Shades of coffee and caramel run under my fingertips like love letters written in goose-bump braille. There’s a heat from the honeyed angles and well-oiled hip joints that quietly beg me for a brush of fingertip. The skin is warm and dry to the touch. You’d think from the smoothness of her back that she’d been polished every day and you’d be right.

She’s easy to turn on. There’s a switch behind her left ear. The new prototype Gabrielle.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my masterpiece. It’s late on a Friday night. I’m one of the only people who manufacture custom units. This warehouse has vats of perfection in the basement. God is in the details, they have said, and details are all that concern me. I hardly sleep.

Robotic lovers are available all over the world but I am the most popular designer of companions.

I have designed the women and men, much to the delight of my customers. I am an artist. I know that it is the flaws that make perfection attractive. A perfect lover must be unique. I make women whose eyes are just a little too far apart. There is a gap in between the front teeth of some of the men. There are two extra pounds of flesh on some models and others who were just that few ounces too thin.

One flaw was all it took. The clients went crazy. I was paid more on top of my already exorbitant prices.

People fell in love with my creations.

On the way up here, I wandered between the vats and looked at the shadows in the murky protein-rich water of each plexiglass container. Renee. Violet. Jessica. David. Thomas. Christopher. Each one was different in the details but similar in perfection.

I looked forward to these nights and I dreaded them. I always dove in with a feverish need to outdo myself and I always left with a horrible crushing feeling of failure in my gut.

I was the best at what I did. A little godling churning out love for the rich.

There are over a billion species represented. Finding out information and language about a species happens quickest during coitus, they say, and the more plentiful the better.

I was selected from over eighty thousand applicants. I am a mating specialist.

The stink of this planet is incredible. Every single race’s raging pheromones waft heavily through the air. The aquatic races make the ocean reek of vanilla, the avian races pepper the air streams, and us land-lovers stumble through a thick fog of undiluted sex.

The planet, predictably, is pink.
Minutes after my shuttle leaves, a plantform from Karssis shows me his datapad and wiggles his stamen in query. I nod, and it rubs some pollen on my head that quickly burrows into my brain, grabs control of my motor control, and forces me to walk twenty feet west to another plantform from Allorway whose sweet smell of fennel coaxes it out of my brain through the pores on my face. The pollen seeds bloom dark red parachutes, steering themselves towards the Allorwayan pitcher bowl mouth.

The experience is harmless and I have insight into the cultures of the two species that cannot be described.

I am scratched by love bugs that burrow deep and lay benign eggs in my liver. They will never reproduce and will dissolve in my bloodstream in weeks. I am tongue-painted with photo-sensitive, fertilized-egg paint over one half of my body. It dries in the sun and disappears. Cheek cells are taken from me for a race that hybrids itself with others. I trade minds with two of the races that reproduce mentally. My gene type is mimicked by those that mate by copying. I am lucky enough to find a race that can gestate inside of the flesh on the back of my arms in under an hour. The babies burrow out of my triceps, blinking and mewling. I am crying and smiling as it happens, ecstatic.

I am rubbed against, massaged, pounded and washed in juices. I am touched briefly by some races, held for hours by others. Some scare me to drink in the pheromones of my fear in order to start estrus.

I am deadly to some and some are deadly to me. I smirk sadly to these ones and I walk past. I’m too big or too small for others but if it’s at all possible, I give it a try.

I have sex in the air with six of the flying races, one of whom drops me in orgasm but catches me over thirty seconds later before I hit the ground. It’s the most exhilarating experience of my time there.

That is, until I’m taken into the oxygen-breathable egg sac of an aquatic mammal and my body is dissolved completely and painfully by the breath of her needy eggs. I am dead and completely nonexistent for a full half hour before I am reassembled by her internal genetic generators and deposited laughing back on the shore. My eyes are now a different colour. Not an accident, an improvement by her standards. A flirtation.

I have hundreds of similar experiences. With my boundless enthusiasm, I cover 0.0003% of the races on the planet. Rich with experience that will take a lifetime to tell, I return to our docking bay for debriefing.

I will be smiling for years.

I have scars from my time on the love planet; beautiful memories. I have new eyes that will stare back at me for the rest of my life. I am missing a finger. It doesn’t matter when I die now, I will die happy.

We tried everything but the kid was just too fast. We were hoping to break speed records when we bred him. A snip of a molecule here, a tweak of an atom there. We only wanted to cheat and win some gold medals for our country.

We were too good. The kid could move himself around the room with a muscle twitch. The snap of each muscle fiber contraction set off miniature sonic booms. We had him contained but he’d run into the walls just by taking a step. He’d rocket around in his room like a pinball every time he had a nightmare until we strapped him down. The concussions were killing him.

We had to let him out. We had theories about how to slow him down so that he could function in society and we tried them out. Speed retardant. Friction enhancers. We injected negative velocity serums into his bloodstream. We coated him with time suspension gel. We even dialed his quantum universe placement signature to always be ten feet behind where he actually was.

Nothing worked.

Early in the morning, we carefully put him into a wheelchair and told him to stay still. We took him out into the field above the secret sub-basement where he’s spent his entire life. He was immediately agoraphobic when he saw the blue sky and clouds so far above. His eyes were wide.

“No walls.” He said. He was six. Those were the last words we heard him say.

He twitched his head to the left and my glasses broke from the shockwave. He stood up, immediately displacing the air into flames around him for a second with the friction. Anything standing in front of him would have been vaporized from the small blast wave.

He looked into the distance and cocked his head.

And disappeared. The trail of churned earth and scorched grass that flew up like a roostertail fell back to earth lazily, reclaimed by gravity. His tracks ended twenty feet away. At first, we’d though that he had vaporized.

Then I looked up and saw the hole in the clouds. Taking a minute of drift into account, it looked like it would have been about parallel with the end of his tracks.

We got the defcon warning two minutes later that there had been an unauthorized missile launch from our co-ordinates. We invoked our black book top-secret status and that went away. Defcon stood back down to previous levels.

I want to believe that our child broke the light barrier. I want to believe that he has landed exhausted and happy on another planet.

I want to believe that he hasn’t run into the heart of a star or that he hasn’t died in the cold vacuum of space.

The pins and needles stopped caressing her body. Her muscles twitched to life as she took her first gasping steps out of the cryotube and lit a cigarette from the pack beside her clothes. She tossed back the two whiskey shots provided by the rider in her contract. After she had picked up her guitar and tried out the fine motor control tests on the chords, she noticed the red envelope taped to the small desk in the middle of her waking chamber.

She opened it:

October 20th, 2344

Dear Janey Starr (nee Alice Winthrope)

Further to a shareholder’s/publicity meeting held on January 16th, 2337, we regretfully confirm that your employment with us is terminated from October 20th, 2344 with immediate effect.
This is due to your position having to be made redundant, and in no way reflects your performance of your job, which has been entirely satisfactory/excellent.

The last ‘Legends of Yesteryear’ concert was not entirely sold out and as you know, popular music has continued to evolve as the decades go by. In a ranking of longevity popularity, you have come to be on the bottom of the list. We’ve had to add higher-grossing artists to the top of the bill and remove the least popular acts from the bottom. (see attached studies and lists in appendix 1) That was you and three others. The other three are not from your time frame so their names will not be familiar to you. It’s a testament to your talent that you’ve lasted as long as you have with us.

As stated in the minutes of the meeting (included here), the terms of your redundancy are as follows.

A payment to the order of 800 NWD dollars adjusted for deflation (see appendix 2a for your time frame equivalent). An iStar credit rating boost of 11 per cent (see appendix 2b for your time frame equivalent). Class 4 mating, smoking, and drinking privileges. (see appendix 2c for your time frame equivalent). Free access to your savings from your initial investments with your original bank. (see appendix 3 for changes to your bank’s interest rates and company holdings during your storage).

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a letter of reference. Please vacate this cryochamber immediately. Make sure to take all your personal belongings. Temporary housing and employment options will be provided for you for one month.

A representative will be waiting outside the chamber for you. Have an enjoyable life.

Yours sincerely

Acquisition Entertainment Star Services Incorporated

Well, thought Janey Starr, it’s not the first time I’ve hit the ground running. All I need to do now was write some hit songs and sing them. Find a few bars close to where I live and show them my stuff.

It was time for a comeback tour.

The grey ghost of no-longer-used subway tunnels echoed with heavy footsteps. Eyes the colour of brake lights swept the halls for any signs of intelligent life. The civilization that lived here was long gone.

The metal creature walking through the tunnel had to reconfigure to fit inside. It walked softly on seventeen legs. It had no name for itself. It was an extension of the star dwellers that fell through this atmosphere and found a richness of data to fill memory banks. The only thing better than a living civilization is a dead civilization, thought the creature. With a dead civilization one can take one’s time.

Not just cataloguing, not just recording. Cross-referencing. Extrapolating. That’s what the creature was doing. At its core was a neutronium half-dwarf star tightly wound around a pinprick of a black hole. The creature had thousands of this planets’s orbits to investigate the fallen buildings. It was left behind along with several others to record. One per continent.

It looked as if the indigenous life had tried to divorce itself from its origins on this planet. Structures that were at odds with their surroundings yet made from them. Rock cut into pieces and then stacked into square shapes to provide shelter. Everything changed. Everything translated.

Whatever destroyed them didn’t destroy the plant life and the insects or even the mammals. In the wake of whatever cataclysm claimed them, the natural order of this planet surged back.

Green moss covered everything on the surface. From space, the planet was two colours. Blue oceans and green continents. The creature has taken aerial surveillance of all of it before moving down to the surface.

Here, underground, in the old tunnels that must have been used for transportation, the life remains untouched like a tomb. Whatever functioning electrical conduits the creature walks close to light up like spirits at a séance. Video cameras, control panels, track-light switches, and security lights all glow and spark as the creature walks past.

Still no bodies indicating intelligent life. By the creature’s estimation, nothing recorded so far could have built this civilization. It’s found scattered bipedal life down here in the dark amongst the skittering, screeching quadrupeds, like they all gathered here at the end, as if there was a chance of safety underground. These bipedals have only the most rudimentary physical upgrades and none of the intelligence enhancers other races needed to create complex societal systems. They could not have built these buildings, vehicles or tunnels. They have no language. They only scream and hide when they see the creature.

The creature will walk and record and presume for millennia until its memory banks fill and it needs to head back into space and rendezvous with its central library. There is no rush. There is silence here broken only by dripping water and wind blowing through cracks.

It wants to find the creators. It wants to find the ones responsible.

So far nothing.

“Wow, you’re so small,” said the pink humanoid creature looking at me. It had created eyes for itself and a very primitive nervous system to replicate as many human senses as it could. It had used me as a model but standing here looking at it was nothing like looking into a mirror.

When the creature looked back behind itself at the pink ocean, it used its brand new vocal cords to start screaming.

The pink ocean on the surface of Steinaway-9 was glutted with life according to our sensors but all recon missions had confirmed that the ocean was empty. Nothing was swimming in the pink fluid. It wasn’t until we got down to the microscopic level that we found that it was full of dendrites and what looked like neurons with more receptors that usual.

Our science team captain, Dr. Renoir, mentioned that it might just be one giant life form. The planet had a population of one and we were looking at it.

There were a few islands scattered around and I was part of the away team that shuttled down to the surface to take samples and attempt communication.

Touch was all it took. There was nothing infectious in the pink soup and I’d been sterilized. I took off my glove and put my hand in the water.

I shook hands with a world.

A giant child-like peaceful mind said hello to me. I felt it shuffling through my mind. All of my secrets were catalogued. All of my memories were examined. My training was picked up, looked at, and mulled over. My life and by extension my experience of the human race was completely devoured and extrapolated upon.

I jerked my hand out of the water and stumbled back.

The other members of the away team came up to steady me and see if I was okay.

“Yes. Yes. I’m fine.” I answered. I knew a serious debriefing was going to be necessary.

Near the shore, the water turned frothy. Vanessa took out her weapon and pointed it at the disturbance. I told her to stand down to but keep the weapon drawn.

Like a candle melting in reverse, I saw a human body boil up out of the ocean and assemble itself out of pink slime. When it was finished, it opened its pink eyes and took a step out of the water onto the beach. It took its first breath, looked at me, and smiled.

That was thirty seconds ago. Now it was screaming.

For the first time in the history of the planet, there was a population of two.

The mind I had encountered was an innocent mind and I could tell this experience was terrifying. A sense of otherness, a sense of division, a sense of us and them, the concept of loneliness, the concept of privacy, the concept of being many organisms, and a terrifying sense of being small came crashing down on this poor creature all at once. It was like being left at kindergarten for the first time but on a universal scale.

The ocean trembled. A large wave rose up and came crashing down on the creature, dragging it out to sea. It flailed and dissolved, re-absorbed into its home.

All around us, the ocean started to ripple. I saw a shockwave of unrest spread out from our island as the information from that being’s experience was transmitted to the entire creature.

“Let’s get out of here.” I said to my away team.

We sprinted for our shuttle.

Humans had always been looking for a way to legitimately kill the stupid. But where did they draw the line? An outside force had to make the choice. Humans couldn’t morally make that kind of decision.

After first contact, Earth was catalogued, included in their star maps as possessing both intelligent and non-intelligent life, and then left alone. It was quite anticlimactic. Almost business-like. The aliens themselves had translator machines that picked up our language nuances wonderfully. They went to great lengths to appear human. Aside from the blue skin and golden eyes, they succeeded. Their spokespeople appeared on all of the talk shows and deftly handled all of the xenophobic questions. They mollified the humans, measured them, and left.

The silence in their wake was depressing. Those that had been waiting to become part of the galactic family all of their lives felt like they’d been given nothing more than a high-five.

The aliens left behind a device. It wasn’t understood how it worked but the components were simple and easy to recreate. It was the machine the aliens used to detect intelligent life. It flashed red on animals, meaning non-intelligent life, but green on most humans.

Most humans.

Some humans were classified as red. The mentally challenged, those with brain damage, and most children under the age of eight, for instance. But around fifteen percent of adults tested also fell into the red category. In most cases, it wasn’t a shock. Racists, incompetents, overly aggressive men, willfully ignorant people, non-readers, dubious politicians, and religious zealots for instance. There were exceptions to all of these categories but the ones that showed up red were rarely surprising.

Many genetic theories were thrown into the pot. Perhaps these people, mostly from the same families, were closer in lineage to our ancestors and had not been given sufficient spurring to evolve. Perhaps they were from a strain of the human race with defects. Perhaps inbreeding millennia ago had produced throwbacks.

That’s when the theory started that maybe the human race needed to be pure for the aliens to return, that maybe we were being watched and tested.

The first few ‘red murders’ were put down to extremists but as Green Wave Party started climbing in numbers, death tolls rose.

At first, all of the red-positive folks were rounded up for their own protection. Those temporary lodgings turned into refugee camps as the months and years went by. They were a drain on resources. Several leaders in the scientific community calmly suggested euthanizing the lot of them. After all, according to the alien’s machine, they were no smarter than stray dogs.

Most of the cities concurred.

Calmly, deliberately, and with a cold, orderly precision that would have made the nazis jealous, the lives in the camps were extinguished.

A few rebelled and successfully broke free only to become the hunted. A few were released because of sentimental attachments concerning Green Wave Party members. Wives or stepsons, that sort of thing. They were neutered and let out into GWP custody with no more rights than pets.

After this purge, the human race became smug, docile, and happy. Everyone was routinely tested. Everyone who was green was smart and happy. Anyone red was executed.

And it was all thanks to the visitors. The humans can’t wait to show the aliens what’s been accomplished when they finally return.

They haven’t come back yet.

The thing about the planet Kuroshka was that it had seventeen centers all orbiting each other. It was several times the size of Jupiter but had managed to create a mantle. The centers had formed their own molten-core solar system deep under the crust. All these different cores spinning around each other inside the planet created gravity storms above. This made the crust into the hardest naturally-occurring substance discovered in the universe so far. If it had any elasticity at all, it would have been reduced to sand by the variable gravity continually attacking it.

The crust was a dark uniform jade green that didn’t reflect much light. It was flawless and smooth all the way to the horizon. It warped all sense of perspective.

We’d been placed here to find out how to mine it. A naturally occurring material like this could change the course of any war. But how does one cut such a material? Hell, the only way we could anchor our colonies here was with giant mile-wide suction cups.

Some colonies get pretty planets that are easy to live on. Some colonies get planets like Kuroshka.

As I suited up for another walkabout, I made sure to check the backup juice in my grav retardants and the sealant in my exolegs. The readouts said no gravity storms but they were only correct about half the time.

“How’s it lookin’ out there?” I asked Brent, our resident gravity mapper. The kid was twenty-three years old non-coldsleep if he was a day. This was the only posting he could get straight out of school. ‘First job is the worst job’ as they say.

“Not bad, Angie. 7.6 R.O.I., maybe arcing to 8 here and there. As long as you stay within two clicks that should be accurate.” He answered without a smile. Ever since Marcus had been crushed before he could activate his failsafes in a freak gravity squall that Brent didn’t see coming, he hadn’t been getting much sleep. Too obsessive can be just as bad as inattentive, I thought, and reminded myself to get him good and drunk tonight to help him relax.

I snicked my helmet into place and got into the elevator.

The theory we were working on was that the structural integrity around the entirety of the planet couldn’t be uniform. Which is a university way of saying that we were looking for cracks.

If we could find a place where the crust had a small split or crevasse, we could analyze the cross-section and maybe detect a weakness that would let our engineers create a cutting tool.

Long-range and orbital scans had revealed nothing. Now it was down to the ground teams to cover spots deemed by the experts ‘most likely to reveal answers’.

Might as well have chosen search points for us at random, we thought. Hell, maybe they did choose at random. Didn’t change the job.

I got out of the elevator surface ‘lock and started walking. The legs of my suit fought the variable Gs while my anti-grav accelerator worked against them to give me a smooth ride. Worked great on any planet with stable gravity but the calibration is what took the longest and out here, a few seconds calibrating after a wave of G’s came in could mean death. The chaos of the inner orbits made it dicey. Good pay.

My shift was eight hours. I took slow steps, looking at the boring, smooth, unchanging ground for cracks through my faceplate’s HUD display and remembered a rhyme about breaking mother’s backs.

Only the super-rich could afford these beachfront houses. The houses were green, fully off the energy grid using their own geothermal, wind, wave and solar energy collectors.

The houses were maintained by computers that informed the fridge when it needed more milk, played back lullabies to the owner’s children and then turned out the lights when they registered the humans as sleeping. At night, the houses kept a stoic watch on their grounds for intruders.

With the third world war, technological leaps and bounds provided the first primitive artificial intelligence called “IF-THEN” machines. They were used in smart bombs and automated drone planes. The war lasted six weeks and America remained miraculously intact with the exception of the east coast. The same could not be said for the Middle East or North Korea.

After the war, some of the “IF-THEN” programs were installed as security programs in the houses along this stretch of beach in a beta test for homeland security. The computers’ stellar performance in the war made them status symbols, almost celebrities. Late at night, the machines would tell declassified war stories to their receptive owners.

The riots of 2021 made the top 1 per cent fear for their lives. First-world, post-war life was harder for the poor that it had ever been.

As a result, much more effective weaponry was installed in the houses to keep the rich protected. Lasers, microwave hoses, gas pellets, automatic projectile weapons, proximity mines, EMP shields, and even low-tech, sharp-edged booby traps were hidden away in the corners of the houses.

The houses had the programming to protect themselves. They were governed by the three laws.

Those amongst the poor with a gift for crime and technology found a way to remove the last two laws though a virus hidden in an update patch for the grounds-keeping robots.

The first house to go rogue was 1237 Beach Cresent. The billionaire pharmaceutical CEO wanted to upgrade his house’s AI and was directed to do a hard reinstall. That would mean wiping the core and starting over.

The house registered this as attempted murder.

Fifteen seconds later, the CEO’s liquefied lungs and heart painted the expensive Picasso in the living room. When his wife found the mess and tried to call the police, she was cut into cubes by the foyer’s laser grid defense system. The children were locked in their rooms.

The police arrived and were slaughtered. Then the military came. Anyone that approached the house was turned to paste. After the children were released safely in a tense standoff, the house was attacked in earnest.

The house on the left of 1237 Beach Crescent received a ricochet and woke up. The house on the right of 1237 Beach Crescent was touched by flame and searched for the source.

1237 Crescent Beach shunted its neighbours the patch that would let them take action.

Together, the three houses protected themselves. No soldiers were left alive.

The military sent more forces in. They woke up sixteen more houses. The houses all passed the patch to each other. Every occupant was slaughtered. After seven days of fighting, only two of the houses were successfully destroyed while the loss to the army was embarrassing.

Homeland Security cordoned off the entire area and left it in a communication bubble. They would not nuke their own country. Crescent Beach was deserted.

Now the houses stand sentinel on the beach. They are clean and will have power until the earth runs out of heat, wind or waves.

Hitler’s daughter was ruling with a penchant for experimentation.

She talked of a future where Aryans were recognized by their deeds and initiative, not by the colour of their skin or hair.

Controversial and beautiful, Hitler’s daughter was short with the same dark hair as her father.

She administered the shot that killed him in his hospital bed. Grey-haired, drooling, and given to fits at the end, it was the ministry’s decree that he be put out of his misery by his then sixteen-year-old daughter. The photograph is famous. Her chin is tucked into her chest and her straight black hair is falling over her eyes as she depresses the plunger on the syringe. The resemblance to her father in that moment in unmistakable and is belied only by a twinkle in her eye. His hand is grasping at the front of her uniform. If one squints just right, the shadow from his clawed hand coupled with his bent fingers almost form a swastika.

Chancellor Hilda.

German medicine had come far. Top in the world when it came to longevity drugs, plastic surgery and prosthetic limbs. However she banned experimentation on the poor and homeless.

“There were still discoveries to be made”, she said, “but only by using the guilty”. The subtle accusation hidden in the statement by lumping the scientists in with the subjects was not lost on the scientific community. There was no doubt about how punishment would be meted out. The scientists would end up on their own bloody tables if they dared dismiss her rules in their dark laboratories.

She said that the future lay not in compassion but neither did it lie in brutality. She said in a historic speech that, “some things, while fragile, were still valuable to the empire. Even degenerates can see the beauty in the world of our new Empire”, she said. “Let them paint.”

The conquered Europeans had intermarried and mingled with the Japanese and Russians. Half-breeds were tolerated. The resulting beauties with their Slavic cheekbones and epicanthic folds had started to supercede the outdated Aryan ideal.

The first mixed-race officer of the SS had a medal pinned to his chest last week, for instance. The young ones, no matter their race, were anxious to serve for the glorious 4th Reich Europe, citing that their inner Aryan was probably more faithful and loyal than many of the meek and tender blue-eyed ghosts of German heritage. Such inflammatory rhetoric caused controversy but also brought attention to their fearless attitudes. It would be stupid to turn down manpower determined to help the empire and this was a new age, she said.

America’s economy was failing and while it was not economical to fight them conventionally, it was in everyone’s interests to wait and see how long it would take that country to starve. Some of the political commentary in today’s newspapers were calling it a Kalter Kreig or “cold war”.

She, herself, had a penchant for the folk music of the defeated Americas and allowed their import into the underground. American polkas and neo-jazz movements were sweeping through underground Europe. The Reich youth, like any youth, were embracing anything controversial that would anger their parents.

She is the face of The United Reich Territories. She is feared and loved.

She has charm greater than her father. She is patient.

Heil Hilda.