Page 8 of Satisfied By the Slime
The form resting in that custom-molded foam cradle is roughly humanoid.
There’s a torso, broad and tapering.
There are limbs, four of them, neatly slotted into the cradle’s contours.
There’s a head, or what I’m going to call a head, because it’s the rounded mass at the top where a head should be, slightly tilted, slightly bowed, like something asleep.
The whole thing is iridescent.
Deep teal bleeding into dark warm purple, the colors shifting as the fluorescent light hits from different angles.
The surface is smooth and wet-looking but not wet, and it has the organic gleam of something pulled from a tide pool on an alien planet.
It looks grown, not manufactured.
I take three steps back and hit my worktablewith my hip.
“Okay,” I say to myself. “Okay. So there’s been an order mix-up. Has… Has to be.”
I ordered a vibrator.
A small, discreet, very fancy $99 vibrator.
And they sent me a body.
I stare at it.
The studio hums with the low drone of the overhead fluorescents and absolutely nothing else, and for maybe five full seconds I just stand there with my hip pressed against the worktable and my hands hanging at my sides like I’ve never used them before.
Then…
One of the fingers moves.
Or it doesn’t.
Or the light shifts.
Or my eyes, which have been staring unblinking at an iridescent surface in bad fluorescent lighting for too long, are simply doing what tired eyes do.
Because what I think I see is: the faintest ripple traveling across the surface of one hand.
A micro-shift from teal to a thread of gold surfacing and sinking in the space of a heartbeat, and one of those smooth fingers curling inward by a fraction of an inch.
I try to take a step back and end up banging into my worktable again.
My heart is slamming.
Full cardiac event energy.
The kind of heartbeat that shows up on fitness trackers asAre you okay? Should we call someone?
I don’t blink.
I don’t move.
I watch the thing in the crate with every cell in my body tuned to a frequency I didn’t know I had, and it is perfectly, completely still.
Teal and purple and not moving.
