The Next Generation
"Glwbrgh"
The woman blinked confusedly. The Sun setting in the distance clearly bothered her. The transparent, gelatinous mass slowly slithering off her nude body apparently did not. It looked almost like aspic, a jiggly substance translucent almost to the point of transparency. Myriad of tiny shards of glass, each almost exactly identical to all the others, cubes half a centimeter along smiled happily in the sun. Their straight angles, intended to minimize the chances of anyone accidentally cutting themselves, also ensured that whichever way they ended up, at least one side will catch the Sun.
Think about this for a second - a civilisation so far advanced, so far decayed, they'd make even the suspension vats out of securized glass. These things were supposed to never break, indeed such a break appears to them as a catastrophic failure on the level of airplanes losing their wings mid flight or boats cracking open mid ocean, yet nevertheless the glass was treated to crack up as safely as possible.
The man had no interest in such considerations. He was sitting on an upturned sentry bot, watching the woman with a sly smile on his face.
"What the fuck!" she coughed a couple of times, tried for a failed sneeze, looked around and finally at him, completely beffudled.
"What the..." but she had no more in her, the vomit started. By now, almost all of the vat dwellers, dreaming their superb if utterly pointless dreams had been there for long enough that separation from their environment took a while.
As she writhed horribly on the floor, by all appearances puking her guts out in thin strands of gelatinous matter, the man sat quietly on the upturned sentry bot, his sly smile slowly ebbing with the convulsions.
"What is this ?" she finally managed, propped on the extended right arm, left bent under herself, looking up at the smiling man.
"I am going to fuck you now" he announced at length. "Come here."
She started at him blankly. He brought his right hand into view. It was holding a strange rolled up contraption.
"Do you know what this is ?"
"No!" she spit, half scary, half angry, entirely confused.
"It's a whip". He unfurled it, a nice leather whip made of many interwoven strands, maybe three or four meters in length. "I've made it myself, out of the tanned hide of dreamers just like yourself. Would you like to try it ?"
"No!"
"Then come here."
She started at him blankly, so he cracked the whip next to her, and when that failed to register he did it again, landing the biting end expertly on her left buttock. She seized up as if electrocuted, but as he continued to caress her flesh rhythmically she tried to get up, failed, then proceeded in a strange, unpracticed crawl toward him, stopping once the whipping stopped.
He took two magnetic cuffs out of his pocket, and afixed her wrists securely on either side of the expired sentry bot. The damned things weighed close to a quarter ton, she wasn't going anywhere. He went behind her, lifted her ass in the air and unceremoniously inserted himself. She groaned, but the jellow she lived in served, among the numerous, carefully engineered biosupport functions, a rather unplanned one : it made for excellent lubricant.
He had his fun with her for a while, and then eventually
"I'll be off now, do you want to tag along ? I guess you're maybe good for a few months."
"Where are you going ?"
"Does it make a difference ?"
She paused, looking purposefully at him over her shoulder. She frowned, then started pouring out questions, all sorts and manner. He stood up and shuffled disinterestedly towards the darkness.
"Yes. YES! Please don't leave me here like this. HEY! PLEASE!"
But he kept on walking, and the magnetic cuffs didn't allow the sligtest play. She started sobbing, and then the light went out.
