Shall Machines Divide the Earth Benjanun Sriduangkaew (books for students to read TXT) 📖

encircles the device, taking hold, running up and down: exploring its contours, its dimensions. She breathes onto its tip. Her tongue darts out, but does not touch. “How virile you are, Detective.”

My nipples are hard, painful points. Hers too—what she wears does not cover much, though for the moment it gives modesty to her lower half. Her skull feels delicate in my palm, avian, made for a creature of aerodynamics and endless expanses. “Enough talking, Daji. Show me what you’re made for.”

She places her hands on my thighs and takes the length between her lips, nearly all of it at once. An impossible feat for most human partners, the piece being considerable in dimensions—her mouth is endlessly capacious. She works the prosthesis as though it is her favorite instrument, her attention a thing of arias and complex maneuvers. My breathing serrates as her teeth put pressure on the most sensitive points. My vision brightens. I dig my fingers into her scalp and can tell from her quickened pace that this is exactly what she likes, how she wants to be handled, the fulcrum of her desire. Machine, yes. Not without her preferences, all the same.

It doesn’t take long before I convulse and fill her mouth with a substance the color and consistency of thick wine. Daji swallows it all, lapping it up as though it’s the most precious liquor this side of the galaxy.

“The profile of good sangria,” she says. “Your taste is good and you taste excellent.”

I exhale. “We’re far from done.”

“Yes, I can tell, this is still hard—”

While I may be no judge of AIs, I am a good judge of women. So I am confident when I yank her up by the hair, close one hand around her throat, and growl, “You do like it rough, don’t you.”

Her eyelashes beat rapidly. Part black, part gold. Subtly dichroic. “This you call rough, Detective?”

I use her neck as a handhold to drag her to her feet and fling her onto the bed: enough force to knock the wind out of her, if she was a non-augmented human. She lies very still, her hands flat against the cerise sheets that bunch and crease around her like stricken lilies.

“I can accommodate any desire,” Daji purrs, her eyes brilliant. “In the most literal sense. My anatomy—it can be anything you want.”

“Give me a cunt,” I say, pulling off the pelt that covers her waist and hip.

What appears at first blank—mannequin neutrality—shifts and reflows, rearranging itself into that familiar part, one of my favorite sights on a partner. I should be unsettled; instead this thrills me, the strangeness of it, the display of machine finesse. She’s given herself the gorgeous folds of labia, the unmistakable clitoral nub as hard as a pearl. Comprehensive in detail, a locus where basal urges intersect. I can smell her heat, her salt.

My left hand on the back of her neck. My right on her wrist, wrenching it so far back that on a human her elbow might have snapped or dislocated. But she’s strong, a body of numinous might, impossible for me to damage. Daji is a canvas that will never tear no matter the force of the pen, the searing of the ink.

I lower myself and push into her with the most minimal of resistance. She is slick, a furnace, far hotter than her mouth. Her inside caresses my prosthesis, nearly as dexterous as her fingers. The world tunnels down to sensation, to the motions of her juddering like a rag doll beneath me, to the bed shaking under us like tectonic prayer. Several times I fill her, flip her over, fill her again.

When I withdraw from her I am panting, my limbic architecture sundered by the song of her, my mind reconstituting piece by piece. She levers herself up, meeting my eyes, flushed. Her lower lip is swollen and bleeding—she must have bitten it.

“If we had unlimited time,” I whisper, “I’d be fucking your mouth again.”

There is no airiness in her laugh: it is deep, smoky, onyx and oodh. “We do have a lot of time. Not unlimited though; who has eternity? Not even the Mandate itself. You were wonderfully rough. A human would be incredibly sore right about now, but I’m not one of those, so we are a most perfect match.” Her hand slides up my thigh, to the silk shirt which has come loose and gaping. “The whole of you makes an interesting artistic perspective from down here. Every square millimeter of you is so pleasing.”

I drop to the bed; we lie facing each other. My own cunt is engorged, sensitive. “Do you often do this?” I fit my hand into her lumbar curve, half-expecting to find it gone to metal and silicon. But it stays flesh-like, deceptively organic. A few roses susurrate under my fingers.

“Do what? Have a good time?” Daji rubs the base of the prosthesis. My nervous system rings staccato with each touch. “Tell me, Detective. Does the fact I’m a proxy add to the appeal? Do you find the synthetic fascinating, the alloyed skin more alluring than skin that is not?”

“You’re well aware that your chosen looks are breathtaking. A woman hardly needs to have such . . . specific predilections to want to push you up against the wall and make you scream.” I pinch one bare breast. She arches into me, as reactive as a taut wire. “But perhaps.”

Her lips purse on the thumb of my free hand. She talks around it as she might around a cigarette. “I can tell a fetish when I see it—the alacrity of your orgasms. The vigor. Not that I mind; some humans are ashamed of wanting a proxy and it’s a waste of everyone’s time.”

“So you’ve tried other humans before.”

“Possessive,” she says, pleased. “It’s just that I don’t enjoy intercourse between my own kind, whereas what we just did together? That’s exactly what I crave. Exquisite. Addictive. And you’re so honest about your wants.”

I run my nail over her jaw; I suspect