their noses, winked at me, and we tapped ourselves out together, leaving Beau alone on the barren moon of Cordelia.

 

Rosemary and I were sitting together in the same venue, in the strobing pink, looking across at Beau, immobile on the middle of the floor, as if asleep. This form was repeated in three other places, though these victims of his derangement were chaotically thrown over each other, their limbs splayed randomly. The surviving orgy members had dispersed, barring a few traumatised stragglers hugging a far wall. Between and around us were pools of blood. Standing over Beau was a very angry-looking, bespectacled man, short, of wide build, his muscular body smeared with various substances, and dressed in nothing but a pair of tight underpants.

 

“Fack me,” he said looking down at Beau. “Sheer carnage.” He tutted. “Sheer, total, utter carnage.”

 

Rosemary removed her nose plug, hugged me to her hard breasts and asked me if I was OK. I assured her I was, then noticed my arm lying a few feet away at the foot of one of the bodies.

 

“Through here!” we heard from behind and looked to see the approach of six green-suited paramedics with stretchers. “We’re gonna need more stretchers!” said the same voice.

 

Rosemary and I turned back to see my guard belatedly appear at the same side door through which I had entered the building and quickly approach us.

 

“Are you alright, madam?” he asked me in a bland tone.

 

“He looks familiar,” said Rosemary and winked at me.

 

I nodded in reply to his question and watched as he crouched over Beau to check him for signs of life. He opened Beau’s mouth, stuck his finger inside and up to the palette. With a gentle whirr the component parts of Beau’s head slid apart, his jaw dropped unnaturally, the top of his skull lifted like the lid off a kettle and his forehead split apart. There was no blood and no suffering as the guard reached deep inside and dislodged, then pulled out an oblate, silver spheroid, stamped with a serial number. Meanwhile the paramedics were removing other lifeless, and more bloody forms.

 

“Who the fack is responsible for this?” fumed the wide man. “Who the fack would make a robot into a fackin’ killing machine?”

 

The guard said nothing and quickly slipped the spheroid into a jacket pocket. He came over to me, examined me briefly and told me to climb onto his back. I obeyed and hooked my one arm around his shoulder while he bent down and gathered the slack body of Beau in his arms. When he stood I clung on tightly, gripping my legs around his hips and hooking my ankles before him. I felt safe on the back of his tall, hard body.

 

“Madam, could you?” he said, looking at Rosemary and pointing to my arm.

 

Rosemary picked it up, laid it across Beau, shook her head and I could see, behind her plastic, stretched features, mostly betrayed by the eyes, the trace of a rueful smile.

 

“That Alexi!” she laughed. “Ooh, I need to sit down,” she added breathlessly.

 

“Are you alright, Rosemary?” I asked. Suddenly looking weak and unsteady, her body was starting to show all the years she been trying to hide with surgery.

 

“I’m just a little dizzy, that’s all,” she said, between labored breaths. “You take care, Irma. Can’t always be flying to your rescue at the last minute,” and she pressed my hand affectionately.

 

“You look after yourself,” I told her, then we kissed and I was led away from the terrible scene.

 

“Just wait a minute!” said the angry gang banger. “Who’s gonna pay for all this? I’ve got my bleedin’ overheads to think about, you know! Some fackin’ robot comes in here blowin’ everyone away, it’s bad for business, innit?”

 

“We’ll take care of it,” said the guard and we left the building the same way we had entered, leaving the paramedics to carry their human cargo out of the front door.

 

“And who the fack are you?” bellowed the man behind us.

 

“Oh, shut up, Donald,” we heard Rosemary’s voice inside. “You’re a lousy fuck anyway.”

 

Outside, in the empty, dark alley, it had begun to rain and the guard began to run at the speed of a car, down towards the busy road. In contrast to when I had been on my own, the crowd seemed a little more willing to allow me through now that I was hanging onto the back of a powerfully built man. The sight of someone carrying two broken bodies must have been a little out of the ordinary for them, though not much. The night was hot and sweaty, despite it being late in the year. As we left the nightclubs and street walkers behind, the pavement crowds thinned to just a few late night drunks and no one stopped us. Our speed increased until we were racing at an exhilarating speed down the narrow, paved footpath beside the water that led back to Alexi’s house. On our left, from a pitch black wasteland, dotted with the occasional bonfire, came the screams of revellers, at one moment joyous, at another full of terror. The smoke from one bonfire not far from the path coiled into the air like a snake, undiminished by the rain. Above, thick clouds swirled, then parted briefly, allowing a small hole in the ceiling of the sky for the bell pull of smoke to pass through, just for a moment. The pain from my wounds, in my back, my hip and at my shoulder, pressed in on me and the night grew darker and darker.

 

When we arrived I slipped, nearly fell, from the back of my guard, and stood outside the house, afraid to enter. The door was opened by the synth in the hall and, slowly, I followed the guard in. Over his shoulder I saw Beau’s peaceful face, his glassy eyes staring at nothing, his mouth open and his jaw awkwardly misaligned. Indeed, he was not my Beau and nothing more now than an empty shell. I loved my Beau now more than ever, but this machine was not my Beau. The house lights came on but all was quiet as the guard opened the laboratory door and took him inside. Eventually I entered and went to the kitchen for a glass of water and from there I listened to gentle bumps from the lab, then watched the guard exit the room and the house to resume his position outside, ever watchful.

 

I turned to the glass kitchen door which led to the greenhouse and in the dark reflection stood a broken form, a crippled woman, torn at the hip and missing an arm. I hardly cared. As I crossed the hall to the lab my gait was unsteady, perhaps as I now had less weight to carry on my right side. I entered the coldly, clinically lit room with my eyes lowered. Before me, on the first table, was Beau, the late assassin, with his brain resting in a wire tray hanging above him from a shelf. I staggered for the next working surface, feeling all my strength fading from me, and only then noticed a second body in the room, stretched face down out on another table, motionless.

 

Her head rested on a cushioned ring, like that of a massage table, and her hair was tied back. She was naked from the waist up and a crimson ribbon ran from her nape to her shoulder, then down. Metal arms hung over her, their steel fingers partially retracted. Using my last reserve of strength I edged towards her, hardly daring to look. I leaned against the table and looked down at the inert body that had been my real Beau.

 

I wept over her and my tears rained on her back until my eyes were dry. I wanted to see no more. I wanted oblivion. Then, as everything was slowly fading into black, the arms of Alexi stirred and she lifted herself from the table.

 

She looked up me and I knew no more.

 

Copyright © Irma Cerrutti 2015