“Doctor, how do you account for the behaviour of the sex synth you created?”

 

“It must have malfunctioned.”

 

“But its body had been tampered with, is that correct?”

 

“I can't comment, I'm sorry.”

 

"With your reputation for eccentricity we’re all eager to hear what you have planned next.”

 

“How do you feel about the seven deaths you’re being held responsible for, Doctor Skolkova?”

 

“Your name as a world leader in robotics has been irreparably damaged. What do you hope to do now, Doctor?"

 

“I still hope to begin my lectureship at the university next year. In the mean time I’m gonna get married. I’ve nothing else planned at the moment.”

 

“Ah yes, you’re sailing to France, I believe, to take advantage of the new synth marriage legislation there?”

 

“Yes, right now, actually, if you’ll just excuse us.”

 

“And this is the synth you intend to marry? Is it the prototype or the finished thing?”

 

“There was a female prototype, but I’m pleased to say I have here the finished synth.”

 

“And we address it as ‘Ian’, is that correct?”

 

“Yes, you can call me Ian and I’m not an ‘it’ or a ‘thing’. Please give us some room. Thank you.”

 

“Ian, you are said to be the first synthetic person of your type ever produced. Do you have a sense of your own uniqueness? Do you feel superior to humans?”

 

"Are you safe or should we run for cover?"

 

“Ha ha! No, I feel a hundred per cent human, no more, no less.”

 

“You’re scheduled to appear around the world within the next few months. Do you resent being an exhibit? Won’t a synthetic person of your sophistication get bored with such a mundane existence?”

 

“I’m not an exhibit, thank you, and I’m hoping to pursue a career as a writer, so meeting people and attending expos is not the only thing I’ll be doing. And the rest of the time I’ll be consummating the hell out of my marriage.”

 

“Ha ha, and, uh, um, Professor Skolkova, what do you have to say in response to the comments made, only this morning, by your other new creation, the synth known as Rosie?”

 

“I really don’t mind what she said. For years before she passed away she was a lovely friend to me and she helped out me a lot. It was her dying wish that if I did this for her, then we’d be even. I hope we are, but I can understand her bitterness.”

 

“Indeed, your synth killed both of Mrs McKinley’s children, the children of the late prime minister.”

 

“I've been advised not to say anything about that, I'm very sorry.”

 

“So, are you fleeing justice, Professor?”

 

“Fleeing justice? No, I’ve agreed a settlement with the families and with Rosie. I know it’s not much and I hope I can help them again. And about the families of the other victims, I'm absolutely devastated about the deaths of their loved ones and they know I'll be at their disposal as soon as I return. In the mean time my solicitor is handling everything. I’m not fleeing, I’m just gonna get married. Excuse me, please.”

 

Alexi and I had finally waded through the scrum of reporters and reached the brass-railed boarding plank that led from the edge of the dock to the sun deck of the yacht. My future wife looked a picture in her wide, straw hat, a simple navy dress and shiny black high heels. A broad, navy ribbon, tied around the crown of the hat hung down her back beside her long hair which she had recently dyed pink. A matching ribbon, tied about her neck in a bow, fluttered its loose ends in the wind. The private yacht was a sleek, phallic wedge with a pointed prow and bright pink to match her hair. The pilot, a skinless, and two other skinless synths waved to us from the bridge. The yacht stood out brilliantly against the tugs and freighters that surrounded and dwarfed it. They could not come close to it for elegance. Behind it the orange evening sun squatted on the opposite shore.

 

The Mayor, slim in her green suit and feathered hat, was standing with her husband, rotund and smiling in his grey suit beside the boarding plank. The Mayor cradled a bottle which, as we approached, she held out to Alexi.

 

Gestures were made for silence and the Mayor addressed us all in a long-winded speech, concluding with, “For services rendered to our city, I should like to wish you bon voyage and a long and happy marriage,” and she kissed Alexi on both cheeks. Everyone clapped and beamed.

 

“Thank you for ridding us of the poxy McKinleys!” shouted a man in the crowd.

 

Alexi accepted the bottle of champagne and thanked them all in a concise speech. Then, at the tug of a lever, the bottle swung against the prow and it struck next to the yacht's name, ‘Mary Beau’. The bottle exploded, everyone applauded and I held Alexi’s hand as we waved, then boarded the ship. She stumbled a little and I held her firmly at the elbow until we were across. She signalled to the pilot, the plank was withdrawn and we both stood in the ship’s needle-sharp prow, smiling and waving to all. The wind increased, Alexi hung onto her hat, the ribbons around its crown and around her neck flapping like flags, and I hung onto her waist. Our yacht’s horn sounded, sending a shudder through everyone and drawing more applause, then the ship pulled away from the side.

 

I was eager to be away from this crowd, good-natured thought it was. The people on the edge of dock faded from view, with the squared-arched flood barrier behind them, and soon we were out in the middle of the river, looking back at everything bathed in the evening gold as the eternal black cloud grew clearer, rising from the city’s belching factory chimneys. The sun sank, the dock lost its lustre and everything behind us faded into the swiftly encroaching night. The dark tint in the glass around us, no longer needed in the harsh sun’s absence, gave way to a clearer view. Ahead were the giant, skyscraping towers of the new flood barrier, but they were still many miles away at the mouth of the estuary.

 

“Jesus, I thought they’d never let us go,” I sighed.

 

I finally relaxed, and squeezed Alexi to me tightly, lifting her feet a little off the wooden deck until she yelped happily and held onto my strong arms while her hat tipped back. I remembered how, so long ago, we had sailed on another ship, a sailing ship, ancient and wooden, and how she, in another form, had led me from there on the strangest of journeys.

 

“Y’know,” I said to her as we watched the waves being sliced around us, “there’s still something important we haven’t done.”

 

“What’s that?” She giggled.

 

“Something I need to do properly.” I went down on my knee, took her long, white fingers in both of my dark hands, and looked into her laughing, sapphire eyes. “Doctor Alexandria Skolkova, dearest! Will you marry me?”

 

“Of course I will, Irma, my love,” she said at length, recovering after a minute bent over with laughter. Her smile, that made multiple dimples in her chin and cheeks, was the broadest and brightest I had ever seen.

 

I kissed her hand, then her arm, worked my lips up to her neck, then found her mouth. I kissed her slightly protruding upper lip, then brushed both lips with mine as she leaned in and expressed her tongue. I held her to me and she pressed her body against mine while our tongues danced in our mouths. She let go of her hat and it fell to the deck, its ribbons flying in the evening breeze while her long, bright hair blew and rippled like a flag. After a while we parted and looked at each other in the light from inside the yacht, our arms still loosely around each other. We even danced a little across the deck, to music we alone could hear, smooching as I had once smooched with Mary in an old, candlelit room. In her I saw my Beau, his cheekiness and his genius and in the beauty of her body and the sincerity in her eyes I saw my Mary. Both of them flickered tantalisingly beneath the surface. She was everything I remembered from my few days with them, but far more. She was someone I had loved all my adult life, or could have loved if I had only been more comfortable in myself. The little girl was there too in her open smile. Her look was one of unbridled love and when she bit her lip the look turned to one of lust. She took just my index finger, gripped it loosely and led me inside.

 

The ship’s interior was too big for the two of us, speaking practically, though the luxury was a turn on for me. A muscular man, bald but with a black Stetson balanced on his head, standing taller than me in cowboy boots and with a gun belt slung low around his waist, stood at the bar and offered us a flute of champagne each. Alexi thanked him, calling him ‘Yul’, and we continued to walk as we sipped our drinks while I looked back at Yul slightly nervously. His wave seemed friendly.

 

Our cabin was in the stern and stretched from port to starboard, decorated in pink and black with furnishings as shiny and sleek as the ship’s hull. As we entered, a soft, sensual rhythm wafted from an unseen source. The broad rear window looked onto a deck, completely cut off from the rest of the yacht, and above, a few stars in the deep blue sky were already visible though the huge skylight.

 

“How’re you feeling, love?” she asked, holding my arm.

 

“I feel human,” I replied after considering the question.

 

“That’s good,” she said and kissed my cheek. “Is everything, um, working?”

 

“How very delicately put,” I said, which she responded to with a gentle laugh. “Why don’t we find out?”

 

A black velvet curtain hung across the rear of the cabin which Alexi now pulled back. Having explored earlier during her purchase of the yacht, Alexi knew where to find the bed, a beautiful super king size. She lifted one knee onto it, sank into its softness and sipped her drink while looking up at me expectantly, then lay down and stretched her long, fishnet stockinged legs out before her. We clinked glasses and took a long sip, then I took them and placed them on the side. I unbuttoned my shirt as she luxuriated in the soft pillows.

 

My chest, in fact, all of me, save the stubble on my head, only had a thin layer of soft, almost invisible hair, just how I remembered Ian and how Alexi preferred me. I sat at her feet, then placed them in my lap. She sat with her hip slightly twisted, one leg raised above the other, her hand on her thigh and a playful smile on her lips, studying me through her large-lensed glasses. I unbuckled and removed her shoes, then tore her stockings. She bit her lip, taking pleasure in my fingers gliding over her ankles and tracing the vein on the inside down to the instep. I massaged her feet, first the left, then the right where I knew she had less sensation and which was sprinkled with a constellation of stars.

 

“I’m not used to this amount of luxury,” I said, looking briefly from her to our surroundings. She smiled but said nothing. “Hey,” I said, “you can’t play the demure game with me anymore. Beau and Mary are in there, deep down, and I’m determined to get at them.”

 

She pressed her feet into my crotch and kneaded me with her toes, then drew the sole of one foot across me and caressed me with the instep of the other. I ran my hands up her legs, noticing for the first time just how beautiful and slim they where, while enjoying the pressure that was building in my loins. Before I knew what was happening I had shot a load inside my pants, but she continued to rub me for a while, squeezing her toes around my cock through the material until her feet were coated in a thin, shining film of my cum. I raised one to my lips and licked her free of my jism, tasting myself and finding how much like real cum it was and not at all like the cream I had sucked from Beau. She moaned sensually and, as she seemed to like it so much, I did the same with other foot.

 

I then stood and undressed at the side of the bed, wondering how many times this body would be able to cum in one night. Once I was naked, she stood also, turned and lifted her long hair. I untied the bow of her neck ribbon, then loosened the dress strap and let the dress fall from her tiny breasts. As I reached around to cup them and press my body against her, I noticed the small, square indentation just below her hairline. She reached up, placed her hands behind my head and we shared a lingering kiss while I massaged her tits and squeezed her already hard nipples between my fingers, tweaking the barbells that passed through them. My hands roved over her belly, around the ring in her navel and down to where her dress still hung at her waist. With a skilled movement I pushed the dress and her panties down until they were in a heap around her feet. I pulled her to me and, with my penis flat against the small of her back, I glided my hands over the lips of her pussy. I flicked my middle finger over her clitty and gently probed her with my other middle finger. As we maintained the kiss my hands made love to her, feeling her wetness and her heat as she opened up to me. She held onto my arms, swaying gently in time to the music, while I deftly brought her to orgasm. She raised herself on her toes, quaked against me and, when we finally broke the kiss, gasped into my ear.

 

For the first time I saw all of her tattoos. They spread from one arm, made a v-shape on her back, the tip of which was at her ass crack, and onto the other arm. They were mostly mathematical equations, punctuated with hearts, one of which, in the small of her back, closely resembled, with its door, the place of my first assignation with Beau. She turned and I saw how, on her front, the ink spread across her breasts and up to her neck. The equations meant nothing to me, but on her left breast just above the nipple, styled in the same way as the numbers and symbols, were the four letters of my name. She took my right hand and placed my palm against them.

 

“I love you, Alexi,” I said and it seemed like that moment was the culmination of everything I had ever known up to that point.

 

She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the ceiling as if in prayer while I squeezed the breast and pressed the nipple with the heel of my palm. I drew her to me again and pressed my lips to her face passionately over and over while telling her again and again, in between kisses, I that I loved her, making up for the times I should have told her, but had not. Through the blur of my tears she smiled up at me and ran her hands over my chest, down to my muscular stomach, then sat on the edge of the bed and gently took the tip of my cock between her palms. I looked deeply into her eyes that were magnified slightly by the glasses, while she caressed me into full hardness, sliding her hands around me and over the helmet.

 

Leaving just a small gap between her palms she pressed her hands over the end, making me push until half of my cock was within her grasp. Slick with sweat and the cum I had leaked earlier I slid between her hands and pulsed into greater rigidity. With her palms still flat she began a full cock massage by moving her hands in a vigorous circular motion as if my penis were a stick being used to start a fire. I instinctively rocked my body back and forth, fucking her hands, while she maintained eye contact with me the whole time. The skilled manual stimulation reminded me of Mary and the smile she gave me at that moment, with her tongue caught between her teeth, such a facial gesture was so typical of my Beau. Then she hooked her legs around mine, and her arms around my ass, hugging me and bringing her tongue onto my cock. She fluttered across the eye, flicking it until my cock waggled from side to side, then drew me into her mouth. I slid between her lips, over her soft tongue and the small, hard ball in the centre of it until I touched the back of her throat. I was amazed by her skill as she was able to take most of me, though she had equipped me with a most generous tool. She sucked me long and sensually, drawing the inside of her cheeks up and down the sides, offering me as much stimulation as she could. As she drew up to the tip she kept me inside her while tonguing me. Then she sucked me in deep until I was pressed against the back of her throat. I stroked her hair, bent my head back and moaned.

 

When I began to twitch she pulled out and hugged me tighter, pressing her chest to me with her nipples pushing into to the skin on either side of my cock. As I exploded she ground herself against me, swirling the cum around my belly and over her neck. She sucked me again until I felt completely drained. When she finally let my cock pop from her mouth her chest was heaving and rivulets of my cum were streaming down her chin. I looked down at her, took her glasses from her and tossed them onto the table at the side. Her characteristic shyness had now been eclipsed by the wantonness I knew from our numerous couplings online, so long ago. I tore the remains of her stockings from her and undid the black, lacy suspender belt. We both lay back down on the bed together on our sides and spent a while just looking at each other.

 

I stroked her thigh, the curve of her hip, then rocked forward a little until my fingertips were in the valley of her spine, drawing my hand upwards to the shallow hole in her nape, making her shiver. With just one finger she traced a line up the underside of my cock and rested it against the meatus which was already oozing. She spread this all over my helmet and then, with the nail of her pinky, she softly scratched around the hard, bulging flesh, even inserting it a little into the eye. The pleasure I felt was so intense and the veins in my entire body were throbbing with such desire that I could take the waiting no longer. I picked up her up, brought her to the head of the bed and laid her across pillows and cushions. She looked a little nervously from my eyes to my erection, then up again and I bent down to kiss her.

 

“I’ll be gentle, darling,” I whispered.

 

I laid between her legs, pressed the underside of my cock against her pussy and moved myself across her lips, loving the scratching of her pubic hair against my bald genitals and the hard ball of metal in her labia pushing into my cock. I felt her wetness increase against me as I moved up and down, across the hood of her clitty, pressing inwards, deeper and deeper until I could feel, against the skin of my cock, her hole opening wider and wider.

 

“Put it inside me, love,” she pleaded.

 

I continued to tease her, loving the sense of power this gave me and savoring the suspense, the feeling of being poised on the edge of a precipice before a great leap. She wrapped her long limbs around me, growing more excited with each of my passes. As a girl I had loved tribbing, kissing another girl's quim with mine while we drew pleasure from the friction, but there had been something missing and, though born female, I had always wanted to be sexually more dominant and in control. Everything about my body felt perfect now, and Alexi felt perfect against me.

 

“Uh, my God!” she gasped and I realised I had made her cum again, just with this simple movement. She arched her back and pressed her chest into mine while screwing her eyes shut and forcing her head deep into a pillow, splaying her hair across it and her face. I nearly came myself, but tamed my arousal and waited while her breathing became more regular. Then, I put it inside her.

 

My cock throbbed into even greater hardness as I slowly forced it into her while she gripped my arms and dug her heels into the backs of my legs. After the first few thrusts she slowly relaxed and, though she was surprisingly tight and her walls hugged every inch of me, I easily worked my penis back and forth and began a steady movement inside her. Her wetness, her eagerness and something about the way her pussy seemed to mould itself to me, made everything feel so right.

 

She brought her legs up, hooked one hand under a knee, and I was able to get inside her little deeper. While continuing my measured strokes, I spread my legs and bent my knees so that I could rest on my ankles. I rocked myself back and forth within her and thumbed her clitty. Her breathing increased again in speed and volume and I matched my thrusts with each breath she took until she began to let out occasional high-pitched cries. I raised her legs, held them to my chest and felt her tighten even more around me. We gazed into each other’s eyes as I laid across the backs of her legs and picked up the pace of my thrusting just a little. Both of us were crying and moaning, overwhelmed by the love and lust we felt for each other, but I did not allow myself to cum until I felt her pussy contract around me. She held my cock so tight and her entire body gripped me so fiercely that I could hardly move. Then she began to shake, waves rushing up from deep inside her pelvis, through her limbs and out to her fingers. I felt every shock in her muscles, every lightning flash in her pussy, every roll of thunder that ripped through her body, and I matched it with an almighty climax of my own. My cum shot deep against her walls, and I drove my cock even deeper, drawing a long and trembling groan from deep in her throat. The union of our bodies opened floodgates in which we both drowned.

 

The image of her face, shining with perspiration, was replaced for less than a second by that of my own and I saw myself moving back and forth with the pink ceiling behind my head. Not just this sight filled my head but every other sensation with it, the bed against my back and a cock thrusting and cumming inside me. Then, the feeling was gone and I had returned from a brief moment inside Alexi’s head, back into my own. To my amazement I came again almost immediately, then again and again, until I collapsed beside her with my cock twitching in the air and still pumping out more juice. She giggled and went down on me until I had finished.

 

With her legs splayed, her chest heaving and her belly still coated in my white juice from my earlier cumming, she stuck a finger inside herself and lifted it to her lips with a heavy-lidded look that was pure Mary. We lay together for a while on our sides and cuddled with her back pressed against me.

 

“You put your neural nanocircuitry back in,” I said while nuzzling her neck.

 

“Oh, no, this is all new stuff.”

 

“But why? I thought you were through with all that.”

 

“I'm just,” she began, then broke off and slapped me playfully. “I’m sticky,” she said, got up from the bed and ran to the window, against the dark background of which she looked young and fragile, like a pubescent girl. Then, as she passed from the room onto the deck outside, looked at me over her shoulder and beckoned with a finger, this illusion was dispelled and the cheeky smile was pure Beau.

 

By the time I had run from the room and into the cool evening air on the deck she had already disappeared with a splash, but it was not water into which she had dived. The broad pool on the rear deck was filled with a thicker, white substance. I watched her slim form cut the whiteness easily and she swam like one of the virtual mermaids she had once created, that had snaked around us both as we travelled from one site to another. Then she turned and floated, smiling up at me, her pink hair turning the milk around her head into a raspberry ripple.

 

I remembered a vast, domed space full of capering life forms, wallowing in a similarly suspect white liquid. Alexi was laughing quietly as I stood at the edge, hesitating. I tried it with a toe, then dipped my fingers into it and, to my relief, found it was cool milk. She threw her head back and hooted with more laughter than I had heard from her she I had known her as a girl. I jumped in and swam around her, laughing with her and playfully grabbing her arms and pinching her bottom which rose as she took a dive. Once in the pool of bright milk I could see nothing of the sky and I imagined there was nowhere else now, only this little, white space and my Alexi. She swam around and around, slipping away from me each time I made a grab for her. I felt so proud that, having first taught her to swim when she was young, she had since grown into a confident swimmer. She swam to the far side of the pool which was just a few feet from the rails at the stern of the yacht and lifted herself out to sit laughing and wiping the hair from her face. I laughed too, gazing up at her pale skin made even whiter by the pool, while my own, in stark contrast, was now a deep ebony speckled with white droplets. I kissed her curled toes and she edged back a little until her feet were resting just over the pool’s edge. I lifted myself until only my feet were in the milk and placed my hands on either side of her legs. With my strong arms, I found the position quite easy to maintain and, as I did so, my cock encountered the sweet, exquisite touch of the tips of her toes. I grazed my glans back and forth across them, driven so mad with desire that I could not do anything else.

 

With her legs apart and bent she brought the soft soles of her feet almost together and looked at me invitingly. I eased myself in between her milky feet and pushed while she squeezed me lovingly, as lovingly as she had with her pussy. As I thrust to and fro, I slowly pushed her back and inched out of the water until I was fucking her feet on the deck. I bent down to her open pudenda, stuck out my tongue and licked her from her ass crack, across her taint, and up to her clitty. She leaned on her elbows and threw her head back while some of her hair clung to her left breast to punctuate my name. My hips pounded up and down while I sucked at her hole which was now lubricating like crazy and I could already feel her orgasm building. Suddenly she screamed, collapsed onto her back and a jet blasted into my mouth of which I drank as much as I could until I felt like I was drowning in her. Writhing, she continued to send her love liquid into the air in brief but high jets and each fountain sparkled in the lights from the pool and the cabin. This set me off and I spunked into her feet, groaning and smothering her soles with my viscous semen, drawing the length of my cock across her insteps and then pressing the tip into her heels, prolonging my ecstasy. The milky droplets on her skin mingled with my jizz, smothering her feet under warm, wet whiteness. I lapped at her pussy lips until she had finished cumming while a welcome breeze blew across the deck and cooled our hot bodies.

 

I lay back on my elbows and smiled down at her, watching as her slender chest heaved and her nipples rose and fell. I couldn’t resist tonguing them a little, biting on the barbells and pulling them up, stretching the erectile tissue and making them even harder and swollen. We laughed a little and, discovering that I did not feel even slightly fatigued, I leaned over to take her again. She gently placed her hand to my chest and shook her head, indicating that she needed a little more time to recover. As I stood she splashed her feet in the milk to rinse them, then she clapped and laughed as I jumped and whooped, did handstands and turned cartwheels, loving the feeling of my virile, masculine body. Thought her juice soon dried on my skin, the smell of honey lingered.

 

I then went to stand at the rails right at the back that overlooked the water. It was night now and the turbid wake was illuminated only by the full moon rising above the city lights. The moon, bloody from the heat and city’s fumes, tinted the foaming water the same color and the ship’s passage down the river seemed to tear at its skin, opening a terrible wound. I leaned into the five rails, placed my foot on the first one, raised myself and stretched my arms out beside me while pointing my cock at the moon. Thus placed at the very end of the ship, in the middle of its stern, I laughed and felt more free than ever before.

 

“Careful, love,” I heard Alexi say from just behind me. The engines were soft, lost in the gentle hiss of the waves and wind, and her voice rose clear above them. “Don’t forget this is real. We’re not playing games in Cyberspace anymore.” I reached back and, though clearly nervous, she accepted my hand. Looking into her eyes to reassure her, I saw trust and a little fear.

 

“Close your eyes,” I whispered to her.

 

As she stepped up I held her firmly, slipped my arms around her and guided her until she was tight against me, her feet on either side of me and her knees pressed against the top rail, her body, like mine, unsupported from the knees up. I took her arms and lifted them until we both assumed the shape of a cross, then I slipped my arms around her waist and pressed the tip of my cock to her pussy. I thrust upwards hard, she yelped and her hands were instantly at mine, her body rigid.

 

“It’s OK, baby,” I breathed into her ear. “I’ve got you.”

 

She gripped my hands tightly and I imagined I could hear her heart hammering in her chest. Her pussy clutched my cock even tighter and for a while I was hardly able to move within her. Hot little trickles of her lubricant flowed down to the base of my cock and over my balls. As I reached up to cup her tits her hands went with mine to press my palms hard into her nipples. Then her head fell back on my shoulder as she began to relax against me and let out a moan. I pushed up into her gently, taking care to keep both of us steady and, as my thrusts intensified, she stretched her arms out again, lifted one foot onto the second rail and began to laugh.

 

Around us the darkness flew, blowing around us, swirling through our bodies and speeding into the distance across the water. We were one with the air, the water and the stars and we cried with joy as the ship drew us on through the night. We were birds wheeling high above the world through clouds of love and when our orgasms hit we were transfigured into crosses of fire. I throbbed inside her over and over while her body shook against me. Her legs were trembling violently so I wrapped my arms around her really tightly, pushed myself up deeply for one last squirt and shot inside her, making her quake from her feet to her hands. Her right leg buckled. In one second she had slipped away from me, out of my arms and I was left alone at the top of a cliff, looking out into a blackness streaked with red.

 

“Lexi!”

 

White arms reaching from the foaming waters appeared far into the distance and quickly faded into invisibility. I cast about for something, anything to throw or help in any way, but could see nothing. Maybe my panic blinded me but I could think only of being with my love. I jumped from the top rail, as far as I could, landed in churning water and began to swim hard, screaming her name with all my breath every time my face rose. At first the water had not seemed cold yet quickly an iciness crept into me and in the night, in the wild wake of the ship, I felt more and more alone.

 

I stopped, looked around and called out for her again and again, yelling her name into a darkness populated by nothing but the distant red lights of the moon, the city and the flood barrier we had been approaching. With the yacht having passed into the distant horizon, the water was now calmer. The lonely and melancholic horns of the distant port reached me from across the vast, gently undulating darkness. A glimpse of pale red on the waves drew me to it until it spread its wings and flapped squawking into the stars. I swam on in desperation, screaming not just for Alexi but for anyone until I lost the will to continue and stopped.

 

A morbid sadness overwhelmed me and, looking up at the zenith, I could just make out the stars between the dim orange underbellies of fluffy, speeding clouds. I sobbed for my Alexi and for myself, my bitter devastation sweetened only by the thought that, in her last few moments, I had finally been able to make her genuinely happy. At least, I hoped I had.

 

Maybe it was a fear of oblivion, or a feeling of guilt that I had not tried hard enough but, despite my sorrow, I swam on in circles around the spot where I could only guess she had fallen. I dived down many times but could see nothing in the perfect blackness. Numerous pieces of detritus floated around me, bumping against me, retarding my progress, and I swam over and through slurries of disgusting filth. The water was making me choke and I wondered how high the acid content was in this water. Another gull, or perhaps the same one, tricked me again the same way and its squawks were like mocking laughter. Then I saw a larger, pale red shape and stared at it for a long time, just waiting for it to fly off cackling, but this was just beneath the surface, completely still, and in the middle was a waving clump of what looked like pink seaweed. I struck out again and reached it quickly.

 

It was her, and her body was cold.

 

She was floating vertically with her arms stretched out beside her. I raised her face from the water. She wasn’t breathing. There were strands wrapped around her waist, which I first thought might be kelp, but were strips of some half-melted plastic. I pulled it away from her and held her to me, strangely glad that I had least found her body, that now, in this black void, we could face death together. I looked at her sweet, vulnerable face, and tried to think of how it had lit up with joy and not of how lifeless it now looked.

 

The wind and water had grown calm and I was treading water so lazily that I must have passed into a trance so that I didn’t notice the approach of lights and the hissing of cloven waves from behind. I looked around and saw the arrow head of a yacht’s keel bearing down on us, our yacht, brilliantly illuminated like a Christmas tree, with two of the synths leaning over the side towards us. Despite its almost miraculous reappearance I almost resented the sight of this ship. I had no wish to be rescued, having lost the reason for my existence.

 

We were hauled on board by the two synths, one of them stocky and the other tall. They took her body first, the tall one almost descending into the water in order to take her arms around its shoulders, then I climbed the steps, feeling heavier than I had ever felt in my life. I had no idea how they had found us and I didn’t ask. Perhaps my electronic nervous system had made us easy to find. They both gently laid her out on the deck while I collapsed at her feet, struggling to control the wild sorrow that was starting to engulf me. My lover, my creator, my second mother, my saviour. She was all these to me and now she was gone.

 

Long ago I had seen her hands, smaller then, waving above the water. Then I had reached out and taken them, pulling the little girl to safety. I had cursed myself a million times since for not being in the water with her when she was so unused to swimming in the sea. Why had I learned nothing, from my old life through to this?

 

The stocky one examined her, then took her to a deck chair and laid her out, though I was hardly aware of this and went to gaze over the side, down at the waters as they were cruelly scythed apart. I wondered why I had not dashed myself against the prow when the yacht had reappeared.

 

I was jolted from my brooding by the horn of another ship. We were passing between two of the vast towers of the flood barrier, metal giants towering around us with their red lights like shirt buttons and a white light at the top like a cyplopean eye. The horn’s basso profundo sang out and bounced back to us from these colossal forms.

 

“How can any of this real?” I wondered, gazing at the two rows of red dots marching into the clouds like a ladder to the stars.

 

“Whether it’s outside your head or inside, it’s all real.”

 

The voice from behind was high and familiar, the voice of a boy. I turned and saw the body of my beloved, like a snow-capped mountain range under the white sheet the synths had laid over her. But beside her, dressed exactly the same as my Alexi had been just an hour before, stood Beau. He smiled at me, took the few paces over to me and slapped me in the face.

 

“That’s for letting me die,” he said, then raised his arms and stood on tiptoe. “Kiss me,” he said.

 

“Beau!” I cried, and embraced him tightly. When I pulled back a little I saw Alexi shining from deep with his eyes. “Oh, Alexi, I’m so sorry.” I fell on my knees, not from physical weakness, but from the extreme waves of grief and joy rolling within me. I took the boy’s hand and kissed it again and again while he bent over and held me.

 

“You were right, Irma,” he whispered and squeezed me tightly. “We’ll always be together. I’m inside you now. I live in your waking dreams!”

 

I looked up into his soft, sweet face and saw Alexi’s love raining down on me. Then the boy stepped to the side, rumbling came from beneath the deck and a red square appeared in the wooden boards a few feet behind him. From this square up sprang the incongruous form of a telephone booth, its red paint coruscating in the glow from the moon and the light from the cabin. Someone within it was waving at me. Beau took my hand, raised me on my weak legs, and led me away from the railings towards the booth, through the door of which appeared the radiant form of Mary. Her long, brown hair was gathered up by a white, peaked cap from behind which came an unearthly glow, casting around her head a halo in which tiny angels, or perhaps fairies, hovered on gossamer wings. A stripey blazer, a man’s shirt, a black dickey bow and a pair of immaculately pressed pants, though failing to conceal her luscious curves, gave her a ravishing androgyny and merely enhanced her charms.

 

“Salve, parum pudici!” she called.

 

I found I was now dressed in black pants and a maroon, short-sleeved shirt and when I looked back I saw my body, my naked, actual body, kneeling at the railings, my eyes gazing heavenwards and my hands raised as if in supplication. Then I gazed down at the bumps in the white sheet on the deck chair and thought how strange and peaceful both of these figures looked, like statues commemorating a chapter of our lives now closed. I felt Mary’s gentle hand take mine and allowed myself to be led into the booth where there was just enough room for the three of us. In the cramped space, lips rested against necks and hands rested casually against crotches and breasts.

 

Poking his tongue out little between his teeth Beau lifted the phone, dialled, waited for a tone, then replaced it on the hook. Water erupted from all sides of the yacht, crashed onto the deck, swirled around our little capsule and in a second we were floating in an abyss, the yacht falling away beneath us, and with the willowy forms of mermaids swimming around us, tempting us with their breasts. We spun around in the vast space and above, the lights of the flood barrier stretched away into infinity. The phone booth’s acceleration pressed us to its floor. We shot upwards through ocean after ocean until a faint, white light sparkled high above and we heard the sonorous clangs of church bells.

 

I embraced my companion, my soul mate through all eternity, in both her disparate forms, assured that, in this world of wild fantasy, Alexi’s love for me and my love for her was wholly and entirely real.

 

Copyright © Irma Cerrutti 2015