Acrylics

“These,” says Billie, tapping a chewed bio-nail against the glass display case. She blows a virulent blue bubble with her chewing gum, then pops it with a quick flex of her tongue and snaps the sticky wad against the roof of her mouth. The sound echoes in the tastefully underlit salon. Behind the case a shadow moves, taking down the flat she wants, inspecting the lacquered aquamarine claws embedded in its foam surface.

“We’ll have to do lapro to change your sheathes,” says the stylist, her voice muffled by the glass. She looks like a ghost back there behind the display. “In and out in fifteen. That cool?”

“Fine,” says Billie, already yards away looking at body glitter, walking her fingers over the glass and watching the prints fade. Lapro is nothing. Lapro is brushing your teeth. 

*

She stands in front of a mirror in the little octagonal dressing room just off the studio where she’ll shoot later. Organic nanopaint flows over her poreless skin, morphing into multicolored Rorschach blots where it glitches out around her armpits and the arch of her cock, already half-hard from the chemical rush of the stim patch she let Annalise slap against the small of her back earlier. She plays with herself idly as she tells the mirror to try something a little more decadent and pink flower petals sweep down her arms and frame her tits and the computer-precise feminine angles of her face, merging with her pink hairline and washing her hair a virulent, sickly red, like she’s dyed it with the blood of those phosphate-colored cherries you see in old pictures of ice cream parlors. She tosses it, pulls it out a little longer with a quick tug on a stray pink lock, makes it curl by winding strands around her finger, then makes a face and smooths it straight again. 

“Chignon,” she says. It coils itself into a sleek knot at the back of her skull. “Ponytail. High. Tight.” It flows and reforms, her scalp putting out a pseudopod of rubbery flesh to hold it in place. She turns her head from side to side, watching the pink tail swing. Smiles.

The mirror shows her where her stylist wants her freckles. Constellations of faint dots like stars in a sea of flesh. They’re hot right now. She nods, tensing, and a web of stinging blue micro-lasers unfolds from the walls and burns them into her, then flickers off. Numbing hypo-mist sprays from concealed vents at head height, to take the edge off. She inhales a little on purpose. She likes the way it makes her tongue feel like a fat, wet slug caught in her mouth, squirming aimlessly against the hard walls of her teeth. She daydreams about sticking it out and biting it in half. For fun. The stim’s probably thinning her blood but the e-jacks in her hips should counteract that; she might not bleed out. She could get a new tongue, rough like a cat’s. She makes a mental note to look into it.

*

The shooting room is an ocean of black around the set where a gilt-legged white chaise longue waits spotless on a vintage mohair carpet, a constellation of lights and cameras hanging in the dark around it with the pale motes of techs and gofers running back and forth between them. Max is directing today. He is short, slim, cis — he despises Billie. “Your defining flaw is that you appear to be staged,” he says in his nasal, colorless voice as she saunters up to him where he stands by one of the cameras, a pale shadow of its baroque black mass. He sounds like Andy Warhol on ketamine. “Your makeup is broad, your affect is forced, and we have no time for revisions because this has to be on the cutting room floor in the Lincoln office before  eight o’clock. I need you to pull it together. I need you to emote like a flesh and blood professional. Are you absorbing this?”

Maybe you’d rather work with some desperate cis third-stringer, she thinks, watching his mouth move, thin lips and pale pink tongue massaging each word scornfully. Maybe you’d rather skim slime off the top of the gene pool trying to find measurements like these, tits this perky, skin that was already machined and treated and hormone-smoothed when I started on your precious regimen. Do you want to work with a fucking breeder sow or do you want a perfect fuck machine who’s never going to get pregnant or fat or ugly because she’s bespoke, because she picked out every part of herself and she has immaculate fucking taste?

She makes a little moue of fake disappointment when he’s done. “I’ll twy weally hard today, daddy,” she whines in her dumbest baby slut voice, and pops her thumb into her mouth. That usually makes him smirk at least, but he’s not smiling now. He stares at her as though she’s something that just scuttled out from under the sink. An aid comes clicking up in chitin implant heels, pressing printouts into his hand, hissing something, and they walk off together into the cavernous dark. Billie spits her thumb out and wipes the saliva — hers is enriched with snail slime produced by custom-fabbed oral glands — on her throat, working it in without thinking. 

*

She grinds against the long, sleek twink they’ve brought her. He plays at trying to get away, his slender fingers digging into the upholstery, his pert little ass wiggling as she pushes into him. He’s soft and hot inside, like fucking a bowl of warm congealed chicken fat. It’s nauseating in a way she tells herself is good and cool and edgy. Like holding onto a live wire when you kiss someone. Like wearing a prosthetic phantom cock, a spectral strap-on glimmering at the sharp, liminal edge of unreality. It’s more intense since her reversal and reconstruction a few years ago. It has a hot, bitter bite now.

Billie rakes the twink’s back with her nails, two-inch aquamarine talons parting his soft skin, ploughing razor-thin red furrows as he screams theatrically. It makes her thighs quiver. It brings a flush to her cheeks. He cranes his neck to look back at her, drugged into an adoring stupor, panting, ass crack and lower back glistening with metallic silver precum where she’s rubbed against him. The mercury her anal plasticity goad produces binds best to ejaculant; she’ll get off after this and then again before bed, just to make sure there’s no buildup. His cum is already soaking into the chaise longue.

She smiles and rolls her shoulders. Her acrylics unfurl from her armpits, synthetic muscles flexing where they’re anchored to her sternum and her scapulae, jointed wires stretching, glossy blue-green blades falling open like straight razors or a mantis’s claws as their prosthetic frames fold closed around her upper arms and the acrylics rear up above her shoulders. Sweat and lymph drips from both edges, sickle-curved and sharp as razors. This is the part Max thinks is crucial, though she’s spent her whole life jerking off and knows it doesn’t really matter. Hardly anyone is watching by this point. They’re getting off, curling close around the throbbing flutter of their lonely orgasms. The only reason to watch her now is aesthetic.

The part they need has already happened. It happened before she shoved her cock into the wriggling twink. It happened when their eyes met. It happened when she kissed his cheek, her plump lips sliding along the shallow plane of his cheekbone. It was filmed with sloppy, caressing indifference. The part they need is touching, sighing, open mouths, half-lidded eyes. A fantasy of feeling safe enough to fall into a lover’s arms. A fantasy of being wanted. Of being touched. She coos and strokes the twink’s face with a pale, long-fingered hand. A candy-colored spray of red splatters her front, dappling her face, belly, tits, and forearms. The studio is silent. She licks blood from a single perfect finger, the one with the little heart tattoo above the second knuckle. It tastes like root beer.

“Cut,” says Max, and the crew kills the lights.

And then it’s over.