Author : Lokon

Richard was forty, paunchy and balding when he came home early and found Susan on the bed they shared. The thing on her and in her was a vibrating mass of warm rubberized orgasm; moving in and out of-across her, her eyes and ears were hidden behind the goggles flashing the holos of what Richard assumed to be one of her Romance novels. She neither saw him nor heard him, and Richard had a manic moment where he imagined she wouldn’t have cared either way. The discarded box it had arrived in professed it as ‘the best sex on the market’ Richard fingered the wedding band she had placed on his finger. His flesh bulged around the too tight metal. He left quietly.

Richard started taking pills. The blue pill made him hard on demand led to the brown pill to keep him going to the red pill to make him more aware of her and better. The pills brought want of the augments. They put little circuits in his head to help him remember dates and recite Shakespeare and Donne on command. At first they were to please her, and then they were just for him. The augments led to uploading, back ups, and gene therapy.

Susan aged and Richard grew to be more then he had been, muscles beginning to regrow and hair migrating from his back to the top of his head. “Darling” Susan said on her 90th birthday “Die with me. We were not meant for more then we were given. Promise me that you will be human with me in the end.” Richard was 96 and looked 28, but said “Yes” as he promised to join the dying who were not to be wooed by the seductive murmurings of technologic immortality.

Richard was getting used to his new legs and eyes when he found Susan there. Susan was locked in a box in her best Sunday clothes, earth forming all around her wooden walls with a tombstone like a sundae’s cherry on top. Next to it was Richard’s marker, now only signifying the shell he’d discarded just before Susan had closed her eyes for good. “I am sorry dearest, I didn’t want to if I didn’t have to.”