It was something definitely worth waiting for

“She said to open it last. Are you ready?”

A square white box tied with a flurry of pink ribbons sat on the bed between them.

Nora put her thumb and index finger on a strand of ribbon and raised a questioning eyebrow. 

“Nick?”

“She really told you at the reception we had to be totally naked for this?”

“It’s my Aunt Selene. What did you expect? So, yes, lose the socks or whatever this is won’t work.”

Nick laughed and peeled off his favorite socks that warmed or cooled his feet as needed,  pitching them toward the great picture window showing a blue expanse of the Pacific as their flying hotel sailed toward an overnight stop in Tahiti.

“Even for a techno-billionaire she’s weird. I don’t know about this. Selene actually is a mad scientist. What if she’s experimenting on us?”

“Be nice. She also gave us this round-the-world trip on The Dreaming City.”

“Well, you’re her only niece. What worries me is she likes to do really crazy stuff. Like getting arrested for organizing that flash orgy on the moon.”

Nora laughed and waved her hand. “Charges were dropped. It wasn’t illegal then.”

“Did you know,” said Nick, “she came up to me at the reception and said if something happens to you she could use your DNA to make a clone so I wouldn’t miss you.”

“Yeah, well, she said the same thing to me. She just wants us to be happy.” Nora took his hands. “She told me every couple needs to have this experience. More than once even.”

Nick returned a soft squeeze, but looking down at the ball shook his head. “I don’t know what this is, but what if it changes things? Between us.”

Nora took one of his hands and kissed it. “Nick, believe me. She promised it only makes a relationship better. I wouldn’t try this otherwise. It’s supposed to be a nice surprise for us.” 

Nick slowly nodded, then leaned over the ball to give his wife a kiss. “You’re right, I’m for whatever you think is good for us. And I have to admit anything that gets your clothes off is fine with me. Let’s do this.”

After he settled back into his cross-legged position, Nora pulled a ribbon and the box unwrapped itself, the paper opening like a white flower, the edges lying down to reveal a glossy black orb about the size of a bowling ball. 

“Selene said it will start once it reads my thumbprint.” Nora looked at her new husband and raised her eyebrow. “Here we go,” she said, pressing her right thumb against the cool surface of the black ball.

Instantly her aunt’s face appeared, tanned and smiling. “Hello and congratulations! Now this will be fun, trust me. After I vanish, place both hands firmly on the ball, close your eyes, and don’t break contact until the humming stops. That’s very important. The effects will wear off in precisely thirty minutes, so make the most of it. Enjoy!”

After the ball went a solemn black again, Nora poised both her hands over the sphere and Nick did the same. “I love you. Let’s begin on three,” said Nora, and began the countdown.

With their hands on the ball, Nora heard a low humming and felt a warm tingling in her fingers that slowly spread up her arms to her shoulders. The mild tickling rose to her head like a swarm of bees, then gently swept down her body until even her toes were softly buzzing. The humming grew louder and the tingling became almost an itching, but Nora kept her hands on the dark globe. Only when the ball became silent and the prickly sensations faded away completely did she open her eyes.

“Wow,” said Nora, her voice deeper than usual, staring across at herself.

Nick looked at his hands, slim and manicured, taking them to a beardless face. “What the hell?’ came out as a light and feathery whisper.

Nora dropped her head to see a suddenly flat chest, feeling an odd new weight between her legs. Flexing, she exclaimed,  “I have muscles now!”

“I never realized how soft you are,” said Nick, Nora watching as his hands found and flowed over a new world of curves.

Nora stretched, admiring her arms. “You guys are like some kind of machine. Really. So strong.”

“You’re like a piece of art. So beautifully put together.” Her husband lay back and raised a long leg, wiggling the painted toes.

“Thank you,” said Nora, noting with some satisfaction that the stylist-bot at the Sky Salon on the top floor of their flying luxury hotel actually did a pretty good job with her hair. 

“We don’t have much time, honey,” said Nora, getting off the bed and carefully placing the ball and its wrappings on a nearby table. Remembering her aunt’s advice, she sat next to her body and put a hand on a smooth and shapely leg.

“Now, let me show you what I really like.”

Image Sources: Depositphotos

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The post “The Wedding Gift”—an Erotic Speculative Fiction Story appeared first on Future of Sex.

Everyone needs somebody—if we’re lucky enough to find them

“This Unit is unaware of its present location,” the tiny-in-volume, tinny-in-tone voice asked. 

Squeezing red-rimmed eyes shut, Jinn swore, their complaint greater in magnitude, gravelly in timbre, “—supposed to erase ’em first—”

“Where is this unit?” the Voluptas Arousator said as its smartpoly body—able to instantly adapt to fulfill every sensosexual desire as the ads used to say—started cautiously, hesitatingly pulling itself out of Jinn’s To Be Processed bin.

Putting aside the monomolecular probe they’d been using and accompanied by an overly dramatic sigh, Jinn, the tyckner, lethargically swung from workstation to bin on their battered but forever-welcoming chair.

Jinn intended to start by untangling the Arousator from the other worn, broken, busted, or merely dumped pleasuretech devices before rotating back to waste the rest of the afternoon, erasing, reformatting, and reinitializing it.

“This unit seeks location of designated owner, Eos.” The Voluptas Arousator’s voice remained as tiny as it was tinny, but as they turned, Jinn heard it say, “Please … please, someone inform this unit where Eos is?”

✻

“—eighteen separate instances, Eos used the designation ‘perfect lover’ in reference to this unit,” the Voluptas chirped faintly as Jinn’s BarginBrandsEatsForOne (Contents: reduced fat, low sodium, high fiber, krill patty; 3 oz liquid alginate supplement; artificially lemon flavored neotame wafer) automatically rehydrated, reconstituted, and reheated itself.

Over Jinn’s PanEurasian Stratoforce-surplus crash-bed’s self-inflating groans and stridently sibilant hisses, Jinn heard it feebly say, “—on March 28 at 14:32 hours, Eos caressed this unit and stated, ‘no one’s as good as you.'”

Gazing up at his shop’s grime-encrusted carbon-lace beams and trusses, absently fascinated by an exceptionally long, metronomically swinging, greasy stalactite, Jinn realized they’d been attentively listening as the Voluptas Arousator droned, “—shortly after the conclusion of an exceptionally sufficient sensosexual experience, Eos would frequently cradle this unit in their arms and express positive emotional responses and repeatedly request this unit ‘stay with me forever.'”

✻

Because back at their shop the Voluptas Arousator had sadly trilled, “This unit has no information on the presence of abandoned structures, holographic calligraphy, or bioorganic recycling technology,” Jinn took the smooth, quiet, and frighteningly fast TransMetropol Maglev from the NeoWeed-cracked, nanographitti-scrawled, and hauntingly-vacant Outerboroughs to the incessantly hustling, increasingly bustling Bostbridge Hub.  

“The accommodation Eos inhabits,” the pleasuretech had merrily chimed, “features five three-meter tall duraplastic windows facing 315 degrees Northwest. After more-than-satisfactorily sensosexually pleasing Eos, this unit periodically was left on owner’s nightstand, thus enabling the visual detection of the Boston Arcology’s middle and upper spires.”

So Jinn took a jarring, rackety, and infuriatingly slow, for-hire biodiesel jeepney to where lower-than-average income, crime rates, and life expectancy met higher-than-average property values, and security costs.

“When … not in use,” the Voluptas Arousator had dolefully intoned, “this unit would attempt to determine time of Eos’s return and the resumption of positive emotional responses, caresses … and tears by positioning itself for optimal downward scanning. In process, Unit established Eos accommodation located approximately fifteen meters above street level.”

A flock of weaponized microdrones went from angrily mummurating around them to pollinating the stately rows of genetweaked Mulberry trees after determining Jinn wasn’t a threat—let the tyckner enter NuevoSeaPort, a district that didn’t scream money but paid other people to scream for it.

Then Jinn stood nervously in an oppressively opulent lobby, asking the building’s decidedly snippy and obviously snooty artificial intelligence if a kind, caring, and loving person named Eos lived there.

✻

“This unit enthusiastically anticipates return to gratifying Eo’s fervent sensosexual longings,” the Voluptas Arousator excitedly and instantly piped when Jinn returned to their shop.

“—to be held while Eos refers to this unit as their ‘perfect lover,’ cuddled while informed ‘no one’s as good as you,’ fondled and tearfully urged to ‘stay with me forever’—”

Hanging their tattered yet comfortably inviting coat on a filthy though always-homey wall, Jinn closed their eyes and whistled a slow, steadying breath, “I … I have to tell you something.”

“Have you located this unit’s cherished owner? Please inform this unit when able to return sensosexually pleasing Eos—” 

Returning to their creaking but consistently familiar chair, Jinn took one of the Arousator’s smartpoly appendages in their roughly chafed but gentle hands.  

“Sorry …. I looked everywhere but couldn’t find your owner,” they said instead of, “Eos said they threw you out.” 

Into the Arousator’s leaden quiet, Jinn added, “But I know they miss you as much as you miss them,” rather than, “Eos doesn’t want you back.”

Dropping their voice to a whisper, they went on, “You made Eos very happy; I know they … care about you … would want you to be happy” because Jinn couldn’t say, “Eos replaced you with a newer, more advanced model.”

The cheeping, chiming, and chittering of the other damaged, not yet repaired, and a few now fully reconditioned pleasure devices made the Arousator’s silence hard to bear.  

But before Jinn could say anything to fill the silence, in a surprisingly soft voice, the Arousator said, “This unit experienced a programming error.”

As its smartpoly appendage gently curled around one of their coursely-hewn fingers, Jinn asked, “Do you need me to repair you?”

“Negative. Fault located in this unit’s perceptual subroutines, resulting in the erroneous assumption of affection and sensosexual satisfaction to incorrect individual … to inaccurate owner of this unit.”

Warmingly, arousingly, tenderly, but more than anything else, the Arousator’s began lovingly nuzzling Jinn’s palm.  

“Error not catastrophic. Does not require repair,” it said as Jinn returned tender with tender, love with love.  

In a not tiny, not tinny voice, the Voluptas Arousator continued, “This unit mistakenly sought—what already found.”

Image Source: M.Christian

The post “Looking for Eos”—an Erotic Speculative Fiction Story appeared first on Future of Sex.

Everybody needs somebody—especially one particular future, self-aware megalopolis

After deactivating its billions of sensors, shutting down its millions of Aerogel-lined ductwork, and flipping its traffic monitoring subsystems from green to red, the city of Reykjavík rebooted its quantum neuroprocessor.

A fraction of a second later, biosynthetic eyes blinked, microtubular lungs breathed, and a smart-plastic heart began furiously pulsing polyethenol blood throughout its freshly printed, human-appearing body.

✻

What was once a minuscule vein was now a frenetic avenue it didn’t know how to cross. What was formerly a gurgling length of its digestive tract had become a roaring storm drain. 

Teetering on its wobbly legs and blinking its unfamiliar eyes, Reykjavík realized there was a surprisingly big difference between overseeing, supervising, and intelligently maintaining itself for the benefit of its citizens and knowing what it was like to be one of them. But it had to—

—no, not it, not anymore. Though walking and seeing was confusing, what wasn’t confusing was that she had to find out why every day, every night, her citizens danced, touched, kissed, and arranged themselves in geometrically and anatomically complex sexual arrangements. Because Reykjavík the city and Reykjavík the woman was lonely.

✻

“So … what turns you on?” The brown-haired, muscle-packed, slying-smiling, apparently-male, noticably-inebriated neurolinguistic programmer asked.

“My original processor network was activated in 2042, and I became aware of my own existence twenty-one years later,” Reykjavík said over the Hamingju Klub’s pulse-pounding hologrammatic sound system. 

“If you are referring to my current physical form,” she added, running a spread-fingered hand diagonally across her chest, “It was decanted from the nano-assembler tank I’d covertly assembled approximately one and three-quarters hours ago.”

✻

“What are you into?” the flame-haired, lithely-framed, cautiously-inquiring, female-presenting, anxiety-ridden robotics engineer inquired.

“Until recently, my consciousness extended throughout the greater metropolitan area’s infrastructure,” Reykjavík answered, doing her best to avoid stepping in any of the Löngun Klub’s pheromone-scented pools.

“But if you mean this body,” she continued while arching her back and tilting her head, “I have yet to fully master many of its basic functions. Of which, I’ve found the expelling of waste to be particularly confusing…”

✻

“Y-you come h-here often?” The bare-headed, generously-padded, nervously-grinning, non-binary, abundantly-affectionate shuttle pilot requested.

“When I was larger than I am now, I was quite familiar with this establishment’s power and water consumption,” Reykjavík responded while spinning on one of Club Drukkinn’s intentionally off-balance barstools.

“Though if you’re asking if this, my newer and smaller self, had entered previously, then that would be no.”

✻

Dawn approached, arrived, then dutifully passed the sun, which faithfully rose higher and higher into the crisp, clear, cloudless sky.

Elbows on a cafe table, head in her hands, Reykjavík was only dimly aware of the sun’s rise and rapid descent towards dusk.

Reykjavík didn’t know what it was called, but breathing heavily, deeply, and slowly in through her nose, followed by exhaling out the same way, felt so right, so appropriate; she did it again. The wettness on her cheeks, the blurring of her vision only enhanced how she felt.

She could hear them, feel them, and should she choose to lift her head, she’d see them dancing, touching, kissing, and—

“Why do you cry?” A sonorous yet soothingly countermelody voice asked. 

Raising her head, wiping away her tears, Reykjavík gazed into a pair of innocent yet passionately warm eyes.

“I cannot find someone… anyone,” saying it aloud made her cry again. “I am alone.”

Handsome yet beautific, sharp-cheeked yet smooth-skinned, haloed by dark yet playfully bouncy hair, the face momentarily eclipsed the descending sun.

With a hand outstretched came the words Reykjavík needed to hear, “let me help.”

✻

In a room as brilliant, beautiful, and, in its own unique way, as playfully buoyant as her companion’s locks, they grapevined, jazz squared, and rock stepped to music only they could hear.

Bursting with excitement, giddy with joy, they stroked, kissed, and touched each other. Everything was new; nothing was awkward. Fingers brushed, hands fondled, and feet and legs entwined. They sensually explored one another, marking each new sexual discovery with a moan, a sigh, or a roar of release. 

There were tears, but not from sadness. There were cries, but not from sorrow. There was laughter with, but never at. 

Reykjavík’s streets and avenues raced, her ducts and pipes swelled, her fiber optic network sparked, and her sensors strobed. No longer was she a 2,000-kilometer square mind squeezed into a 1200-gram brain, an emergent neural network, a digital collective consciousness, or a human-artificial construct. Reykjavík expanded.

Bigger than a city, more than human, she was a tenderly sweet, passionately hot, thrillingly bright wave that surged through her population. 

As two lips savored, two mouths tasted, and two breaths merged into a single shared moan, she simultanenously danced, touched, and kissed all her citizens. 

Reykjavík the city and Reykjavík the woman knew what it was to be loved. 

✻

The sun had set long ago and the stars were sharp and clear overhead. With hands tightly entwined, and knowledgeable grins exchanged between them, Reykjavík and her companion went in search of something to eat.

A thought came to her not-metropolitan, not-human, not-biological, not-artificial mind that made her giggle.

“I must apologize,” she said with a hand squeeze and a cheek kiss, “I do not know what to call you.”

With another squeeze, kiss, and more laughter came the answer, “you may call me Budapest.”

✻

Images: Unsplash, M.Christian

The post “Bright Lights, Loving City”—An Erotic Speculative Fiction Story appeared first on Future of Sex.

Today and in the future, sometimes it takes another person to help us love ourselves.

“Too much to see—” Seir thought, stepping from the cramped confines of the puddlejumper’s airlock and onto Akkadian station’s vast demarcation terminal.  

“—too much to do?” the words semitranspently danced in front of Seir’s nose. Less telepathy, more a low level though highly perceptive algorithm’s talent for reading the neuromuscular language of every fresh-off-the-boat tourist.  

Followed by a brighter flash of holographic typography, likely generated by another skilled program. One with a flair for extremely persuasive advertising.

“Then get Schismed—because two is always better than one!”  

✻

Before laying down on the hover bed and prior to having several trillion monomolecular filaments slid into Seir’s cranium, a surprisingly human Schism staffer had launched into an over-enthusiastic explanation of what the process was and how it worked.

Eager to get on with it, all Seir heard was, “Quantum this, quantum that, consciousness this, consciousness that, RapReplika this, RapReplika that.”  

But enough came through for Seir to understand after those strands permeated skull and brain, a high level quantum intelligence would use them to read, record, and replicate Seir’s consciousness in a biologically identical RapReplika body.  

Then, when the pair wanted to become a single, solitary Seir again, the two minds would be merged, leaving the original with both memories.

No sound, no light, no sensation, no nothing: one moment, the zero gravity lift field was a gently oscillating wave under Seir’s back; the next, the same over-enthusiastic staffer was drawing back a nearby plastic curtain.

Which was when Seirs reflected on Seirs and, sharing a mutual exchange of awkward, disapproving glances, each simultaneously turned away from the other.

✻

Seirsright, named for heading in that direction, and Seirsleft, for going this way, departed with a matching set of disconcerting, hesitant waves. Each agreeing to return to the clinic—and be reunited—in 18 hours.

Seirsright immediately visited Nixie Street. Relishing in the teasing, tickling, caressing, and stimulating delights of its hyperoxygenated, polywater fluidic environment.  

Splashing and cavorting in its protean embrace, not to mention from the sweetly slick caresses of the equally immersed swimmers, Seirsright’s orgasms were brightly shimmering bubbles playfully popping on the street’s distant surface. 

Seirsleft jumped at the chance to soar through Nuvola Avenue’s synthetic sky. Unfettered from gravity, expectations, doubt, and hesitation, Seirsleft happily let the rented gossamer wings do the flying.

Bodaciously plumed serpents, lusciously winged harpies, leather-clad angels, fur enshrouded cockatrices—or is it cockatrici?—cavorted in and out of the Avenue’s musk-scented clouds.  

Without an up, nary a down, and nothing remotely like a sideways, Seirsleft joined endless carnal murmurations. Laughing fully throated and joyfully loud as the flock’s feathers flew everywhere.

Seirsright initially perceived Le Veles as formal, elegant, stately. Tables next to chairs, candles in candlesticks, soup spoons in close proximity to fish knives, teacups in appropriate saucers, une entrée before le plat principal.

Initially, as in Seirsright’s perception changed. Changed, as a finely tuned set of sensorial projectors turned silver into a playful slap, porcelain into an engorged body part, cloth into a spontaneous orgasm, and the air its patrons breathed into a lover’s caress.  
After dining on breasts, thighs, loins, bellies, and tongues. Seirsright, tasted lustful le vol-au-vents, and sipped voluptuous vintages—and, accompanying the last seductive morsel Seirsright boldly, brightly proclaimed, “Compliments au chef!”

✻

Blissful hours, rapturous boulevards, merry shindigs, exhilarating kilometers, cheerful boads, gleeful jamborees, jubilant routes, euphoric festivities, and everything between and beyond, Seirsright caught sight of a new and wholly unfamiliar holographic display.

As Seirsleft saw a different sign advertising exactly the same service.

Fueled by recent experiences and a long-standing urge to be someone, anyone else, a transformative hour later, Seirsright left AlterSelf an entirely new person. 

At the same time, for the same reasons, Seirsleft emerged from RestyleU looking completely different.

✻

Bodies watercolored with sensual radiances, their eyes only briefly skated across each other’s. But then, seeing they were both being deeply, truly seen, their gazes firmly locked together.

As they did, Harlequinade Park’s resident neural network tweaked its sybaritic light show to highlight their shared arousal.

Which was firmly, inescapably magnetic, invisible lines of reciprocally attractive forces pulling them across the dance floor.

Illuminated by the intelligent system, ablaze with desire, they moved ever closer until there wasn’t any distance between their hands, their bodies, and then their lips.

Echoing laughter, they gamboled away from the dazzling crowd and towards the shadowed privacy of the park’s topiary garden.  

Nestled between the leafy paws of a massively and splendidly flowering tiger, their kisses ardently wandered. From cheeks to necks, necks to shoulders, shoulders to chests, chests to bellies, on and on, up and down, back and forth until neither could tell where one began, and the other ended.

Their bodies were as comfortably familiar as a threadbare, yet eternally cherished, spacesuit’s inner lining and as thrilling as an undiscovered asteroid.

Their minds spun, cartwheeled, and skyrocketed. Each was part of an ouroboros loop of emotional, physical—and the intersection of those and more—pleasures.

They never felt so liberated, so connected, so happy. But with the too-fast, too-soon rise of Akkadian’s artificial dawn, they knew it had to end.

After another cascade of kisses, touches, caresses, and especially sweet tears, one went to the right, the other to the left.  

As they did, they looked back; each bidding farewell with an exchange of brightly beaming, deeply grateful smiles.

✻

With a ship-jarring knock, Sier decoupled the puddlejumper from the station.  

Home was free fall loosened muscles, a perpetually recycled atmosphere, the gentle tang of long chain molecules, and the far-from subtle perfume of hydrofluorocarbon industrial lubricants.

Suspended outside the main viewport, Akkadian sedately rotated in the big, black emptiness of planetary space.

Palm flat on the hyper-dense plastic, with the station’s glimmering superstructure peeking out between five fingers, Sier promised to return.

Hand removed, but before setting course for Telesto and the mining stake Sier had been working, another thought came.  

One accompanied by the now unobstructed view of Sier’s reflection superimposed over the station and the stars beyond. 

A contentedly glowing and serenely twinkling face, because we all deserve to love ourselves.

Editor’s note: “We/They/Us” is the first of a new Sex Science Fiction section on Future of Sex. If you’re interested in writing an erotic short story for us, please submit your idea for review.

Image source: M. Christian

The post “We/They/Us”—An Erotic Speculative Fiction Story appeared first on Future of Sex.